How to double trading newsletter sales in 3 months.

How do you double a trading newsletter business?

In this hotseat session Bret Holmes, who has helped build newsletter publishers up to $225 million in annual revenue, digs deep into the business of a trading newsletter founder who has built up his subscription business to a point it ranges between $55,ooo to $85,000 per month.

This is an example of the premium conversations we're having in FMS PRO - the discord community for the financial publishing, trader education, and media industry.

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John Newtson, host and founder of The Financial Marketing Summit can be reached via LinkedIn at John Newtson

Chapters

• 0:02 Business Growth Hot Seat Session
• 5:39 Overview of the details of Dan's current newsletter business
• 20:40 Problems using social media as growth strategy of a newsletter business
• 31:42 Market Commentary and Customer Engagement
• 37:17 Defining your newsletters precise value to readers
• 39:55 The importance of the telesales model with newsletters
• 50:12 Baseline revenue targets based on email metrics
• 51:46 Why it's important to include personal stories in your trading newsletter
• 52:53 The basics of direct selling in emails vs selling on webinars
• 1:00:41 The need for paid acquisition strategies to build a trading newsletter
• 1:12:44 What should the ROI on acquisition media spend be in week 1?
• 1:14:23 New leads should go onto free newsletter not a long marketing funnel
• 1:16:49 Your free email newsletter is the most valuable content in your business
• 1:17:49 The #1 problem with offer owners who just have a marketing funnel
• 1:19:30 The difference between "offer owner" and "publisher" & why publishing generates more money

Transcript

John Newtson: 0:02

All right, hey everyone. I'm here today with Brett Holmes and Dan Passarelli. We're going to talk about really just kind of do a hot seat session. Dan has been very, very brave and generous with this willingness to kind of come in here and like kind of open the books and let Brett and I kind of dig into what he's got going on with the business and look for ways for him to grow the business, find more revenue, kind of solve some problems. So first off, dan, thank you very much for being willing to do this. And for anyone who doesn't know Brett, I should say Dan has a great business called MarketTaker. You've been how long have you been a trader educator?

Dan: 0:41

I've had market taker. I want to say 16 years wow, wow, yeah.

John Newtson: 0:46

So you've seen a thing or two, and brett holmes um is. I think everybody in the fms pro community knows you. Most people in the fms world know you, um, but I want to give your quick background too, for any new folks who might not be familiar with you.

Bret Holmes: 1:00

Okay, uh, I'm going on 17 years 17 years in this industry. Before that, I was an internet kid at 18. I started with adcom and got lucky when I was young, being able to do HTML and PHP when I was 18, which afforded me a lot of opportunities to work in this world. And then I went and I was an engineer for a little bit, as a cold fusion engineer. That used to be a programming language that idiots could do, so that's what I I did, and then I found out really quick that the only thing that I did better than guys that were a lot cheaper was speak English better than they did. So I found myself commenting on code for Northrop Grumman in the Navy and it was nice being a part of a large organization, but then I found Agora, which was right up the street from me.

Bret Holmes: 1:42

I was working in downtown Baltimore and then a friend of mine was at Agora and from there Agora was just starting to get started with being serious about online advertising and websites and things, and it was a very, very again I'd say 80% of my success has been being in the right place at the right time. And from Agora just growing a company from zero to 250 million a year and from Agora, just growing a company from zero to 250 million a year, 200 million a year, seeing that growth over 15 years. And then from Agora I just went and worked with I've been doing this kind of thing for probably about five years, which I find. I mean, trust me, I love working for one company. It gets a little mundane, given your skill set sometimes, um, it gets a little mundane given your skillset Sometimes, um, it's. It's a lot more exciting for me to work with a bunch of people, especially at different levels. Some people are going from zero to the first a hundred K. Some people are going trying to go from 500 K to 2 million. Some people are trying to go from 2 million to five. All of them had their different issues, different problems, um, but luckily I've seen just about all of them.

Bret Holmes: 2:44

So I've been doing this for a long time and I and full disclosure, I've never met Dan and I can't believe I haven't, not in this regard anyway. So everything you're going to see here today is is, is not, nope, nope, I gave him some questions on stuff that so that way we can move a little quicker, but I haven't really dug into anything and I I wouldn't say. I don't know where this is going to go, but it could go in a lot of different ways. So I'm excited to see what kind of business he has and also for you guys that are watching, to kind of see what that process looks like. I go through this process with somebody at least somebody, whether it's for free or whether they pay me and I'm happy to do it. I love John, I love FMS, I love all you guys. I do it about once a month, if not every day for some people, so it's fun. So let's see where we are.

John Newtson: 3:32

All right. So the idea then is I know you sent Dan over a bunch of questions earlier to kind of get a feel for some things. Where do you want to start with? Sure, Should we have Dan give him a little bit of introduction of his business.

Bret Holmes: 3:46

so everyone is kind of clear. Talk about how long it's been along, anything you know from a core standpoint. A lot of times these hot seats, some people have a very specific problem, like they don't know how to figure out something specifically. I find that that can be, but there are a lot of bones that have to be put in place before that skeleton is able to walk. So let's just let Dan introduce the company and where they are and where he wants to be, and let's see if we can get him there.

Dan: 4:19

Yeah, first of all, I just want to say I'm here because I'm well, because I'm an overachiever.

Dan: 4:22

I've been told that you should try to be the brokest, dumbest person in the room and I think I'm really overachieving today here with a couple of really really great guys.

Dan: 4:35

Um, so I've been doing this for 16 years and before starting market taker, I was a market maker, trading on the, trading on the floor, and then I started teaching classes at CBOE, so I learned how to teach options and I thought, well, I understand how they work, I understand how to teach them. I'm going to start my own education business and if you've ever read a book called the E-Myth, you understand part of the fallacy in that logic. I was missing the understanding how to run a business, how to market, and I was a little bit naive back then and it took me a while to figure it out. And now I get it and, like any other business, I've grown and had some successes, had some failures and still have some hurdles ahead of me, and I'm looking forward to talking to you know, some of the best minds in the business here, especially to hear what Brett has to say as he grills me on the hot seat.

John Newtson: 5:39

All right. Do you want to give us kind of an overview of like? What kind of staff do you have, um? Do you want to give us kind of an overview of like? What kind of staff do you have, um? What are your um? Kind of like the number of products you have? Um, and kind of your general like, maybe price points and where, like, just generally, where you're acquiring right now?

Dan: 5:58

We currently have a list of about 22,000 that are marketable. About 4,000 of them are what we call unengaged marketable, where they are getting very minimal emails. Our weekly newsletter, minimal emails, our weekly newsletter. About 18,000 of them are marketable, although some of them are less engaged, so we send them a few fewer emails. As far as broadcasts in any given month I mean, we send out. We were sending out about 800, some thousand, 850, 900,000 emails a month total. We've pulled that back a little bit as Keep encouraged us to not send so many emails out by charging us more for them. So we made a little bit of a change to how we do business. I used to send out a daily video that was just nurture content every day. Now we do that all on social media, which we weren't really doing before, and then we just send out two emails a week to remind people to go to social media. What other data points would you like me to go over?

Bret Holmes: 7:31

That's good, john. Do you mind if I use this little whiteboard here? Is this okay for you? Yeah, that's great. Perfect, I just want to keep track of some stuff. So you got 22,000 engaged.

Dan: 7:43

How many paid people do you have, dan Paid people? I would guess a couple hundred. I I don't have an exact figure on that we'll just call it 300.

Bret Holmes: 7:51

How many products do you have?

Dan: 7:54

uh, so we have three what I would call high ticket products, which is two degrees of one-on-one coaching and a mastermind, and then we have five scanners. And then we have three recurring classes two are daily, one's weekly, and then we have about three other classes.

Bret Holmes: 8:20

What kind of trading do you do? It's all option trading and we intentionally try and keep a breadth of products from investors to traders from fairly new traders to pretty experienced traders.

Dan: 8:42

What are some price points here, buddy, Sure. So as far as the high ticket stuff, the masterminds 15 grand, and we only sell a couple few of those a year. The one make up more, but the last couple of years, candidly, we've just had a harder time selling them.

Bret Holmes: 9:13

It used to be about 50% of our business. What?

Dan: 9:17

about the scanners. So the scanners are about $250 a month?

Bret Holmes: 9:25

Yeah, and are they hosted on your website or do you put them on TradingView or you put them like what are we talking about here?

Dan: 9:30

Yeah, so these scanners, it's data provided from the CBOE. It's basically real-time alerts. When a specific trade occurs, they get a notice that that trade happened.

Bret Holmes: 9:43

What is that called? I use the same thing at another company Trade Alert. Oh, they use Trade Ear. They use Trade Ear for some of their CBOE stuff. Oh, okay, so you have five scanners and then you teach classes during the week Yep, some daily, some weekly, okay and you teach these on just how to trade basic introduction stuff, flies, spreads, all that stuff, or what are we talking about?

Dan: 10:10

Yeah, I mean the daily group coaching is it's kind of like what a lot of people call a trade room, and then the other daily class is sort of more on technical fundamental analysis, on technical fundamental analysis. And then the weekly class which I teach is more pure education which, as you can probably imagine, has a little less demand, I think, than the other ones, because it's less actual.

Bret Holmes: 10:37

What do you charge?

Dan: 10:38

for the trade room. The trade room is $227 a month. That's about the average.

Bret Holmes: 10:44

Did your? I'm going to poke funny from time to time. Did you pull that number out of a hat, or was it the lottery number that night?

Dan: 10:54

Yeah, kind of it was $199 a month and then I wanted to go to $ but when decided on 225,. But use more of an odd number. Okay, yeah, okay.

Bret Holmes: 11:10

I, I deserve that's okay. It's the numbers inconsequential. I'm just I'm. I haven't seen 227. So unique numbers. I kind of like it. To be honest with you, it doesn't bother me. All right, so you got 22,000 people on the list. What are you doing for revenue every month?

Dan: 11:26

So you know,000 people on the list. What are you doing for revenue every month? So you know I've got a lot of what we would call in the business volatility there. It's recently been anywhere between about 55 grand a month to 80 grand a month.

Bret Holmes: 11:43

How much of that is renewals versus new sales.

Dan: 11:47

Oh, bobby, if you've got that handy I could take a look. But I want to say renewals make up about maybe 15,000 a month.

Bret Holmes: 11:59

And then new sales are another. You know, somewhere between 30 to 50 K a month. Yeah, how?

John Newtson: 12:04

are you promoting.

Bret Holmes: 12:05

You go on live and webinars. You make an evergreens you're doing straight to order form. How are you promoting?

Dan: 12:11

Mainly live webinars. Maybe once or twice a year we go straight to order form. We do have some evergreen webinars set up and we do run them, but you know they get maybe half the conversion rate, so I tend to do them live more.

Bret Holmes: 12:30

How many people normally show up?

Dan: 12:31

for the live webinars. We'll get anywhere. I mean anywhere between. If it's a real small one, it could be like 20 to maybe 65 actually showing up Right.

Bret Holmes: 12:43

Any idea what kind of revenue. How many times are you going live a month with the webinars? Once a week?

Dan: 12:49

once a month, twice a month. We basically what we do is we try and sell two things a month and with each thing we do about three to five webinars, so they just call it four webinars. So basically eight sales webinars a month and then follow-ups to the replay and then direct to the order form.

Bret Holmes: 13:10

Okay, okay, good. How do you guys start your day-to-day? So one of the things that and it seems in this business, my experience is that there are a bunch of different kinds of businesses. There are ones that grew up from small businesses into large businesses that kept their foundational staff, meaning they promoted from within. So I mean, I've seen people that were customer service reps become CMOs. I've seen people that were customer service reps become CMOs.

Bret Holmes: 13:44

It's one of the great things about this industry is that there is no sort of pre-qualification for your skill set, aside from the desire to work hard, listen and learn. If you can write a little bit, that's great. If you can market a little bit, that's great. But for the most part you have a lot of people that when you grow up inside the business, they know what to look for every day. It's kind of like being a nurse versus being a brain surgeon. Like a nurse can tell you you know how our patients are doing just by looking at them. Same thing with a guy that's been there five or six years. They kind of can feel whether or not a promo is going to work or how well the business is going.

Bret Holmes: 14:19

And there are other companies that were once small and then got large and they lost the core foundation of the business. I've seen this a lot of times too. And then they end up bringing in people either I don't want to say retreads, but people from the industry that might know a little bit enough to be dangerous, or and this is some people aren't going to like this worst case scenario you bring in an executive from outside the industry and the executive from outside the industry oftentimes looks at KPIs that I don't know why they look at them, and motivation there is different. Some companies want to be acquired. Some companies bring in a CEO or a COO that is in an acquisition mode. Some people work for private equity, some people they have to keep the cash up, some people focus on renewals and et cetera. In my experience, the day-to-day run of the business is almost like it's like playing a game every day.

Dan: 15:26

And how many people are on your staff? There's two, three, four. I mean there's four full full time, two part time and then some other you know 1099s who help. Okay, and what do they do? So I mean, one of the full time is me and that's running the business and sweeping the floors, everything in between.

Bret Holmes: 15:51

But you write and trade right, you are the product.

Dan: 15:54

Yes, yeah, yes, I'm kind of the face product. But John, who's our head coach, delivers a lot of the classes. But John, who's our head coach, delivers a lot of the classes. He delivers a lot of the one-on-one coaching and he delivers the group coaching as well. Okay, what else you got? We've got a full-time marketing person, Bobby, who's our VP of marketing. That's totally full-time. And then we've got Kathleen, my wife, who she's you know, she does a little bit of everything too. She kind of keeps everything in order and sometimes does really granular stuff, like going through and making sure all the first names in our database are capitalized. You know de-duping email lists, but also handling some real nuanced customer service, and you know the occasional chargeback and stuff. And then we have another person who is like a part-time marketer, who has a lot of tactical skills, who was able to execute on a lot of stuff.

Bret Holmes: 17:03

So an iSoft, so an Infusionsoft expert. Yeah, has a lot of tactical skills who was able to execute on a lot of stuff. So an eye soft, so an infusion soft expert yeah, does a little design, does a little webinar set up, that kind of thing.

Dan: 17:16

Yep, exactly. And then I I do have another part-time coach, which is nice. It leads to one of the questions that you sent me that I guess I can wait on or I can throw it in here now. But having a part-time coach helps, because one of the hurdles is that at this size of a business, you know, when the business is really growing and doing well, it's like, oh crap, how are we going to even take on any more one-on-one coaching students, because I can't really hire a full-time person for that, but nobody who actually has that skill set wants to do it part-time. And then when business is slower which it's been a little bit lately for me, then it's like geez, you know, maybe we should cut back on the part-time market or something. It's hard to scale, gotcha All right.

Bret Holmes: 18:10

So day to day, do you guys meet every morning?

Dan: 18:16

Bobby and I who's in charge of our marketing meet once a week formally, and then pretty much almost every day.

Bret Holmes: 18:26

You guys use Slack or Skype or Teams or something weird.

Dan: 18:30

Yeah, we use Slack, but we'll just meet in GoToMeeting, okay.

Bret Holmes: 18:37

All right. So back to the day-to-day right. So the most successful companies that I've been around are the ones that do grind the day-to-day. There are obviously people in your business that are big idea, people that go and work on something totally outside.

Bret Holmes: 18:53

There are marketers that have longer-term goals, and my old boss, mike Ward, used to always say that we're in the bestseller business, and while I believe that and I definitely think he's right I also know that a lot was gained from working with a COO or CMO on a daily basis to establish what our baselines are, basically taking our health check every day. First off, it does two things One, it gets everybody talking about what we did yesterday, and two, it allows you to. One, it gets everybody talking about what we did yesterday, and two, it allows you to set expectations so that you understand what the growth looks like, and also what your inventory looks like, and by inventory I mean like it or not. The amount of email that you send is your methodology for making money, aside from that, with the webinars, et cetera, but those are all wrapped into one thing.

Dan: 19:49

You had mentioned a social media presence being the sort of the center of some of your e-letter pushes. What's the following there? Our main focus is YouTube and we get maybe 80 views per video on YouTube. How many?

Bret Holmes: 20:01

followers do you have on YouTube?

Dan: 20:04

Well, we have 2,200. I don't think that that's very indicative, though, because I had YouTube and I put some videos up there like 15 years ago and some people followed and probably forgot that they're following. So I'm active.

Bret Holmes: 20:24

Yeah, how about Twitter, which is usually the other big one in our space?

Dan: 20:28

And similar thing. There I've got about 14,000 followers but I'm so inactive that you know it's going to take a lot to re-nurture that Sure.

Bret Holmes: 20:39

All right. So the bad thing about social media as being sort of the growth core of the business is a couple of things. One, you're at the mercy of an algo that you can't manipulate or understand, yeah. Two, you're engaged and that algorithm determines your dispersion of messaging, and that can be really frustrating for people, especially when there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to something getting shown two thousand times and something getting shown 20 times. Um, you're also depending on a third party to increase your response. Now I will say that the next generation of marketers um do and I I don't disagree with them that tick, tiktok, twitter and YouTube are your big three there.

Bret Holmes: 21:26

The successful businesses I see in that space are usually one-man shops or two-man shops that are giving away a product for free, which is totally fine. They give away picks for free. They have a free live video, free live trading every day, and then they sell a class right and they do $50,000 to $100,000 a month if they can build an audience of half a mil to a million people and get 1,000 to 2,000 concurrence a day. I see them all the time, and no offense to my marketers who are just starting out or haven't been doing this for a long time, but it's something that you can invest in, but it's not something that you can count on as a business plan when you're trying to have a company. If it was just you in your basement, it's a great hobby to have, and when you find success, it's awesome. So All right. So you got two. You're going twice a week with an e-letter. Why aren't you going every day? You're a trader, right? You're an options trader, yeah.

Dan: 22:33

Okay, what kind of options do you trade? You trade the spy vix, you know nq. What do you do? What's your yes?

Bret Holmes: 22:37

is? I mean, as far as what names uh stocks, etfs, indexes, everything uh. Do you trade your own money?

Dan: 22:40

yeah, okay, and you look at the market every day I do, um, you know, but you know you mentioned kind of being a grinder and that's a lot of what I do. I put in a lot of time and I would like to be able to be more efficient and be able to focus on trading even more, because I think I could well, first of all because I like it and second of all because I think I could create even better products.

Bret Holmes: 23:07

Okay, why would you only go twice a week if you're trading every day?

Dan: 23:15

Why would I? Oh well, because we used to send out I still make a daily video, every day I do. We used to put it just load it up to a spotlighter, post it there and put it on our blog as a page and then send out an email that sends people to the blog. But you know, we got I imagine it's the same letter that everybody got from Keep and Fusion Soft that says you know, well, we're going to start charging you a bunch more money if you keep sending out all these emails.

Bret Holmes: 23:49

All right. So as a business we have to realize that A email is very cheap and B, if we can't overcome the cost of sending email, then we're probably not in a very good spot. So Infusionsoft is fine. I mean, I've had ups and downs with Keep or Infusionsoft for years. I would recommend switching ESPs. I mean Beehive is extremely advantageous right now, extremely cost effective as you get larger. There are people like Optipub, which I don't think you're giving a list of 22,000. Even if you went out every day, that's only about a half a million to maybe a million mails a month. 22,000. If you, even if you went out every day, that's only about a half a million to maybe a million mails a month. But you have to find a way to get that messaging out. What is the USP for the e-letter? What is the unique selling proposition?

Dan: 24:34

Why should I read it every day? Well, I mean the, the video. It's free nurture content and and it's it's an insight into various aspects of trading.

Bret Holmes: 24:47

You got to tighten that up, right. So that's like me saying I got a clothes store.

John Newtson: 24:53

We sell clothes, yes, they go on your body.

Bret Holmes: 24:56

Yes, right. So the first thing that we do usually is we try to define a USP, a unique selling proposition for the e-letter. We make a promise, we deliver the promise. We tell them value, we tell them this is the only way you're going to get this and you're not going to hear it anywhere else. We leverage our expertise, we leverage our point of view. You even leverage your personality and what it is that you do as a trader the fact that you're trading real money and the fact that you trade every day.

Bret Holmes: 25:22

There is no reason not to come up, and I understand the cost and efficiencies with keep, but it should not be a decision maker. You're not going to make more money by sending less mail. It's not going to happen. It's never going to happen. And you're not going to make more money by sending them to social media instead of sending them to your website, where you control the environment, et cetera.

Bret Holmes: 25:43

So again, beehive is an option here. You can easily pick up the list in Infusionsoft, move it over to Beehive and start sending immediately. Even if you just took the openers over the last 30 days and move them over there, I would still try to establish a point of view and you can do that really quickly. You can easily send them an email saying hey, we have revamped what our commitment is to our audience. We are going to start bringing you content every day. It could be any kind of deliverable, whether it's a watch list, whether it's our biggest trade of the day from yesterday, whether it's what we're watching, what sort of strategy that we have right now that is most advantageous, what our key levels are, what our key numbers are, whatever it is and you want to set the table for the people that like you and you want them to read you every day. The way to do that for free, without giving away the milk and the cow, is to give them things to look for, things to watch, things that you see that they won't see anywhere else, especially on CNBC and FBN or the Wall Street Journal or Forbes or Bloomberg. So in our industry, we are not journalists, we are publishers and authors, and we are also contrarian and we're also independent, and we have to have a point of view on the market and we have to have a stance on it. What that means is that you have to be able to come out and say listen, I really don't like interest rates right now. I think the FOMC is going to keep rates exactly where they are. I think we're in for a nasty inflation, which means you're going to see the tech sector getting beat up here over the next six months. These are the levels that I'm looking at. These are the ETFs that I have circled as ones to dump, and you can come at it from two different angles both trading and long-term investing.

Bret Holmes: 27:34

A lot of traders don't feel very comfortable talking about macroeconomics. That's not a good idea. You don't have to be a macro economist to have a view on the on the U S economy, the market fed policy, et cetera. You don't have to be that Um, and you also have to look at yourself like you know 90, you were. You were at the SIBO, right. That automatically puts you at the tip of the sword of people that understand options trading. They, the people that read you and watch you every single day, could only dream of even being on the floor of the SIBO, even though you can just walk right in. So you have to leverage that with the fact that you have insights and understanding of the market that they will never have, and you are a celebrity.

Bret Holmes: 28:17

At the end of the day. You're a trading celebrity, you're a financial celebrity, but your opinion counts and your opinion is what they look for, your, your insights, and where do you think you don't have to be right and you don't have to be wrong? That doesn't matter nearly as much as being present, as being, as being there, right, if, if I, if I have a nasty cough and I'm coughing up blood and I call my doctor, like he wouldn't say like oh, I don't know what that could be, sorry, no, he knows more than me, he knows more than I do. He's in a better position to help me than I am to help myself. Similar to these people that are looking to make money from the market, become better traders, become better investors, retire, et cetera, take care of their money. You know more than they do. So you have to have a point of view and you have to be confident in it. And even if you're wrong, it doesn't matter.

Bret Holmes: 29:14

Our audiences are very forgiving. They're not stupid, like they're not dumb people. Same way that I wouldn't think that because a doctor said you might have tuberculosis, when in actuality all I had was a scratch larynx or something. But I'm not going to scold him for it. You told me. I had my. Only the worst customers do that and the problem is that in our business we tend to listen to the loudest. Worst customers the most. The people that are like you send me too much mail. Can you stop selling me things? You were wrong on something. Let that person go. You're never going to make them happy. I'm sure you know those people in that person. Go. You're never going to make them happy. I'm sure you know those people in your life anyway. They're never going to be happy.

John Newtson: 29:50

Hey, brett, if I can jump in real quick, just to touch on, this is not a copy call, this is not a, but I definitely recommend, dan, that you guys look at that. In the Discord community we posted a link to a video systems video that did really well, crushed it this year, and the opening hits because the guy worked at the CBO, the CBO, right, and he hits that credibility really well. You actually taught options there. That's another layer on that, that the C. Not only were you trading there, but you literally actually were basically blessed by the CBO to trick, to teach this professionally too, right, that's a huge thing. And then the other thing I'd throw in there on that idea of like talking about the markets is as traders.

John Newtson: 30:32

A lot of times what I hear from folks is like, well, I don't care what the economy is going to do, I'm going to trade it when it comes. That's literally the point of like the content. Well, hey, if this happens, we do this, we'll probably do this. If this happens, we do this, we'll probably do this. If this happens, kind of projecting, like the fact that, like, maybe you're not predicting the interest rates are going to go one way or another, but you know how you're going to trade it, if it goes up or it goes down or if it stays the same, and kind of forecasting that in the content. That is something that like gives people confidence, it's interesting, um, and keeps reading. So there's a lot of really interesting things you can do this way, and you also.

John Newtson: 31:07

My last point is I always loved the name of your business, right, market taker. You know, because you have the market maker background, but also that idea that, like you're going out into the market and going to take the profits Traders are. Fundamentally, if you're an active trader, you're fundamentally somebody who thinks that you can get good enough to kind of go out there and make things happen versus passive investing, and so leaning in on that idea in your editorial is, I think, a really good choice for you. But I'll pass it back to Brett now.

Bret Holmes: 31:41

No, that's all viable. Even if you're market agnostic or macro agnostic, it doesn't mean you don't have an opinion on it. You just don't care. You have to be able to talk about it. Your readers are not going to get financial information from 15 different guys. They might get it from three. Be one of the three, which means when NVIDIA has earnings and you don't talk about it, you look dotty Like when there's a Fed meeting and you don't talk about the fact that they cut, raised or kept rates. The same, you look dotty If there's a major market thing and it doesn't happen every day, it happens once or twice a month.

Bret Holmes: 32:15

If you're not talking about the Bitcoin ETF, even though you may not trade it, at least say I'm not trading it. Here's why, here's trading it, here's why, here's why we don't trade. Like, first off, there's no option chains on the Bitcoin ETF yet. But you know, if you look at it and say you have to be able to comment on what's happening and then just apply it to trading if it, if it doesn't, if you're not going to trade it or it doesn't factor into your trading, that's fine. But say that have a point of view right, um, it's, it's, it's really important your customers. Have you ever had a live conference or interacted with your guys? Your subscriber base? Oh, yeah, often. How many of them take pictures with you? How many of them do you feel like you're a little bit of a celebrity around? Yeah, all of them.

Dan: 33:00

Right.

Bret Holmes: 33:01

Well, that's, that's who you are and you have to embrace that. And by embracing I mean they're going to want to know things from you that you may think to yourself, well, that's kind of boring or stupid or doesn't have anything to do with it. Not to them, not to them, it's not. It's like imagine if you could watch, if you can mic up a head coach for a baseball game, right, the whole, the whole game, the baseball coach sitting there going where the hell does anybody want?

Bret Holmes: 33:25

to hear. Sit and listen to me talk. Everybody wants to listen to you talk. Everybody watching that game wants to hear what you're saying during the game, but to him it's benign and monotonous and boring, but to you it is mano from heaven. If you are a baseball fan, similar to your take on the fed, the markets, etc. So, um, that helps you create more content. It also helps you become pertinent and relevant when things happen in the market.

Bret Holmes: 33:52

Don't take days off when shit happens. Market drops 3%. You're talking about it. Nvidia splits you're talking about it, even if you're like listen, nvidia split tomorrow. It's not a tradable asset for me right now. I don't see any patterns here that make any of these premiums look good post-split. I can tell you that. Post-split, I can tell you that post-split, stocks usually go down in price for two or three days before they come back up because the short interest by the major banks and the major hedge funds. They're taking into account the fact that people are going to want to buy this and get into it and they're going to suppress the price whatever. You know that right. You have an opinion on that. Don't be afraid to share that. And to the person on the other end of the line they're going. That's my guy Because, like it or not, a lot of what we go through is golf stories.

Bret Holmes: 34:36

You are, you know, oddly enough, porter Stansbury. I was at a school function one time and I overheard people talking about Porter's picks on, you know, obama's third term or whatever it was, whatever his weird thing was. And I like overheard them and I couldn't believe that these guys I mean, I mean, we're so close to it that it's a hard time for us to sort of understand but they were really proud of themselves for learning this and sharing it, and they were very, very confident in the outcome of what porter was saying. But they were, but they liked it. Um, similar to what it is that you can like. Imagine if you could hear that coach in the dugout say man Rodriguez is just terrible, I can't play this guy anymore. Like you just learned that and now you know that and nobody else does, except for the other people that were watching. But point is, is that that's solidified, not only his opinion, but now you gave your opinion to someone else and it likely became their point of view.

Bret Holmes: 35:32

That is the religion that you're after, that is the ethos that you're after is that your point of view, your usp, becomes somebody else's point of view and usb. Look what's happening right now in politics the dogma associated there, the same thing, the financial markets, same thing. With religion. It doesn't matter. The point is is that if they're your people, you have to imbibe them with your stance on the market so that they don't have to go somewhere else to form their own opinion, because they're going to form it. Um, you know, do you watch sports? Um, occasionally, okay, um, what do you have a strong opinion on?

Bret Holmes: 36:12

well, like movies, books, art, oh, yeah, uh, yeah uh movies music right now you may go watch a movie and like maybe you watch dune right, and you're like this is great. But I guarantee you, as a matter of fact, I'll bet you, that at some point you read an analysis or an article about two or three other people and you found something more insightful that they would say because, by the way, they're probably a little more insightful than you and you took that home into your own ethos and you said oh man, they are going to be in trouble when Dune 3 has to drop because that book was never finished. So I don't know where they're going to end this freaking trilogy, that kind of thing, because you learn that somewhere else you do the same thing for finance. So, first step get back out there more, figure out the keep situation. I don't know the economics of what you're facing would keep, but I can tell you that beehive is extremely economical. You can move the names over there. I would set up an account, I would put five or ten thousand people into there and I would start mailing them on a daily basis with your thoughts.

Bret Holmes: 37:08

If they're videos, that's fine. But before you do that, before you make the video, write down why you're unique on, just as a welcome letter. Think about, listen, I'm Dan Passarelli. Here's what I do every day. Here's what you're going to get every day and here is why this is the only place you're going to get it. If you can answer those three questions, you're off and running from a value standpoint.

Bret Holmes: 37:32

Don't be passive. Don't be a journalist. Nobody pays for the afternoon news guy to give me the scores on Major League Baseball. I can get those anywhere. What people pay for is well, sadly at this point, gambling picks. But what gets him an audience is his insight into the local sports team. If it's a local guy or for a national guy, they go to a national guy and be like I'm in the locker room right now for the Mets and I can tell you that they're going to make three trades over the next 24 hours. That's value. You can do that with the market. That's why I watch that show. That's why I go there for my information, Similar to the markets. So take that down. Stop going out once a week or twice a week. Stop pushing the social. Post the blog on your website. You can still push them to social if you really want. All I want is a click. All I want is messaging and please don't go out. Do you only go out like Tuesdays and Thursdays too, or like Tuesdays and Fridays?

Dan: 38:35

and Fridays. Mondays and Fridays is when we send the email, but we do frame the YouTube video onto our website and that is where we send them to.

Bret Holmes: 38:39

Okay, that's fine. All I want right now is the click, the modality of the click, the monetization of the click. That comes after. The first step in anything is establishing the operations. Can I do this? Do I have a USP? That's step one. Can somebody send it for me? Good, that's still in step one in operations. Number two do people like it? Do I get better open rates, better clicks, no spam complaints? Am I fine here? Once you pass level two, then you get into the monetization of it. How do I leverage this for money? Right, and do steps one and two first and you only have one letter, right?

Dan: 39:19

Yeah, one free. It's a free weekly newsletter. Yeah, okay.

John Newtson: 39:27

One thing real quick while you're talking about sending an email to the blog just real quick. You also don't have any um. You put. You embed the video on the blog but there's other than a sidebar ad. There isn't anything in there that they could link to to buy underneath like you have. You're sending people to a page. There's nothing wrong throwing an ad underneath content or a text. You know writing something in there that links to something that they could buy content or text. You know writing something in there that links to something that they could buy is. They're act, they're actively engaging with you right at that moment.

Bret Holmes: 39:55

Is the only way that they can buy digitally as well. Do you have a telesales guy or a customer service guy that they can call?

Dan: 40:02

Yes, I mean the number is really only available during live webinars. It's not like on our website or anything.

Bret Holmes: 40:11

Companies your size usually do 50% of their revenue over the phone. Wow, that's the easiest money you're ever going to make, especially for selling $10,000 to $15,000 products. You cannot sell those. I wouldn't say cannot. It is much more difficult to sell a $10,000 to $15,000 product via an order form in Keaton. That is a tough sell. First off, you're not able to work with the customer on payment plans. You're not able to cut them a deal that you don't know their first name.

Bret Holmes: 40:36

Sometimes, especially in a company your size I mean, jeff Bishop used to get on the phone for Raging Bull. If you want to buy a $10,000, $15,000 package, he's like give me the phone, I'll close that that you need to get on the phone with somebody, but the phone needs to be avid and what it is that you do. Because I I'm going to take a stab here and I haven't seen the marketing materials, but I would imagine they're not as polished as some of the other ones you've seen in the industry. You know, with 10 page order forms, 60 minute vsls, with high-end, the ability to convey a message extremely clearly, repetitively, over and over again, with some sort of celebrity voice track record, et cetera, all those things that when you see those promos you say, man, that's a really good promo For smaller businesses.

Bret Holmes: 41:21

They don't have the ability to make those when they're only doing 50 to 100,000 a month. First off, the guy that wrote it ain't cheap. Second off, the production time to go into it takes months. So the way to get around that is live webinars, which is what most people are doing. But also the interaction of a telesales portion of your business is imperative. It's important you have to have people accessible on the phone. That's how you're going to close about half your sales. That number that is not like anecdotal, that is even in a $100 million business you will still do $30 million a year in telesales, you'll still do 30%.

John Newtson: 42:04

How do you normally tell somebody who's kind of at the stage that Dan is at to start that process? Like what are you going to do? Are you going to get a part? Dan is at to start that process. Like what do you? What are you going to do? You're going to get um part-time person to start, you know, work with the external group that does telesales. Like what's the um?

Bret Holmes: 42:18

There are. There are options, right. So there are external groups which will take a 20 to 30% commission, which becomes a little tough um at scale, but it's really nice when you get started. Um, you, um at scale, but it's really nice when you get started. Um, you can hire somebody internally, but, given that you have 300 buyers and a 22 000 person list, it would be a part-time person. They might get 20 calls a week. They might get 15 calls a week. They should be closing 50 of those calls, right so? And it should be worth about 100 to 200 dollars per call as a matter of fact, the less calls is probably worth closer to three to four hundred dollars call. So, or you can do it yourself, to be honest with you, and sometimes doing it yourself, and you may have a VP of marketing and you may have your wife, and you may have another coach and John, and they may say that, well, I'm not a sales guy, dude, it's a five person company. We're all sales guys.

Dan: 43:06

Yeah.

Bret Holmes: 43:07

Right. If you're running a small store where you sell designer jeans that you made, the guy who designed the jeans is probably working the counter and the guy that's working the counter is probably making the sale. And that's the way you go. When you're a small business, there aren't a lot of shortcuts. First off, you should do it anyway. Any new person that I hire at a company, they spend their first week in customer service. I don't give a shit what they do. There's nobody in this business that comes with that kind of pedigree that they don't have the right to work customer service for a week. And if you do, you shouldn't hire that person anyway, because that person needs to know the products, they need to understand the sentiment of the customer and they also need to start asking some questions like holy shit, like what is this product, like what is this? Where do I find this? What is that? What's our product?

Bret Holmes: 43:52

Fulfillment look like that's important. So when you're still a small business, everybody works customer service and everybody should be clamoring for customers to write in on a regular basis. They should be writing in with questions, they should be writing in with suggestions. You should open those lines up. When you're four or five people, you can't have a delineation of responsibility. It has to be a group. When you get larger, the great news is when you get larger, the first person you hire is a telesales guy. And guess what?

John Newtson: 44:22

Everybody there can train them Right. Everybody there can. I was going to say you guys should also check out in the resource library and the FMS pro video page. We have a video with John Curtis about starting to build a phone team. You know, internally that has a lot of the stuff that we talk about here and how you kind of start to where you can get to more help.

Bret Holmes: 44:41

All right. So let's do some quick math here. 22,000 emails should get and I don't we're going to get to the tough part next, but should get about a 4% response rate If you're sending out two times a week. Let's just call it a nice 1,000 clicks per email. Let's just be nice about it If I can just move this freaking thingamajigger here.

Dan: 45:01

Move.

Bret Holmes: 45:03

Ah well, I'll just pop this down so I can do some basic math. Sorry if this is screwing up the presentation, john, I just wanted to get some notes. All right, 22 at 4% equals 1,000 clicks, which, if you're looking at this every day, should be worth between $2 to $5 a click. So let's just call it and that's times seven. So you're looking at let's just call it 14,000 a week from email doesn't count renew renewals. So that would be my target goal and that's pretty conservative. So that's what? 60? What man? Bad math. 56 000 a month. 56 000 a month on email volume alone. Then you have sounds like eight webinars, 50 in attendance. Let's be conservative and call it 50 dollars per attendee. That's 400. That's 400, that's another 20k. Right, that's where you should live. That's, given your, given your inventory right now 22 000. I'm not even counting the 300 buyers or whatever it is you have, because they need a list too if they buy a product.

Bret Holmes: 46:18

If you're still thinking that you fulfill them from the free email, or that you fulfill them from a class, or you fulfill them from some sort of like very benign, uh, transactional kind of email, you're thinking about it wrong. They've just moved into a different planet, but they haven't lost the desire to continue to communicate in that way. So one of the biggest mistakes people make in this industry is once they move somebody from a free person to a paid person, or once they acquire a paid person, they start talking to them differently. They start talking to them in a different way, but not in a good way. There's a good way to do it, and then there's a bad way to them differently. Like they start talking to them in a different way now, but not in a good way. There's a good way to do it, and then there's a bad way to do it. The bad way is transactional. Thanks for buying my product. It's Tuesdays and Thursdays at one o'clock. Here's your calendar. Have a nice fucking life.

Bret Holmes: 47:00

That's not good. They just moved into another world so, and those people are worth a hundred times more than the 22,000 people are worth. So the fact that we don't talk to them more over-fulfill them, give them different insights, especially into the product. I know it's a pain in the ass, I get it, but we are in the relationship business at the end of the day, and if you just made a buyer and you think putting them on an email that sends them out a trade alert twice a week with two lines of copy that says trade NFX at 220 option spread. That's not good. That's what people do. That's looney tunes, because in their mind some marketer says well, I mean, they're already getting the free e-letter. They stopped caring about the free e-letter for the most part. They have moved on to another planet. They are breathing different air. They are now in a paid product and if you under-deliver, under-fulfill or stop that relationship through the paid product, you are not maximizing the value of that customer. Also, that customer is not as happy anymore. I hear it all the time at conferences and, by the way, conferences are really good for getting actual feedback from people. That's why customer service and telesales is also very good, because they'll tell you what a phone conversation looks like.

Bret Holmes: 48:16

You can listen to people. I'm not saying you have to do what they say, because they don't. Most people. What is it? Get that aside. But if you have paid people at 300, look at your paid mail. How much paid mail do you send them every day? Because it's going to be worth a hundred times more than the free mail that you're sending to 22,000 people. It and, by the way, if you think because there's 300 people, whatever, on the 22 000 list and they're already getting that information anyway. Stop thinking like that. They likely interact with a product in silos. So if they bought your class or they bought the, or they bought the scanner and you're not sending them fulfillment, all you did was send them a receipt and access that customer now is probably checked out to a degree. They have moved on. You have to communicate to them the same way that you did with the free letter. What I would recommend there is within Keep or on Beehive, wherever you want to go. You can go to Aweber, you can go to Constant Contact. I mean, I use Beehive. So that's what I would recommend, but I'm not saying there's not other options.

Bret Holmes: 49:09

You take those 300 buyers, however many there are, and you start what we call a FOMO list or buyers list. But even before you do that, you look at if 75 people have bought the classes, how much email do you send Once a month, once a week? Does it just say join the class today? Is that all it says? Then they go to the class how many people are on there and how many people attend? These things are imperative and it's one of the most overlooked process of what we do. We spend 90% of our time talking about sales and only 10% of our time talking about the product. And yet we all know that the value of the future sales come from the quality of the fucking product. Yet we stop talking to people about it because we think that they bought something, so now they're happy. They're likely happier, but they're probably not still fulfilled, or else they wouldn't have bought.

Bret Holmes: 50:00

Okay, does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got the USP. You got to understand your buyers. See how much mail you're sending them. Your baseline revenue right now should be about 70. This is conservative too. I mean this is taken into account. $1 to $2 a click and $50 per attendee In a good marketing cycle. For a list your size, this is usually $5 a click and about $100 to $150 on attendee and a good marketing cycle.

Dan: 50:37

Any idea what your response rates are on the 22,000 on the email list? Yeah, I mean, my open rates are like around 29%.

Bret Holmes: 50:45

Okay, so you're being throttled by. Infusionsoft, then yeah, yeah, which I mean anything below 40%, anything, anything. Okay, we'll get to the next. So what are the click-through rates on it?

Dan: 50:55

uh the well. The click-to-open rate is about, on average, 11 and a half percent is that okay?

Bret Holmes: 51:06

click to open. So if I send out 20,000 mails at 11%, I'm getting 2,000 clicks, 2,500 clicks or am I getting 250 clicks? How many clicks are you getting off the 22,000?

Dan: 51:19

Yeah, okay. So if you get, if you send out well, let's say you send out a thousand emails you're going to get, say, 11% of that, which is what? 110. So we're looking at 250 clicks or something.

Bret Holmes: 51:39

No, 11% of 22 grand is going to be 2,500.

Bret Holmes: 51:41

Oh right, yeah, sorry, yeah, yes so even my number here is extremely conservative, at 4%, which is where most people live. So if you literally are doing 2,500 clicks for 22,000, that's really good. That's good. If I saw that, I'd be like why aren't we sending more fucking mail and don't just send crappy mail Again? Establish the USP. Give them value, Give them your insights.

Bret Holmes: 52:10

Don't be afraid to boast about some of the picks that you've made or some of the things that you've taught in a class or do customer profiles. Talk to yourself. Talk about your own private life if you feel comfortable about it. Your family, your friends, what you do on the weekend, how you got interested, your time at the SIBO All those things play. I say it all the time. Bill Bonner has sold a billion dollars worth of stuff and the guy hasn't recommended a stock in 20 years. But people like Bill because they know he's got a church in Ireland and he's got a winery in Argentina and he hates the government Great. But every time you recommend somebody else's something, they already know that it comes from a guy that they like.

Bret Holmes: 52:48

So don't be afraid to namestize yourself.

Dan: 52:50

Yeah, yeah, now mind if I jump in with a question or two. Um, you know, this year is a little bit lighter than last year. I I was a little bit more up in that area last year, but like a difference is I've we almost make nothing from Emails. We make money from emails promoting a webinar and webinar. So just looking at your figures here, you know that first, 56k on email volume, does I mean? Does that include? Does that include email sending people to webinars? Because that one's a missing link right there.

Bret Holmes: 53:38

It shouldn't be right. That's why you need telesales, that's why you need an amortization of product and you also need multiple lists. So when you have one list going out twice a week, you can promote one thing, which means you're pretty much dark until the webinar launches. You're making $0 unless they come from renewals. That's not good. There are other products you have that still fit into the lifeline of what it is that we're doing in the market. Also, having multiple lists allow like you can easily take those 22,000 people and start another list with another specificity. It doesn't have to be complicated. It could be. Let me tell you about the best options trade of the day or the best options set up of the week. It doesn't have to be complicated. But if you want to know the secret to Agora, aside from having really great marketing and a laissez-faire attitude to how they run their businesses meaning they let the marketers kind of do their thing without a lot of oversight they also shared their files with each other.

Bret Holmes: 54:33

Like I started at Money Map Press, we didn't have any money, but zero dollars zero. You know where our first 100,000 people came from the Oxford Club. You know what we became in like six months we went from zero to $100,000 a month because they gave us 100,000 names. Now I'm not saying you have to do that. What I'm saying is you got 22,000 people here in one USP. Push yourself by the end of the summer to make a second USP.

Bret Holmes: 54:58

It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be a watch list. It could be five things to know before the market opens. It could be five things to know with the market closed. It could be whatever. But the problem that you're facing right now is, yes, we don't make any money unless we do the webinar. My contention there is then you don't have enough email bandwidth to be able to support a company that's going to make revenue every day. That's why meeting every day and saying how much money we make yesterday and if the conversation continues to be well, we've made zero because we're promoting a webinar fix that problem.

John Newtson: 55:27

To be clear right now within the next few months he should have minimum three separate kind of e-letters, right, he should have the one he has now, some new one that people can be opted into or moved into that they can with a different USP, and then a customer one for all the buyers, correct?

Bret Holmes: 55:46

That's a minimum right. As soon as you figure out that formula, you're going to find yourself having, instead of 2,000 clicks a day, 3,000 clicks a day and you're going to have the bandwidth to promote the scanners, promote the class, promote the one-on-one. Throw in a telesales number and stop depending on a webinar every 14 days to make all of your income. That is stressful and I know a lot of people do that. They put all their eggs in one basket. They don't dynamicize their volume and it would be like me having a ramen store and all I sell is ramen. You never see that. You wouldn't see that. I got soda, I got soft drinks, I got spices, I got whatever else chopsticks, whatever else you want but I wouldn't just sell ramen, right, no matter how fucking good it is. Even the greatest stores in the world like I'm looking at a shake shack across the street and I'm sorry to keep dropping the up bomb for my my bad john john can beat them out actually be my challenge yeah yeah, nobody.

John Newtson: 56:44

Nobody dropped something on this show right.

Bret Holmes: 56:46

So like I'm looking at a shake shack across the street, shake shack is known for smash burgers. That's what they're known for, but that's not how they make their money. They make their money because it's 17 cents to fill up a Coca-Cola and they charge you $3.95. The smash burger is $7.95. Probably cost them about five and a quarter to make is that you have to create more inventory here to give customers more options. Now, the down part of that is your time. How much time do I have to pump these things out? It does not have to be Shakespeare, it just has to be on point.

John Newtson: 57:18

And this is where like this is actually where a lot of the AI tools really help you, because you can get there on. You can do a video where you're going to tell it. But, like, think about this Like, how many stories do you have of people and traders who blew up or did whatever when you worked right? Like you could just get on a video, have one of your, your, your staff interview? You just go through those things. They can take that, transcribe it. You have the videos. You can get turned into shorts that you can post and, all of a sudden, you have a lot more content. Um, you can do a lot of stuff these days with production to speed up how much content you create. It's not like you have to, like you know, stop everything else you're doing to do it, but you should be commenting on the market.

John Newtson: 57:58

Yeah, even if it's short, but personal and short.

Bret Holmes: 58:03

If you did that by the end of August right now you would probably double your business.

Dan: 58:12

All right, so you have a different USP, but that's to the same leads. I mean basically what you would have people have the ability to. Well, I'm trying to think about how to actually execute this.

Bret Holmes: 58:31

Well, it would be difficult in Infusionsoft. It would be a lot easier in Beehive. You can send them opt-outs. I don't think that's, and you can check with the legal team here at the FMS Pro. But improving their subscription to the free e-letter by offering them more value and providing them an opt-out two or three times is always going to be advantageous to doing an opt-in. An opt-in is going to get you about 5% of your file. An opt-out is going to get you about 95% of your file moved over.

Bret Holmes: 58:58

So you take the 22,000 people, you send out a few emails and say listen, your subscription has been upgraded, we are launching a new letter here. If you don't want it, feel free to click here. I won't send it to you, but let me tell you what it does Every day. I'm going to give you the five levels that I think are most important across all the ETFs. Whatever it is, it's just a different USP and it can be simple. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, you don't have to write 2000 words. You just need to provide a very pointed level of value that somebody would want to see All right, yeah, that makes sense that makes sense.

Bret Holmes: 59:28

If you did those things, you would double your business by the end of August, just because you've increased your volume, and it's going to allow your marketer, bobby, to be able to say oh shit, I have all this new inventory. I don't have to promote the webinar twice. I can talk about the scanners, I can talk about the class. I can push to telesales. If push to telesales. If somebody wants to do one-on-one like training, if somebody wants one of these things, it gives you bandwidth. You basically just took a store and instead of having one product, you just put a second product on the shelf. You're going to. It might not sell as much, but you're going to sell more. You're not going to sell less. That's that's not going to happen. So that's a good start. So let's have the hard conversation, because what that'll do is that'll get you burning the furniture, which is fine.

Dan: 1:00:22

no-transcript yes, um, and I mean this may be part of the reason why things slow down a little bit this year, but you know it's ends up being a chicken and the egg. Uh, last year I spent about five grand a month almost every month. Uh, maybe, probably, probably, 10 months a year on. You know, just paid traffic. You know I'd use Darwin or whoever else, and I did slow down a little bit on that this year because the end of last year ended up being, you know, I don't know, things sort of slowed down a little bit at the end of last year and the beginning of this year.

Bret Holmes: 1:01:12

All right, well, if you don't feed it it's going to die. Yeah, it's not going to get better. So, and that's what small businesses do a lot of times like, well, our spend's not working. Figure it figured out, because nothing is more important than that spend. If you aren't spending 10 of your gross revenue a month in ad spend as a minimum, then you're not taking any shots. And if you don't take shots, you're going to get smaller.

Bret Holmes: 1:01:38

Our friends at MarketWise, who I love, who I respect dearly, when they cut out their advertising in August last year. They're a public company. You can read their quarterly reports. Look what it does to them. They shrink. Now the bottom line looks better for a very short matter of time, but they're going to feel that pain really quick.

Bret Holmes: 1:01:56

It's one of the decisions that, one of the reasons that I love working for Mike and I love working for Jeff Bishop and Morgan and I like working with these guys and like even Zach down at StocksToTrade, is that they will never cut the spend unless we are in, because they know as soon as they cut the spend, the company is going to shrink and things are going to get much harder. Instead of cutting the spend, focus on the spend, find new people. I hate to say this to my friends out there selling leads right now or selling traffic, but it's not 2020. People aren't lined up chomping at the bit to buy their shit. They will work with you. They know that their inventory isn't worth anything unless there's somebody there to buy it. So, while you may not be a big fish at only five or $10,000 a month, that doesn't mean they don't want your business. That doesn't mean they don't have room to feed your business. But if you think that that is a passive part of what it is that you do and something that you can shut down, it's not.

Bret Holmes: 1:02:52

It's the first thing you meet about on Monday morning how much money we spent last week, how many leads we bring in. What do they look like? They look bad. Okay, stop. What are we sending them? What do we have for them? Let's make this better. Let's focus on this. You've got to make that work and it has to be a part of the business that cannot be secondary or worse.

Bret Holmes: 1:03:09

Third, if you aren't spending money and you're in an established business meaning you're not just getting your feet set up under you and I can all the operation stuff set up as soon as you stop spending money. You can count the days on your on your hand until you start shrinking. Now, what I've given you here is, if you do start spending money, you will make that money back quicker. So all these things that I've made they're not for, or some of these ideas that I've given you, these aren't just for cheap thrills. What these are are bones that when you do start buying money and you pour those names over everything that you have, you will see value and they will mature faster and earn faster. Okay, what's your, what's your webinar process? You say. I mean, it sounds like we've got about five or six products, seven products, and you do two different ones a month. When you and who do you put the webinar together with? Is it you and Bobby? Yeah, okay, and how does that conversation start?

Dan: 1:04:13

Well, I mean, if it's a new product, it's. You know, it's one thing. If it's a product that we've had already, I mean. I mean, first of all, I'll look back at the slides and I'll see if I need to freshen up any examples, because I find it tends to convert better if the examples are not a year old. Yes, yeah, so you know. If it's an existing product, it's pretty easy.

Bret Holmes: 1:04:40

Yeah it's easy for you, but in my like, I'm going to be a turd here. It's lazy. Do not run the same webinar. You have got to position it like it's brand new every week or every time you run it. That means not only do the examples have to be brightened up, obviously, but you have to have a forward-looking perspective on why the service is freaking important right now. It's one of the things that people that are smaller get extremely wrong, and this might be you. It might not be you, but traders think, just because they're good traders, that that's enough. It's not. It's not enough. You have got to be make somebody take action to buy that product right now, or else they're either going to lose money or they're going to lose the opportunity to make money. If that is not the cornerstone of every promo that you put out, that promo process needs to be changed. So, instead of starting with all right, what are we going to run? Some people do it on track record. Some people, at least the mildly smart ones go what's our best track record right now? Let's run that one, because that gives us the ability to stand on past results or most recent results. That is some JV level marketing. It's great, but it ain't good. It ain't great. I'll tell you that much Varsity level marketing is. What do I think is going to happen in the market and what about this product is going to make them solve that by making them more money. That's going to bleed into that. What can I look forward to over the next week, month, year, no matter what, that if I don't sell this thing to them now, they're going to miss out.

Bret Holmes: 1:06:09

I'm sure you see other people's promos out there, like the Al Tucher promo or Porter's promo. None of them talk about their past results None Ever. And if they do, it's like fifth or sixth thing they talk about. What they talk about is if you don't start doing this right now, you are going to miss the next big thing and that's where your promo has to start. I'm not saying that's what every promo has to be, but that's where it's got to start. No-transcript. Some of the other guys is that with a live webinar, I can literally on the day the FOMC allowances be like yep, they kept rates the same. Here's what that means for the market over the next week. And here is the strategy or service or the scanner or the class that we think is most pertinent to this that you're going to have to take now in order to take advantage of this short term, long term, whatever it is you got to, you have to be a problem solution in the, in the real time. Don't think that anybody wants your product because they, because you're a good trader. They want your product because they're going to make money.

Bret Holmes: 1:07:26

If, if you think about how, like, gambling services work and I hate to do this because I don't like comparing our industry to gambling, but it is not that far off as a matter of fact, a lot of the artificial inflation that we saw during 2020, during COVID, or was that 20? Yeah, it was 20. I mean, you can guess why. That was because dudes didn't have anything to gamble on and day-by-day trader went to the market and started trading option chains because he needed this fix. I hate to say that, but people like action, right. And as soon as sports came back, our sales everybody's sales in September went way down. But that summer everybody was like I don't know what's happening. But this is great. And for the first time ever, what also happened? Option chains were being traded more than stocks. For the first time ever, 19-year-old kids were getting on there doing straight naked puts, trying to make a hundred bucks on a $10,000 YOLO margin account. That's nuts God bless them, but still nuts.

Bret Holmes: 1:08:23

Anyway, the point is like if I told you that, hey, by the way, football season's coming up, I'm a really great football better. Uh, as a matter of fact, there's over 200 games coming up. In last year I was 171 and 96. Now that will definitely beat your man. If you're really interested, give me a call right now. We can get started. That's one way to pitch it.

Bret Holmes: 1:08:43

The other way is Monday night the bears take on the saints. I have inside information that the fact that their left guard, their left tackle, cannot pull one of them's got a weak hamstring and they love running the ball to the left. They're not going to be able to do that. The bears know that. They're going to stack. They're going to stack an outside linebacker over there. They're going to shut it down. I love one play on this game specifically and you need to call me right now to get that information.

Bret Holmes: 1:09:03

Which one of those sells better? Yeah, number two, you got to be specific and you got to be forward thinking in the real time. Yep, you have enough products to be able to do that. Some of the other things you can do to up sales obviously bundle the classes, launch new classes. Classes are great because they can expire or they can go into a vault. So if you're doing them, live good for you. But don't be afraid to put them on wax and make 10 or 20 of them that you can sell at any time, so you can get out of your webinar cycle and actually go to the Bahamas with your wife, so you don't have to do a webinar every two weeks. Figure out something that can sell out of the gate. So you got. I mean, I like the fact that you're making 50,000 a month on a 22,000 person list. 300 buyers is light. You got to get back to buying some leads right.

Bret Holmes: 1:09:53

Again, not to disparage our guys, they are good media buyers, they are great media buyers and they are and a lot of them I posted on LinkedIn the ones that I think are probably the most honest or the easiest to work with, and a lot of them are in John's FMS pro. Like they will work with you. They want your business. I don't like to say they're struggling, but in the financial publishing space it's not exactly high-tied like it was four years ago. So while they may have, as a company, pivoted to health or pivoted to IR or some other things, that's fine, but I also know that their leads can be bought, probably a little cheaper. They're probably listening to smaller guys right now with smaller spends, um, and they're probably willing to work with you. If you don't have success on trying to give you some leads, so that you do have success, don't be afraid to reach out to them. There's a lot of them out there.

John Newtson: 1:10:42

Well, that's where I'd like you know again like your willingness to come. Share is a big deal in this space in particular. A lot of small guys everyone small compared to agora in size. Um are scared to to to be vulnerable about their business and the irony is is that the media groups, like everybody, actually wants you guys once you just see it and grow, yes, they're willing to share because they help. Everybody makes more money if all of us are a little bit bigger and so like there's so so many people like Brett who are willing to share information and really help your business.

Bret Holmes: 1:11:12

And so yeah, they're. They're actually stingier when everything's going well. Now they're like. Now they show up with like hey man, I need like a thousand leads. I'll give you a thousand leads, just tell me if they work Right, there are people out there that will work with you.

Bret Holmes: 1:11:27

It actually sucks when everything's going well or there's one promo that's dominating and you got to beg somebody to run your stuff. Now is not that time. Everybody's skinny. We're getting skinny. A lot of people are getting healthier again and a lot of people are also seeing new highs into the market share because they're starting to spend money more now than they were three years ago, when everything was much more expensive.

Bret Holmes: 1:11:47

I'm not saying things aren't expensive, were three years ago, when everything was much more expensive. I'm not saying things aren't expensive. I'm saying there aren't as many buyers there. So the people that are buying media are finding better deals, quicker turnarounds, more volume. I'm not saying that's you, but as a business like. If you said, brett, I want you to come on and be the CMO, I'd be like. You have to. You have to commit to five to. You have to commit to 10 to 20 percent of your revenue every month being spent externally. If you're not willing to do that, because you want to be on a boat with your wife or you want to like that, I'm not working for a company that won't spend money. It's not going to happen. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of yours. So and I know it's hard, but it's supposed to be hard You're not going to win every month, but if you don't get up to the bat, you're also not going to play for very long.

Dan: 1:12:31

Yeah, you know, one of the biggest issues, which was one of the questions that you asked and, I don't know, maybe answered a lot of this already is that if I spend a dollar on a lead, that first week, you know if I get back 50 cents, I mean that's that's.

Bret Holmes: 1:13:00

That's about what I do.

Dan: 1:13:00

Maybe uh if I'm 50% ROI in one week on a lead is well above industry's average. Yeah, I was probably being generous to myself.

Bret Holmes: 1:13:04

Um, 30% is usually pretty good. A hundred percent after 45 days. It should be your target range. Some of the guys that are larger. They can go out 90 days to 120 days and that's fine. That's what they can do. That's not the world that you're in. But if you're doing eight webinars a month and you're bringing in leads, 45 days you should be able to break even. I can tell you that there are businesses out there right now with the exact same model. They don't have a very good external evergreen product. It converts to 20 to 30 roi up front. They make up the difference in doing live webinars and live events that are pertinent to the market. Um, so you should be there, you should. You should be able to catch that money up in 30 to 45 days and if you lose a thousand bucks, so what? You will make it up at some point.

John Newtson: 1:13:47

But do not let the list dry up not to just not to make sure we're making an assumption about. When you do buy media, what do you send it to Yep?

Dan: 1:14:00

Well, I mean, if I use some, oh, I typically send it to an e-book or strategy guide, I'll call it. I typically send it to an e-book or strategy guide, I'll call it that puts them into a funnel, that puts them into a webinar A lot, sometimes evergreen, and sometimes we'll time it just right so that it goes into a live webinar.

Bret Holmes: 1:14:22

Sure, make sure they go into the e-letter file, make sure that you're communicating with them, the live stuff that you're doing. I really don't like 30 funnels, 14 day funnels. I think they should have a three day funnel and then after that they should be in your world where you're talking to them every day about shit that's actually happening. Yeah, unless you had one of the top three copywriters in the world, right, you a 30 day funnel. It's probably doing more harm than good.

John Newtson: 1:14:48

Yeah, I've never really heard, seen anybody who actually tried shortening the sales cycle. Regret it in the industry.

Bret Holmes: 1:14:55

So there are some people out there that I know like, especially in the real estate spaces and the people with less content than us. But why deprive somebody who came in with a, with an active interest with the, the you know probably the attention span of a net, to assume that over 30 days, you sending them 15 emails to buy a product that they've already said no to 14 times, without starting to send them real content about the market, is advantageous? That doesn't make any sense to me. Now there are markers out there to be like well, our funnel works and I don't want anybody talking to our guy while they're in our funnel. Fine, I contest that you can do the same thing in a five-day funnel with 12 emails that you can do in a 30-day funnel with 12 emails, I guarantee you. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you saw Rob Braddock's post about the promo that he put together which, by the way, I don't know if it works. I don't know if it doesn't work, but I know that his promotion of it and the quality of it is freaking awesome. Because here's the thing what did he do every day? And what did he do every day? He put up two. I mean it wasn't much, but he put up two LinkedIn posts that were extremely pointed. That had everybody talking about it. He had enough sizzle there that you saw what he did. That was different. Chris was great, the promo was great, the shot was great and everybody is just waiting around saying I want to. I mean I don't know how many I I hit him up and I I fell for my own shit. So I was like I got to see this thing. I got to see this thing, but he did that in three to five days. He didn't need 14. He didn't need 20.

Bret Holmes: 1:16:15

You can do the same thing with opportunity. Get people into an e-letter that fulfills them on a daily basis with value. Establish that USP. I know nothing in this business that is worth more than that. That is so overlooked by everybody. People think free e-letters are something that you can create in AI, or they're just. You send them out at eight o'clock and they say some bullshit and they don't ever read them. They don't care about their open rates. All they care about is their marketing cycle. Where do you think those marketing cycles people's like? Do you think they're being fulfilled by getting new sales pitches? Some maybe, but the majority of them don't want to leave that e-letter because there's value there. The biggest businesses in this industry have value in that e-letter daily wealth.

Bret Holmes: 1:16:58

I don't even know what Agora Financials is anymore. Daily Reckoning, investmentu, the one at Motley Fool. I mean, look at Motley Fool's e-letter. Like literally you're talking eight million people on a file and the fact that they weren't a part of the Agora universe and they figured it out even before Agora. Because I was working with Motley Fool in 1998 when they were the MotleyFoolcom with the jester hats and shit. They knew the value of that letter and they don't mess around with it. That's their baby and people in this industry overlook it so hard. They fire their editors. They don't care about it. All they care about is their marketing cycle.

Bret Holmes: 1:17:40

You're going to find yourself and you're going to be neutered pretty quick if that's all you care about, unless you're buying money and turning it around in 30 days and even then. So I'll give you another example. There's companies out there spending a shitload of money. The guys at NUPR, right, or some of the other guys have been about FMS. I don't want to call them out by name, but they're spending a half a million to a million dollars a month. And you talk to them a year later or two years later and John could probably attest this in a private conversation but they're like well, now I've run out of good places for my leads and I can't scale this budget anymore, like well.

Bret Holmes: 1:18:14

So what's your annuity? What's that? What is the value that you reap from these people, aside from the 30-day funnel, the telesales funnel and the live webinar that you did for the acquisition? What do you do with them after that? Well, we sell them and then we sell them more stuff. What do you do with them after that? Well, we sell them and then we sell them more stuff.

Bret Holmes: 1:18:32

But it's it's not going well. No shit, because you didn't build an annuity, you didn't build anything there. That's going to last. Right, and that is literally what I know that and people can work all they want about a free e-letter. It's got to be good and it's got to go out and it's got to be unique. And the people that have that, they find themselves when times are. They have something to depend on.

Bret Holmes: 1:18:50

The guys that are just buying traffic to build a funnel to do sales. I've been around this business long enough to know that I've seen 30 of those guys pop up and they're like I'm like the greatest media buyer in the world. I'm like, no, you have a new product, good marketing in a niche, but I can tell you that in two years I won't see you again. And that has happened so many times because they don't care about the business in and of itself and they don't have a purpose. They just wanted to build a funnel. That made money and God bless them. But they'll be on to selling penis pills or heart medication or whatever is hot next. They won't be in this business.

John Newtson: 1:19:29

This is exactly the difference between offer owner and publisher right here, right Is, there's a lot of really amazing marketers who can build an offer in a funnel and go out in a lot of niches and just burn through and put big numbers up and then, like Brett says, in a couple of years they're gone.

John Newtson: 1:19:47

We see it a lot. The difference is, if you're acquiring those customers in a way that you can build an ongoing relationship and keep a huge chunk of them paying attention, then you have a publishing business that can be much bigger than just the offer, and so there's a lot of sex on the offer side up front, and that's why everyone's all like I got this funnel. And there's always every every few years there's a new internet marketing cycle where you'll see, someone will take all the traditional pieces, rename them in a new way, and here's the funnel, this is the funnel and everyone does the funnel and they're like all the successes are people who did nothing before, and then they put something in place and it worked for them to some degree and it's like oh, this is amazing, it's perfect, it works. And then there's no publishing business behind it. There's no communication, there's no e-letters or nothing. They just have a sales process Looks great, does great, makes money Disappears over and over again, yep.

John Newtson: 1:20:50

What else else you want on this?

Bret Holmes: 1:20:53

no, I mean, that's that's you know. I'll send you my bill. That's that's a lot. But what I'd like to do, john, which I think would be a value to people, is check back in in August and see where we are, and I'd also, if you're up for it, dan, I'd also like to kind of maybe do you record some of your webinars uh, yeah, yeah, I record for.

John Newtson: 1:21:15

I'd love to take. Maybe maybe we can do a version of this and grab a couple of hobby writers, maybe do it live, like Brett suggested earlier, um, and maybe we can kind of run through, um, some of your copy, um, give suggestions, things like that um on the promos and products um, and see if we can kind of like give you guys some ideas on that side and then, yeah, check that. Then we can check back in in a month or a couple months here and see, see, what, what, which, which we're able to kind of deal with from all this.

Bret Holmes: 1:21:45

Dan if you want to, if you want to send me. If this is a lot and I used a lot of nomenclature here which may be foreign to you and I tried to sound really smart I tried to take some notes here which will at least be able to like you can hearken back to. But if you need me to read something or rehash an individual idea, just try to do one thing at a time Right now. Get that e-letter out every day. Make sure it's healthy. Get it out of keep if you can. Put it in. Be hot if you can, but get your messaging right. Be a statue in the middle of this field of other financial experts. Be in there.

Bret Holmes: 1:22:18

Don't be afraid to send content because it costs too much. I swear to God, if you said that to me and I work for you, I'd be like I quit. I can't do that. Like if somebody walked into my house and house. Be like brett. We got to send less mail because the mail costs too much. Be like I don't know what business we're in, but this ain't mine, because it costs about 0.001 cents to send a mail and you're telling me it's too expensive to send the mail. That ain't good. Um, that, yeah, I'm not. I'm not saying that to be a douche. I'm saying that because it you that math can't be in your decision makingmaking. Your messaging and what you send out has to be of the utmost importance. And if you want to send it out 15 times a day, as long as that mail is healthy, delivered, opened and clicked, that's what you should do.

Dan: 1:23:02

I also need to make sure that they're not throttling me for sending out too many emails too.

Bret Holmes: 1:23:09

Yeah, I mean that's the. I mean don't take this the wrong way, but that's the pussy ass answer. Okay, right, all right, like, don't like get out of keep, like, go to be. You know you can stay in keep for those two emails a week, but take that list and move it over to beehive and start sending from there and see what it looks like. I understand the throttling. I don't mean to go 15 times a day, but you can go every day. That's not going to hurt you. Going twice a day in probably three or four weeks is probably where you want to be. One marketing, one editorial I assume you send marketing every day.

Dan: 1:23:44

Well, not necessarily Okay.

Bret Holmes: 1:23:50

On average, I'd say in the industry everybody sends two emails a day to every list, just about, unless the list is a very niche list. But your core file gets two emails a day, no matter what. I don't know anybody who doesn't send two emails a day. And when things are doing well, sometimes they get three, sometimes they get four, but two is pretty much bare minimum. Sometimes they're four, but two is pretty much bare minimum.

Bret Holmes: 1:24:15

And I'll tell you, the dogma to avoid is well, our people don't like getting that much mail. Incorrect, the people that complain don't like getting that much mail. I hate to say it because if our customers saw us doing this they'd be like, well, screw this guy. Do you turn off Seinfeld because there were commercials? Right, but if, but if I asked you like, what do you hate most about TV? Oh, I hate damn commercials. But do you like Seinfeld? Because there wouldn't be a Seinfeld without the commercials.

Bret Holmes: 1:24:37

Buddy, I hate to break it to you. Like they don't do it for free, so people understand it, but they love to complain about it. And if you listen to people's like incoherent complaining about things, that people love to complain about everything, you can't listen to them. If you listen to your wife or your mom or your brother about everything they complained about, you would think that they had the worst life ever. Nope, they just like to complain. And to a company like ours, especially over the internet, the complaints get pointier and they come more and more. You have to have a thick skin about it Just a great story.

John Newtson: 1:25:10

I always love the story because Adam Richardson always tell me about when he worked at Altucher. Altucher loved his blog posts and it was like his favorite thing that he would send out. And he was, you know, that was his thing and that was he was known for. And they sent out some marketing emails and he got pissed off because the unsubscribes from the marketing email was hurting the list. And they just showed him hey, the unsubscribes in the marketing email are lower than the unsubscribes from the content blog post that you send out. And then it's okay, whatever.

Bret Holmes: 1:25:37

Um, so yeah, it's um, a lot of the list and it's ego. I. I don't work on that, I work on the numbers. If the numbers show me a doubling in clicks, I'm happy, because clicks mean that my people are happy. If I piss off 1% of people, here's the other number that I can tell you, Dan, because I had to pull this from Mike Ward back in the day. He made me do it because he had the same problem. He's like Brett I'm tired of.

Bret Holmes: 1:26:01

Because Bill Bonner and Mark Ford were like you guys send too much damn email. Because other people in Agora were jealous of how much email we send and because other people in Agora were jealous of how much email we send. And that happens Like. I was even at John's conference at the Pendry and I watched. I forget his name. What's his name? Camaterra, Camarera. Like he stood up. Yeah, it was Camarera, he used to work at Agora.

Bret Holmes: 1:26:23

Financial Camerer, yeah, Camerer, yeah, Tom Tom was like stop sending so much damn mail. I'm like that's okay, I guess, Whatever. It's like telling somebody stop going to the gym so much. It's ridiculous, you don't need to go that much. Yeah, okay, Anytime you want to arm wrestle, I'm willing to take you on.

Bret Holmes: 1:26:46

Like people don't like sending mail because they don't have anything to say. I get that. And they don't like sending mail because they don't have anything to say? I get that. And they don't look at the numbers. The numbers that Mike wanted me to pull was Brett, because he was getting complaints. He was like everybody in Gores are planning to send in like three times as much mail as everybody else. It's bullshit. I'm like okay, let me pull all the people that unsubscribed. And we pulled everybody. It took about two months and Grace Epperson helped with this. I was like pull all the unsubscribes and tell me what their LTV was. There was one buyer out of 15,000 people. I was like who'd you lose? After that, Mike was just like you do what you want with the email. I was like thank you.

Dan: 1:27:28

Just stand away, all right, awesome, this was great, great stuff, I really appreciate.

Bret Holmes: 1:27:34

I hope you got some value out of it. Dan again, spend the money, make the volume. Um, the tough part of this business is the art right. So the messaging, the quality of the editorial, the quality of the webinars, these are things that need you know the day-to-day interaction of your business. I can tell you how to build the roads, but how you drive on them, that's going to be up to you a little bit. Yep, all right, at least in these sessions. Yep, john, you cool, I'm cool. This is great. Guys, I appreciate it If you stuck around this whole time. If somebody sees this, I will send you $20 because I want to see how many people actually stuck around. You just hit me up on LinkedIn or my email address or whatever.

John Newtson: 1:28:16

You made it all the way through. You got 20 bucks from Brett.

Bret Holmes: 1:28:19

Yeah, man, Actually I'm kind of looking for a response right there. That's a free 20 bucks.

Dan: 1:28:23

Wait, does that count for me too?

John Newtson: 1:28:28

Thanks guys, awesome Thanks. Take care Bye.