heya,

just wanted to give you a quick update about what’s going
on with me so you dont think i disappeared on you again…

the last couple of months have been both exciting and
painful.

as you know, i have been in and out of chemotherapy. and
this has reinvigorated my resolve and excitement about
business. i’ve had this clarity of thought that is
unrivalled. it’s almost like the chemo killed off all the
shitty brain cells that were messing with my thinking and
left me just the awesome ones that have good ideas haha.

i’ve had some breakthroughs i promise to share with you
soon. basically i figured i’m not gonna live forever and
this business has been pretty much killing me. so i started
to push all my ideas forward as fast as i can, but more
importantly i started getting help.

a major accompishment that i have now cleaned and
reawakened my dormant mailing list completely. it took
fewer than 20 emails and was complete months ago. what this
means, is that any subscribers whose emails are invalid,
out of date, or expired have bounced. Most people who don’t
want to hear from me have either unsubscribed or complained
their way off the list. and what i’m left with is a pretty
decent chunk of the original subscriber list who still want
to hear from me, i’m happy to report. the final numbers are
yet to be calculated but i’ll do an email dedicated to
this. i think a big part of why it did so well is i had a
pretty good relationship with you and your fellow
subscribers before my long hiatus, and then i came back
with some powerful and unique content and recaptivated
people’s interest.

another bit of news, is that if you recall we were having
some serious speed issues with the server. this is because
up until recently i hadn’t decoupled all the elements of
the website, email, tracking, membership etc. We were
running everything from one machine. that is, when i’m
sending emails, that affects your ability to access the
site and click links etc.

so i cleverly outsourced the system infrastructure and we
separated the applications into different machines. The
setup is pretty sweet now. i can send millions of emails in
parallel, in the blink of an eye. Emailing doesn’t affect
any other aspect of the website, despite running off the
same database. i still got a dude working on fine-tuning it
and making it more resilliant and horizontally scalable. in
another email, i’ll fully geek out and tell you how i
sorted it out for like $200.

meanwhile, this is going on, i started the proper work of
doing the data analysis for the tracked data and emails
that were sent. i compiled a 70GB zip file of interaction
history as a complete dataset. i’m doing some modelling on
it to just get some insights as to what type of emails and
email content get response. the report is not yet complete,
but when it is, again, i promise to share full details of
what i find. this is an early step in figuring out machine
learning for the email sending. which, btw, i’m also doing
in parallel with this thing. i hired a bunch of help and
consulted with lots of experts and i think we could have a
beta test ready in the next 3 months.

Now one of the big issues i’ve had is being consistent with
email writing. Email is important because it’s how i gather
real, human, interaction data. i decided i can’t do all
this shit and write daily emails too–i’m unreliable if i
want to count on myself to do it. So i’m going to start
hiring out writing email. in fact, i’m trying to be a lot
less hands on from here on out. this doesn’t mean it’s not
gonna be still ME behind the emails, just i need help with
it, because i can’t do everything on my own. so i’m looking
to do that. i will probably do a dedicated email announcing
the opening later, but let me fill you in, in case you
wanna get a head start on the opportunity.

so basically, i looked at hiring out email writing to
professionals and was completely unimpressed with the
quality of the talent. granted, i probably didnt look hard
enough or long enough…but i can quickly tell that there’s
a general shitty way of doing email that i’m not really
impressed with. this attitude of ‘get er done’ and writing
an email in 15 mins is not my jam. i dont do that shit and
i dont respect it and i’m not impressed with fast and
thoughtless. i spend a lot of time on my emails, i put a
lot of thought into them, and i edit them hard and i want
to maintain that consistency.

there’s really only one way to get that kind of quality…

it’s to train someone on it. so i’m opening up two paid
internships with me to learn to write daily emails the
“yaghi way”. it’s for three months, after which, the
internship transitions into a proper part-time position.
i’ll give you more details about it soon…but if you’re
keen and want to get first dibs, reply and hit me up NOW.
the truth is, i have already given one of the spots
away…dude is FIRE.

truthfully, i’m also going to give priority to people who
have taken the Super Traffic Machine training for a couple
reasons….

first, the basics of the yaghiway of email writing are
taught there…

and secondly, i want someone intimate with the product.

if you have not been through the training, get it here
quickly

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

and dont forget to email me NOW to tell me you’re keen on
the paid internship.

So that’s about it as far as work accomplishments go. But
here’s the huge one my friend…

i am now officially a CANCER SURVIVOR!!

By the grace and love and protection of God almighty, i
conquered the disease. i did major surgery on Tuesday last
week, i’m in the hospital recovering like crazy. they
removed a whole bunch of organs and i’ll never pee like a
normal human boy again…BUT the doctor told me the
pathology report indicates there was NO cancer present in
any of the organs removed, it was killed completely by the
chemotherapy. so i’m cancer free.

i’m writing this update from the hospital. i’m a few days
away from being released inshallah (God Willing).

thanks for bearing with me and my on again off again
erratic emailing. I’m gonna do awesome things with you and
share stuff no one has, or ever will ever share with you.

With love,

~j

—
{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

When I was a young naive feller coming up in Internet
marketing, I was given advice that made me unhappy. Over
the years, i’ve managed to let go of it a bit at a time,
and in the process discovered that advice to be wrong.

It made me less effective as a marketer…

It made me feel inauthentic and less true to myself…

On the other hand, the more i went against the advice, the
happier i was, the more i love what i do, and the better my
results are.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to let go of all the advice
until my long hiatus from emailing you. It was only during
this time, when i severed my ties with most of my peers
that i truly found my voice.

So in today’s lesson, i’d like to share with you some
of the advice, which i’m sure you too have heard in your
online business journey…and how doing the opposite
changed my perspective…and perhaps, just maybe, you feel
inspired to try doing things your own way too.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll feel happier.

1. MAINTAIN YOUR POSITIONING
==============================

Well, early on, it was all about being the “guru”. You
gotta sit on the mountain top, put out bits of wisdom,
being all perfect and worship-worthy. If you didn’t have
the results to back it up, the advice was: fake it until
you make it!

I remember one of my earliest mentors saying to me a little
speech along these lines:

“See my porsche? No one rides it but me. The minute you
let them inside, the fantasy goes away and it becomes real.
Same as my waterfront apartment I never let anyone in. If
someone comes to pick up something, i’ll meet them
downstairs. You gotta maintain your positioning at all
times.”

Positioning is how you ensure people respect what you have
to say.

You had to remain untouchable, unreachable, inaccessible.
People shouldn’t have your number, you shouldn’t waste
time responding to personal emails, and so on.

This stuff is great advice for creating a facade of being
important, when you’re not.

But i always felt it was really unnatural, fake, and
dickheaded. Especially that it was my business to teach
people who wanted to learn and help businesses that needed
help.

How does it make sense then, to push them down and so
intently put yourself above them?

It just did not suit my personality. I come from a family
of highly competent, highly educated, and yet humble
people. My father, a university professor, a world-renowned
multidisciplinary philosopher…when introducing himself
will do so with no more than his first name, and even that,
he abbreviates. This is in a culture where people use their
ENTIRE title. Where, even if you have no formal title, you
will take pride in your family name or tribe, or in the
name of your first born son which itself is a title (ie,
“Abu so-and-so”).

We sit on the floor to eat.

What money we earn is not spent on fancy showoff things,
but rather invested into charitable projects and helping
others out. My family have a scholarship fund for the less
able, every member contributes from their yearly zakat to
it. We have so many “Doctors” in the family that it was
once mistaken for our surname!

So how much sense does it make then for me to keep my
students at arm’s length?

I felt uncomfortable and inauthentic as i did it.

When i began using Google Ads, in my earliest days, i
disclosed my phone number in the footer of my emails. And
encouraged all my subscribers to call me for guided help. I
was advised against it, but i didn’t listen. People would
call and talk for hours getting my help for free. My
earliest success in affiliate marketing was a direct result
of doing this.

Later, as i got busier, i looked for ways to leverage my
time. I personally manned my email address. Until this day,
i reply to emails i receive from subscribers.

What i found as i did this, when all my peers were showing
off about how they distance themselves from their
customers…what i found, is it pays off. I have my finger
on the pulse of my customers. I know what it is they need
and it gives me ideas of what kind of products to create.
It informs me as to what they are struggling with. Where my
products are coming up short. And i constantly improve on
my offerings as a result.

I found that replying to people’s emails brought in extra
sales.

But it also told me what objections and questions
subscribers had which they were not all voicing. When
someone asked a question and i took the time to write an
email response, they would buy. It wasn’t a matter of
just a single sale which i “wasted” 30 minutes of
one-on-one time to get…

Rather, i could take that very question and that very
response, and repurpose it by sending it to my entire
mailing list. All of a sudden, that same question that ONE
person voiced…which was on the minds of hundreds of
subscribers…now they had their answer, they too would
buy.

My intern program was born as a result of this idea too. I
decided rather than sell another coaching product, as many
of my peers did for 20-50k to listen to their golden
bullshit once a month… i’d just offer people the
opportunity to work alongside me with unrestricted access
to me. I would make it free and only ask they help me do my
work in exchange.

I built an entire line of services around this and made a
lot of money in the process while giving my interns the
exact sort of help they needed.

So yeah, i don’t do positioning. I’m a regular dude and
I’m working it out as i go, just like you. I might be a
step or two ahead of you…or behind you. Either way, i’m
grateful you’re here, listening to me.

2. AVOID CONTROVERSY / POLITICS
=================================

Another early mentor advised one to avoid politics because
it is controversial and controversy is not good for sales.
He argued that alienating your customer was not a good way
to make your customer like you. People who do not like you
will not buy from you.

I am not generally a political person. But i can be quite
controversial as i learned a few years ago.

Here’s how it started…

When i was an affiliate for Magnetic Sponsoring, what most
people did not know is that i was not a regular affiliate.
I was actually HIRED to do their Google Ads and i was
pitted against a professional traffic agency.

I was still pretty new and raw to the whole thing…so when
they asked me how i’d like to be compensated, i did not
have the confidence to ask for a recurring fee. Instead, i
said i’d be prepared to do a revenue sharing deal. My
thinking, at the time, was if i don’t do so well, they
won’t be overly disappointed. Basically, if i generate
few sales, they won’t lose much.

The deal, however, turned out to be a generous one. For the
sake of simplicity, i was offered the same percentage as
affiliates, and sales would be tracked through the
affiliate system. Only difference is, they would be paying
the entire ad bill. My commission was all profit.

So i agreed wholeheartedly and jumped right in and did
really well. Within a month or so, the professional ad
agency was fired and i became the top affiliate in their
system.

Here’s the thing though…

They ASSUMED i was collecting the leads myself first and
that i was building my own list. I don’t know until this
day why they would assume that and even be ok with it. I
did no such thing! I figured that since they were paying
the ad bill, the leads belonged to them exclusively and it
was not my right to collect even one for myself.

All the industry leaders, however, including Magnetic
Sponsoring, thought i had this huge mailing list that i
could mail offers to.

The reality is i had a small personal blog list, built with
my own money and effort…and i had stupidly put my own
business on hold while managing their campaign.

Everyone and their mum was asking me to mail for them. They
were all releasing products and i was not. Each time i was
expected to mail as a courtesy because at some point down
the line, i was probably going to need all of these people
to mail for me when i wanted to release a product of my
own.

One day, i was asked to promote a product that i honestly
found naseauting. but i was trying to genuinely promote it.
I emailed about it using a technique that i still use until
this day, called a “link centric email”.

What this is, is an email that basically looks like a
personal message, written in a rush. Its only objective is
to get as many people to click the link as possible, so
they can read the sales pitch on the other side. I always
use it as the first email when launching a new product and
i want as many people as possible to see the sales letter
at least once.

In this case, the style of email was a good way to avoid
saying something inauthentic about a product i didn’t
believe in…without endorsing the product…but still
sending as many people as possible to read the pitch. If
the product’s pitch was good enough to stand on its own
without my endorsement, it should have succeeded in
converting the people who clicked.

Now the thing that made this technique effective, was to
point out a curiosity on the other side of the click as an
afterthought in the email copy.

For example…

“Oh, don’t mind the bird that keeps trying to eat off
my ear in the video…”

–or–

“Btw, some people told me the form isn’t working for
them, so just let me know if that’s you”…

Something like that.

I pointed out the dude in the video looked a bit goofy, as
part of the technique.

Next thing i know, i get a reply from the said mentor
scolding me for how i emailed my list. Which, btw, wasn’t
his fucking business nor his place to say. It’s my list
and i can email it how i want.

But i didnt say this. Instead, being still quite a small
fish, i felt bad that i offended him and apologised and
sent out a second email to my list retracting my comment!

This was one of MANY things bothering me of course.

I found myself constantly compromising in my own values,
doing things i didn’t care for, or agree with, that did
not serve my interests nor my subscribers’ interests…

And one day, when the frustrations reached an intolerable
level…

I said dude, screw this. I don’t actually NEED any of
these guys. All of them sold traffic products, but not one
of them ACTUALLY knew a thing about how to generate
traffic. Because the only strategy they ALL used was (1) to
have affiliates and (2) to use joint venture partnerships
to promote each other’s shit.

On the other hand, i actually knew how to generate traffic
by the bucket load. I did not need them and did not NEED to
keep compromising so that one day i can maybe ask some of
these guys to return the favour and promote for me.

So i turned my back on the industry leaders in a very
public way.

And i began marketing in a way most would have considered
at the time to be “unprofessional”. Because it was raw
and real. It was unapologetic and i didn’t give two shits
who would get offended. I cussed. I was offensive. I mocked
and laughed and just had a good time with it.

What was weird is, this was working really well!

I found that by polarising the audience, people either
loved me or hated me. No one was feeling “meh” about
me. And this was EXCELLENT for sales.

Gooroos couldn’t understand what i was doing or why. They
thought i’d lost my marbles. They began warning people
off me and my team. Saying we were toxic and that we should
be avoided and not modeled.

Breaking away from them was the best thing i ever did. Fuck
them.

I was finally free to be myself and to run my business the
way i liked. In the process, i wrote sales letters that …
i swear to God, once i showed one of my early mentors and
he LAUGHED! He thought it was weak…and yet, it was
accurate, authentic, and most importantly it was WORKING.

One of the landing pages i ran on Google Ads used a
left-aligned page content instead of center aligned. I
remember people asking dicks like Daegan, Marshall, and
Livingston about my site and how it was able to run on
Google Ads when everyone else was getting kicked off..

And they said, oh he just got lucky, they’ll get him
eventually.

They’re off. I’m still standing cocks.

It was fun to break all these conventions of the “proper
way” to write an email or do a promo…or to write a
sales letter or a landing page. It was profitable like
crazy. And i attribute it all to being controversial.

3. DON’T GET ANALYTICAL
=========================

I was given this advice very early on by a respected
colleague. He told me, “Dude you’re too technical.
People are dumb. Just keep it simple.”

This is great advice, if you want to market to a mass
audience.

It’s also great advice if you’re a gooroo who likes to
sell to the lowest common denominator. Stupid people make
easy marks. So you can trick them into buying things that
are no good.

The thing is, for most of my career i fought against my
technical / analytical nature. I saw it as a curse.

I’d write things and then go back and try to simplify
them and bring them down to layman level. It wasn’t
comfortable and it was unnatural for me to do it. And i
think because this advice was a criticism, i saw it as a
personal flaw i had to mend.

Thing is, detail can be quite important. Skipping it for
the sake of “simplifying” can even be dishonest.

Only recently have i managed to break away completely from
it.

My emails DO get technical and analytical. Fucked if i care
anymore. Honestly, if “smart stuff” bothers you and
“numbers hurt your head”, you REALLY shouldn’t be
buying anything from me.

If you don’t like to read or listen, also, probably not a
good idea to buy from me. I’m long winded as fuck. But
what i’m saying is useful and it’s stuff i think about
before doing things. Thoughts are what dictate actions. So
if my thoughts aren’t of value, then you cannot value the
actions.

I began to discover this analytical stuff was beneficial
early on, of course. If you recall, when i was 14, i told
you i was a consultant for a company in Malaysia and one of
the tricks i used was to deliberately use technical jargon
to demonstrate i knew what i was doing.

Later in life, when selling traffic services, i found it
advantageous to show the complexity of what my team and i
do. This makes sense–it demonstrates the value of hiring
us instead of doing it themselves. Being analytical worked
there and made a lot of money.

When i transitioned back to selling info products, i
discovered there was actual INTEREST in my subscribers to
learn technical things. Since i am technical, much more
technical than any of my competitors in this space, it’s
my unique advantage which they can’t touch if they lived
thrice!

But i am also good at making technical stuff simple,
without making it unnecessary. And i made a lot of money
selling products that taught technical skills to internet
marketers.

Today, i’m taking it to a whole other level.

Because now i’m deliberately trying to filter out people
who are not particularly intelligent nor hard working. I
want to build an audience of smart people who can
comprehend complex things. I want to surround myself with
people of SUBSTANCE.

They’re easier for me to root for their success.
They’re better for me to deal with. They make good
customers, partners, and colleagues. They challenge me and
i challenge them.

To succeed in running a business of any kind, requires
skills, smarts, and hard work. There’s no room for lazy
people. There’s no room for greedy shortcut takers,
unless i’m training scam artists. And i’m not.

More importantly though, there is HUGE value in deep
analytical philosophical discussion. It allows us to
consider WHY we do things and to challenge our norms. If
you’re innovating or hope to innovate, you need to be
running on a different playing field all together. Your
thoughts aren’t simple. Your goals aren’t as simple as

“oh, *DUHH** i want to make 100k a week”…

…but more along the lines of…

“how can i spend 100k a week on advertising?”

(Btw, i learned from a guy who was spending 100k/day on PPC
and he was the most impressive man i ever met!)

And finally, i want to bury the big revolutionary ideas in
camouflage that only the deserving will reach.

That’s all i have for today.

—

If you’re interested in learning more about my crazy
online business and traffic ideas, check out the Super
Traffic Machine. It’s technical, it’s analytical,
it’s practical. If you’re prepared to put in the time
and the work, it will pay off.

Read more about it here…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

If you’re bothered by the idea of it taking 8 months to
get to the end of the training, it’s probably not for
you. It takes time to build something good that works. You
want a shortcut, you won’t find it here. You want a real
business, get the program i’ll see you inside.

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [ Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation ]

– [ Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL ]

– [ Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages ]

– [ Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares ]

– [ Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You ]

– [ Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages ]

– [ Part 7: Watching Visitors ]

– [ Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice ]

– [ Part 9: Why I Don’t Do Email Marketing Like That ]

– [ Part 10: Your Professional Email Addy ]

– [ Part 11: Build Your Own Clickfunnels Clone for a
Fraction of the Cost ]

– [ Part 12: How to Choose Your Website Tech When I’m Gone
]

– [ Part 13: How to Build Incrementally Robust, Reliable
Revenue & Traffic ]

– [ Part 14: Mailerlite & Facebook’s Dumb Email
Marketing Ideas ]

– [ Part 15: How to Make $3.5 Million When Your Campaign is
Bleeding]

– [Part 16: Things to do before going live]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

Apologies for the absence. Been busy working with a new
client, recording pilot episodes of my podcast, and was in
for the third cycle of chemo over the weekend which
wasn’t too bad.

You know how you can tell it wasn’t too bad?

I took my laptop to the hospital and worked the whole
weekend 😀

Also, just on a side note, i figured out i can do quite a
bit of writing on my phone. For example, the Clickfunnels
Clone email was written while in the hospital bed, on my
phone, in Google docs. It was then edited on my laptop when
i got home, before being finalised for sending.

Anyway, let’s get this party started.

Like i said, i’m working with a new client. Before going
live with a new ad campaign, there’s a bunch of things i
have to get sorted BEFORE even opening the ad account. So i
thought in this lesson, i’ll walk you through some of
what i do or had to do with this client to get things
rolling.

1. PLAN CONVERSION STRATEGY
==============================

After some back and forth, we decided to go with a straight
for the sale, long-form sales page landing page. He had a
sales letter that had performed well in print. We published
it onto his Wordpress tech stack, with some major rewriting
to tone down claims, clean formatting, and so on.

Recall from one of our earlier lessons that there’s two
drawbacks with the long-form sales letter approach:

(1) You can’t collect leads without distracting from the
sales pitch

(2) and, it exposes you to a host of Google reviewer
scrutiny

After weighing our options, we thought, despite the
drawbacks, this would be the fastest way to get started.
However, we agreed to run a hybrid landing page funnel as a
backup plan. The client was VERY reluctant to try anything
so drastically different, so i asked him to commit only
5-10% of each month’s budget to testing this hybrid page.

Here’s why…

I know there’s a good chance Google disapproves our ads,
down the line (it’s a risky business category, which is why
people come to me–i specialise in risky business
categories). If Google’s objection is simple enough, it can
be resolved with light changes to the letter. No big deal.
But to be honest, i don’t think we’re going to be that
lucky with this one.

There’s precedent that suggests their objection will be
to the sales letter’s main HOOK. The “gimmick” or
story that makes it work.

Should that ever happen, we will either need a brand new
letter / story (which may not be anywhere near as
effective), OR we need a brand new conversion strategy.

Either way, the main funnel that would have been generating
sales is going to be completely stopped. While we’re
building out a new funnel, no money is coming in. Which
means, this client won’t be able to afford to pay me
during the time he needs me the most!

Having a hybrid page funnel as a backup plan, that’s a
whole different strategy for converting traffic. It’s
probably going to be my next move if Google disapproves the
sales letter. This way, we give Google less to object to,
it’s easier to isolate elements for testing and improving
conversions, and we have multiple avenues to convert
visitors.

Rather than wait for Google to kill the main funnel before
building out a hybrid page funnel, i rather do it now. Then
we make a small budget allocation to that backup funnel. An
investment into “R&D”. We get to develop that
backup strategy while the client is making money from the
main funnel, where he won’t feel the sting of negative
profits while it’s being fine tuned.

Should we ever need to use the backup, we won’t start
from scratch.

The backup funnel is how we’re dealing with the potential
for exposure to Google’s reviewers. The second issue of
not being able to collect leads is irrelevant; the client
doesn’t want to deal with non-buyer leads.

2. COVER YOUR ASS
===================

For this sales page to run on Google Ads, we’re going to
need to add a clear disclaimer for claims made about the
product and a carefully worded guarantee we spoke about in
an earlier lesson in this series.

The trouble is, if you recall, one of the techniques to
make a “direct to the sales letter landing page” work is to
make it sound informational. Having a loud, clear
disclaimer early in the page is really going to fuck this
up for us. You can’t talk about your guarantee and cover
your butt about what your product can do for people before
you’ve had a chance to get them reading.

On a hybrid page, i put the disclaimer at the end of the
first copy block. But a hybrid page is clear about its
intent to present something to sell. A sales letter is not
so immediately obvious. It’s part of its charm.

I thought, initially, no problem, we’ll put the
disclaimer a little further down the page…but there’s
still the risk that a lazy google reviewer won’t notice
it and will disapprove us despite having the proper
disclaimer. So i thought instead, i’ll put a fixed footer
at the bottom of the screen (not the page), containing the
copy of the disclaimer.

This would sit in the lower, say 10-20% of the screen and
persist, even if you scroll, until you dismiss it.

But when i tried it, on mobile it covered up half the
headline!

This thing needed some creativity to work. What can i do?

Using Elementor’s Popup designer, i built the disclaimer
as a popup anchored to the bottom of the screen. Then i
instructed it to be triggered about 15 seconds into the
reader’s arrival on the page.

This allows the reader a chance to read the headline and
get into the hook BEFORE seeing the disclaimer. And the
disclaimer, by this point, may as well have been a generic
sitewide statement, making the reader aware that this site
sells things. Which is perfectly ok.

But more importantly, it allows even the lazy Google
reviewer to see the disclaimer if they visit.

In addition, i included the same disclaimer text into the
footer of the page. This way, if Google’s automated
review system looks through the page for a disclaimer, it
would find it. (Elementor uses javascript to generate the
popup, so there is a possibility that Google’s bot will
not find the content of the popup when it crawls the page,
hence the need for it in the footer of the page too).

On a side-note, after running this page, i watched how
visitors react to the disclaimer…and they mostly ignore
it. They don’t even bothering to close it! How cool is that
🙂

3. OPTIMISE THE FUCK OUT OF MOBILE
====================================

Now, with this all done, i spent the next few days
perfecting the appearance of the page on mobile.

Why? you ask.

Well, a few years ago, we would deliberately turn off
mobile ads in Google, because mobile traffic would never
convert. But today, i find that more than 80% of all
traffic i drive for clients come from some sort of mobile
device.

Not only that, but people are more willing to buy with
their mobiles than ever before.

The trouble is, most of us build pages for desktop FIRST
and do mobile responsive as an afterthought. Often fonts
end up being too big or too small, important CTA buttons
wrap around and break, images appear before important text
that gives them context, etc. All kinds of horrible,
horrible things that cause mobile traffic to convert less
frequently.

So what i do is i test the heck out of the landing page on
mobile starting from the iPhone 4G size all the way up to
iPad Pro sizes.

And when i design with the CSS rules, i try to simplify my
life by stating font-sizes in rem (root em). This way, i
assign a main font-size to the HTML / root tag of the page
in px (pixels), and then everything is sized relative to
the root using rem units.

Eg, if the HTML (root) tag is set to 22px font size, then i
might define my main heading as having a 3rem size which
means 3 x 22px = 66px and the subheading as 2rem which
means 2 x 22 = 44px.

The beauty of doing it this way is when you want to setup
the different mobile sizes, you don’t have to change the
font-size of every heading. You only change the root
element’s font size (the reference point). So i’d say
on mobile, make the HTML tag 10px. Then the main heading
which was set to 3rem originally will automatically scale
to 3 x 10px = 30px and the subheading which was set to 2rem
will scale down to 20px.

Bit of geekiness. You can do these things easily with
Elementor without touching the code if you understand the
rem unit.

4. CONNECT FUNNEL PAGES
==========================

Once the landing page is all done, the next step is to
connect it to the checkout page and the product you’re
selling. And if you’re going to be doing upsells (which
you should), you’ll need to set those up too. Since i use
Cartflows for my clients, i was able to do this pretty
easily and quickly.

Make sure you setup your Abandoned Cart Recovery emails and
build your checkout page. Test it too on mobile.

Here’s a little “hack” if you want to know one…

I don’t generally condone this, but i know my clients
think they can convert WAY better if they didn’t have to
abide by Google’s strict rules. So i tell them they can
do whatever “ the fuck “ they want on the upsells and
in emails. I let them go to town, doing whatever they want
and i don’t interfere.

Google reviewers are neither interested in, nor will they
ever purchase or sign up to your forms to see what comes
next. So as long as the remainder of your pages are not
reachable by clicking a link on the page, you can get away
with just about anything on there.

I still think you should take Google’s guidelines as
generally good advice for being a responsible online
business. But if you really can’t live without your
scams, hype, bullshit, and lies, at least hide it in your
upsells, email follow-up, and pages that are not publicly
exposed to Google.

5. INSTALL TRACKING
====================

Once you’ve got checkout setup and upsells are in order,
checked them thoroughly on mobile, the next thing i always
do is ensure i have Inspectlet installed. I add it on:

1. the landing/sales page,
2. checkout page,
3. all upsell pages.

This is how i ensure the entire process is working exactly
as i expect and can troubleshoot if something isn’t
working.

In addition, you need to get the Google Conversion Tracking
pixel on at the very least the page seen immediately after
a purchase completes. Ideally, you setup all the conversion
values through the entire funnel so you can tell the full
value of a particular traffic source.

6. TEST PAYMENTS
=================

Then you switch your funnel to test mode and make a test
purchase. Go through every step. Go through every branch of
your upsells, systematically. Ensure congruence and make
sure everything works as expected. You cannot possibly
spend enough time on this. Test thoroughly.

No sense starting an ad campaign, spending money, then
discovering it’s not selling and having to hunt around to
see what you forgot to do.

Once you’ve finished the test mode test, turn off test
mode, drop the price of your product to $1 and purchase it
at least one time using a real transaction to ensure it
works in live mode, with a real credit card. If all is
well, raise the price back to its original.

7. START TRAFFIC
=================

Then and only then are you ready to start your traffic
campaign. Generally my initial ad campaign is VERY simple.
I manage accounts in a way to minimise effort and
maintenance. So i typically start with 4 VERY distinct ad
groups, 5-20 keywords each, each with 4 very different ads.

I don’t do any exact keyword matching, nor any
split-testing of ads. This is a load of shit only idiots
do.

Turn on your campaign with a minimal budget to start (eg,
$20). Google likes to blow the first day’s budget
immediately on stupid things. Use the maximise clicks
target to get as many clicks for your budget as possible.
You can always change this to optimize for conversions
after you’ve had like 100+ conversions. There’s plenty of
details on how to do all this stuff and why in the Super
Traffic Machine.

—

That’s all for now. That’s the checklist of things i
like to do before going live with any ad campaign. If
you’re interested in getting a more detailed, step by
step plan for preparing yourself for major traffic, leads,
and sales…

You know the drill. Check out Super Traffic Machine. It has
everything you need to get going with your online business.

Read all about it at the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [ Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation ]

– [ Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL ]

– [ Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages ]

– [ Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares ]

– [ Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You ]

– [ Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages ]

– [ Part 7: Watching Visitors ]

– [ Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice ]

– [ Part 9: Why I Don’t Do Email Marketing Like That ]

– [ Part 10: Your Professional Email Addy ]

– [ Part 11: Build Your Own Clickfunnels Clone for a
Fraction of the Cost ]

– [ Part 12: How to Choose Your Website Tech When I’m Gone
]

– [ Part 13: How to Build Incrementally Robust, Reliable
Revenue & Traffic ]

– [ Part 14: Mailerlite & Facebook’s Dumb Email
Marketing Ideas ]

– [ Part 15: How to Make $3.5 Million When Your Campaign is
Bleeding ]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

Students complain to me always they’re unable to get clicks
at a low enough cost and conversions at a high enough rate
to recover their ad spend.

They refuse to scale their Google Ads campaign before they
break even on the frontend product. Even if they have other
products being upsold in their funnel.

When i was pioneering PPC, I subscribed to this view too.
Today, my priorities have shifted and i give very little
importance to breaking even or even frontend profitability.
I’m much more concerned with customer acquisition. And
what’s more is, i do not take so seriously any of the
fine-grained measurements of performance and instead prefer
to focus on overall, big picture, business numbers.

In today’s lesson, i’ll show you the flaws of the old
way and how the new “Yaghi Way” makes your ad campaign
management simpler and gets you to your business goals
LIGHTNING fast.

Suppose one of the big goals for your online business is
that it becomes financially successful, so it can support
itself as well as the extravagant spending habits of your
kids, spouse, and yourself.

Which of the following, would you rather make?

a) $5 profit / customer, from 10 customers

b) $1.50 profit / customer, from 10,000 customers

I’ll save you the multiplication. The total profit is (a)
$50 and (b) $15,000. So you’re choosing (b) because
you’re a playa.

Let me get this straight…

Despite (a) being the more profitable choice, you’re
going with (b), the less profitable per customer?

As it turns out, you don’t care about “profitability
per customer” anywhere near as much as you do the
FREQUENCY and SPEED with which you’re acquiring
customers. When not distracted by the detail of
profitability per customer, you saw the big picture; total
profit is a more useful and desirable measure of
performance.

So the fine-grained measurements of profitability serve no
more than to distract you from your real goal.

But this isn’t the only issue.

See, the problem with trying to make a campaign run as
efficiently as possible is you end up aggressively trimming
the fat and in the process, you trim away much of the
available traffic volume.

The technique, generally looks like this:

You study which keywords and ads are converting below a
certain threshold and killing everything else that
doesn’t. This aggressive fat trimming strategy requires a
fair bit of micromanagement and long, tedious, boring hours
pouring through keyword and placement reports. It’s worth
it too.

It WILL lower your cost per acquisition, it WILL increase
your ROI…

But at what cost?

You reduced the overall traffic volume available to you.

WHY? Because it does not convert?

NO…not really. It would convert if you let it. But it’s
because it’s not converting at a low enough cost to give
you the profitability per customer you’re desiring. In
other words, you’re killing traffic that does not convert
at a “cheap enough” price for your CHEAP frontend product
to recover.

This is silly.

What if YOU priced your product too cheaply for the cost of
traffic in this market?

And who says the frontend product HAS TO single-handedly
recover all your advertising cost? This idea of a “self
liquidating offer” is one of the dumbest notions to
deliberately try and implement. It was a marketing ploy
used to position PPC as a “free” traffic method when
selling you PPC training by early marketers in the space.
In reality, it’s a similar concept to the age old “loss
leader” in retail sales–which basically is a product you
sell at a loss just to get customers in the door and then
you make back what you lost by selling other things less
cheaply.

In fact, it is not the purpose of a single product to make
up all your advertising cost…but the purpose of your
ENTIRE business, and everything you sell, to recover your
advertising, production, etc costs (and profit).

There’s no law that says you can’t do this by selling one
product, two, or 100. You can do it with 1 customer /
month, 100, or a million. It all depends on your business,
your competition, and your market.

Besides, cheap traffic is scarce and it’s cheap for a
reason. It doesn’t convert very well or there isn’t
enough of it, so there’s little demand, which means less
competition, so you can have it for next to nothing. But it
won’t do you much good. Unless you’re willing to
micromanage the fuck out of your campaign.

This means, when you make your priority to lower “cost
per acquisition”, or to “break even” on the frontend,
or to make your funnel “self liquidating”…

…these are all fine-grained measurements of performance.
They do not look at the BIG PICTURE. You’re zoomed in,
micromanaging tiny details, and losing sight of the
ultimate goal of maximising overall earnings from your
business.

Overall earnings are about VOLUME.

Volume is a function of FREQUENCY and SPEED of
transactions. Meaning, more customers, buying more quickly,
more often is how you get your goal.

This is why it’s really misleading when someone posts on
Facebook a heavily truncated screenshot, with redacted
details, just to show you:

“LOOK! I’m getting 30 cent leads!”

— or —
“WOW, i’m getting $1 CUSTOMER leads!”

This seems REALLY exciting. But don’t rush to hire them
to manage your campaign, because this is a telltale sign of
an amateur. I’d go so far as to include anyone who’s
boasting about making $x per lead or per customer, or 400%
ROI or whatever.

Because these bullshit numbers are STILL focused on
profitability metrics without saying a darn thing about
volume.

What use is all of this if they can’t repeat it 10, 100,
1,000 times every day?

What you want to ask these screenshot guys is:

“How many of those leads/customers do you get per day?”

— or —

“Great ROI bro…how many customers per day are you
generating at that ROI?”

If you’re with me so far, i’m gonna fuck your head just
a little bit more.

To be completely fair, i should have included an option (c)
above, that shows you a negative profit (ie, a loss). So
here goes.

Which would you rather make:

a) $5 profit from 10 customers

b) $1.50 profit from 10,000 customers

c) $15 LOSS (-$15 profit) from 100,000 customers

I’ll save you the multiplication, option (c) = $1.5
Million in LOSS.

Would you change your answer?

Would you take (c) over (b)?

Probably not. And i was like you for most of my career as a
traffic guy. But today, after nearly two decades doing
this, i’d pick (c) EVERY TIME.

Bear with me though, hang on. You have 100,000 customers,
right?

Suppose, you created a “high” ticket product or service,
say for $500, and you offered it to this list of 100,000
people.

These are 100,000 people who have paid money already. This
demonstrates they’re not ONLY interested in the category
of products you’re selling, but they’re interested AND
willing to pay for solutions to their problems. They have
already trusted you once to buy from you before. If you
were conscientious enough to sell a good product in the
first place and you used email follow-up to remain in
contact with your customer leads…

What stops them from buying more solutions from you?

The only limitation of who will take you up on this new
offer is who can or cannot afford the amount right now.

Suppose only 10% took you up on it. This is realistic,
remember they’re customer leads, not freebie seekers or
whatever.

Option (c)– means 10% of 100,000 is 10,000 buyers, paying
$500 each giving you 5 million dollars in revenue. You get
this with a SINGLE product launched to this list.

Now compare to (a)– where 10% of 10 people is 1 buyer and
$500+$50 (from earlier) = $550 total profit.

And (b)– where 10% of 10,000 customers is 1,000 customers,
giving you $500,000 + $15,000 (from earlier) = $515,000
total profit.

Option (c) gets you $5,000,000 – $1,500,000 (the loss from
before) = $3,500,000 total profit!!!

You did this with ONE product launch.

Imagine you generated the same traffic monthly and sold the
same things, then these would be monthly profit figures.

Now, would you rather be doing (a), (b), or (c)?

Yeah, i thought so. (c) is the right answer, even when
you’re losing $15 for every customer you acquire.

Even if i’m being overly optimistic with the 10% conversion
(i might be), your chances of finding more customers
willing to spend more money in 100,000 monthly customers is
certainly higher than it would be in 10 or 10,000.

If you have volume, you can always, very easily turn it
profitable by selling more products to current buyers.

Bottom line is, get your nose out of the data and look at
the big picture. Obviously, i’m not suggesting everyone
has the balls of steel to pull off a 1.5 million dollar
monthly loss without batting an eyelid. This was simply an
example to show you how much more important scale is than
tweaking and fine-tuning profitability m etrics. I
certainly am not suggesting anyone should run a campaign so
recklessly either.

I certainly don’t.

But the moment i have an ad campaign that’s generating
customers in volume, at a halfway decent cost, i’m slowly
raising the budget to see how much potential the campaign
has for scale. What i am definitely NOT doing is going in
and micromanaging the campaign for tiny reductions in cost
so i can break even on the front-end.

Simultaneously, i’m scrambling to put together offers to
make on the backend. Because once there’s volume, even if
you’re losing, turning it around to a MASSIVE profit can
happen in the blink of an eye.

I hope you enjoyed this little lesson here on my campaign
management strategy.

—

I know it’s unorthodox, but it’s fucking brilliant, and
you love it. If you want to know more about the “Yaghi
Way” of traffic management, aside from this killer series
you’ve been enjoying, there’s the Super Traffic
Machine. It’s a fully structured course with precise step
by step instructions with screenshots and worksheets to
plan, produce, and orchestrate an online business that
scales with minimal traffic management.

Read all about it at the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

– [Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages]

– [Part 7: Watching Visitors]

– [Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice]

– [Part 9: Why I Don’t Do Email Marketing Like That]

– [Part 10: Your Professional Email Addy]

– [Part 11: Build Your Own Clickfunnels Clone for a
Fraction of the Cost]

– [Part 12: How to Choose Your Website Tech When I’m Gone]

– [Part 13: How to Build Incrementally Robust, Reliable
Revenue & Traffic]

– [Part 14: Mailerlite & Facebook’s Dumb Email
Marketing Ideas]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

A client asked, what is the best way to generate traffic
for his website.

You’d be surprised that my response was NOT Google Ads.

In fact, this is not the first time i give such advice,
despite it not being in my best interest. Particularly if
my aim is to secure and keep clients paying me ridiculous
fees to manage their ad accounts. Not only this, if
you’ve been a long time subscriber, you might remember me
taking a FIRM stance against chasing this type of traffic
(although it isn’t really true, as you’ll soon see).

In today’s lesson, i’m going to share with you a
“traffic strategy” that has proven itself time and time
again to be the most robust way to build a business
website, to get a steady stream of customers, and to
reliably monetise your efforts.

Recently, i’ve been more focused on “robustness” of
business. I no longer invest into things that give
short-term results at the expense of stability.

Let’s backtrack a moment to give some context.

Early in the year, a client for whom i was managing a
website and Google campaign decided to end our contract. If
you’ve done client work before, you know how it goes.
People are temperamental and all relationships eventually
end. Sometimes for good reason and others baffle your mind.
I learned a long time ago not to worry about WHY and to NOT
try to convince anyone to stay. In fact, i already knew the
end was near when i saw him take hit after hit in other
parts of his business, losing hundreds of thousands of
dollars due to some bad hires he’d made.

I knew better than to take it personally. So i terminated
our contract promptly and shifted focus to my other
clients.

Strangely, however, he couldn’t let go of our
relationship. He would reach out, periodically, and claim
he was aiming to bring me back on board. I never asked or
pushed for it. Secretly, i knew the more he tried on his
own, the more he realised how important what we were doing
was.

Here’s why…

Whenever he’d get in touch, it was always after some
burst of sale activity from our “paused” funnel. I
still get the notifications when they come in, so i know,
inevitably, a couple of days later he wants to talk.

He’d wonder, “Are you SURE we paused the campaign?”

Diligently, each time, i’d check and assure him, “Yes,
it’s definitely paused.”

“Where did these sales come from?” he would ask.

I started digging around his analytics and tracking to
identify the source of these sales. And sure enough, each
time i would conclude they came from ORGANIC SEARCH ENGINE
TRAFFIC.

Now relax. Don’t get your knickers in a knot.

i’m not about to start advocating for doing search engine
optimisation (SEO) because i never believed in it and i
STILL don’t believe in it. And there’s a subtlety here
i don’t want you to miss.

Doing SEO is NOT the same as organic search engine traffic.

One is a process, the other is the result. Meaning, some
dumbasses DO SEO to GET organic search engine traffic. But
SEO is not the only way to get this kind of traffic.

And organic search traffic is amazing! What kind of psycho
would i be to diss on good quality traffic from search
engines, free or otherwise?

My objection to SEO stems from the fact that much of it is
a bunch of idiot, waste-of-time tricks to game search
engines into ranking a website for some popular search
term, to get this mythical free traffic.

Those tricks amount to:

(1) building (typically JUNK) content in a way search
algorithms might determine to be relevant to a popular
search query,

(2) and, linking to that content in a special way to
artificially give the algorithm confidence in its
assessment.

What you MIGHT notice missing from this strategy, is the
USER. The only thing the SEOist is concerned with, is the
computer and the software that determines ranking. He
ignores the user.

However, the algorithm is in fact attempting to anticipate
the USER’s determination of the relevance and usefulness
of the result they see.

Notice too, the SEOist is handpicking the search query he
wants to rank for and attempts to force relevance. Which
requires him to understand how the algorithm works…and if
in fact his content does not actually fit the criteria for
relevance, he has to somehow shape his content in a way the
algorithm would read it as relevant.

Ignoring the user and focusing on the algorithm is idiotic.
In the end, even if the algorithm is initially fooled, it
will self-correct by majority vote, based on all the
users’ responses to the results seen. Meaning, most SEO
efforts have a short-lived traffic benefit.

Aside from it being a poor long-term strategy, though, a
big part of the problem lies in the JUNK content being
produced to accomplish search ranking. Since content is
ONLY designed to game search engines, when it is eventually
seen by human visitors, that content has no value
whatsoever to them. In fact, it reflects badly on the
website, hurts its reputation, and makes no sales of
anything.

“Free” organic traffic built this way, rarely
translates into revenue.

You see, producing high quality, useful content that human
searchers will appreciate, takes time, skill, and money.
SEOists (especially those you might contract) want to get a
fast, tangible result so they can get paid–and they
don’t want to spend a fortune producing content to get
it. That would eat into their profit margins and make their
business not very lucrative. They’re lazy.

Even if it were possible to sustain the organic search
engine traffic they get you forever (you won’t), you will
struggle to turn it into any revenue and it can damage your
reputation.

Case in point….

Some months ago, i was cleaning up posts at the yaghilabs
website. and i came across some strange pages of content.
They were hierarchically arranged, so i thought perhaps
they were important. But i did not remember writing them.
Upon closer investigation, it turns out the author was an
SEOist i allowed, in the early days of YaghiLabs site, to
try to “rank” us for some “important” key terms. The
content was horrendous. It was riddled with embarrassing
grammatical errors (poor, second language English speaker
errors). There were nonsensical, misguided totally bad
ideas about topics i had deep knowledge about, even back
then!

Imagine someone coming from a search and landing on these
pages of my website…what kind of impression does it give
of me, of my expertise, and of my business?

I’ll tell you what, I was EMBARRASSED that those pages
were on my site for so many years without me realising.

Do you think anyone is likely to buy from content like
this? Clearly whoever is behind it has no idea what
they’re talking about.

The problem is, no visitor comes along, sees it, and says
oh yes Jim’s probably really clever about traffic but
this must be his dipshit SEOist’s writing.

No. They’re saying Jim Yaghi is clearly a dipshit who
clearly knows NOTHING about traffic generation, and he
can’t write worth a toss, and he sounds like a fucking
idiot.

None of this is true, of course (except i can be a dipshit,
at times).

On the other hand, my client’s unexpected sales were not
a result of bots enjoying his search engine “optimised”
content and buying his products. It was real human
visitors, discovering his consumer-targeted content,
reading it, and deciding it was worth buying from him.
Because it was me guiding him on what to write, and it was
me editing and cleaning up the articles, and it was me
formatting and publishing them on his website.

Surprisingly, the amount of content was actually VERY
little!

We’re talking about less than 30 original articles
published to his website. All of them started out as email
marketing pieces, repurposed as website articles. And they
worked.

Not only that…

I was using the Google Ads search query report to identify
QUESTION type queries and guiding the client to write
emails answering those questions. So imagine, the dynamic
of this approach:

A user punches in their question, sees one of our articles
in the organic search results OR sees our ad in the
sponsored results.

If they choose the organic result, they will have their
question answered immediately in a quality article. After
reading our answer, they’re transitioned into an
intelligent sales pitch (as we do in email marketing) for a
product positioned as a solution to the problem the reader
is facing. At the end of the article, the reader is given
the opportunity to buy or join the mailing list for more
answers. Either way, a positive experience that either
results in a sale or increases the chance of getting a sale
later.

On the other hand, if the visitor chooses the sponsored ad
instead, they are pitched to join the mailing list. If they
subscribe, at some point in the follow-up sequence,
they’re going to see an email titled with the EXACT
question they asked the search engine several days before.
They may not recognise it as the same question, but we know
they’re going to be interested in hearing the answer.
They will open it, read with anticipation, and again, when
the email eventually transitions to a sales pitch to sell
our product…they’re very likely to buy.

The technique is absolutely brilliant.

There is no “trickery” here. It’s just a human
talking to a human.

The big benefit is that as you build out content, day after
day, month after month, year after year…the website grows
into a more and more valuable asset. The search traffic
that results is cumulative. It does not stop when you stop
paying for it. And should you ever choose to sell your
business, its website and its content are what will give
you the power to raise your asking price.

So to be clear, my stance on SEO has not changed, i still
think it’s a dumb method to get organic traffic. But if
you use the right method, it makes a heck of a lot of
sense.

The word “organic” here means natural. This is a kind
of traffic which some content gets by being naturally
relevant to a searcher’s query. What “relevant”
actually means is not our concern. We just need to produce
content that WE think is useful to people with the kinds of
problems our products solve. And then point visitors to
where they can buy our products.

Divorce yourself from the search term you WANT to rank for,
and just create content for the audience you want to
attract. When you do this consistently, you will be matched
with people looking for what you are publishing about, and
your content will rank for whatever terms those people are
searching for.

Becuase the goal of organic search algorithms is not to
match keywords to content–but rather to match people’s
intents to what would satisfy them.

So the whole key to getting organic traffic is quality
content. Not “optimisation”.

Smart website owners, influencers, and online businesses
recognise that the currency of the internet is this
content. And content can be information, entertainment,
education, discussion, or answers. Its delivery medium can
be text, video, audio, image, or software. No matter what
it is or where it resides, open, free available, useful
content is what attracts people, and what search engines
use for food.

It’s what the algorithms are trying to organise for
users.

If we, as business owners, focus on just producing quality
content, there is ALWAYS a way to monetize it. ALWAYS.

You know why?

Because quality content attracts audiences. And if you can
attract and keep a large audience engaged with your
content, whether or not you’re directly selling to them,
there is ALWAYS a way to make money from them.

I had another client who told me she took FOUR months to
reach 6-figures in monthly revenue, WITHOUT having a
product of her own, WITHOUT spending a cent in paid ads.
She monetised her content by selling banners on her website
and with amazon affiliate links.

Do you know what she did to get to this point?

She single handedly produced and published 6 REAL articles
per day, every day, for four months. And she didn’t stop
when she hit 6 figures! Of course, now that she makes a lot
of money from her work, she’s not doing it
“singlehandedly” any more. She can afford researchers,
writers, and helpers. And she’s increased her daily
output of content. And she sells her own products too.

Despite the potential reward, i cannot possibly imagine
producing that much daily content so consistently. But
it’s amazing when someone can do it.

If you’re like me, on the other hand, and you know you
can’t do that kind of daily creative output, then
you’ll want to use paid ads to sell and profit in the
short-term and simultaneously invest into a less aggressive
content producing strategy for long-term.

And here’s one more anecdote…

One of the clients i manage Google Ads for produces an
INCREDIBLE amount of content both paid and free–i’m
talking YouTube videos, podcasts, daily emails, blog posts,
social media, eBooks and reports, interviews…THE WORKS.
She has a team helping out, of course.

When i run her Google Ads, the MAJORITY of the traffic we
convert into instant sales for really really cheap, are
BRAND NAME seekers. That is, people already familiar with
her free content, seeking her and her business out for more
content. They easily buy her products without much of a
push.

This is powerful. It is POWERFUL.

That is why today, i am focused primarily on building out
content. You’ll notice my emails are deeper, more
thoughtful, and well thought out. They are longer. But they
are also more valuable, to the right people. I’m also in
the process of launching a new podcast that adopts a
similar philosophy. And i have many more plans to make high
quality content available and open to our website
subscribers and users.

Now it’s your turn.

If you’re interested in the combo approach of organic and
paid marketing, while optimising effort, i encourage you to
check out the Super Traffic Machine. We set up EVERYTHING
from the start of the series for this approach to work.

But you’ll find the 8th User Manual has a companion
resource book that goes over all the different types of
traffic methods and how they work, the history, and the
evolution, and what works and what does not. The main
manual has a step by step practical component to help you
execute, but the companion resource book approaches it all
from an informational angle.

In particular, i discuss how i manage traffic campaigns
ALONGSIDE Machine Learning to reduce work and increase
results. It helps you implement both organic search traffic
and paid traffic. It’s a pretty good read–i was thinking
about selling it individually on Amazon but you get it free
with the Super Traffic Machine.

Read all about the series at the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [ Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [ Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages ]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

– [Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages]

– [Part 7: Watching Visitors]

– [Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice]

– [Part 9: Why I Don’t Do Email Marketing Like That]

– [Part 10: Your Professional Email Addy]

– [Part 11: Build Your Own Clickfunnels Clone for a
Fraction of the Cost]

– [ Part 12: How to Choose Your Website Tech When I’m Gone
]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

Heya,

We’ve been talking about WordPress and how wonderfully
extensible it is with plugins. But we have yet to look at
its DARK side.

In particular, in this lesson, i’d like to give you some
general guidance to help you make better technology choices
in your business. Your business is unique, so even if i
make a very comprehensive tutorial, i cannot make every
decision for you.

Eventually, you’re going to need to choose plugins,
services, or software on your own. And your choices need to
be carefully studied and smart.

Not every plugin or theme built for WordPress is inherently
good.

Not every software or service that APPEARS to solve your
problem is gonna be the best choice.

And tech choices have a significant impact on an online
business. Choose wrong, and you might end up with a
complicated workflow that slows you down and reduces your
productivity.

Or you might end up stuck with a solution that later gets
abandoned (no longer updated), has no support, or is
riddled with bugs. Migrating to another solution later can
waste weeks and cost a fortune in data loss.

In fact, MANY plugins are poorly written, badly designed,
and full of security vulnerabilities. They can cause your
site to be entirely broken, slow, or open to hackers and
saboteurs.

The worst part is, unless you’re a pretty decent
programmer yourself AND you look “under the hood” to
study the code, you’re unlikely to realise there are
problems. To a typical user, it looks like the software has
all the functionality they want, even when it’s ROTTEN to
the core.

For instance, while looking for a membership solution for
Wordpress, i came across LearnPress; it seemed promising.
The demo showed beautiful course presentations and a
wonderful interface. It had all the features i was looking
for in a learning management / membership system.

After i’d done my due diligence, i decided to adopt it.

I looked at their database structure and began the tedious
task of migrating all my courses, students, and student
records into their format. This required complex SQL
queries which only someone with advanced programming skills
could pull off…and it was dangerous too, because a single
mistake could easily destroy all my customer data.

It was only after i did all this that i discovered my site
was CRAWLING to the point of being unusable.

Keep in mind, this was not due to heavy load. The site was
not deployed to the public and its ONLY user was me.

Upon searching through Learnpress’ support, i found other
users making similar complaints about speed. They were
advised by the developers, Thimpress, to get a better
server and to install caching plugins.

My guess is, most people would have taken the
recommendation and did as instructed. They would have seen
a sufficient improvement to end their complaints.

But i’m a pain in the ass.

I argued with their support that something is FUNDAMENTALLY
broken in the software if out the gate, with a single user,
it REQUIRES a caching plugin to be usable. Caching is
something you do to further optimise efficient, working
code. It should NEVER be required to fix the shortcomings
of its developers, against their inefficient code.

Let me make this simpler…

It’s like buying a car that won’t drive past 10
km/hr–and when you complain to the dealer, they tell you
to install a turbocharger! I mean, sure it will probably go
faster now…but clearly there’s a problem if the car
can’t go past 10 km / hr without a turbocharger, no?

Thimpress, the developers behind Learnpress have no
business selling plugins or themes.

I later realised their entire code base was ripped off from
[Woocommerce]
and [Sensei
LMS] , bastardised
and butchered into something absolutely rotten. I was
shocked that despite duplicating huge amounts of code, they
claimed to be “compatible” with Woocommerce. Meaning,
they encouraged users to use Woocommerce and Learnpress
together. Anyone who did so was likely to have two copies
of the same code running–with duplicate queries, duplicate
database storage, and all sorts of conflicts and wasteful
redundancies.

Needless to say, i did not continue using LearnPress.

Another example was a popular mailing solution named Sendy.
This was not a Wordpress plugin, but one could buy a
license and have full access to its code. So i considered
it as a potential backend service for my own mail platform.
Rather than start from scratch, i figured if it was a good
fit, it would save me some time to start there.

I bought a license to the code and began to dig in to see
how it can be modified to suit my work. At face value, it
seemed like an extremely feature rich platform, very
popular, and some were even selling it as a cloud-based
sending service!

This was good news. Until i dug into the code.

I remember spending months pouring over it, thinking the
developer is either some sort of genius or a madman. I
mean, it was written like someone just sat down and
programmed everything in one shot without testing or
optimising or planning. The fact it even worked was
miraculous. All over the place there was code
duplication–it’s something you try to avoid as a best
practice. As a programmer, if you’re likely to reuse some
functionality, you wrap it onto a utility function and then
you can just call it when you need it. But this guy was
repeating thousands of lines of code, copying and pasting,
modifying a few lines here and there to do something
slightly different. He programmed like i did when i was 9.

It was a MESS!

How was he keeping up with this madness? If code is hard to
follow, it’s hard to identify the source of bugs and
security holes. Fixing an error in one place, won’t fix it
in the 20+ other places that same code was copied and
pasted. You’re bound to miss a few.

I did not agree with many of his choices, refactoring his
code was taking way too long, and i knew it was going to be
a nightmare to maintain. So, ultimately, i gave up on Sendy
and moved on.

My point is, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong
with software choices. Even *I* am not immune to them.

It’s not sufficient that a plugin or service does EXACTLY
what you want…or that the interface looks beautiful or
professional. Nor is it a matter of free vs premium. This
is the easy stuff. Writing efficient, well thought out code
is something only few programmers can genuinely pull off.

(Thank GOD i am one of those few programmers 🙂 i breathe
this stuff).

How do you choose software for your online business written
by the good guys?

Here are some general guidelines you can follow when i’m
gone:

1. DON’T FIXATE
===============

If you’ve found a plugin or software service that does
what you want, keep looking. Chances are there are plenty
of alternative choices available too. It’s unlikely that
one programmer / company decided to build a solution to the
problem you’re facing and no one else thought of it.

So the most important tip i have for you is, don’t
fixate.

Once you find your solution, research and study as many
alternatives as you can. Don’t be so fast to adopt / buy
the first solution you find. If something doesn’t suit you
perfectly, scrap it and keep looking. Chances are you’ll
find something better. Try to figure out which will serve
you best before committing money, before migrating your
data, and before starting to build data into it. Changing
that choice later will be very difficult.

2. AVOID SOFTWARE BY MARKETERS
=================================

Your favourite gooroo released a bit of software? Fuck him.
Don’t buy it.

WebinarJam was a piece of shit. Everwebinar was a piece of
shit. Kartra is probably shit, because everything Filsame
ever touched was shit. And this goes for just about every
software a marketing gooroo has ever released.

Marketing gooroos don’t know the first thing about
running a software business. They’re in it for the quick
bucks. Giving support, making updates, and adding features
is a long game most don’t have the patience for.

Plus, their primary business is marketing, not software
development. So even if they develop and release a bit of
software, they would need a major business restructuring
and plenty of new fulltime hires just to maintain it. Which
they’re not likely to have experience with nor to do in a
good way. In the end, they will abandon the effort, leaving
you in the lurch, and they’ll go back to releasing
marketing frauducts.

Refer to point #1 above. You’re likely to find a better
alternative written by a professional software company.

3. AVOID PREMIUM WITHOUT TRIAL
================================

If you come across a premium plugin or software or software
service that doesn’t give you the opportunity to try it
for free, don’t buy it. This is a HUGE red flag.

In fact, i’d avoid anyone who tries to get your card on
file and automatically bills you in a period less than 30
days. Don’t go for $1 trials either, that’s a
marketer’s gimmick. Professional software companies
don’t do these shit tricks because they know how users
use software.

Since the beginning of time, software has always offered a
demo version.

This is only fair. You should have ample opportunity to try
the software and see if it fits your needs and solves your
problems. This requires time and enough usable
functionality to give it a proper test run.

So if you don’t get a trial on your terms, refer to point
#1 above, and keep searching.

4. FAVOUR OPEN SOURCE
=======================

In general, i suggest you find an open source solution to
your technological needs…OR…if you do go premium, avoid
individual developer efforts.

Open source, of course, has the advantage of being free.
But not all free is good. Good open source is community
developed. This means LOTS of people from different
environments and with different needs are working on the
software. So it’s getting battle tested in different
setups, and there’s usually an enforcement of best coding
practices to ensure good, efficient code results.

It is a lot of work for a single developer to maintain and
upkeep good software. Even if the developer is decent,
without a team behind the effort, their software usually
leaves a lot to be desired. Which means, for the most part,
you should prefer software built by a large team of
developers.

So how can you tell if a plugin or software is open source
and community developed?

Search for it on Github or Subversion. These are the most
popular version control systems used in open source
projects. Then ask the following questions:

How many people are actively working on it?

How frequently are they releasing updates?

How good is their user support?

Is the project still being actively developed?

See, many projects are TECHNICALLY open source because of
their license and their source is in the public domain. But
they might be unpopular in reality, with only a single
developer actively contributing to them. Or they could be
abandoned projects that have not been updated in a long
time. So you have to answer these questions before you make
your choice.

Here’s a good example you can try. Search for the
[Elementor page builder]
on Github.
You’ll find it. So that’s a good sign.

Now, you can tell how many people are working on it by
looking at the number of CONTRIBUTORS (60). That’s a
decent team of developers.

To know how frequently they’re releasing updates, look at
the number of COMMITS (18,741) and RELEASES (242). A commit
is made every time the code gets updated like when a bug is
fixed or a feature is added. A release, on the other hand,
is when an official version bump occurs, and a set of
features or fixes has been completed and a new version is
released to the public. These are all pretty decent
numbers.

To know about support, i don’t mean the usual support of
hey i have a problem how can i fix it–but rather, if there
are bugs or unexpected behaviours or incompatibilities that
you as a user discover–you’d like the project owners to
care enough about fixing them. So on Github, you can click
the ISSUES tab. Here you will see 1,450 Open and 6,606
Closed. An open issue is a problem or task still in
discussion which has not yet been resolved. A closed issue
is one that has been fixed or dealt with. It’s a pretty
good sign to see so many closed issues, because it means if
you have a problem and you report it, it will be quickly
fixed and incorporated into an upcoming release.

And if you want to know if the project is still in active
development, check the LATEST COMMIT (8 days ago). Most
likely this project has NOT been abandoned, it is still
actively developed, since it’s only been 8 days since a
change was made to the code.

It’s easy to figure out what a good project is if it’s
on Github. I’d rather go for one of these than any free,
premium, or individual programmer effort.

But if you do need a premium software, that’s ok too. Just
make sure you get answers to these questions first. Most
importantly, ensure there’s a TEAM behind it, not a single
developer.

If it doesn’t fit, see point #1…look for another.

—-

I think this covers the main ways to make optimal software
choices in your online business, especially when it relates
to your Wordpress website.

If you want to learn more about how to build your online
business on Wordpress and get unlimited traffic, leads, and
sales that scale, check out the Super Traffic Machine. It’s
a pretty impressive training program like none the industry
has ever seen (or ever will see, because let’s face
it–it’s a lazy industry in which few actually run an
ethical business selling legitimate solutions to people who
need them). I, on the other hand, come from an academic
background and education is in our blood. I love to get
through to my students and i love to see them learn. So
this course, i wrote it with my friends and colleagues Zak
and Andrew with great care. They’re the only people i
know as obsessive about quality as i.

It’s easy to follow and you will love learning from us.

Check it out at the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

Until next time,

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

– [Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages]

– [Part 7: Watching Visitors]

– [Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice]

– [Part 9: Why I Don’t Do Email Marketing Like That]

– [Part 10: Your Professional Email Addy]

– [Part 11: Build Your Own Clickfunnels Clone for a
Fraction of the Cost]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

Heya,

When you want a sales funnel, most marketers think of
Clickfunnels. I know Russel, worked with him, and have much
respect for what he’s done with it. This lesson should not
undermine his work in any way.

In fact, Clickfunnels is probably the superior option in
the funnel builder space when compared to say Kajabi,
Kartra, or Groovefunnels.

Rather, if like me, you have concerns about control of your
business and its assets, i intend to show you what i
believe to be a better alternative.

In this message I will walk you through how you can easily
and cheaply build your own funnel solution… A
“Clickfunnels clone”, if you will…

… With ALL the functionality and simplicity
… With total data independence
… With more features and customisability to suit your
specific business
… and all for a FRACTION of the cost.

To build our setup, we need to look at the key components
of existing funnel builders as a benchmark for minimum
requirements.

Funnel builder services are marketed as all-in-one
solutions to all your online marketing needs. For a single
monthly price, you get:

1. Visual Page Builder: A way to easily design and serve
lead capture, sales, order, and upsell pages

2. Professional Templates: Ready-made, well designed
templates you can modify and use so you’re not creating
from scratch

3. Lead Management & Email Marketing: A way to capture
non-buyer leads, build and store a mailing list of
contacts, and send sales emails to them

4. Customer & Order Management: A way to setup
products and prices, collect payments, store customers,
manage refunds, and send transactional emails

5. Post Checkout Upsell Logic: A way to create a
step-based sequence of offers after the initial purchase,
which a customer can easily add to their purchase by
clicking “yes” (this is the core of a “funnel builder”)

6. Membership Areas & Subscriptions: A way to protect
and deliver intangible/digital products, complex training
programs, and recurring billing products

This is an incredibly large set of really crucial features
for most online businesses. Which explains why many
companies are now investing into and selling funnel builder
services–they’re lucrative!

Besides, once a funnel builder customer begins relying on a
funnel service, it’s unlikely they ever want to leave.
It’s just too painful.

At face value, it appears like the benefits of subscribing
to a funnel builder service are:

(1) fewer accounts to manage,
(2) fewer recurring bills,
(3) and, simple and fast to get up and running.

The trouble is it just LOOKS this way.

In reality, you will pay a high monthly fee to effectively
buy an interface with other services that do the real
work… Services you will also be paying for.

Example: If you want to do email marketing in your funnel
builder service, you might also need a separate
subscription with Sendgrid or similar sending service. Then
you will need to configure the two services to talk to each
other.

Similarly, for transaction processing, you might need a
merchant account and a processing gateway service. These
are separate from your funnel builder service. You will
need to configure the funnel service to talk to your
gateway through its api.

So in many cases, you won’t have fewer bills or accounts to
manage… Rather, you will have one more bill and one more
account to manage (that of the funnel builder service).
You’ll still need everything else.

Even if the funnel builder service has its own builtin
services, you will usually pay extra for the privilege of
using them, and they’re not very good. They lack key
features otherwise available in dedicated solutions.

For instance, the email tracking in Clickfunnels is
extremely limited compared to say Aweber or Mailchimp.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice having email marketing inside
the funnel builder, but in practice it’s very hard to get
any useful, actionable insights about a client’s email
marketing efforts. This is to be expected. Funnel builders
are trying to be and do everything–they can’t possibly
compete in quality with a dedicated service that does just
one thing really well.

But if we were to put aside these issues of multiple
accounts, multiple bills, and limited functionality…

Having so much of your business in the hands of a single
business entity is dangerous and just bad business all
around.

It doesn’t take much to get locked out of your business
completely.

Suppose they decide you’ve violated their terms of use, or
you weren’t able to pay your monthly subscription fee
because your credit card was lost or stolen… Or you could
not afford the subscription fee for a couple of months…

Your entire business is held hostage.

And if you don’t get payment sorted out soon, your account,
customer contacts, and all your business assets may be
deleted.

So what am i proposing instead?

Simple. Use WordPress!

I’ve said it before and it seems boring by now but hear me
out. WordPress drives some of the world’s biggest ecommerce
websites. It has some really amazing free and premium
plugins that add every functionality under the sun. Many
Wordpress plugins offer similar functionality as funnel
builder services with better maintenance and support, and
typically for a lower cost.

The quality of code has impressed me as i’ve looked
closely inside many of the plugins mentioned in this email.
Code quality is crucial when multiple developers interact
with, improve, complement, or add to the software. And i
think my choices and recommendations here represent a
unique perspective on the plugins that you can consider to
be “the BEST” for the job. Primarily because i’m a
seasoned programmer who has seen under the hood of these
plugins, and in many cases even contributed to their
development with bug fixes and reports.

So let’s go through each of the core features of funnel
services and see how you can reproduce each in your
Wordpress installation.

1. VISUAL PAGE BUILDER
========================

Page builders have been around in WordPress for years and
they’ve come a long way. Page builders break us away from
the usual restrictive paradigm of a site’s THEME. They
enable us to build pages that look exactly how we want.

You literally draw your page with configurable drag and
drop blocks and require no coding whatsoever.

This is how you can create beautiful landing pages, sales
letters, upsell pages, home pages, or whatever it is you
like to present in your website.

There are many choices here and you might already have a
preference. For the most part, you need not change your
choice if you’re happy with it.

My page builder of choice is [Elementor]
. It’s free.
And in many cases is sufficient on its own.

There’s also a premium version, [Elementor Pro]
, which
costs $49 / year for a single site license. The yearly fee
does not mean the plugin stops working if not renewed
yearly, only that you may not continue to receive updates
and support. If that’s ok with you, don’t renew.

If you plan to build landing pages with opt-in forms, you
will definitely need the Pro version. Of course there’s
lots of other features like popups, automation
integrations, theme builder, and more that make the Pro
version worthwhile.

For me, i choose Elementor because it is mature, well
coded, well supported, and has a large ecosystem of addon
plugins to give me extra functionality. I needed highly
custom form actions and popup rules, which were a breeze to
code myself. For you, you’ll appreciate the addon
ecosystem most, which brings you additional functionality
to do those more specific tasks you wish you had, which may
not be handled out of the box.

Also, it has native responsive design support, beautiful
animation control, countdown timers, and about 30+ widgets
to make really cool pages.

Elementor integrates natively with the transaction, optin,
email marketing, and upsell solutions I will discuss
shortly. So you can build landing pages, hybrid pages,
sales letters, custom order forms, and upsell pages with it
and they will perform the proper function in your funnel.

Additionally, you can use it to build an ENTIRE custom
theme for the rest of your site and blog posts, without
touching a lick of code! It’s really cool. If you go this
route, i suggest you install “Hello Elementor” theme which
is a barebones base theme, which gives you a clean slate on
which you can design your custom theme.

There are other page builders of course, many with the same
or similar features.

[Thrive Architect]
, divi, [Beaver
Builder] , and
Oxygen come to mind. All of these natively integrate with
the checkout solution I’ll propose shortly, so if you use
one of these (or one i didn’t mention), use it. My
experience with other builders is limited and i cannot say
for sure if all my suggestions will work with them, but i
don’t see why not 🙂

If you do NOT have a page builder you already use, start
with the Elementor (free), try it out, and if you’re happy
with it and feel you need the Pro features, then get that
next.

[Get Elementor (free) here]

[Get Elementor Pro ($49/yr) here]

2. PROFESSIONAL TEMPLATES
============================

You will find both Elementor and Elementor Pro have
beautiful templates for every kind of page you might want
on your site. Including order forms, optin pages, popups,
hybrid landing pages, login forms, and so on.

I do not have experience with the other builders but my
guess is they too have professional templates you can use.

You might not find the swipeable sleazy / pushy / hypey
sales copy you’ve grown to love as an Internet marketer.
But I believe we could do with a lot less of that in our
world anyway. However, if you do want swipeable sales copy
the Upsell flow solution I’ll discuss shortly gives you
templates for all these things for a wide variety of page
builders. Just be aware of the coverage in Part 4 of this
series where i talked about the problem with the sales copy
traditionally used in upsell page templates.

3. LEAD MANAGEMENT & EMAIL MARKETING
=========================================

In Part 9 of this series, i discussed the recommended
solution to do email marketing from within Wordpress. Read
through it if you missed it (you’ll find links to
previous parts of the series at the bottom of this email).

My plugin of choice would be Mailpoet 3. It’s free.

Configure it with Sendgrid, Amazon SES, OR Mailpoet’s own
sending service. All have free tiers and reasonable sending
fees once the free tier limits are exceeded.

The Mailpoet plugin is natively compatible with Elementor
Pro’s form builder. So you can create an opt-in form on any
page or popup, and configure it to collect leads directly
into one of your Mailpoet mailing lists and start emailing
broadcasts or follow-up sequences.

It will also track revenue for you and tell you which
emails are worth the most money to you 🙂

[Get Mailpoet 3 (free) here…]

4. CUSTOMER & ORDER MANAGEMENT
===================================

Customer management, order management, product management,
transaction processing is a complex bit of functionality
and it is ALL provided in one plugin called Woocommerce.

[Woocommerce]
is free. It
is built by the same company that built WordPress. With it
you can create and describe products that are tangible,
intangible, physical, or electronic, set pricing,
discounts, shipping, taxes, access, inventory, etc. It
manages orders, product access or fulfilment, customers and
customer accounts, refunds, tracking, analytics,
transactional emails.

The works.

Out of the box, Woocommerce creates an ecommerce store
within your Wordpress website. Products are listed,
described, and customers can fill their cart using an
“add to cart” button. When done, they can continue to
checkout to purchase all the products in their cart.

This is probably not desired behaviour for you.

And i’ll explain how to override the default behaviour so
you can benefit from all the features of Woocommerce
without turning your site into a wannabe Amazon.

But i HIGHLY recommend Woocommerce instead of any of the
other checkout alternatives because it is really robust and
boasts a huge ecosystem of addon plugins, many of which are
free. It is highly customisable with these addons, and they
enhance the functionality to do all kinds of useful things
including running affiliate programs, membership sites,
selling consulting hours or events, recurring
subscriptions, and even transforming the whole checkout
experience.

This is a crucial part of your business and it needs to be
handled by a robust piece of tech that you can count on,
which integrates with everything. Woocommerce is the
industry standard, so anyone who wants to write a plugin
that deals with Wordpress and commerce must include
integration with Woocommerce. Therefore, do not trust this
part of your tech stack to ANY OTHER plugin, no matter
what.

You can integrate with different payment solutions
including PayPal, Stripe, and Google and Apple Pay, to name
a few. Woocommerce even has their own native payment system
which I have not yet tried but it looks really, really
good. And i think most if not all payment integrations are
free.

I personally use Woocommerce with Stripe for payment
processing, it works natively when you install the
appropriate free addon plugin.

If you want to sell online courses or subscriptions, I have
more info on this shortly.

[Get Woocommerce (free) here]

[Explore Woocommerce addons here]

5. POST CHECKOUT UPSELL LOGIC
===============================

As i said earlier, Woocommerce turns your site into an
ecommerce store, which you probably don’t want.

Chances are, what you’re looking for in terms of customer
experience, is to be able to build a sales page (using your
visual page builder), and have a BUY NOW button on it. When
clicked, the button should take the user to an order form
where their details and payment info are requested. After
which, you want to pitch a series of one-time-offers, which
are immediately billed when the customer clicks to accept.

I’m with you there so don’t stress. Here’s the solution.

Install the [Cartflows]
plugin. It’s
free in the WP plugin repository.

Now I know this plugin on its own is missing some core
functionality from what i described above, and I’m not
entirely sure of the use case for just the free plugin
although from their Facebook support community it looks
like many people are just using the free version.

I use the [Cartflows Pro]
premium
plugin. It costs $299 per year, which seems steep at first.
But keep in mind this is for the entire year, not a per
month price. And it still works outside the year, just you
won’t get later updates without an active subscription.

Here’s what these plugins do for you in combination with
Woocommerce…

Cartflows and Cartflows Pro enable you to string together
funnel page sequences the same way Clickfunnels does…

Use your favourite page builder inside Wordpress to make
lead capture pages, sales pages, conversion optimised order
pages, upsell pages, downsell pages, and thank you pages.
Then set the sequence in which these pages are displayed to
users with Cartflows.

The checkout page in Cartflows has a two-step checkout mode
which is fabulous. It also supports order bumps natively,
which are small offer boxes on the checkout page for an
impulse buy.

Cartflows comes with professional templates for all the
funnel page types, compatible with a variety of page
builders including Elementor Pro.

You can split test your funnels too, clone funnels, offer
discounts or custom pricing, enable coupon codes and so on
and on. Anything you can do in Clickfunnels you can do
here.

In addition, i highly recommend you use their [Cart
Abandonment Recovery]
plugin.
It is completely free. We discussed this in Part 2 of this
series, review it if you need.

It helps you recover lost sales from people who began
checkout and stopped partway. You can send a personal
coupon code to give a small discount incentive that
encourages customers to return and finish their order. I
personally cannot imagine running a campaign without it, it
saves so many sales!

Adam is really disciplined about releasing updates, bug
fixes, and new features. The support community in Facebook
is top notch. I highly recommend you join in and ask for
help with anything you’re not sure how to do on your own.
And if a feature you need is missing in Cartflows, ask for
it there. They were pretty quick including a bit of
functionality i needed which allowed more complex, nested
funnel steps.

[Get Cartflows Pro (299/yr) here]

[Get Cart Abandonment Recovery (free) here]

6. MEMBERSHIP AREAS & SUBSCRIPTIONS
=====================================

Out of the box, Woocommerce already enables protected
electronic product delivery for one-time sales. But what
happens if your product is a more complex training program
with modules and downloadable content… Or If you need to
deliver it as a membership area with a monthly subscription
access?

In this case, I suggest you use the free plugin made,
again, by the same people who made WordPress and
Woocommerce, titled [Sensei LMS]
.

Sensei LMS is free. It is an extremely mature piece of
software that’s been in development a long time. And I’ve
looked at a bunch of other learning management systems
(LMS) in WordPress. Most are based on hacking together code
stolen from Sensei LMS and Woocommerce to make some
frankenstein slow mess. I would not bother with ANYTHING
else.

Sensei LMS enables you to create training modules, lessons,
and quizzes for your customers/students. It handles student
enrollment and management. It has a decent ecosystem of
addon plugins to enhance its functionality to do anything
you can think of in the context of an LMS.

To be able to sell your Sensei LMS courses with
Woocommerce, you will need another plugin. It is called
[Woocommerce Paid Courses]
. The cost
is $129 / year. Again, remember this is a yearly fee, not
monthly. The plugin does NOT stop working if you don’t
renew after a year. It does NOT lock you out of your data.
If you choose not to renew yearly, all that happens is you
will not receive updates and bug fixes but the plugin will
continue to work.

What Woocommerce Paid Courses does is protect courses you
create in Sensei LMS from being accessed by people who have
not paid for access. Without it, your courses are open to
the public.

Optionally, if you want to sell your courses as a
subscription with a recurring billing (eg, monthly), rather
than a one-time purchase, you will need another plugin. It
is called [Woocommerce Subscriptions]
.
The cost is $199 / year. It adds a new product type to
Woocommerce’s product setup interface–Subscription
Product.

Keep in mind, using Woocommerce Subscriptions is not
limited to JUST Sensei LMS courses…You can combine it
with ANY type of subscription product or service you want
(eg, a community, a recurring services, retainers,
recurring software licenses, autoship of physical goods).

You can offer trial periods or different pricing for setup
vs renewal, you can fast forward subscriptions, and a whole
host of other useful options.

The plugin will handle removing access for people who
default on payments, it will perform dunning for failed
transactions, it will send out reminders to customers to
update expired payment methods, and so on and on. It
integrates with Stripe and Woocommerce Paid Courses
natively. It allows the use of coupon codes and discounts
on the first payment or on all payments. Pretty much
anything relating to recurring product billing is handled
by this plugin. Looking at its code-base, i can tell you
with absolute certainty it is worth EVERY cent.

[Get Sensei LMS (free) here]

[Get Woocommerce Paid Courses (129/yr) here]

[Get Woocommerce Subscriptions (199/yr) here]

—

This remarkable combination of Wordpress plugins is how you
can quickly make your own self-hosted Clickfunnels clone.
Add up the cost of everything mentioned in this lesson, and
the total is $676 / year. Keep in mind, you may not need
everything here, nor do you have to renew yearly–but with
these tools you will be able to create an unlimited number
of funnels, pages, products, and customers. Even if you
paid for licenses for just ONE year and did NOT renew a
subsequent year’s subscription, you can STILL run your
business uninterrupted, exactly the same way, without ANY
limitation whatsoever.

All your data belongs to you.

Nobody can lock you out of your business.

Compare with Clickfunnels et al, and only for the sake of
comparison…their SMALLEST plan ($97/mo) with limitations
on number of funnels, domains, users, pages, and features
costs $1,164 / year.

That’s nearly double the cost, year after year.

And if you stop paying for any reason your fault or not,
your entire business is put on hold.

I don’t know about you, but the configuration i described
above is a complete no brainer. I encourage all my clients
to go this route. I do the setup for them and now I’m
encouraging you to do the same.

One last tip if you do client work and have clients who
rely on you for the “technical” website stuff… use a
WordPress Multisite install and create a site for each
client. You’ll only need to make the configuration once
and it will clone nicely to ALL your clients. Then the cost
is divided between them and you can include the site /
funnel as part of your retainer fee.

Use your imagination 🙂

If you liked this email, you will appreciate the Super
Traffic Machine which i wrote for you with a lot of love
and care, to help you with EVERY step of creating an online
business from scratch. Read more about it at the link
below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

More tomorrow,

Jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

– [Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages]

– [Part 7: Watching Visitors]

– [Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice]

– [Part 9: Why I Don’t Do Email Marketing Like That]

– [Part 10: Your Professional Email Addy]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

If you took my unconventional advice on domains and hosting
from Part 8 of this series…

You’re probably wondering, “How do i get an email at my
own dot com?”

Or rather, how do i keep my professional email forwarding?

And you’d be right to wonder. Because for years, there
was a tradeoff i had to make by leaving Godaddy and moving
my sites and domains to Google Cloud Platform–that email
forwarding is no longer straightforward.

Eventually, i found a solution that works easily, it’s
free, and i’ll share it below.

Look, i can’t deny it was pretty sweet having the ease of
Godaddy’s mail forwarding, wildcard email addresses, and
so on. I could come up with an email address on the fly,
without doing any setup, and all my mail ended up in my
Gmail inbox. I always got a kick out of being asked for my
address by people outside our industry and telling them
it’s jim at jimyaghi dot com and seeing the look on their
faces.

No one realised everything ended up at sexiest_yaghi1 at
gmail dot com. Couldn’t even get first dibs on it. So
unimpressive, so unprofessional 🙂

So when i made the decision to move hosting away from
Godaddy to Google Cloud, i had to figure out a way to keep
email working. All kinds of stuff was attached to my
address and i couldn’t afford to miss a single message.

At first, i setup my own self-hosted mail server to receive
mail and then forward it over. The amount of spam, however,
i’m subjected to on a daily basis, was so revoltingly
high that i quickly used up my generous free tier limits in
Sendgrid. Not on legitimate emails, but just to forward
junk messages into Gmail’s junk box.

Then i setup Spamassassin on my server so it would only
forward non-spam emails. While this worked to some extent,
Spamassassin isn’t as good as Gmail’s filter. It was also a
nightmare keeping rules up to date, configured, and working
correctly. And still there were issues with forwarding and
the mail server configuration frustratingly flew right over
my head.

In the end, i found a way that works flawlessly.

Here’s what i used:

[Zoho Mail (Forever Free Plan)]

They have several paid options, but it won’t cost a cent
if all you want is to have your own “name at yourdomain
dot com” that forwards to your favourite mail client
where you like to receive, read, and compose emails.

The “Forever free” option entitles you to mail
management for 1 domain, 5GB of email per user, and a 25MB
attachment limit. This is more than enough. The only time
you need more than 1 domain is if you setup websites for
clients (as i do), then it’s only about $1 per extra user
per month.

The link below goes directly to their easy to use setup
wizard, which walks you through all the steps of
configuring your account.

https://yaghilabs.com/recommends/zoho

Once you’re up and running, you can:

a) use the Zoho mail client

b) or, configure your favourite mail client to access your
Zoho account as a POP service

c) or, setup mail forwarding to the address of your
choice.

Also, you can easily have a wildcard mailbox. This way you
can invent any email address on the fly (eg, sales at
yourdomain dot com or support at yourdomain dot com).
Messages sent to any such addresses will go to the default
mailbox on the account.

If you’re keen to give Zoho a whirl, start setting up
your Forever Free mail account at the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/recommends/zoho

More tomorrow,

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

– [Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages]

– [Part 7: Watching Visitors]

– [Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice]

– [Part 9: Why I Don’t Do Email Marketing Like That]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

I’m back and eager to talk with you about the tech side
of traffic generation, because i spent the best part of the
last few years neck deep in it.

Our topic today is email marketing solutions. I developed a
bit of a pet peeve with traditional email marketing
solutions and i’ll never use them again. We’ll explore my
peeves first and then i’ll show you what i’m doing
instead…

1. PRICING
==========

Until recently, email marketing services had two types of
cost variables:

1) number of contacts
2) and, number of emails sent per month.

For a daily emailer like myself, this often meant i was
paying for subscriber packages four, five times my list
size, so i can email with the frequency i needed.

Most services bring you in on a small monthly fee which is
great when your list is small or non-existent, but as your
list grows, that cost balloons exponentially. Eventually,
instead of a few dollars a month, you’re paying several
hundred, if not thousand dollars per month.

Admittedly, i went to research this point last week so i
can give you specific examples of services that do things
this way…and to my bitter disappointment i found my usual
suspects have changed their ways. lol.

iContact, for example, for many years allowed only 6 emails
per month per subscriber, which meant if you had 5,000
subscribers, for example, and wanted to email them daily,
you need to pay for the 25,000 subscriber package. I
didn’t even understand Aweber’s pricing, but after mere
months of starting at 19.99 found them charging me several
hundred dollars per month.

Like i said though, this does not seem to be the case any
more. According to their support, both now offer unlimited
emails and only bill on the basis of list size. Sweet!

All the same, pay attention when picking a service about
how they calculate their pricing. Is it number of stored
subscribers, number of monthly sent emails, or both?

The trouble with making the wrong choice in the beginning,
is your needs will not remain simple forever. Once your
list grows, migration to a new service is a nightmare.
Making the right choice early is key.

2. MIGRATION & DOUBLE OPT-IN
===========================

Moving from one mailing service to another is tedious and
in most cases will lose a large, responsive portion of your
list.

In almost all cases, importing your existing list of
contacts into a new mailing service will require you to
explain the source of your contacts and then to ask your
contacts to confirm their subscription. These rules, put in
place to protect services from spammers, are conveniently
thrown out the window for clients with large lists who are
worth thousands of dollars per month in fees to the new
mailing service.

My guess is you’re not one of those lucky guys and
neither was i in the beginning.

At one point, i was maintaining different mailing lists in
three different services (1Shoppingcart, iContact, and
Aweber), paying each a separate monthly fee, and unable to
merge my contacts into one mailing service. Any time i
tried to import contacts from one service into another, the
service i was importing into required me to send out a
prewritten email to all my subscribers asking them to click
a link to confirm their subscription.

The argument is if these people really wanna hear from you,
they will be eager to confirm their subscription.

Truth is, unless people are EXTREMELY into your
emails…like their life depends on them somehow and they
avidly read every email you send, most are unlikely to take
a proactive step of confirming their subscription.

For what reason?

What motivation could they possibly have to go through this
process?

I mean, you as the marketer, you’re changing list
providers, that’s your problem…what does the subscriber
care?

Anyway, all this assumes the email doesn’t land in junk,
the subscriber sees it and opens it, believes it to be from
you, and reads and understands far enough to recognise they
need to take action, and finally decides they care enough
about not missing out on your emails to do what you’re
asking.

How likely is that?

Every time i tried this exercise, i could only get a small
handful of my list to comply. I earned every subscriber
fair and square, paid for every lead, i wasn’t going to
lose them over some technicality.

So, i ended up with several email services, with some
subset of my subscribers locked into each.

In addition, many email marketing services impose really
strict rules on how you can add subscribers or move them
from list to list, requiring double confirmation from
subscribers. Aweber, for instance, is a nightmare to
integrate into any automated API because by default they
require double confirmation even if you turn it off.

3. TERMS OF SERVICE
====================

Email marketing services all have rules about what you can
and can’t market in your emails–like the nature of
products and services.

And some of the rules are really arbitrary and crazy!
I’ve seen some seriously open to interpretation types of
things which i’m sure they just put in there to cover
their butts.

Here’s an example. A couple of months back, i asked my
d!ck pill client to join Mailchimp because it integrated
nicely with our shopping cart and other bits of tech. I had
a look at it, and the email writing interface was beautiful
and it was overall quite impressive.

Once we had everything setup, i did all the work of putting
in the emails and creating all the appropriate
autoresponders. We started up the traffic campaign and
spent money. But for some reason the email follow-up part
of our funnel wasn’t converting.

It took several days to figure this out. When i dug a
little, i discovered they had paused our follow-up campaign
because it violates their terms of service. Apparently this
stuff is sexually explicit and isn’t allowed on
Mailchimp. We asked for a refund and i quickly found an
alternative i’ll share with you shortly.

But man was i pissed off. The amount of time and money we
wasted because of these jackasses!

—

I think this covers the major issues i’ve had over the
years with email marketing services and why i no longer use
them.

Look, the mailing list is an internet marketer’s entire
business. If you lose it, you have lost your business. The
trouble is because they collect, store, and email contacts
for you, traditional email marketing services forcefully
take ownership of your most important business asset. And
they dictate what you can and cannot do with them.

I don’t think they should have that much power over us.

A better approach, i have found, is to decouple our email
leads from the service that emails them.

I mean, we invest great amounts of time and money into
collecting our contacts–sometimes our contact database
contains records of customers! Those are super important
contacts NOT to lose under any circumstances. That’s our
property, it does not belong to any service that
facilitates mailing.

This way, we collect and store our contacts independently
into our own database and then use a separate service to
email the contacts. This way, if an email service wants to
lock you out or be a dick about your email content, they
only prevent you from emailing through them. Your contacts
are yours. So you quickly switch the service without losing
or affecting your hard earned contacts.

How do we do this?

There are several techniques. But the one i will describe
here is what i found to be easiest and fastest to setup.

WHAT I DO NOW (INSTRUCTIONS)
===============================

With this approach, you get to maintain all your contacts
in your own Wordpress website, where you have complete and
exclusive control over them.

A free plugin takes care of collecting and storing contacts
for you into your Wordpress database. It also allows you to
write and store your emails locally on your own
server…Emails are simply a custom post type. (which
reminds me of one more peve…losing all my old emails when
leaving an email marketing service).

When you’re ready to send an email broadcast, the plugin
integrates with one of several services that ONLY does
sending on your behalf. It does not manage your leads in
any way.

Let’s go through the setup steps quickly:

First, install the FREE Wordpress plugin: Mailpoet 3.

Mailpoet is completely free. However, it does offer an
OPTIONAL paid mailing service with a free usage tier. But
it also integrates with other mailing services i’ll talk
about shortly.

The email composition interface in Mailpoet is beautiful
and really easy to use. It works very similarly to
Mailchimp, but inside your Wordpress site, and without
Mailchimp’s jerkiness.

Additionally, lots of form plugins integrate with Mailpoet
out of the box. I will share with you some experience on
how to build lead capture pages that collect leads into
Mailpoet in a subsequent email of the series. You can also
link email leads to their purchases which is SUPER
important when determining a lead’s value. And you can have
customer lists automatically made for you when people buy
things.

The beauty of Mailpoet is it collects leads straight into
your Wordpress database.

Even if you uninstall the plugin, your leads are yours. You
can look at them in your Users section, export them, do
whatever you want. You don’t pay anyone to store them. No
one holds you hostage through them. No one forces you to
confirm or double confirm them. Move your site, move your
server, they go with you everywhere.

The next step is to setup your email sending service.

Like i said, Mailpoet has their own sending service which
they push. I have NOT used their service so i cannot speak
for its quality but it does seem to be the simplest way to
go if you’re looking for EASIEST.

However, Mailpoet also allows you to choose between using
your own local server, Sendgrid, or Amazon Simple Email
Service. These options, i HAVE tried and have some
experience to share.

Sendgrid is an excellent transactional email service with a
full fledged sending interface inside should you ever want
it. We only need to access it by API with Mailpoet,
however. When you sign up, you can do so for free and get
40,000 emails the first month and 100 emails per day
thereafter in their free tier. Once your needs increase,
you can do 100,000 emails monthly for $14 which isn’t too
bad. They walk you through all the steps for configuring
DKIM and SPF so your emails are delivered to inboxes
instead of junk.

Amazon SES is a bit more advanced and does NOT have a nice
sending interface. But, once more, we only need its API. I
like it best because their free tier gives you 62,000
emails free per month before billing starts. And it’s
only 10 cents per 1,000 emails thereafter. This is pretty
darn cheap for data independence and peace of mind if you
ask me. They too walk you through setup so your emails are
delivered to inboxes instead of junk.

The final option is sending through your own server. Now i
would NEVER recommend you do this, unless your own server
has been configured with a Postfix smarthost relay
connected to some other external sending service.

This is super advanced stuff, but i only mention it because
if you have the right tech guy on your side, you can
connect Mailpoet to ANY other sending service you want.

I know this whole thing ends up sounding like a big ad for
Mailpoet. But please understand I am receiving no
compensation from them or any of the other services i
mentioned here (this is why i didnt link any of them). They
just served my needs really well and impressed me.

Mailpoet’s code is REALLY clean and well written. I have
seen some nice looking projects with awful code under the
hood (eg, Sendy is absolutely vomit inducing).

This is how i setup all email marketing for my clients
these days. If you too care about retaining ownership and
control of your most valuable online business asset, i’d
recommend you follow these steps today.

And hey, if you’re enjoying this series, drop me a line
and tell me what you like or what else you want to know
about. And if you enjoy my take on things, you’ll
probably love the Super Traffic Machine. This series of
manuals documents in step by step detail exactly how to
setup your online business to maximise traffic and
conversions.

Read all about it at the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

See you tomorrow,

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

– [Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages]

– [Part 7: Watching Visitors]

– [Part 8: Fast, High Traffic, Unconventional Website
Advice]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}