#112: How to Generate Millions For Your Business Using Affiliate Marketers with Cody Bramlett

Guest Introduction (0:00) Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of The We Live to Build Podcast. I’m here today with Cody Bramlett. We already did a private interview. If you haven’t seen that yet, then definitely go check that out. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go to the welivetobuild.com website and you can find out more information there. So, Cody, for the people who don’t know who you are yet, why don’t you tell them a little bit about what it is you do so that we can set up the topic for today, which is affiliate marketing. Get to know Cody (0:30) Cody Bramlett: Yeah, definitely. I’m really excited to talk about affiliate marketing today, because this is an easy way for people to make money without having to invest a lot and without having to know a lot. It’s really about relationships, which I think is the most powerful thing. So, me, I started out selling food at restaurants with US Food Service. I was a great sales rep there. I kind of owned my chops, for figure how to do the door-to-door sales concept. I hated the job, though, because I had terrible bosses. So, I started a gym. A kennel gym in San Diego? Ran that thing for seven years. Realized that making $2,000 a month, working 40 hours a week, and being emotionally and fried and exhausted was not what I wanted to do. And I decided to develop a supplement brand. So, I created a company called Science Natural Supplements. And we sold turmeric. We were the first major company online to really push it. And the first year of operation, we did two and a half, and then six and a half, and then, I think four, and then five, and then four, all selling Turmeric with a handful of offers on the back end. We acquire our traffic through affiliate marketing, which is getting people with blogs, email lists, other sources of traffic, or people that just know, hardly know how to get traffic to promote you, and you pay them a commission for every single sale that happens. And we’ll go into depth about that. There’s a whole structure and way of building a certain type of sales page and certain type of offer or video that allows these things to convert. And we like to see things converting between 1 to 3% conversion rate. And basically, it’s just when you get an offer that works, and a network of people that know, like, and trust you, it’s just like printing money. And on our bad months, we’ll do a half million, and a good month, we’ll do 2 million. Every month is profitable. And the coolest part is, we’ve actually created our business to be really more about a customer acquisition. And we monetize in the back end. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th sale that people make is where we make our true profits and the majority of our profits. So today I’m an open book to explain the whole darn thing. I do coach people how to do this as well. Just get it out in the open, because I love to make sure or people do it the right way. I’ve made a million dollars of mistakes, and I’m open about those two. So, I think on our last call, we went into a few of them, and they were painful, but yeah. So today it’s all about teaching you guys what you want to build, how you want to get traffic to it, and how to make money once you have it working. Profit from Affiliate Marketing Strategy (2:40) Sean Weisbrot: All right, great. Thank you for the intro. I appreciate it. So, I just want to clarify something real fast. You said between half a million and 2 million a month from affiliates. Cody Bramlett: Yeah. In terms of revenue, not profit, but yes. So, slow month, half million, big month, 2 million. I have one coaching climber now. It’s doing, I think, 30 this month. So, the sky is the limit. He is truly a unique one of a kind of company. But to be able to do $300,000 a month in revenue is really achievable for pretty much anybody. It’s just a matter of having focus and staying on track. And within six months to a year, you can have that without having massive skills. You don’t need to be an incredible copywriter, incredible ad buyer, an incredible salesperson. You have to know what to do, when to do it, and as long as you’re a kind, nice person who wants to be people’s friends, it’s possible. Sean Weisbrot: What percent would you say your affiliate marketing generates in terms of total revenue? Cody Bramlett: The idea is you’re trying to acquire a customer by paying as much as possible, and then once you have them, you make money in the back end by promoting offers that are only to customers you already have, by re-promoting the same offer, or by sharing other third party offers that convert well. And you have to kind of do all three of those things to truly be successful. In terms of the company’s overall revenue, this year, I think we’re on track to do about 8 million in sales. So that’s front in sales, and then about 2 million on the email list. Now, the email list is about 80-90% profit. And then on the actual product sales, it’s about 15%-10% profit. So, the idea of where revenue comes and where profit comes is a big kind of lopsided, 80/20 kind of thing, but they are needed without having the customer acquisition. You can’t develop an email list that has life and longevity because no one’s going to stand your email list forever. And without out having a strong back end and email focused mindset, you can’t make any money because you’re not making enough money in the front end to be a successful company for the amount of staff and time and people and energy, you need to grow the business quickly. Sean Weisbrot: Okay, so I didn’t quite hear an actual percentage though, of what the affiliates were for the total revenue. Cody Bramlett: Oh, 100% Sean Weisbrot: So, 100% of your revenue comes from affiliates? Cody Bramlett: Yes. Most companies, they can figure out how to do ads on their own. Maybe you are a person who had experience with Facebook or YouTube in that aspect. I don’t, I never did. I started this six, seven years ago now. And back then it was a lot more of a wild west on Facebook. And you had to be a really aggressive marketer and you couldn’t compete with these people. It was hard to win in any aspect. And so, I just avoided that and kept working with affiliates. Now there are affiliates who are Facebook people. I have this wonderful affiliate for a year, drove probably $4 million to one of my offers. He found a target audience; he found an ad set that worked. And then I just paid him like $100 per conversion. I made about $5 in profit and he just printed me customers all day long. So, there are certain affiliates out there that are great in these aspects. They are harder to find because they tend to usually gravitate towards large companies, are really successful offers, and those are usually the ones who are the top three to five offers you’ll see on platforms like Clickbank, Digital Store, and Buy Goods, which are the large marketplaces for people who are looking for affiliate offers to promote. But yeah, it’s always been affiliate. It’s always been about that. This year’s goal is building an internal sales team that can do Facebook and YouTube and things along those lines, but that’s a year and a half long game plan. It’s not a thing I expect to have printing money instantaneously because that would be crazy to have that wish. How to get affiliates (6:12) Sean Weisbrot: As an entrepreneur, you want things to go a lot faster than they actually go. So, I’m curious, how do you find people to be affiliates, and how do you convince them to work with you? Cody Bramlett: Perfect. So, the first step is having an offer. And we’ll get into that a little later, but assuming you have an offer that converts at one and a quarter to one and a half percent on a typical list, and let’s just go with the most general offer there is, weight loss, right. Online, there is how do I make money online and how do I lose weight? There’s the two biggest money making, two biggest ways to make money online. So, obviously, I have a coaching program on how to make money by selling how to lose weight. Boom, boom. With the idea of losing weight, you have a great offer, one and a quarter, one and a half percent conversion rates. And then you go out and you put that offer on these platforms. So, as you start out as a beginner, you have no street cred, no one knows who you are. And in this space, affiliates, list owners like myself, who promote other offers get burned occasionally. I have a gentleman in my coaching group who was burned by a gigantic 30, 40, $50 million a year company because they just stopped their affiliate program and forgot to pay him for a year. And the gentleman in my group, he’s an OG person. He’s been in this space forever. And so, you get burned by the people you least expect sometimes. And so, a lot of list owners, traffic owners, are very wary about just promoting someone who has their own platform. So, ideally, you take your product once it’s tested and good, and you put the offer in the funnel. On Clickbank, Buy Goods, Digital Store, or a combination of one or two or three of them. Each platform has their affiliates that prefer to be on that platform. But I would say 70-80% are on Clickbank, about 20% or so on Buy Goods, 10% are on Digital Store. So, you have your offer, let’s say, on Clickbank, because it’s the biggest platform out there. They have a whole marketplace that has a thing called Gravity. So, as you increase sales, you raise up, you get ranked. There’s a scorecard on there. And if you have a super mega awesome unicorn offer, which I think there’s two or three a year, you automatically shoot the number one. But there’s a bunch of people playing games on there to rank the top 20, top 30. So, in order to actually get free affiliates from Clickbank or Buy Goods, you have to have a crazy good offer. So, you got to scrap that idea, because the chances of your offer being unicorn are very limited. And the next step is, Daniel just said, how do you get the affiliates? So, you reach out to Clickbank, your account manager, reach out to Buy Goods, did you store? They have a plethora of affiliates they can introduce you to or get your offer in front of. After that, the next step is, how do you meet these people and how do you meet more? So, I always tell my wife when I go out to conferences and do stuff, I’m just out there shaking hands and kissing babies, because all you’re doing is acting like a politician and making friends. So, you go to events. There’s an event in San Diego in September called Traffic and Conversion. That is the event to go to. There’s an event in January called Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. That’s the one to go to. There’s one that just happened in New York called affiliate summit east. There’s a flat summit world. You go to these events, you book coffee dates with every single person you know and lunch dates, and you make friends with them. And you be their friend, you be their advocate. If your offer is not good for them, you find a way to help them by introducing them to someone else, by writing a blog post, because it helps their offer by referring them to someone they want to hire because you know someone that could be a good fit for them, whatever it may be. You’d be their advocate and their friend. Because as you start to grow in this industry, if everyone knows, likes, and trusts you, when your offer does work, they’re going to drive a ton of traffic. And if your offer is okay, they’re going to throw you a bone and send to your offer occasionally as opposed to never at all. So you go to conferences, you make friends. The next step is, of course, saying, hey, my offer to good. Do you know anybody could refer me to could you introduce me to someone else? If you make friends with somebody like I made friends with Sean, if I need something, I’m going to help. Say, hey, Sean, you got anybody that could be good in here? He’s going to be like, maybe. And then if it comes along a month from now or two weeks from now, he’s going that person should be a great fit for what Cody’s looking for. So that idea of being able to ask someone for help, ask someone who they can refer you to, is key and important. And then finally being a part of groups. I have the supplement millionaire mastermind. We teach people how to build offers, right? How to run their offers, how to structure offers. You join our group; you instantly meet 40 people who can drive to your offer and be friends with you. There are other groups. There’s a group called Traffic Tribe; Amber Spears runs it. She’s a great teacher of how to be an affiliate manager and a great connector. There’s like 300 people in her group. It’s a more virtual Facebook one, but that’s huge. The more groups you get involved with, free Facebook groups, groups that cost a couple of months, master plans that cost ten grand a year. The more you’re involved in them, the more people you meet, the more people you get introduced to. So, it’s just about spreading out your social network of people in the space, asking who could be introduced to and going from there. And of course, all this stems back from the fact that you have to have an offer that functionally, works, and is something that’s worth talking about. Because if your offers offer converts at a half a percent, there’s no reason why anybody should ever want to promote you. So, you’re wasting a lot of time because you need to be focusing on perfecting that offer. Process of acquiring affiliates (11:21) Sean Weisbrot: Once you convince them to give you a chance, is there, like a sales process or an on boarding process? What’s that next step looks like? Cody Bramlett: Definitely, it’s all about making it as simple as possible. So, a good example Savannah, who runs our sales team right now, she probably gets 100 emails a day. Not from inside the company, from people reaching out, being like, well, you promote me. Hi. Can I talk to you? How can I waste your time, whatever it may be. Before I pass everything off to her, I was just getting hit up on Skype by just networks and people who drive traffic just trying to get my attention, because they’re hoping that I can either drive traffic to their offers or they can drive traffic to mine. And a lot of times, it’s never a good fit. So, these people are slammed. If you can get someone to agree to talk to you, that’s the first step. You can have a conversation with them in person, Skype conversation, whatever it is. The next step is to get them to remember you. Right? So, one of the things we do, we give people a mini gift, a Starbucks gift card, right. Or I find out that they love wine, get them a bottle from a wine.com kind of thing. Do something to share love. It’s the idea of Bill Glazier and Dan Kenny, they talked about how to get it in front of somebody. You don’t send them a sales envelope or, hey, check this thing out. One of the things ideas they had before was sending an umbrella with all the letters stuffed in the umbrella to explain what it is. So, if an owner receives an umbrella, they’re like, what? And they open it up, and they’re very curious. So, you want someone to remember you. You want to be likable, and you want to make sure that that connection is made. Then they agreed to test her offer. Yeah, no problem. I’ll test your offer. You want to be, of course, gentle because you’re new and not over demanding, annoying because you’re new. And then they’re going to ignore you. You want to make m sure you talk to the right person. So, if you’re contacting my sales manager, the first thing is, hey, do you have an affiliate manager or someone, your team I should be working with? So that way you don’t have to spend all this time with me. And if they do, if they have some underlings that can run the stuff for them, that saves them time. And those staff are usually a lot more less bombarded by emails. So, you have your offer. They agreed to do it. They already know I can trust you. The key is then sending them everything in a clean, consistent place. So, in Clickbank and Buy Goods, everyone has ID, and their ID goes into the link in a way to track it. And it tracks commissions. And Clickbank and Buy Goods pays the affiliates automatically because if your offer is on there, then Clickbank is paying you the remainder of the money. It’s a really cool system that saves you a ton of time and energy every single month. So, you just basically set up their link for them. So, it’s the correct link with the correct tracking on it. You give them the appropriate email, creatives, swipes, any imagery, any blog post, anything they requested, needed. But only what they need, you wouldn’t give them, hey, here’s 20 email swipes. Mail one right now. You want to give them the top two that work. These does great, and this one also does great, but this one is better. Make it simple so that way they can paste the email in, put in the hyperlink, hit send. The next step, of course, is follow up to give them stats back. One of the things that I pride my team with is they provide stats to people constantly, especially if they’re new and they’re testing the offer. Here’s how they did in our metrics. Here’s the conversions, here’s the clicks, here’s the earnings per click. Here’s how much you made. And then, the goal is then to find out, did that drop, that promotion equal what they expected? So, if someone makes $1,000 a day on average for emailing an offer, and they only made $800 when they promoted you, your goal is to find out what that number was with $1,000 to see if you could increase their commission or if you can do anything to make it up. So that way they can make that average. Because people are all about the dollars. Sometimes, they’ll throw you a bone, but it’s just like they have to meet their metrics. Not everybody is the same metric. Like, our company tends to look at eCPM, which is earnings per thousand cents. So, every thousand emails we send, we should make X amount of dollars. And that’s is the metric we tend to look at, because it does allow for list growth to look at and changes to be able to those variables, to be able to understand how well the offer is doing now and later versus different lists. But some people have earnings per click they care about. Some people care about money. A dollar amount per drop, it just all depends on the actual company. So, understanding what those things are, reporting back to them, understanding if you can meet that mark and how you can get to that mark, and then just overly impressing them. We’ve had instances before where we were so far off with a good affiliate that we wrote them a blank check. Not a blank check, but like, hey, they should have made $3,000 more. Here’s four. I’m sorry it didn’t go your way. I’m going to work on it again and I’ll let you know when it’s live so I can have you test the offer again to make it more successful. And when I do those types of things, people are impressed, they remember and they’re like, yeah, I’ll test it again because they know there’s no risk because I’m going to throw them a bone if there’s a problem. Different metrics to measure success (16:10) Sean Weisbrot: I’m curious, you were talking about different ways to track the success of a specific promotion. You mentioned one was earnings per thousand emails. Can you go into how you actually figure out those numbers? Cody Bramlett: I’m not the best for explaining exactly how the math is done without having a spreadsheet in front of me, but I can kind of walk through all the different aspects. So, we’ll just take my company for example, when we’re testing an offer. So, I have a brand-new collagen offer I want to test. So, we’ll send an email to it and let’s say we send 10,000 emails. We know how many we sent, we know how many clicks or how many people opened that email. And we know how many people click that email. So, we want to make sure that the right open happens, not right percentage of opens. And we’re shooting for 30% because since the Apple thing happened, you got to be high because if you’re at 20%, that probably means in reality you had like 10% of people opening, which means your emails are tanking and no one wants to inbox your emails. Like Yahoo and Google are just putting you in spam. So, you’re shooting for like a 30% open rate with the open rate being correct. That means you had a good subject line as well as a healthy list. The next step is to understand the click through rate. And you can look at click through for how many people that opened versus or the amount of people that were sent to. Those are two different metrics you can look at and the click through rate is indicator of did the email do its job and get someone to go to the sales page. So, we’re looking at that metric. Then we’re looking at the amount of clicks that landed on the sales page and the amount of people that purchased from those clicks. That conversion rate there matters. That’s the one we want to have one and a quarter plus on it, one and a quarter of a minimum to be a successful offer. And then of course, if you had a low click through rate and a low open, then the conversions will be different. Like a good example, I have a weight loss offer. You get more clicks to those eight, discover the secret to learn how to lose weight and then have another offer that’s just get Turmeric. Buy one, get three free. So, the email is like, do you like Turmeric? Do you want free bottles free, click this button. It has less clicks because you’re only going to click it if you know you want Turmeric. If you don’t give a crap or you already bought term if you’re not going to click it. So, the conversion rate will be different on that page because the clicks are going to be more of a proven audience than a curiosity email to a curiosity weight loss offer, to a curiosity remedy to solve a problem. So, they’re all kind of different, and then it all kind of been looked at to the revenue that’s generated. So, your commission that’s generated, you ideally, again, want to meet that affiliate markets. Let’s say that email lists $1,000. Whether you have one conversion and pay $1,000 commission, or ten and pay 100 or 20 and pay 50, it’s irrelevant as long as the affiliate and traffic source make the money they expect for that drop, and that can be looked at through the drop, just how much money was made from promoting your offer at one time. It can be looked at through earnings per click. They look at the number of clicks they sent and how much money they made and divided out, and they’re looking for a particular number for that list. Could be a dollar on that list, could be $4, depending on the list, whatever it is. But usually, a dollar is a healthy conversion. And then the eCPM is what we look at because the eCPM ignores the email. So, if the email did not convert and get enough clicks to the page, it looks back at how many emails we sent and so we can have a better idea of how that list works. So, if you sent to 10,000 people and you made $1,000, that means there’s $100 CPM. $10 CPM. I can’t remember, and I’m terrible math, something like that. In our coaching program, of course, my affiliate manager teaches all the stuff. She has examples, what to do. She teaches people how to send an email appropriately so it’s clean, clear, concise. That way people don’t get confused, and the key is just being as clear as possible and helpful as possible to the people driving traffic. That way you can build that working relationship with them and not just be like, oh, cool, they sent to me, and then a month later being like, why aren’t they sending it again? Because you haven’t developed a relationship. You have to kind of have that constant dialogue to be like, cool, awesome. I’m glad I did well for you. You’re going to skew it up for next month. What can we do for you? We’re doing a contest next month. You should promote during that time because you could win an extra $5,000 or whatever it is. Sean Weisbrot: It’s really complicated in terms of all of the nuances of the relationships with keeping them happy and making sure that the metrics are right. You are saying that it’s important for you to know that you’re at least hitting their expectations for what they will earn. Is that as simple as, like, hey, how much do you expect to earn? Cody Bramlett: 100%. Does eCPM matter to you? Are you looking for earnings per click? How much do you typically make when you send to a drop? Those kinds of things all matter. And of course, you want to tell them what their commission is ahead of time. Like, hey, you’re a $50 per conversion, and this offers a 3% conversion rate. You want to be honest about that ahead of time. So, you’re not trying to squeeze cash out of them, not giving money. If someone says they make $4,000 a drop and they make 4500, and I look at my offer and I made more than normal, I’m like, guess what? You actually made five. And going forward, you’re going to make more money every time you sent. Because the goal is if you can pay for the most if, we can pay the highest for the traffic widths. And by the way, all these stats and metrics are not exclusive to affiliates. If you’re looking at buying ads, it’s all the same metrics and conversions. It’s just different lingo. You’re worried about the conversion on the ad. You’re worried about the conversion of the page. You’re worried about the click through rate. You’re worried about the cost to end the bid. And the whole thing comes back to are you making money every time they convert? And are people happy in the affiliate world, too? You can also buy list drops. So, you can come to us and be like, hey, Cody, can I buy a drop? And I’ll be like, sure, I got a list for $1,000. A list for $4,000, and you can buy it. And of course, it’s the same as buying ads on Facebook or buying ads on YouTube or Google. You’re just understanding that you have a budget and you spent that much and you’re hoping to make it back, and you’re trying to figure out what the metrics are to achieve that. Promotion via affiliate marketing (22:25) Sean Weisbrot: So, you’re saying, if I have an ecommerce product, I can buy from you the ability to promote my product to your list? Is that what you’re saying? Cody Bramlett: Yeah, there’s plenty of people that do do that. I would never recommend it, especially from an ecommerce product, because you need to have an average order value. If you have a one and a half percent converting page, you need to have about $180 average order value, because you’re going to need to pay about $100 per conversion to be able to meet that metric. So, if I had $1,000, you need to have a page that will convert ten people. And you need to be making at least $100 profit per customer to be able to pay me. So, the game truly is about learning to build a funnel that can have an average order value of 150 to 250 and then have a high conversion rate of 1.5% to 3%. Obviously, the conversion rate is higher. You can pay less per conversion. The conversion rate is lower. You have to pay more. You have to be able to meet that traffic sources minimum to make them happy. Sean Weisbrot: My mind is blown here. I’ve never dealt with affiliates. I mean, I did when I was doing consulting. I would have people refer to me. You call it affiliate, if you want. And they would refer clients to me. And I just knew there’s, like, a 90% chance that this person is going to close, because using the psychology of trust and having the client who trusts the refer selling my service, they’re then transferring the trust over to me. So, it’s, like, really easy for me to get their trust. It’s very different because it’s a manual, it’s one on one, but the deals were five, six figures. So, it’s a lot easier because then you go, hey, look, I’m just going to give you 10% of what they pay me. And my goal is to maximize what I can charge and whatever that is good for you. So, sometimes people were getting 10,000, 15,000 commissions, and they’re like, I’m going to just keep bringing you money because you’re paying for my college or you’re paying for a house for my mom, or whatever it was. But like, I didn’t have to ever think sorry, I never had to think about conversion rates and clicks and ads and I never dealt with any of that stuff. It’s like very foreign. Cody Bramlett: It’s an entirely separate layer because you still have to do that. Making you friends with people and get into know, like, and trust you. But then they’re not paying you, you’re paying them based on how well the offer converts or some kind of reciprocal in that way. Because another thing you can do too is like swaps. Hey, you see, you promote me, I promote you, as long as it’s fair enough for both of you. Cool. Maybe it’s not as good as normally, but I got an extra email to promote my offer. So, there’s a lot of tit-for-tat in the industry. That’s more frowned upon now because a lot of people who want that usually have a crappy offer, doesn’t convert. So, one person gets to shorten the stick in that kind of scenario. But it’s really about making friends with them so they want to continue working with you and then proving that your offer does well on their list. So, they make the metrics they need. Otherwise, they can promote the other crappy offer on Clickbank about, drink this coffee, lose weight kind of thing. Sean Weisbrot: The whole layer one, make friends and give them a great offer. That’s natural for me. But all of the tiny nuances of the metrics and the math and all of that is, that’s what unique. Cody Bramlett: I was fortunate. My brother had gotten into space with a workout program before me. And he was probably doing it for about a year and a half, two years before me. And so, he understood and got to kind of figure out all the stuff. And then when I jumped in, he kind of helped me for six months and is just like, what is EPC? It was all completely foreign and it does take time. And that was one of the reasons why I was happy to make a coaching program. Because we teach all the stuff. We beat it in through videos. We give examples on all the forms. All the sheets that we use internally for a trigger company so people can use it successfully when they’re starting out and know from the beginning where they are versus being confused and lost as you slowly grow up until you finally have the time and energy and understanding to get it. And there are other groups too, again, like Traffic Tribe that are phenomenal and they teach all these things and where things didn’t exist when I first started. So, there’s the good part is where you meet people are where these things are being taught. So, you’re going to come into it novice and new, but people will be like, oh, you’re new. Cool. Your offer is neat. This is how we do things, welcome to the group. As long as you’re open, honest and truthful, people are very receiving and nice, and they don’t hate you if your offer sucks. They’re just going to wait for you to make it better. And this isn’t crucial because there’s two ladies in this space that are just amazing. They’re just uber successful. And both of them, when I first met them, were nobodies with offers that didn’t work. And now they’re probably twice as big as my company and have been successful for years. Everyone knows that. Not everyone. But there’s a huge chance that someone will have a great offer eventually. So, everyone wants to remain friends and stay connected because it just takes that right headline, right video, right product, right story, whatever it is that hits the mark for that day and time, and then suddenly, that’s the offer everyone wants to promote, and you want to make sure you are friends with that person and they don’t hate you because you gave them crap. It when they first started out. Sean Weisbrot: Do you use affiliates to drive traffic to your coaching program about teaching affiliates? Cody Bramlett: So that’s an interesting thing. I’ve had a hard time finding a lot of affiliates that do that. Most affiliates are into promoting to direct to customer. And because we teach people who are either 100% serious, they’re ready to invest 20 grand into starting a business, not through coaching, but to build their company, or people that already have existing businesses, they’re not as targetable of an audience. Now, a good example is Clickbank or Buy goods. We’re right now in the process of partnering with them so they can go, hey, all of our clients that already have companies, here’s a coaching program that might help you be better. So, in terms of the affiliate in those aspects, that’s what we’re targeting to do. But there’s very few traffic sources out there that drive direct to our kinds of offers. There are ones that will do the hey for $49, I’ll teach you how to buy ads on Facebook and do this kind of thing. And they’re kind of just overly promising how you can make millions, but they’re only teaching step one of 50 that takes years to get through, and those ones can get traffic. But in our hiring space, it doesn’t really exist. And also, I don’t necessarily want it. I only want to help people who are serious. I’ve already had a handful of coaching clients that found me through whatever social media channels or something bad, or saw a podcast that just weren’t really into it and quit after three months. So, I’m not interested in waste my time with those people. Only serious people that actually want to build a business or have a business that they want to improve upon. Partnering with other companies (29:10) Sean Weisbrot: It’s interesting that you’re thinking about partnering with a Clickbank or something like that. I have a pretty wide network, and a lot of the people I know are like agency owners, right? They’ll do digital marketing, they’ll do social media, they’ll do PR, they’ll do email marketing, whatever. So, I was thinking that I could actually go to those kinds of people and talk to them about the service I provide. Do you know anyone like that, or you’re just thinking about these larger companies? Cody Bramlett: Yeah, definitely. So, within my coaching program, we actually have about 50 videos. And each of those videos, I bring on experts, I bring on people who we work with, we contract with. For example, the best customer service agency I love. They’re called Help Grid Phenomenal. They make us money. They may be $300,000 in five years. Most customer services cost people money, so I recommend the best people, and of course, they give me a little cutback as a thank you. So, we’re doing that on that side. But then we’re also going back to them now that we have developed our program out much stronger, and saying, hey, can you share this with your clientele? Because we want to help rise the entire title. We want to lift the whole industry up. And if you have 25 people that are doing the exact same thing that we’re teaching, I’d love to share with them, because probably 10% of them want to improve their business or realize they need to take that next step to become a CEO, to be able to have an entire team who can build the offers and the structure. And you don’t have to work every day in the business, but instead work on the business. And I want to reach out to those groups as well. So, we are in that process. I’m excited right now because I started the coaching year and a half ago, and it really was, I want to learn from a handful of friends who are in the industry, they were smaller than I am, and give them advice as possible. And I learned what their needs were, and then I, in turn, made the program better. And then I learned what they needed next. And I, in turn, made the program better. And so, the whole idea for me is not to just make as much money as possible right now. It’s to build something that has longevity, that actually provides a service that actually is worthwhile in the long run that people don’t want to leave. There’s an EOS. There’s all those big coaching programs out there for businesses. I want to be that for the direct marketing stuff in the space, and that’s what we’re pushing to do. And yeah, looking for affiliates in that world is different than for the actual direct to consumer, but I would consider that idea of, like, what you mentioned or Clickbank as an affiliate as well. So, it’s definitely the same concept. Cody’s struggles (31:39) Sean Weisbrot: What are some things that you’re thinking about are struggling with on either business right now? Cody Bramlett: The biggest struggle of all is what’s next, right? So, coming up with the next offer, the next best thing is this. With the economy changing and taking a downturn, do we want to make discount brands, make them more exclusive? Do we want to have a more aggressive offer that solves a more niche problem in someone’s life? Are we looking more general health? We kind of determine what that is. And it’s hard because at this point, Science Supplements kind of ran its life course as a brand. And we had more aggressive Facebook advertisers advertising that we had a lot of flak from people, because a lot of nobody’s weirdo people online who want to complain about everything critical. And they’re like, I never buy from this company. They’re terrible. And I’m like, you didn’t even buy something from me. How can you call me terrible? Like, I provide something that actually works. And I have five-star reviews all over Amazon. What are you talking about? So, we’re determining now how to either turn the company into multiple brands or rename it to one larger brand so that we can have a fresh face. That’s my big one. And the second one is, of course, understanding how to structure the team amongst the different services and brands we have, and partnerships I have. So that way, there’s a cohesive understanding of responsibility for the team, cohesive understanding of how you’re going to be compensated for bonuses when you achieve your results for the team, and really understanding who’s in charge of what. That way, I’m not getting asked questions from my fulfillment manager, dealing with the warehouse, because I’m so far disconnected from that. The only conversation I should be having with the owner about, hey, your team’s not doing a good enough job you need to go with them in a shape because they’re not answering my staff questions like, that’s all I should be involved in. So, it’s making sure that we have the right vertical, right company structure and continue to tweak that. So, it makes sense for the company as it evolves. How Cody started (33:34) Sean Weisbrot: Am I right in saying that it was your brother that kind of taught you about the affiliate model when you first got started? Cody Bramlett: Opposite. So, I was involved with Bill Glaser and Dan Kennedy. They had these, if you haven’t heard about them, you got to just type in Bill Glazer, Dan Kennedy. They have a ton of books, like, No BS marketing. The term swipe and deploy comes from Bill Glazer. Dan Kenny has been around forever. He has tons of letters, tons of stuff about direct marketing. And they teach the idea of storytelling, right? Story star solution. There’s a story about a person. They found a star or guru to help them. They found that solution. And lo and behold, here’s the solution. It’s an ebook. It’s a course. It’s a how to. It’s a product. And that idea of direct marketing has been done forever. In there, they talk about people who written stuff for wristwatches and glasses and all stuff like that, and how it’s gone from being copied in newspapers and magazines to mail to email and online. So, I learned from them. I was in a group there trying to figure out how to use that approach from my gym, which I think I did a pretty good job considering I was in a warehouse in the back of the back of a complex. I somehow got 200 members. And a very niche kind of gym too, teaching kettlebells only, it was a very niche gym at the time. And so, I kind of learned from that. And then I happened to fall apart another group for the gym coaching. And they happen to have a digital marketing course. And I brought my brother to the event the second year. And we signed up to do that. And we actually created an entire online video course, kind of like P90X, but with kettlebell. So, we filmed the whole thing. At my gym, we had like a little flip cameras that were like the Canon Zaidy or something like that. And like the little tiny cameras. And we had microphones. And it’s just all completely shoestring budget with some friends who can film. It took us like six months to edit the whole thing. And then we got it done and we brought it back to the coaching group. And they’re like, well, no one does videos. It’s all PDFs. We’ll give it a try a year later. Everyone was doing videos, by the way, so we’ve kind of beat them to the punch. But we sold like $20,000 in a week when we had one guy promote us. And then after that, we were like, what do we do? And my brother’s wife just become pregnant. And so, he kind of just did his own thing and created an online training, how to train people online, train people online kind of thing. He expanded that to his huge company as now. And at the time, I had a really successful a job, was making six figures. I call it the Golden Handcuffs. And I just didn’t care or know what to do next. And so, I just kind of quit and was focused on my gym and didn’t do the online thing. My brother continued it for the next two years, understood all those things. And then we were on a family vacation. I was saying how much I hate my gym and hate my life. And he’s like, you should do supplements and that idea, spend from there. And he kind of gave me some advice to get going and took off. Sean Weisbrot: I made a video course in 2015, I think it was, about how to become a millionaire using WeChat, which is a Chinese application. And I was doing some trainings online with Chinese people who could speak English about positive psychology, personal growth and development, emotional intelligence, empathy, these kinds of things. Something that they were so happy about because they really couldn’t find it anywhere else in China, especially not in Chinese, because those things are I don’t want to say taboo, but just not really well ingrained in their society yet. And so, I decided to take money I was earning from them and fund a six-week trip to Thailand, where my sole focus was creating a video course for something else. And I did it, took me six weeks. Thankfully, I wasn’t videoing myself. I figured out a way so that I could just do, like, PPT images, the slides turn into individual JPEGs, and I record, because I had a lot of experience with recording things with my voice. And I knew from my business before that, because I was doing, like, a podcast for that, too, but there was no video. Everyone was like, I love hearing your voice. Because this again, I was talking about psychology and all of that in English. And they were like, I love your voice. Some people are like, I need to hear your voice before I fall asleep. Some weird stuff. I had, like, 10,000 plus people listening to this content. It’s very strange. So, I was like, okay, I know I don’t need to record my face for this. I can just use my voice. People like, it, whatever. And I did it. It only took six weeks, but it was all day, every day, every waking moment. It just focused on making that course. And it was very difficult, but taught me a lot, actually. It was a really cool experience. I put it on Udemy. I didn’t have a following for WeChat all of my efforts have been in China for Chinese people who can speak English, and this was like for foreigners who are thinking about being in China or something like that. Totally different audience. Had no budget for marketing anything. I was not doing too well yet. And to this day, I still get cut checks from Udemy. Like $5, $10 a month. Like five, six, seven years later. The course paid for my trip to Thailand over the last few years. Cody Bramlett: What you put together there, that is incredible course, right? That idea of sharing that. And I know people right now are probably listening, being like, what is my thing? I was stuck on this forever. What is my singular thing? It doesn’t have to be special. You don’t have to be the best person in the world to know what it is. You don’t have to be the biggest expert in the world to teach it. You have to be the best expert in the room, know the most in the room. And so, it’s understanding where you are in your growth and what you can share with someone else. It’s understanding what you could put together. And the idea of filming an entire course and selling, of course, filming it and then having a product from it is absolutely genius. A lot of people do that concept, especially when you already have people listening to you. That will be our next way of doing stuff. Right now, we’re working on how to help CEOs train their staff to run all these weekly, quarterly, yearly meetings and have all the expectations that myself and my COO have. So, we’re putting that together, and then we’re going to use that with our one-on-one coaching clients and teach them over the next six months to a year, and then when it’s done, course to sell. So, it’s really understanding to use your leverages things you do every day that you’re proud of, and then teaching others how to do that is a potential way to build a company, build a business, build a brand. Sean Weisbrot: My focus going forward with coaching is going to be on helping entrepreneurs that are doing like 200 a year to reach a million or more. And I think that after a year of coaching people would be an amazing course for people who don’t want to spend the tens of thousands that it would be to run through it one on one over months and months. I’m looking forward to that because then by the time I get all of those people there and the course is done, then those people, they’re going to be into the multiple seven figures. And then it’s like, okay, well, what can I help them with then? And then how does that turn into a course? And then it’s like, oh, maybe these guys are hitting eight figures. Well now how do you help them with that? Maybe that’s the course, how they go from seven to eight. So, there’s a lot in there, too, for sure. Creating your sales page (40:52) Sean Weisbrot: So, what’s something that I didn’t ask you about that you’d like to mention? Cody Bramlett: I’d love to kind of talk about the production of your offer, the sales page. So, you kind of mentioned, like, how you can create a product, especially if it’s not in the supplement space. You could do that idea for exercise program, stretching program, a coaching program of any kind of a mindset program. You can create those kinds of things. As long as you have a camera and a microphone, you can make it right. Anybody can do video editing. And the next question is, how do you actually sell it to get affiliates to promote it? And that sales page is the key. Now, there’s two types, let’s say three types of sales pages. The first is, I call it the e-com hybrid. This is more for a physical product that’s a lower ticket and more well known. I call it in the Zeitgeist. So, turmeric it’s in the zeitgeist. Everyone knows what it is. Moringa is now, but it used to be. So, we have a page that’s buy one, get three free Turmeric, and it’s just a page about how great Turmeric is. It’s kind of like a hybrid of a blog and an ecommerce page. It’s got an aggressive close, it’s got some teasing at the beginning. It has a little video of me being like, hey guys, do you want to reduce inflammation? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, here’s amazing thing. Have you heard of Turmeric? It does all these things for you, and Turmeric is great, blah, blah, blah. It’s great, blah, blah, blah. And right now, you can get a great deal, and it’s guaranteed, right? So, we have that entire little short video at the short page. And those are really great for something that’s a lower ticket and something that’s in the Zeitgeist understandable, doesn’t require a wealth of explaining five-minute video of explanation, four scrolls and you understand what’s going on. The next type of sales page is what’s called a long form sales page, or a TSL, tech sales page. Text sales lender. These are almost 10,000 words stories. And earlier I mentioned story star solution, that kind of concept. This is what they are. They are, hey, I’m so embarrassed. On my 40th birthday, my pants split open and I’m still not happy. And my husband divorced me because I did the terrible stuff. I tell a terrible story that happens. These are what grab the emotional connection of somebody and allow someone to feel like they’ve been listened to or heard in the first time in their life, because so many people sit with these dark fears, anxieties and sadness, and they’re never heard, they’re never listened to, they’re never shared or spoken to. And these sales pages basically tell their story. But then, show them that there is a way out. You can do this exercise program. You can take the supplement. You can follow this mindset course, whatever it may be. So, it’s telling the person’s story of loss and struggle, telling the worst, how to hit the rocks bottom, and then telling the story of how they discovered their way to get out. So, like I mentioned in the last podcast we did how my first sales page was about Turmeric. My dad’s doctor told him to go eat Turmeric. And that kind of developed the whole idea of the sales page. And we told the science Turmeric how it’s so amazing how you need bioprene the turmeric to actually get absorption and they can reduce inflammation. Inflammation is one of the biggest health problems that we don’t realize exists in western society. And it’s killing everybody and make everybody sick. But now, you can get Turmeric. It’s amazing. It’s easy, it’s free. It will ship it to you. It’s fast. It’s guaranteed for 180 days and there’s discount below. Save 20%, get free shipping, click the button and those sales pages exist. And the last one of course, is a video sales letter, which is very similar to the course you were talking about where traditionally it was literally a slide deck, which is text on the screen and then someone reading the background. And occasionally an image would slide up and they’ve gotten more advanced where they’ll be the first 15 minutes will be more of a production. Sometimes filmed with the owners or people sometimes just stock footage because there’s so much stock footage online now. It’s insane. And they put together like a little movie at the beginning and then it rolls into that whole story and then, the science behind it and then the sale and the close. And so, those three types of stories are how you create that sales page. Now, the most important part of all, if you are not an accomplished writer right now listening to this, you are not allowed to write your sales page. I’m going to put my foot down right now. You are not doing it because if you are wanting to start a company and be selling to having to go to promote you and do direct marketing online, you need to be the CEO. So, what you do is you find a copywriter who can do the copywriting for you. There’s copywriters everywhere and 80% of them suck. 20% of them are good and one that 20%, 80% of them are not probably worth working with. You want to find that 4% of the copyrighter out there that are amazing. You find them by meeting people at conferences, ask them who wrote their sales page, making those connections, being in masterminds of people maybe like you are a sales background person and someone else in the mastermind is a copywriter. And you’re both kind of struggling because you both feel you have half of what you need to get done. Partnership. All of a sudden, 50/50 ownerships of something you guys put your best-efforts in. And you don’t have to pay $20,000 to a copywriter to produce an amazing sales page because you have this partnership going on now, or of course, as I said earlier, it takes 10 to 20 grand to start these projects. You hire the right copywriter for the right project, and you try and get referrals from being within a coaching program about who you should use, because there’s, like, four copywriters that I use, the rest of them are not fans of. So, it’s knowing that story, knowing which avenue you want to do in your product avenue, sales page you wanted to do for your product, getting a copywriter to help you produce it, and then from there, design and build. You basically just hire any web page builder you can that’s referred to you by someone in one of your coaching groups. My company does web page building design. There are dozens that do that. So, they’re out there. Those are kind of the key steps you need in order to have that original offer before you can test it, to know the metrics to make the affiliates friends. I really want to make sure to kind of plant that seed for people out there so they kind of know that there is a prescribed step by step checklist of items and grand chart of things to go through. And I teach all that in my course, but it’s commonly known knowledge you can find out there about building offers. Sean Weisbrot: Thank you very much for your time and your energy, Cody. I appreciate it. Don’t forget that entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint, so take care of yourself every day. And if you’re looking to launch something soon, think very deeply about what you say, how you say it, who you say it to, and how you get the people to come to you. Because if you’re not thinking about those things, then you don’t have a business. Cody Bramlett: 100%. Thank you.