I might not completely understand what Rihanna is saying, but I think I agree.
I had an unusually inspirational dinner adventure with Aaron S. on Sunday night and have a slew of notes for future emails as a result. While I’m telling them a bit out of order, this one has been prompting many esoteric giggles since it was born over a bowl of ramen.
While speaking about the nature of our projects, I was reminded of something shared with me back in my days of multi-level marketing. When asked what one could expect in regards to the flow of income, the speaker responded with the following timeline…
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I started the Ghost Influence you see before you today in November of 2015, but it was the third iteration within 18 months. The first iteration was a ‘how to’ book while the second was a ‘done-for-you’ service and neither were capable of (effectively) communicating the message in a way that would be measurably valuable to those that purchased it.
The internet is the bar.
Your website is your house.
Your email list is your bedroom.
Customer acquisition is, well… you know.
I don’t know about you, but if someone comes into my bedroom I want them leaving happy.
Having seen a former partner spend waste obscene amounts of money attempting to sell the ‘how-to’ book, Ghost Influence was designed from inception to be minimalistic. Built entirely within ClickFunnels with payments processed via Stripe and members manually added to Slack, my operating costs were a grand total of $97 per month (ClickFunnels subscription).
Ghost Influence was later moved out of ClickFunnels—because their code sucks and cost me a slew of sales by breaking without notice—into WordPress (props to developer Mark!).
The community was restructured from being specific to “Reddit Marketing” and opened to “Digital Empathy” which was what I saw as the most meaningful leverage (that I learned in working with Reddit). This opened up a string of public conversations with members which had previously been in private chats with me and the community began to thrive.
As this was happening, the daily email series was taking off and I had been flooded with so many of your thoughtful responses. The idea to expand the number people teaching to include new perspectives came from the specialists who had been inspiring it all along.
None of this was fast and none of this was easy, but it was relatively simple.
The acquisition of new members was unreasonably challenging at first. Mind you, I wasn’t doing paid advertising that drove to a sales page. I was having conversations with people who had been asking me for help—in some form or another—for years and offering them the opportunity to have me coach them full time for only $97 per month.
Think about that for a second. A guy who has been featured in Adweek, Forbes, Business Insider, etc. was having massive difficulty convincing people he knew to pay him just $97 per month for complete and unrestricted access to his brain. Want to know why?
I sucked at communicating the offer effectively.
Over time… I got better. Every objection and rejection I experienced helped me to craft both the offer and the language with which I used to communicate it to people. People started joining with less effort and eventually with no effort at all. Last week, three people joined with zero paid advertising and no initiation (they came to me). What’s astounding is that most of them came through a single endorsement from a current member.
An endorsement I didn’t ask for, but one that was a result of the value delivered.
I haven’t always known what Ghost Influence was meant to be, but I made damn certain that anyone who joined got a hell of a lot more than what they’d paid to join.
“I hope that you see this through. Work, work, work, work, work.” ~ Rihanna
If you don’t have Drake and need an ally along the way, join Ghost Influence.
What was the physical feeling you got when you first made money online?