The 80/20 Playbook of Profitable Offers

[0:06]

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now, it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

[0:53]

Just like with any industry, in the make money online space, the offers, like finding good offers comes down to the 80-20 ratio. And the 80-20 ratio means that 80% of the offers will just not be great. And that’s true for literally every single market. In fact, it’s actually worse in some markets, if I’m honest with you. With the MMO, what I love is that there’s never a shortage of offers. There’s always a pool, a growing pool, a gushing pool of different offers that you can choose to promote. And that’s really cool because you will never run out of options.

[1:33]

Now, does it mean you always have to be looking for new things to promote? Well, yeah. I mean, you do always have to be on the lookout for new things because offers get stale. Offers have a shelf life. And this is something that annoys me a lot about the whole nature of the business that we’re in. It’s one of the few things that actually is truly annoying to me. I too wish to have something that I just set up and forget, and it’ll forever convert. Unfortunately, that’s, I wouldn’t even say rare. It’s just impossible. It just doesn’t exist. Even my best offers, the ones that have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars, even those have a shelf life. And you eventually have to just move on. And that’s fine. That’s perfectly fine. Because creating a good offer is just a lot of work. Creating and maintaining a good offer is just a lot of work. And I’ve learned this after I made the transition from not just being an affiliate marketer, but also having my own offers out there and managing the affiliates, managing the offer, keeping everything up to date, maintaining that engagement, continuously coming up with new ways to position the offer because the market continues to evolve. I mean, all that stuff is not easy as a vendor. And it is also why you’re always on the lookout for the next hot thing. Because the market changes. The conditions in which we operate constantly change. It’s never just sitting still.

[3:20]

Now, the desires of the market tend to remain the same. The goals of the market tend to remain the same. But the way they want to get to that dream outcome tends to change. And the landscape in which it’s happening tends to change as well. There’s also different new ways constantly being developed for the purposes of making money, for the purposes of building lists, for the purposes of driving traffic, for the purpose of achieving conversion. Technology sometimes changes. And even though email is one of those technologies that thankfully doesn’t change or hasn’t changed yet, knock on my Ikea wood desk, in most industries, in most ways, technology does change. For example, I was reviewing an offer today, actually, by a pretty famous internet marketer who lives in Thailand. And he’s kind of made a name for himself for doing bonuses. So one of the strategies that I teach you guys is to actually offer a bonus. With your promotion, and by doing so, entice more people to buy through your affiliate link, right? So those of you who made it to day nine, etc., you probably have already gone through that part of the training. And so given the fact that now everything is accelerating with AI, there’s lots of different tools out there. And so he developed a tool that you just give it your affiliate link and the joint venture summary page, and it’ll go and create, come up with a bunch of bonuses and create the bonus page for you. And I think it might even create like a video that you can upload as a review or something. Because this guy does a lot of video marketing, like he invested many, many years into video marketing. And so I was reviewing the software and it kind of tells you where we’re at in terms of what the market wants, right? It’s no longer a coaching program or a training program on how to create the best bonus. It’s no longer like a rights thing where, you know, people just give you rights to existing products that you can leverage as your own bonuses. Now it’s about, oh, it’s an AI tool that on its own makes strategic decisions about what the bonus should be and how it should be positioned, as well as build your page for you and on and on and on.

[6:02]

Now, I don’t know how good the tool is. I actually reached out to him and through a mutual connection and asked him to get more information about the tool. Even though he’s showing a demo on the sales page, I wasn’t like super convinced. But again, it just shows you that there’s always going to be new things on the market. And it’s actually a good thing. It’s a good thing because novelty is an indispensable part of why things sell. You see it everywhere. You see it in every industry, not just in the online space and definitely not just in the make money online space. You see it pretty much everywhere. You see toothpastes develop new branding and new color schemes and new images on the boxes. You see the shampoo industry, which is pretty much all the same goo developed in the same labs, but everything looks different. You see it with the car industry, where every 20 minutes there is a new car. Now, of course, most of these cars are exactly the same with just a different badge, different paintwork, different shape maybe. But even the same car companies come up with new variations of the same cars. So let’s take General Motors, for example. You’ve got a sedan, a mini SUV, an SUV, a pickup truck, etc. 

[7:36]

And then every one of these vehicles gets the new version. So they create a version for this year, then the next year’s version is going to be slightly different, and then the next year, the next year. Now, could have they just kept it exactly the same, not released a brand new version of the vehicle and just said, oh, yeah, this is like Ford Model T, right? When Henry Ford was releasing them, they were all exactly the same. So whether you bought one today or whether you bought one 10 years from today, they were all the same. And he even had a famous quote that his customers could get any Ford Model T with any specs as long as they wanted it in black or something like that, right? So he didn’t even paint them differently. Now, of course, those days are over. Now, the car companies do not take that approach. They keep coming up with new things and changing things and changing the design. Every five years, they radically change the way the car looks. This is not by accident because this novelty keeps helping them sell the cars. In an ideal world, it should be you buy a car and you drive that car for like 20 years because it’s built to withstand that kind of wear and tear. The only time you replace the car is when you’re tired of fixing it or when it just doesn’t go. There’s actually a famous Volvo because of how reliable Volvo is. There’s a famous Volvo that’s now almost 100 years old that they take around and show off. And quite frankly, any car, almost any car that’s well-maintained will survive decades. And yet people replace their cars all the time. Now, of course, part of it is the whole leasing thing where people don’t actually buy their cars, but rather lease them on a monthly payment. And then they have to kind of get a new car every few years or so. But also a big part of that is the car companies trying to get more sales. And so you see some of that, a lot of that in the online space where every year there’s something else. Every six months, there’s something else. And so there’s a lot of novelty. And this novelty, this activity is both good and bad.

[10:10]

Now, it’s bad because it contributes to the shiny object syndrome. And if you’re an active participator in this industry like myself, you’re always on the lookout for the next thing. On the other hand, because of all this novelty, there’s a lot of activity and people buy stuff. And that’s good. As a marketer, that’s a really good thing. You don’t want a stale market. You don’t want a market where you can only sell one product to one customer and that’s it. You want something where the relationship you have with your customer can result in multiple transactions over time. So it actually pays you to develop good relationships with your customers. So all this novelty, you can look at it as a bad thing and how you will now have to forever, from now until the end of time, to keep looking for new offers to promote. You could look at it as a bad thing, as a nuisance. But I choose to look at it as an opportunity to build multiple streams of income. And if I have to go looking for new offers all the time, I might as well do it with that outlook. Because if I find a great offer, a blockbuster offer, it will reward me with tens of thousands of dollars. So every new offer found has that potential that I can always look forward to.

[11:45]

Now, tips on how to find a good offer. Well, first off, you want an offer that sells. You want an offer that actually converts. And today you can usually see the statistics for most offers. In fact, I even developed a habit of asking my friends if they promoted an offer. Because I now have like quite a few super affiliate friends. Now, of course, it’s not something that you might have at this time, but eventually you will. So anyway, I asked like earlier today, about two hours before our call, I was kind of spying on one of my buddies. I’m on his list. And I messaged him and I said, hey, I know you promoted this offer. So how did it work? And he gave me the real sort of the real take on it, saying that it converted. He described it as MEH, right? So he wasn’t very happy with the results. So it just performed about half as well as he expected. So that’s some data, right? So I know the offer actually converts, but for him, it didn’t convert really well. Now, I know that he didn’t offer a bonus. I know that, you know, I know exactly which angles he used in his emails, because I was getting those emails. So if I choose to go for this offer, I could give it a different sort of spin, right? I can try a different angle. I can approach it in a different way. I can come up with a bonus, maybe something unique, something unique that only I can create. I can, you know, maybe get additional promotional materials from the vendor, maybe, you know, record something together and so on and so forth. So one thing is I like to look at what other people are promoting, and I don’t like to be the first. Like, I rarely do I go first to promote an offer. I usually try to watch for data, watch to see if anyone promoted, and specifically to see if anyone that I know who promoted it. That’s like a big, big thing.

[13:57]

Another thing to look out for is to actually just start developing a sense for what your market likes based on the promotions that you’ve been running. Because if you’ve, if you ran enough promotions, you will start sort of developing the sixth sense or intuition or, you know, call it whatever you want. But you’ll start developing an idea of what your audience likes and what it doesn’t like. But that will come with experience. So if you’re still not very experienced, the best thing you can do is just start trying things, promoting offers, promoting things, promoting different, you know, and just assume that you will not get most of it right. You know, when I kind of track back to the early days, when I finally understood how to build a list, and then I could finally, once it started to grow and I could focus on monetizing the list, I was pretty much running anything. I, you know, whatever was talked about, whatever was hot in the launch community, whatever was on everyone’s sort of calendar, I was attempting to promote it. And most promotions bombed, like 9 out of 10 promotions, I didn’t make any sales. Now, I don’t know why exactly, but I was still determined to mail. So I kept mailing and I kept mailing, kept, you know, creating promotions, kept, you know, writing emails. And, you know, I guess at the time for me, just the mere act of emailing my list was the most important thing because I started treating it like, like gym, you know, like I didn’t want to miss a day. So I needed something to mail every day, be it a freebie or not. I still was sort of like, if I couldn’t find like an offer to promote that I felt at least somewhat confident about, I would email some sort of freebie funnel or do an ad swap or something like that. And so I tried not to miss a day, you know. And so then the breakthrough came when I emailed a 67 or $77 program and I made a bunch of sales that was like exciting, very, very exciting, but then the next promotion I bombed again, but from that point forward, the gap, the sort of the timeline between finding the next winning promotion actually got a lot shorter. About half. So it was, took me half as many attempts to get the next winner, to find the next winner, to test the next winner. 

[16:35]

And then over time, I’ve, I’ve developed this sixth sense for what converts and what doesn’t convert with my audience. Now, this doesn’t mean that it just generally converts, it means it converts with my audience because it’s quite common for something to convert with my audience and not convert with someone else’s as well as the other way around, you know, for, for my list, not to be as responsive towards an offer as someone else’s list was. So, but it’s because of the experience. It’s because of the consistency that I stuck to it. I started making fewer mistakes. I developed a much better judgment about offers. And as a result, I started making a lot more money. Now I was still making some mistakes. I was still choosing their own offer every now and again, but it was happening a lot less, a lot less often. And it was a big help. Now, these days I still get it wrong sometimes. Like even today I can still get it wrong. But I, I no longer beat myself up about it. You know, I just take it as, okay, this was a test. The test showed me that this offer did not convert. I can try to guesstimate why it didn’t convert. But at the end of the day, it didn’t convert and that’s it. So, and then I move on to the next offer. In fact, sometimes when I’m not super confident about an offer, I would even have a backup offer ready, kind of, you know, loaded in my gun, if you will. Because like, if it doesn’t convert, I can pivot very quickly. Right. So that happens too.

[18:25]

Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.