Nate Kennedy is a digital marketer and creator of the Celebrity Effect. He specializes in business growth strategy and brand development. Nate helps each one of his clients create a customized plan aimed at increasing company awareness and sales, both in and out of the digital sphere.
Nate (00:00):
For me, it's you get enough data into the offer? So within give, we spun stuff up and we tested it, it just wasn't working, but I wasn't willing to kill it because I was excited about it. I think at the end of the day, I wasn't thinking about the money I was thinking about just doing, you know, doing it. And, um, but I, you know, for me, I guess decision-maker, if I want to kill an offer, it's more so I don't want to just throw it out one time and then just say it didn't work in quit, which a lot of people do. Right. So we're going to test, run, run through our kind of testing protocol with headlines and hooks and angles. And we tested a bunch of it, but I, you know, if you tested five or six things into a marketplace and it just isn't working, I would probably, you know, sometimes obviously, yeah,
Intro (00:55):
[inaudible]
Zach (00:56):
Going to the rich and poor ed podcast where we break down the financial principles that rich advertisers are deploying today to turn advertising into profit and get tons of traffic to their websites without killing their cash. These advertisers agencies, affiliates brands are responsible for managing over a billion dollars a year in ad spend. You'll hear about what's working for them today. They're rich ads and we'll roast their epic failures and crappy ads on the internet with poor ads. Let's get into it. All right, everybody.
Dylan (01:25):
We're back in action with another episode of the rich dad, poor dad podcast. We've got your host, Mr. Zach Johnson and Dylan Carpenter in the house. What's good. Zach, you ready for this one, man?
Zach (01:34):
Yeah, man. Today's guest has made it out alive and is on the back end of the agency business. It is, uh, it'll be really interesting to hear what he's up to. Gosh, I don't even know how long, uh, he was rocking the agency game, but, um, but yeah, it's a difficult business to break free from. So it'll be, it'll be a celebration, uh, uh, but also be cool to dive in and see, um, what he's up to next.
Dylan (02:02):
Oh yeah. And even more recently he launched an email, you know, media company that went from zero to one 67 K within six months during a pandemic. So I mean, they call them the doctrine of marketing, the canned conversions, you know, he's got that name for a reason. So Nate, what's good, man.
Nate (02:18):
What's up. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited. Excited to chat.
Dylan (02:22):
Heck yeah. So yeah. Give everybody an idea of kind of what you're getting into these days. So everybody has some kind of context.
Nate (02:28):
Yeah. So for me, it's, you know, one thing we've done a lot of over the years is funnels and traffic traffic and the diversion. Right. And I think way back in the day when I was, I was one of the original war room members, backward, um, digital marketer guys, and I would just dove in and traffic and funnels, started doing a bunch of stuff there. And we had an agency through that time, but nowadays man, like Zach said, we are on the tail end of that. We've gotten out of it and really been focused on holding our media and in creating brands, online, creating newsletters online and ways to drive traffic for other people, you know, basically finding pockets of audiences of that are super passionate about specific topics and then providing them with opportunities to buy things they low that's been working. Great.
Dylan (03:17):
Heck yeah. And click movement. That's kind of one of your newer projects, right?
Nate (03:21):
It is click movements. The, the newest project we have that we launched, that's the one, uh, we launched decided in April to do it, launched it in may. Uh, we had nothing just signed up with an email auto responder, had no website, put it online and just started buying traffic. And we started growing this. You know, some people may say email is dead, but I think it's, we've proven that it's not. And there's a lot of people that are proven that it's not, but it's, it's gotta be the, the easiest business I've been involved in over the years and, you know, grow your list, provide them with opportunities. So we launched it in, in may, may decision April launched in may. And last month in October, we hit 167,000 and change in revenue. And it was, it's just been kind of head down and pushing and pushing and pushing.
Nate (04:12):
And every month we just keep hitting new numbers and looking to grow it to, now that we hit that number or next or metric goals, 200 K, which I think we'll hit December and then kind of a long-term goal. What not long-term another year long-term in marketing world, digital marketing world. And the end of 2021, our goal is to be at 500,000 a month in revenue and then ultimately get it up to a million a month. So, and it's, it's one of those businesses, man. That's just, so I think the reason it's so easy to scale is because of simplicity, right? If you take out, you strip out all the complexities that go into marketing businesses and companies, and then you boil down to what good marketing it is, creating offers that people want. So
Zach (04:55):
That's awesome, man. Congrats. It's so much more scalable than like the, get a client, hire a team member fire, please. The client fire, a team member.
Nate (05:04):
Yeah, we did that for many, many years. Yeah,
Zach (05:08):
Yeah, yeah, no, I, um, I love it. That's awesome.
Dylan (05:13):
Heck yeah. Well, let's get to the nitty gritty. Y'all so Nate, as you're aware, which had poor ad, we dive into what's working, what's not working. So I mean, what's working good for you right now. What's your rich out here?
Nate (05:24):
So, you know, I'm, uh, my rich add, I guess my rich rich process is then my new, but many people's old one step funnel. Um, so I just started using this one step funnel and it's been working amazing. It's eliminated all the barriers. It's eliminated the ability to get into market. Uh, the, the complexities of getting into a new market and we leverage email, we leverage paid traffic with it and it's simply running to polls, right? So we run, pull traffic to very passionate crowds, letting them vote. And then we put them onto a dedicated list of that type of product or you know, of that industry and of that niche. And we run a newsletter to them. I mean the process in itself, it's super simple. It's worked, it's so much easier to just put a poll up, test a messaging and have it done in a, you know, an hour as opposed to where a lot of people are complicated funnels.
Nate (06:21):
And, and I, and I, you know, I I'm, I'm guilty because I've done plenty of complicated funnels. I think I launched a company called funnel architects back in 2011. And so we've done all the complicated stuff. And it was one of those where, you know, you, when you're trying to get a, a low ticket offer created, and I'm sure you guys seen plenty of those. It takes a lot of time energy. You gotta have a great copywriter. You got to have the right offer. You got to have the right audience, you got to have the upsells and downsells, you've gotta be willing to lose money on the front to make money on her back, like all this stuff that, just these decisions that go into it. Right. And even a coaching offer might just not hit the, you know, we'll talk about bad offers. I've had plenty about offers over the years. So, but you know what I mean? It's just eliminates all that confusion and all that, all that. Decision-making all that complicated tech and it's squeeze page with a, you know, simple. So not saying I, you know, I don't think we're breaking the internet here with, you know, groundbreaking information. But one thing I've learned over the years is when people stop doing something in the marketing space, in a cause they were on the new shiny object, that's always a great opportunity to go back and focus on the stuff that we've all forgotten about already.
Zach (07:29):
So how does the ma how does the model work? Right? Like if I'm an agency and I'm thinking about, you know, making a jump out, right. And I don't want to do another retainer client situation, you pay for the ads, right? You're, you're doing the, your, your own Facebook ads. You're, you've got a cost per email target. And then are you selling the leads as they opt in? Or are you just making money on the newsletter promotions or both? Like, how do you really break down the unit economics of the
Nate (07:57):
Business? So starting out, what we do is we basically start with CPA offers, right? People are paying us per sale or per lead. And so we're generating and growing the list, running the newsletter. And then when we, so we generate the revenue in that manner first, and then what happens when our list is big enough and the subscriber base is big enough. We go to these other advertisers and say, Hey, we will send an email for you for X. Right? So we got lists that. So, you know, uh, on a daily, not a daily basis, we sell anywhere for like 13 to 15 dedicated emails a month. And we don't do it as a, we don't sell every day, but because we want to, you got to also provide value. You can't just sell, sell, sell. Right. And so we, we sell 13 to 15, ends up, usually fall closer to 13 every month.
Nate (08:49):
And some of our lists, they recharged 1254. Some of them, we charged 3000 a drop. So for those dedicated it's now it's all at the end of the day, that site is still performance marketing. It's, you know, obviously the advertiser has to get a result and if they get the result, they keep buying and buying and buying. So it's, you know, which is a lot nicer than, but different than the agency world. Right. Right. Um, so it's, you know, pressing send versus building a phone on two different worlds. So, um, yeah. And that's, so we've now what we do is we generate revenue, obviously on those dedicateds we generate revenue on the newsletters through CPA offers. We also have a ton of site traffic. So we use push notifications over there now. So it's evolved, uh, you know, we generate everything about push notifications. We do other polls and push people around in different newsletters. So there's like a couple of different pieces. There's some cool tools out there that allow you to create your own ad server. So we put that on our sites and it kind of pops up different, different ads and rotates ads. So it's, you know, we're not, it's only like this, it's almost like an internal Google ad sense, right. The way that we can set it up so we can have maximize what we're doing on viewer, you know, impressions and everything with different affiliate offers,
Dylan (10:00):
People are getting with the different polls. So I'm kind of curious, like, what are the posts as an example, kind
Nate (10:05):
Of, you know, what a simple one man is, is the, obviously in marketing, everything, Donald's down the demographics, right? Certain demographics by certain things. So with us, and one of our main poles, which has been really solid is, is more in the conservative space. So conservative media now, it's interesting. We bring them in on a political topic on a poll, but we don't promote any political offers. So we just know that that audience, and then we've got advertisers that have offers. So for example, some of the people we offers, we show our Stansberry research offers, uh, three publishers or three founders publishing some of those different, uh, companies that are out there. And what happens is, so they're buying financial offers, they're buying health offers and things of that nature on the backend that fit, you know, the people are already gone through the, you know, they got the massive teams of people to, to create these funnels and systems and whatnot. And they just need more traffic.
Dylan (11:04):
Oh man. Probably yeah. Prime time with the elections and stuff I imagined.
Nate (11:10):
Yeah, man. It's uh, it has been, it has been interesting.
Dylan (11:13):
It was on Facebook too, to get those leads essentially. Yeah.
Nate (11:17):
We buy a lot of media just since we're an email, we buy a lot of email from people. Like we go out to other companies and buy emails from them, but we also do have Facebook and Facebook leads tend to be a little bit more. They tend to, the interesting part about Facebook is the leads are cheaper than if we go by email, but the open rates and conversion rates on the back end are way less. So it's kind of, kind of interesting, you know, just, I think people are so busy just clicking a move in and opt into everything on Facebook.
Dylan (11:48):
Oh yeah. So I, I, I didn't curiosity where you getting flagged for political ads since you kind took that angle out of the gate, but didn't kind of focus on it, you know, in the back end side of things.
Nate (11:57):
No, we had, uh, cause you just do the special category just falls under a special category.
Dylan (12:03):
Yeah. So yeah.
Nate (12:05):
Reduces your targeting options. You know what I mean? But yeah.
Dylan (12:08):
Yeah. And anything this year that had to do a little bit political got really, really nervous.
Nate (12:17):
Yeah. Yeah. It is. But a pretty, yeah, it's pretty crazy.
Dylan (12:21):
Yeah, man, shoot, that's a one step funnel process, learn something new every day. So, you know, we'd love to see what's working and of course what's not working. You mentioned some offers that definitely not work. So what's your poor out in this scenario?
Nate (12:38):
Oh man. I don't remember. There's a couple of them. Um, you know, if you don't have offers that bomb, you haven't made enough offers. Right. So you know what, in 2019 we were working on, I put a bunch of time, energy and money into a fitness offer, a spot, the domain, military fit.com still own it. But we, you know, we tried supplement offers over there. We tried fitness offers. We tried membership offers and I mean, it's, it ended up just being a complete, that was kind of, we're like, all right, we're going to start holding. All of our brands is when we started making that move. And this was the first one we did. And it started as kind of a passion project because back I went out to fill out the San Diego like five years ago and got my book kicked by a bunch of Navy seals for like this 24 hour thing.
Nate (13:27):
And I was like, oh, you know what? I need to go create something around that now. So, um, and I did all that. And then when I came back and I started launching, it took forever to launch it, invested in it. The supplement offer bombed, put a bunch of money into that, bought the supplements and everything. And then we had a we're like, all right, well that didn't work. Let's try clothing, clothing, bond. We were like, let's do shirts, do passionate crowds did not work. Then we were like, all right, well, let's try, let's take that. We got all this membership concept. Let's be created. All these products, create a sales letter and sell it. Nothing
Zach (14:02):
You like accept failure here. That when you say it didn't work. Right. Like I think that when you, like, how long do you kind of run at that? Cause this is every agency's dream. Right. I've seen, um, a lot of agencies, you know, try to spin up their own offers, right? Like the grass is greener on the other side, they're robbing Peter to pay Paul to fund, to fund their other offers. And um, you know, like what point do you say, all right, this isn't working logo. Like let's move on
Nate (14:34):
Way sooner than I did. So it was, I, you know, for me, it's do you get enough data into the offers? So within it, we spun stuff up and we tested it. It just wasn't working, but I wasn't willing to kill it because I was excited about it. And I think at the end of the day, I wasn't thinking the money I was thinking about just doing, you know, doing it. And um, but I, you know, for me, I guess decision-maker, if I want to kill an offer, it's more so I don't want to just throw it out one time and then just say it didn't work in Quinn, which a lot of people do. Right. So we're going to test, run up, run through our kind of testing protocol with headlines and hooks and angles. And we tested a bunch of it, but I, you know, if you've tested five or six things into a marketplace and it just isn't working, I'd probably, you know, something's obviously off. So, uh, you know, I'd probably kill it after that. This one I did not, I just kept going and going.
Nate (15:31):
So maybe that's why it's the bad ad. Right. Because that was a role I wasn't willing to accept that I was losing. But, um, yeah. And interesting enough, one thing I didn't do in that business that I did. And so the very next offer we rolled out was I went and know hired a, I just hired a copywriter and said, all right, I'm going to go invest a bunch of money on the copy. And, and that thing is produced consistently for us ever since, too. So that has one, one, one kind of thing out there is if you do get into the, those offers sides of it, just hire the right people, you know, throw
Zach (16:07):
Down, what'd you throw down for the, uh, for the copywriter,
Nate (16:10):
Uh, 15, 15 grand, and that got you what a sales letter, or then also sales letter, but it's produced, you know, and it really, I kind of got the buddy deal out of it. And the, on the, on the pricing of it because of the guy has charged upwards, like points and fees and whatnot. But, uh, you know, over the years I've developed some good friends over there in the industry. And my buddy was like, Hey, I invested a bunch of money and I have all this copy don't I got no projects. You want to just buy one of them from me. And so it kind of worked out, you know? Oh
Zach (16:52):
Yeah, yeah. How was that process? Was that like painful? I feel like just working with copywriters, uh they're they're uh, interesting animals, you know what I mean? Like you have to like, re-explain everything to like, like it takes them a while to get up to speed on the product that you're trying to sell and do market research. I mean, I've spent long hours and evenings, like educating some very talented writers and like they're very difficult on timelines.
Nate (17:22):
Well, they got a fuel creative to be able to get it done. It may not happen for three months. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's this one I've, I've paid copywriters over the years. Like it's always kind of just been one of my things I've tried and ironically the one that tank was the one I refused to hire a copywriter for and did it myself. But, um, you know, I think what it comes down to is I've hire different ones. There's been some that are easier to work with. Some that aren't some have intake processes, but it's really hit or miss cause everyone thinks like, because you hire a copywriter, it's going to be a winner and it's not, you know, it takes testing this one here, this guy that I hired happened to be very in tune to the niche, the real estate investor niche, home ready, and he's written a ton of copy unit.
Nate (18:10):
And so basically what I did is I sent him basically a bullet point of what the offer is big benefits, and then he wrote the entire letter. So, and it came out and came on. Well mean it's, it's, like I said, it's produces everyday for us now, so it's hits, but we didn't interesting enough. I took it from, he wrote it as it being a low ticket offer and that I just realized I just don't want to sell ticket offers. And so I turned it into an application that feeds to a phone call every day. We get applications that come in. So, you know, it's kinda different too. Yeah.
Zach (18:46):
Interesting. Yeah, it took, you took a whole like low ticket sales page instead of add to cart. It's apply. Uh, that's awesome. Cool man.
Nate (18:56):
Nothing crazy, but you know, it's the thing I always come back to the old is new
Dylan (19:01):
Killer domain to military fit. You would think, you know, that would be a solid one too.
Nate (19:06):
Yeah. I mean, it might come down to congruency cause I was never in the military and the guy I hired, I was never in the military. So I think like our own mental blocks got in her own way, you know, kind of, we weren't willing to go all in on some of the pieces cause we just didn't feel like, all right, well we weren't in the military.
Zach (19:22):
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Dylan (20:25):
Well, Zack it's time man. Favorite piece of the segment. So Nate, as you're aware, this is, this is where the big 180 is now, but you know, of course with the name of the podcast, we'd love to find the crossroads and marketing and the finance side of things. So based off your expertise and kind of experience, what are some kind of financial fundamentals you live by some tips out there you can kind of give based your experience,
Nate (20:49):
Um, financial advice or you mean ad buying advice? Um,
Dylan (20:55):
Shoot. It could be either. We've had guys talk about personal stuff, real estate investing, scaling ads, cashflow it's super open-ended, but we definitely want to make sure,
Nate (21:07):
Uh, spend it. So I would say definitely go with ed card and then, uh, so, uh, I think, uh, I mean, man, that I was prepped prep for this question. Let me give me a second to think here. So I think if you're looking at on financial, in regards to marketing, I think the biggest thing and misconception that people have is they feel they need to break even on day one. And I think you, it's a very tough thing to do if you're in the internet marketing info marketing space, which is where I have spent so many of my years, that there is a way to do that. If you have to be willing to invest upfront, knowing you're going to make it out in over 30, 60, 90 days. And I think really understanding your metrics and numbers on the financial side, that way allows you to generate more revenue.
Nate (22:06):
What happens is so many people get scared of spending money on media because they do one of they're like, oh, well, I spent if someone's new and they're like, I spent 10 grand this month and I only made five very well. How many beads do you have? What's your backend offer? What are you doing? Uh, and if you're scared about that, then, you know, work on setting up, banks will give you at, I'll give you a credit line potentially where you get actually have 30, 60, 90 days to pay that money back. Right. So I think for that, I think if people really understand their numbers and they can invest properly in media, for me, I've always been a guy that I've done a bunch of real estate over the years, but I've always just reinvested my money back into new businesses because it's tangible, it's something I can see.
Nate (22:49):
It's something I can see the ROI on. Um, assets are great too. And real estate is great assets, but like I always really, you know, I like investing back into my business, which I think sometimes people, you can invest back into your business and then grow it faster than a lot of people just don't. They just it's it's every month, you know, they get in his hamster wheel and it's like, all right, well, I made this much, I took this much. I made this much, I took this much, you know, and they don't reinvest to grow that, that nut, you know, and keep growing it up. So, um, I guess there's more than just use on the marketing side. Yeah, yeah. No, that's awesome.
Zach (23:25):
That's awesome. I love it. Uh, yeah, I think in terms of, you know, reinvesting back into the business, there's definitely some, I I'm a firm believer in that. Like I just invest heavily back into the business. I mean, just like add garden capital. It's just like, uh, raped and pillaged me for everything. But I think like, it's just, uh, it's going to be amazing. I'm like, it's, it's an opportunity for us to level up from, you know, selling like agency software or like, you know, dashboard software from our roots and level up from, you know, agency services and hopefully, you know, you're leveling up the offer and every offer you're, you're, you're investing back in the business going to give you more and more scale. Um, and some of them are going to bomb, right? Like that's true. And, uh, yeah, I love that. Well, that's cool, man. So tell everybody how, uh, how we can support you and, uh, how everybody can get in touch.
Nate (24:29):
Yeah. I wouldn't say just, uh, easiest way to reach me because I always have a bunch of different websites out there. So I got one hub@natekennedy.com. That one is consistent and will always be online. Uh, yeah. So Nate, kenny.com and then really mainly my handles on social media are Nate Kennedy, M D as in marketing doctor. So Nick Kennedy MD, and you hit me on Instagram and messaged me over there, try and stay active and, um, you know, happy to, I love getting into conversations about marketing. I've been doing it for so long. It's what I do. So feel free to message me your most burning question on marketing. And if I know it I'll answer it, if I don't know it I'll act like I know it just kidding. Just kidding. That's awesome. But, um, yeah, that's easiest way.
Zach (25:15):
Cool, man. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. You've been an amazing guest on the podcast. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Zach (25:26):
Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich ed or ed podcast. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich dad, poor dad.com/podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review. I'll give you a free copy of the rich add poor ed book to learn more about the book. Go to rich ed for a.com to leave a review that are rich ed or ed.com/review. Thanks again.
Jason Hornung is the founder and Creative Director at JH Media LLC, the world’s #1 direct response advertising agency focusing exclusively on the Facebook ads platform. Jason’s proprietary methods for ad creation, audience selection and scaling are responsible for producing $20 million + of profitable sales for his clients EVERY YEAR