For the past 5 days, I have been receiving emails for a new writing course. If you’ve never witnessed a JV barrage it’s quite something.
JV stands for Joint Venture and it’s how most people who make 7 figures a year make 7 figures a year. You release a course and then you find big names to promote it.
It’s the smart thing to do and technically it always works just because of the numbers game. If you have 5 JVs with a combined list size of 250,000 subscribers, you’re obviously going to get some sales, right?
Well, I don’t know how many people were promoting this offer, but they didn’t do a very good job with it. They’ll think they did because they made free money. They didn’t have to create the offer, they just got paid.
And the emails they sent weren’t bad. All of them had storytelling elements but they felt like they came from the same school of copywriting. The problem was that the emails didn’t seem like they were in the same sequence.
Each email stood on its own. So if you read one email and then the next, the only connection you’d make between them is that they are promoting the same offer.
It wasn’t good.
But again, it can look like a success on the outside because they still did numbers. So what do I think they should’ve done?
A Story Sequence.
I mentioned how each email had some element of storytelling, but they were all separate stories. One was about eating pancakes and another was apartment shopping.
When doing a JV, especially one where you didn’t ask your list for permission to tell them about it, you’re going to catch people off-guard. So instead of each email violently pushing the offer, pretend it’s your own offer and walk me through the Customer Journey.
Connect the dots with each email until I see the big picture and then let me decide if the offer is right for me.
You want to write emails with stories, but you want each email to end with a cliffhanger to make me anticipate the next email. You want me to WANT to read the next email. To be excited about it. To anticipate it.
That never happened and these are some of the big dogs on Twitter. To be honest, I was surprised to see this because I figured they knew better. At least they talk like they knew.
But when it came down to it, they used the same tactics that people have been using for 100 years and most people wouldn’t have noticed.
And it’s okay to think, “Well money is money.” Nobody is disputing that. I want you to make money. I want to make money.
But one of the JVs was bragging about how they made 8 sales one day. I think the offer was $300 so 8 sales is solid money for one day.
The problem is that this person has at least 20,000 people on their mailing list. That’s a 0.04% conversion.
That’s not good. That’s not good at all.
That shows they missed the mark completely.
Today I’m going to pretend that I was a JV for the offer and write a sales sequence for it. I’m going to put it in the Examples section of the Feel Good Funnels course which is now officially live.
Your Marketing Tip
Long-form content is going to make a huge comeback soon. Okay, it never really left, but as more and more Creators join the Game, they don’t understand the value that long-form will provide.
But you can do a much better job of converting your audience by giving them more of something instead of sending them to the wrong place.
How many Twitter threads and LinkedIn posts have you come across that end with a random promotion to sign up for a newsletter? You’re given some wonderful information and you’re to dive deeper, but instead of giving you more to feed on you’re told to wait for a newsletter.
It’s like going to the food court, being given a free sample, and then being told the restaurant opens next week but sign up for updates.
But what happens if you attach a piece of long-form content to your thread? You get to start building a customer.
Let’s say you get 200 people (that’s not a lot) to read your thread and 20 click over to the blog post attached at the end. That’s a pretty small conversion, but those 20 people read the blog post and now they’re deeper into your world.
From there 2 of those 20 buy your $49 offer on the spot because it logically takes them to the next step. The other 18 sign up for your email course or newsletter.
But those 18 are different than the randoms that sign up for the newsletter because they view you with a bit more trust and authority.
One of those 18 buys your $500 course within the next month and you didn’t have to hard sell them on it. Now, just looking at this example it doesn’t seem like much. You made $600 from a thread (whoa, okay, that sounds pretty great actually).
But scale this out over 6 months. How many threads can you write that link to a long-form piece of content? How much will your list improve due to you filtering people based on the content?
How much authority and trust will you build?
Everyone is going to get good at Twitter and LinkedIn. Very few people will get good with the next level of content.
This is a huge gap that will separate you from the rest.
I’ll talk more about long-form content and it’s a major section in my Customer Content Blueprint course. But for now, what I suggest you do is look at the people you feel you will be competing with and see if they do long-form content.
If not, awesome. If so, do you think it is effective?
I’d like to know.