Building the Mothership

I paused for the holidays. 🎄

Then picked it up at a rapid pace on January 1st. I didn't care if it was New Years Day, I knew what I needed to get in place and it always seemed to take longer than expected.🏃🏻💨

I started working on the website, the landing pages, the checkout, the funnels, forms, opt-ins, email flow, connected to Stripe. 📋

This took me to mid-Feb but it was all there, the course, a way to buy it, some additional supportive products and services (like a landing page review for people who wanted to dip their toes in the water) and a Built-For-You option for those that wanted someone else to do it from start to finish, and then hand it over.

Now it was time to get it out there.🤩

I had taken some time to listen to some of the successful influencers of the day. 3 Days of speeches, more tactics than a small marketing army would know what to do with.

I was showing up on the first of every month for an influencer marketing session with nearly 1,000 people. Walked away with some good tips, implemented many strategies. Tested a bajillion different things.

My vids on Insta were TIME CONSUMING. I'd have an idea, bang out a script in an hour or so, get myself costumed up, deal with lighting and camera positioning. Film away for a few hours. Return again the next day to start editing, improving motion effects, sometimes spending many hours just searching for the right title overlay, sfx, music, motion effect, transition or film look. A couple shorts or reels burned 4 days. Sometimes they'd get lots of views, sometimes they'd seem to play well over along the coast of Africa somewhere. What they were not getting, was in front of my ideal audience. That was frustrating. ⌛️

I employed quite a few other strategies to make sure that I was getting in front of them. Targeted ad campaigns, boosted posts, performance max campaigns, optimized video campaigns with highly targeted audiences. 🤷🏻‍♂️

After a couple months of this - I could tell something was wrong. The cost-per-email signup was waaaaay too high. Like $100 per email. When I would get the campaign in front of the targeted audience - they wouldn't bite. 😠

I started surveying and researching, lurking and listening. 🙉 Was it the message? Something was wrong. In all of my marketing days, I'd never put in so much work, to get so little back in return. The 1 Day Course, for example, the quick thing that I built around a fictitious power-washing company in Florida - had oodles of traffic in hours. I had to shut off the test campaign in the first 3-4 days so that I didn't brake the bank.💸

I had partnered up with an actual power washing company in Florida. One that I had used for 4 years while living there. And once I was ready to send the owner free leads, it was radio silence. Now 1,400 miles away (no longer living in that part of the country) I couldn't just pop over. Emails and texts went unanswered. No vmail on their main line at the office.

I started to wonder if they were still in business. I could see their website was still live and active. Were they having labor issues? This was smack dab in the middle of what had been coined as "The Great Resignation". Why would he not want the free leads that we had discussed before I moved? What in the world was going on? 🤯