Ten Arguments, Each One Taken From A Build
Everything here came out of a project, not a content calendar
Most marketing blogs are written to fill a schedule. Somebody picks a keyword, writes eight hundred words around it, and publishes on Tuesday. The writing is fine and it teaches nobody anything, because nothing in it came from doing the work.
Each post is an argument that came out of a specific project, and each one links to the case study it came from, with the numbers attached.
That constrains what appears here. There are ten posts rather than ninety, and there will not be a new one every week. A post gets written when a project produces an argument worth making, which is not a monthly occurrence.
The subject is narrow too. Where course businesses, coaching practices and consultancies lose revenue, and why it is almost never where they think.
Everything below started somewhere else.
On funnels and offers
3 posts
- 01Your front end offer is not where the money isA $597 course brought in $7,243. What came after it brought in $23,445. Most course businesses spend their attention on the front end and end the funnel at the thank you page, which collects the smallest amount each customer was willing to pay.
- 02A launch earns once. A ladder keeps earning.Launches produce a spike and then nothing, so the business has to keep launching and the list gets tired. A free plus shipping book funnel built once was still selling three years later, across two platforms, with no launch behind it.
- 03When friction is a featureEvery piece of funnel advice tells you to remove friction. For a $27 event that is correct. For a coaching program with limited capacity it is backwards, and the question is not how much friction but what each piece of it is buying you.
On webinars and platforms
2 posts
- 04Webinars do not work for my audience is usually a build problemIt is one of the most common conclusions in coaching and it is reached honestly. What almost never gets examined is the ninety percent of a webinar funnel that is not the webinar.
- 05Your course platform hosts. It does not sell.Vimeo OTT, Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific. Every platform gives you somewhere to host the product and a way to take payment, and almost none of them give you a way to sell. The mistake is assuming that because there is a checkout, the selling is handled.
On measurement and spend
2 posts
- 06Why last click sends your budget to the wrong campaignRetargeting touches people who had already decided, so it looks like your best campaign. The cold campaign that actually created the customer looks worse than it is and gets cut. Scale on that data and you scale the channel receiving credit instead of the one making customers.
- 07The second campaign should usually be cheaper than the firstMost accounts scale in one direction: a campaign works, the budget goes up, the return goes down. Two cohort campaigns for the same business in the same year, and the one that spent a quarter as much returned more per dollar.
On copy and automation
2 posts
- 09Explaining is not selling, and your sales page knows the differenceAn explanation moves in the order the subject makes sense. A sales page moves in the order a buyer decides. Those orders are almost never the same, which is why founders writing their own pages open with context and reach the offer three screens down.
- 10The best automation ends with a human, not an emailThe default use of automation is replacing a person. The more valuable pattern is the opposite: use the machine to catch the moment, then put a person in it. A declined card is the clearest example.
The Numbers Are On The Case Studies
If one of these describes something happening in your business, the case study behind it has the numbers.