Endless Audience 2020 – Ramit Sethi
TODAY, I’M GOING TO SHOW YOU…
How we built a traffic engine to generate 15,000 subscribers a month
Including the exact system that grew our email list from 0 to 276,000 subscribers …
While generating more sales than Facebook ads, partnerships, and social media combined.
Plus, see how to use the system to build a bigger business that lets you …
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Spend time on the things you love (and hire peopleto take care of the things you don’t)
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Reach more and more people (even millions)
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Invest your growing profits where you want: an amazing lifestyle, rapidly max your savings, plow back into your business or give back — or all of the above
Hi, I’m Ramit Sethi, the New York Times best-selling author and CEO of I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
Today, I write for over 1,000,000 readers a month about business, personal finance, psychology, and careers.
I’ve built a team of dozens of people — analysts, traffic & growth experts, copywriters, product experts, and masters of technology — to help power this multimillion-dollar business.
But if you rewind to 2009, I didn’t have any of that.
2009. I also didn’t have a good sense of style.
Back then, I didn’t have a team. I didn’t have a big audience. And with tons of competition, I couldn’t seem to get traction — traffic wasn’t growing, my sales weren’t growing, it all just felt…
TOO SLOW!
I found myself spending a lot of time fiddling around with opt-in copy, setting up random A/B tests (which I didn’t know how to analyze), and wondering how to write that one article that would put me on the map.
But man, it was slow.
Do you know what it feels like to spend hours on an article, hit “Post,” and sit back and wait … only to hear nothing? If I was lucky, sometimes I’d get a “Great post!” comment. Is this what growing a business is really like? And I’m supposed to do this for YEARS?
Out of every four or five articles I wrote, I might have gotten about 100 subscribers. So here I was, basically realizing I’d have to write THOUSANDS OF POSTS for about 38,000 years just to get a big enough email list.
How the hell did these other people build email lists of 50,000 people or 100,000 people?
My dream was to write something, click “Post,” and have people posting comments, sharing it, replying to my emails. (Well, my dream was to be a male model with an Italian accent, but that’s beside the point.)
I knew it would be hard, but not this hard. The way I was doing it felt like pushing a huge boulder up a hill … and starting over every single day.
The bad news is that I still can’t speak with an Italian accent. But the good news is: today, when I post something, tens of thousands of people read it — within minutes.
The number of people subscribed to my email list?
279,825
EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS
People find our site, read the material, subscribe to our email list, and many of them eventually buy — automatically.
THIS FEELS GREAT. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It feels amazing to know you can spend your time doing the creative stuff — writing fun posts, recording videos, exploring new ideas, linking to other people you admire — and your business automatically attracts new people, eventually turning the right ones into buyers.
THIS IS AWESOME!
Here’s an example of how this works. Over five years ago, I wrote a post on weddings. It was something I felt strongly about and I loved writing it.
I wrote this post over seven years ago. It does so well, I refreshed it in 2019, and it’s still bringing in quality leads.
That post still brings new buyers in. And the material I write today will continue to bring new readers in for years to come.
I want to get really specific to show you what this looks like on a daily basis, because I want you to know this is possible for you, too.
We built a traffic engine to generate 15,000 subscribers a month. Imagine every single person in Germany’s SAP Arena raising their hand and asking to hear from you — every month.
That’s this place:
15,000 seats is a lot of seats. (Photo by D.roller.saparena)
(I walk you through the path to 15,000 subscribers a month, step-by-step, further down this page.)
Every morning, when I open my email, the first thing I see is my inbox crammed with thank-you notes and success stories like these:
We get covered in the national media all the time, including Forbes, Fortune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC, which helps us spread our message to even more people.
That’s me next to Warren Buffett. We hang out every Sat to eat buffalo wings together. One of the last two sentences is untrue.
Now we have over 590,000 followers on social media.
I hate you, Pinterest.
When you have a business with a “traffic engine” like this, you can make a big impact — fast.
When you share a link, people click it.
When you recommend a book, it sells out.
You don’t have to offer huge discounts because people love your products! (In fact, we never discount.)
Here’s the best part. You don’t have to sell, sell, sell all the time. You can actually relax, breathe, and have FUN. When you’re having fun and sharing the things you love, your audience can tell.
Let me show you what I mean. I happen to love hot sauce, and my favorite hot sauce is Dos Toros in NYC. I decided to show them some love and mention them in my newsletter. BOOM — they instantly sold out.
My simple dream: moving mass quantities of hot sauce with a single click.
Life isn’t just about selling stuff over and over. When you build a great business, you get to have fun and your readers love it, too.
(Plus, some days it’s nice to just take off and catch a daytime movie, knowing that your business will automatically keep bringing in new readers.)
When I think back to the early days, I was doing all the “right” things, but it wasn’t working. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t throw in the towel.
Now when I share something, I can see people talking about it, sharing it, and responding by the thousands. It’s amazing to know you’re putting something into the world — and people love it.
And it’s even more amazing to know that you’re also growing your business at the same time.
I want to show you how we grew from a dorm-room blog to a multimillion-dollar business.
Not just the basic stuff you could Google for free. I’m talking about the lessons the outsiders don’t know … that we do.
To go beyond mere tactics — and to build a sustainable, high-growth business — start with your own psychology.
Which of these invisible scripts are holding you back from growing your business?
I discovered three painful invisible scripts around growing a business — deep beliefs that can kill your business if left unchecked. How many of these scripts apply to you?
(In my experience, every business owner below $12 million in revenue believes at least one of these.)
“There are so many ways to grow traffic.
So why isn’t it working for me?”
“WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? I feel like I’ve already used a lot of the tactics out there. I can’t keep posting in FB groups. People will get sick of me. I tried auto-webinars but it didn’t work for me. What am I doing wrong? I just need to try a different strategy.”
“IT’S TOO COMPLICATED. I’m trying to piece together all these tactics without annoying my readers. I have enough stuff going on. Now I’m supposed to master FB ads and Instagram and contests and webinars and … I feel overwhelmed. I guess I’ll just keep trying to make it work. I just need to figure it out.”
“I’m so overwhelmed”
“I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH TIME! I tried blogging and posting to social media every week and it nearly killed me. All these people say I’m supposed to blog and create products and take care of my customers and post infographics. Uh, there’s not enough time to do all of this.”
“I’LL SPEND THE TIME — IF I KNOW IT WILL WORK. I’ve jumped to a lot of different things, but that’s because nothing works. I’m willing to spend the time — IF I know it’ll work. But I need to know.”
“I need to go faster”
“WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? How come they grew their list by 15,000 last month? What do they know that I don’t? What is going on?!”
“GUEST POSTS ARE DEAD. I already did the basics, but that’s not enough. Now what? I’m supposed to write guest posts, PLUS posts on my own blog? I don’t want to write guest posts. They’re dead.”
“WHY ISN’T ANYONE RESPONDING? I spent so long writing it, and I only got one comment.”
“UGH, IT JUST NEEDS TO WORK. I’m super frustrated with the lack of organic traffic (I think there’s something wrong with our website). I really need to make this thing grow on its own.”
Do any of these scripts sound
familiar to you?
I used to think I was “above” invisible scripts, but I wasn’t. God, I was so stupid.
And one of the biggest impediments to growth is yourself. I know it was for me. I thought because I was a business owner, it was all just pure “logic” to growing my business. Do X, then Y. Yeah … that works, until you realize that what got you here won’t get you there.
For a lot of us, if we see a problem, we jump right into solving it … without evaluating whether this is the right solution … or if we should be tackling this problem at all.
Think about it — there’s so much advice out there … that just doesn’t work.
We all have so much we want to do with our businesses … but never enough time.
But if we could crack the code on traffic and know which growth levers to pull, we could build a high-growth, profitable business that lets us share our passion with more and more people.
Consistent growth. Not a daily grind.
18 months of solid lead growth adds up fast.
If you’re ready to unlock the growth in your business, read on. I want to share three of the most surprising truths I discovered that radically changed how I drive traffic for my business.
The path to 15,000 subscribers per month
When we started out, we did the basic things that everyone recommends:
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We set up our blog.
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We wrote high-quality posts.
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We did guest posting on larger sites.
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And we set up a pretty good opt-in form that converted traffic to subscribers.
Then we added on more intermediate strategies to grow even more: We started focusing on SEO, so we showed up at the top of search engines. We created an A/B testing program to optimize our opt-in forms and copy, which boosted subscription rates by over 50%. And, of course, I was posting on social media.
These strategies worked, and traffic was growing, but I was getting impatient. Honestly … I wanted to go faster. I didn’t want to wait years to grow. I wanted HOCKEY STICK GROWTH. You know what I’m talking about.
This is when I really started paying attention to the strategies that were getting more popular. I’m talking about high-growth, fast strategies. Facebook ads. JVs and affiliates. Rapid funnel growth. The strategies that didn’t take months (or years), but ones that could scale fast.
I have to admit … I was getting a little jealous of all the numbers I saw being thrown around. I was hearing people talking about getting 10,000 subscribers a week. WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK WRITING NEW STUFF!!
Here I am, slaving away writing new post after new post, and they were looking at me like I was some old-fashioned goober. “Dude,” they would say, “you’re wasting your time writing all this stuff. Write one thing, then use paid ads to drive a ton of traffic.”
They’d tell me how they spent a dollar and made two.
I heard people were making $3,000 profit every day. That’s over a million dollars in profit every year — without having to write anything new!
You can see why I started to get jealous. If I was sitting around writing post after post, email after email, and someone else could just spend a few bucks and make a million dollars in profit … what did they know that I didn’t?
And really — why wasn’t I doing this?
I started to get worried that I was missing out on the next big thing. That because I knew how to write blog posts, I was falling into the trap of “a guy with a hammer sees everything as a nail.” I felt comfortable writing, so I kept spending time doing that …
… while the world was passing me by.
In the back of my head, I heard this voice saying, “It can’t really be that easy.” Because if it was, what had I been spending all my time over the last five years doing?
So I decided I had to find out how they were doing it. This is where being (1) jealous and (2) having the money to execute becomes a dangerous combination.
I could afford to put teams on each. And that’s exactly what I did.
We built an entire Facebook ad team, including copywriters, designers, and a data analyst. We spent $2 MILLION (not to mention building the entire team) over 2+ years.
We built an entire affiliate team and recruited dozens of affiliates, generating substantial revenue.
We built an entire optimization team focused on optimizing opt-ins, running dozens of A/B tests every month across our business, including funnels, holdout tests, and upsell & cross-sell optimization.
Basically, we spent a shitload of time and money (and we got really good) at all of these strategies to grow faster.
And finally, I had the data.
The day I discovered the truth
about traffic
Our analyst called a special meeting. Every member of our senior team attended. As the meeting started, the analyst began by setting the context.
“As you all know, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time investing in new strategies to gro—”
Honestly, I just wanted him to get on with it.
That’s when he clicked to Slide 2 and started with the word, “Unfortunately…”
“UNFORTUNATELY”
Never a good way to start a massive presentation on millions of dollars of tests we’d run. Actually, it made me want to puke.
Yes, the numbers looked good on the surface. Some of the strategies made us money, even a decent amount.
Unfortunately, none of these new strategies — paid ads, JVs, tripwires, and more — beat the system we’d already built over the last five years. Not even close.
Yes, traffic was at all-time highs.
Yes, we’d been able to dramatically scale our number of email subscribers.
Unfortunately, most of the new subscribers never bought a thing!
That sinking feeling was me realizing we’d made a huge mistake. All those damn gurus, all those rumors I’d followed … when you actually run the numbers, a lot of them don’t pan out.
When something bad happens, life is good when you can blame someone else. But this time, I had nobody to blame but myself. I’d chased the rumors. I’d looked for a shortcut. I’d said, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” then promptly ignored it.
Let me show you what I mean. (This is what none of the gurus will share, BTW.)
We used Facebook advertising to generate 81,316 new email subscribers in 2016.
Sounds like a home run, right? Most businesses would be happy to have 81,000 people on their list in total. We did it from one channel, in one year. Double opt-in subscribers.
But as the saying goes, “not all that glitters is gold.” I wanted to know: “How many of those people actually BOUGHT anything?”
Shockingly, very few.
If we’d never built an entire analytics team to look underneath the numbers, we never would have known. (Which is why so many people who run FB ads think they’re profitable … but they’re actually not.)
Similarly, we did a high-profile partnership with a well-known business with a massive audience of entrepreneurs. It was as close to a “perfect partnership” as you could get.
Here’s what happened.
When the other business promoted us to their massive audience, 49,514 of their readers joined our email list.
AMAZING!
(Stop right here and imagine how many “gurus” would instantly write a post called, “How a single partnership generated 49,000 subscribers for our business.” We like to go much deeper.)
We dug into the analysis, going beyond the surface number. When all was said and done, only 165 of those people wound up staying on our list and reading our emails. Only 2 of them ever bought anything.
As you can imagine, these numbers were a surprise to us. Let’s just say when we got to the Q&A section of the presentation … it was pretty quiet.
I’m sharing these uncomfortable numbers with you because I don’t want you to be misled by the “popular tips” out there. Running a business means going much deeper.
You can build a profitable business — one that reaches 1,000s of people and makes tens of thousands of dollars a month. But only if you realize 3 important truths.
Here’s how you do it …
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