3 Business Models That Will Bleed Your Business

Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast!

I’m back in Toronto. I took the family and ran away to warm, sunny Mexico. A couple of weeks ago, we had a bad ice storm over a three-day period. I don’t think anyone went outside. There were no cars on the road. I ordered a book on Amazon Prime for same day delivery, and book took three and a half days to arrive at my house because it was that bad.

We decided last minute to book a trip to Mexico and it was awesome. Warm weather and lots of tennis. We got to play in the sand on the beach and hang out with the kids, and didn’t worry about ice and snow. We had a great time, and we are back.

Today, we’re going to be talking about a slightly controversial topic. So, brace yourself. I’m going to talk about three business models that will bleed your business.

When I say bleed your business, I’m talking about sucking the time, energy, and money out of what you do. I’m not saying that they don’t work, because they can. I’m just telling you, from experience, that they will take forever to see results, and you’ll probably feel very frustrated in the process.

I would rather you not feel that way. That’s why I’m sharing this with you.

If you’ve got a successful business already, great. Keep doing what you’re doing. Please, don’t jump into this stuff if you don’t need to. If you’re just starting out, you’re probably discombobulated. You’re probably confused with the things you could be doing, and that’s a very dangerous place to be.

So, I’m going to highlight three business models that you’ve probably seen online that I don’t recommend you do. I’m not saying that they don’t work, I’m just saying that, for the most part, there are smarter, faster ways of growing a more impactful business that brings you more income as well.

 

Number one: Product launches, or launches in general.

Launching a product, coaching program, or whatever it is, is not the best course of action for most people. Now, I love Jeff Walker. What they’ve done with PLF is awesome. And some of my closest friends are doing amazing things with launches. Stu McLaren with Tribe and Todd Herman with the Ninety-Day Year are good friends of mine whose entire businesses are based around launches.

I’m not saying they’re not doing a good job, because they’re doing great. They’re earning millions of dollars in revenue and helping lots of people.

But you must remember this: They have large platforms. If you don’t have a large following, it’s not worth the time, effort, and money to do a launch. Let’s do the math. Let’s say you had 1,000 people on your list, and you do a whole launch sequence sent over the course of three videos.

You send your thousand people an e-mail. On average, being generous, let’s say the open rate is 20%. So, what’s 20% of a thousand? 200 people. So, let’s just say that 200 people open all the e-mails, and 50% of them, again being generous, click on the links to go watch the videos.

Now you’ve got 100 people watching all three content-based videos in your launch.

Each one of them gets the same 100 people going through the process. Let’s say, on the back end, you’re selling the typical $19.97 or $2,000 program. So, on average, the conversion rate in a launch is going to be higher than if you sent them directly to the sales page.

I’ll be very generous and say, out of 100 people who go through all your videos and watch your sales video afterwards, two of them are willing to spend $2,000 each. That gives you $4,000. Not too bad, right?

You know what? Let’s bump it up to five. Let’s say that out of 100 people, five people decide to buy the $2,000 program. That’s a five percent conversion rate. A little bit higher is typically seen in launches of that size. That’s $10,000.

Not a bad payday, right? Earnings per click is good. You’ve got 1,000 people on your list, you make $10,000. Not too bad at all.

But here’s the thing: Now you’re working with five people.

Remember, it’s not just about the $10,000. It was about the creation of the videos, the thinking about it, how you acquired your list in the first place, and sequencing it. All the logistics that go into a launch were for five clients.

With most launches, it’s done on your own program. So, you’re not even working with them closely. They’re just doing it as a course on their own. $10,000 is not too bad.

Let me give you an alternative. Follow our Perfect Client Pipeline, which is a Facebook ad, webinar, and strategy call, then you can enroll those same five clients in one tenth of the time without going through the whole rigmarole and hoops of creating all this PLF content, content videos, and launch sequence.

That’s the way I see it.

Launches are fine if you want to run that type of business model, but you need a huge following. And if you don’t have a following, then you need massive amounts of traffic from Facebook, most likely, and what’s going to happen with that traffic isn’t predictable.

You’ll let people drip through the funnel for two weeks and you won’t know what’ll happen at the end of that. For me, that doesn’t feel good. Another reason I don’t like launches is because it’s a very seasonal type of business. Let’s say you have two launches per year, two big paydays and that is it.

Now, if those paydays are five to ten million dollars, who cares if you only have two of them, right? That’s a good business. But for most people, having two paydays a year of five to $10,000 doesn’t make sense. I get more excited when, daily, we can bring in five to $10,000 in new clients who are enrolling in our workshops. That’s a lot more exciting to me.

The nice thing about having this every day, evergreen type of model is that it’s predictable. You have enough data and time to make small changes to improve things. With a launch, you don’t have enough time to think on your feet and move things around. If something doesn’t work, your whole launch is done.

When I say launches, let me also include summits. I’ve run and been part of summits. It’s essentially a launch. Everyone mails to their list, and you have 500 people as these experts telling everyone opposite things. It’s very confusing for the customer. Then, you can buy all the recordings for $97.00. It’s very predictable.

Again, there are some good summits out there. There are multiple seven-figure summits and businesses have been built on the back end of summits. I’m saying that, for the work that goes into that for the one-time bang, you’re much better off putting the same effort into an evergreen model that’s going to give you consistent results every single time, 365 days a year.

Would you agree?

We ran a summit called the Fat Loss Summit about four years ago. We interviewed 24 experts, so I spent 24 hours interviewing people on video. We turned those into audios, had cheat sheets and PDFs, had the whole core, and made all the joint venture partners to promote the damn thing. We did just over $100,000 grand, which isn’t chump change. We had some affiliates that did well.

But, for that same amount of revenue, we could have done something a whole lot simpler. After I did that summit, I told my team that I will never do another summit again. I’d rather invest my time and energy into something that is more predictable, sustainable, and evergreen.

That’s my opinion on launches and summits. I’m not saying they’re bad, I’m just saying that for most of us, it’s probably not the best first option as a business model.

 

Number two: The second business model that will bleed your business dry is content marketing.

You may be thinking, “Haven’t you built your entire business and your health business on content marketing?” Yes, that is a very good point. That is true. Yes, I did build my entire health and fitness business on the backbone of content marketing.

As of this recording, we have close to one million unique visitors per month to my blog at yurielkaim.com. That’s no small feat. I’m happy and proud about that.

I’m going to share exactly what we’re doing with that in a second.

I also have a YouTube channel that I don’t create videos for anymore. I’m done talking about health and fitness, to be honest with you. Even thought I haven’t produced any videos in about six months, our subscriber base continues to grow and grow.

Right now, we have 207,000 subscribers and it’s continuing to grow every single day even though I’m not shooting any more content. I’ve created over 900 videos since 2006, and they’re all amazing. Obviously, some are better than others, but they’re helping people. I don’t have to do more all the time.

With Healthpreneur, things are different. My only content strategy is my podcast.

And because I’ve freed up more of my time because of some of the stuff we’re doing, I’m starting a YouTube channel. I wasn’t going to do a YouTube for Healthpreneur, and I’ll tell you why. Out of the gates, I wasn’t doing anything big with content marketing.

First and foremost, I needed to dial in a predictable process that generates revenue every single day for our company. That’s our Perfect Client Pipeline. Every single day, we’ve got Facebook ads going to a webinar, and we’re enrolling people on the back end of our strategy calls. We’re delivering amazing value to clients in the process.

But I dialed that in.

I spent a lot of time and money, through trial and error, to figure that out. It’s not 100%, but very close to it. We’ve got a great process now. I don’t have to do many of the calls anymore. We’ve got a great team that supports us there.

Now I’ve freed up my time to say, ” I don’t have to do as much on that side now because it’s a system, a machine, doing its thing. So what do I really want to do?”

I thought to myself that I enjoy videoing, hence why I created 900 videos on my other YouTube channel. So now, I have the space and freedom to start talking a bit more on camera. We’re putting it up on YouTube and then we’re leveraging that on our blog. That feeds into the e-mails we send out.

So yes, content marketing is great. I think it’s a great way of building know, like, and trust with your audience, very much like this podcast does.

If you had to choose one channel, go with a podcast. But here’s the thing: A podcast is a three-year plus game plan. Do not expect anything from your podcast for the first three years. I’m serious.

People say don’t expect anything from a podcast for a year. I would stretch that to three years because I had a call with a new client who enrolled in our workshop and I asked him how he came across our stuff. He said that he listens to my podcast.

So, you can see it’s starting to gain traction.

To be honest, I don’t look at the numbers. This is how little emphasis I put on this podcast in terms of how I must make the numbers work. I don’t track the numbers on this. Initially, we wanted to know how many downloads we were getting. But now, I have no clue what’s going on.

Jackie on our team told me a couple weeks ago that we almost had 1,000 downloads in a week. That’s amazing because it started off at 50 downloads a week. We haven’t done any crazy promotions with this podcast. There’s no crazy circus-like tactics. It’s just getting great people on the show, sharing awesome content, and just organically letting it do its thing.

It’s like planting bamboo trees.

It takes seven years for bamboo to break the surface. If a farmer didn’t know that, they’d think it wasn’t growing and they’d give up. But as soon as the bamboo cracks through the surface, it skyrockets. It’s crazy.

That’s what can happen with a podcast. That can also happen with your blog or YouTube, but you must go into it understanding that you won’t see anything for the first couple of years. So, if you’re blogging and frustrated because you’re not getting any revenue from it, tough shit. Pardon my French, but that’s just the reality of the platform.

Build it and they will come does not exist online.

You can’t put up a blog post and expect people to see it. You can’t put up a blog post and share it on your Facebook page. Nobody sees organic stuff on Facebook anymore. No one sees anything unless you’re putting money behind it.

That’s the name of the game nowadays. You have to pay to play. If you want your stuff to be seen on Facebook, you have to be buying Facebook ads. If you’re starting from scratch and you don’t have a large platform on YouTube or a blog, I strongly recommend – unless you love doing that stuff – doing a podcast.

It’s an intimate experience. You might listen to this in your car, while you’re walking your dogs, or while you’re working out. It’s distraction-free, kind of. You can do other things while you’re doing this. If you’re on YouTube watching a video, you’re distracted by other things that you can click on. It’s not the same immersion type of experience.

And blogging, well, the average time on a site is about a minute and 21 seconds. So, what would you rather have? A 30-minutes podcast, or a minute and 21 second user experience on your blog?

Our blog has almost a million visitors. We’ve got a very specific process we use on our blog called “Teach to Sell”. We teach this in all our workshops, and not even from a blogging perspective. It’s just how to share content in a way that leads to sales while providing tons of value.

One of the cool things we do now with our blog is pick some of those people and send them Facebook ads. That’s the benefit of having a nice platform. You have an engaged audience. Our cost per conversion from Facebook ads targeting our website visitors is about a quarter of what we get through all our other audiences.

But I’m telling you, don’t worry about the content. Don’t even build the content until you’ve built a predictable pipeline to generate clients and revenue for your business.

You might be thinking, “But Yuri, how do I do that without content?”

It’s simple. Allow us to help you. We have a great process. If you want to learn more about it, check out our webinar healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Go through the webinar and you’ll see what we’re doing. If you want to go deeper, we can jump on the phone with you and walk you through the process. That’s what we do every single day.

I’m pleading, do not write another blog post or create another video until you have your pipeline dialed in. Nothing matters in your business if you’re not generating revenue. And there’s nothing more frustrating that writing a long blog post, thinking it’s amazing, then…silence. Crickets.

Let’s build your income, then your influence.

It took a long time to build up that blog and that YouTube channel. It took three to five years before we started seeing any traction. So, I don’t recommend you do that. It’s a back-burner activity.

Your sole focus needs to be on acquiring clients, delivering an amazing result for them, rinse and repeat, until you can step away because it can do its thing on its own. Then you can start thinking about adding some value and asking, “How am I going to do this? How am I going to put up some content?”

So, that’s the second way you’ll bleed your business dry.

To give you some context, we were spending $25,000 per month just on our blog’s editorial team. That was not including the rest of our team. Do you want to spend $25,000 a month just on your blog? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Down the road, once you got money to throw around, go for it. But now, even if you’re in the six-figure range and you want to go to seven figures, do things intelligently. Do not waste your time and money doing that stuff.

 

#3: Why spray and pray marketing doesn’t work

The third business model that will bleed your business dry is not even a business model. I call it spray and pray marketing.

It’s putting up a post on Facebook and hoping many people see it. Or posting some stuff on Instagram and expecting your followers to increase. It’s posting pictures of your butt or in front of a private jet so people think you’re successful, then hoping they’ll inquire about doing business with you or buying your stuff.

That’s not going to work.

Let me give you some context here. Instagram is great. I’ve got some friends that are doing very well on Instagram. They’re building their business DMing on Instagram.

I completely get that. One-on-one communication, human interaction, is terrific. Whether it’s on Facebook Messenger or Instagram, it’s all good.

But I can’t tell you how many people we’ve spoken to who’ve asked, “How do I monetize my audience?” That’s a very bad question to ask in the first place. How do I monetize people? It’s like asking, “How do I extract the juice out of people?” No. “How do I better serve them,” is a better question to start.

If you’re younger and millennial you might be into Instagram. You might be at Starbucks waiting in line and flipping through your fricking feed on Instagram instead of looking someone in the eye. I understand that. That’s the way the world’s going.

But the more that happens, the more people are going to be looking for interaction with other human beings. That’s why people love DMs and Instagram stories. If you want to do that, go for it. If you want to live a life like Gary Vaynerchuk and be glued to your phone, go for it.

You know what I’d rather do? I’d rather be present with my kids. I’d rather put my phone away when I’ve done my work, because I don’t need to rely on that to build my business. Why? Because I have my Perfect Client Pipeline running and I know that, even when I’m sleeping, on vacation, or when my phone doesn’t want to work with me – even though I don’t have Instagram or Facebook on my phone – we’re using both of those platforms to acquire clients every single day.

Organic reach is dead. Even if you have a huge social media following, you’ll probably see a dramatic decrease in organic reach.

A couple of months ago, Facebook announced that organic reach is now at two percent. So, if you have 100 people that follow you, two of them will see your organic post. An organic post is when you post something and you don’t put any money behind it.

So, if you have a new blog post, you want to let people know about it on Facebook, and you’ve got 10,000 followers, guess what? 200 of those followers will see that.

Isn’t that depressing?

You have to pay to play. And if you don’t know how to pay for your own clients or customers, you will lose in the long run. If you’re wasting your time, money and energy on ridiculous business models that are ineffective, take forever to see results, and you don’t understand, you’re not going to see the results you want to see.

That’s why I wanted to share these three business models in this episode. To save you from the insanity.

Again, the three are; launches and summits, content marketing, and organic social media. I’m not saying they don’t work, but there are smarter, faster, more effective ways to build the business you want, make the money you want, enjoy a lot more freedom, and help your clients at a deep level.

 

The online training that’ll grow your business

If you’re interested and have enjoyed this, then I thing you’ll enjoy our Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint. It’s the free online training that I mentioned earlier. Head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

Let me walk you through what we’re doing in our business. Let me show you our Perfect Client Pipeline and how you can deploy it in your business. You’ll attract clients who are going to pay you top dollar. You’ll help them transform their lives in a deeper way and free up more of your time, so you don’t have to get on the treadmill of never-ending content creation and waste all your time on social media.

Does that sound good to you? If so, head on over to the website. Join us today for our online training. You can enjoy it at your leisure. You can choose whatever time is best for you over the next couple of days.

For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. I want to thank you so much once again for taking the time to join me, and for being a loyal subscriber if you’ve been with me for a while. If you’re brand new, welcome.

Remember to subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes. You can find us on SoundCloud as well, I think. I’m here to talk and share, and whatever happens, happens. I know that three years down the road, this podcast is going to be in a great place from a numbers and impact perspective. But it all starts at day zero with a long-term vision.

This podcast is a back-burner activity for our business. Everything we’re doing isn’t reliant on this podcast. I hope you don’t put yourself in that position. Thank you so much for being with me.

Continue to go out there and be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode, which is with Dr. Andra Capitelli. She’ll talk about how to get yourself out there and stand out in a natural health space, which as you know, is very competitive. That’s coming on Wednesday. Have an awesome day, and I’ll see you soon.