Difference Makers™

Hey, in this interview, I'm sitting down with Dan Carr, we're going to be talking about affiliate marketing and some tips and tricks that you can use when participating in the 5DayDeal.

Hey, folks, really good interview for you, 5DayDeal. Today, we're going to be talking with contributor Dan Carr, who is one of the more successful affiliates. And we're going to be talking about some of his tips and techniques for running a successful affiliate campaign with the 5DayDeal. Dan Carr, welcome. How are you doing, man? I'm good, thanks.

Thanks for having me. Excited to talk about this. Yeah, I'm excited to pick your brain about this. So I get I get to pick your brain and benefit from your knowledge, as well as sharing the knowledge with the other people that are out there that are there presumably going to contribute to the 5DayDeal. So first of all, let's just start with a little bit of history. So you've been how long or actually when did you first hear about the 5DayDeal in sort of what's the origin story of Dan Carr in the 5DayDeal?

I must have got an email off the 5DayDeal team. At some point. They probably found my website. And once I got chatting with them, it was it was clear that this is something I needed to be a part of. And our relationship has really evolved and grown to suit both our needs over different years. I've been just an affiliate. I've been a contributor taking part in the business bundles, the regular deal bundles, promoted the video ones.

You know, whatever suits my business at the time is important to me. And the 5DayDeal team have had that flexibility to work with me on that as well. So, yeah, we've we've had a long history together.

Yeah. And how long how many years.

Again, I think it must be gosh I would say at least five years now. Yeah. Yeah.

So you've seen them grow, you've seen, you've seen sort of the, the evolution of the deal from the beginning and then now it's sort of polished. Right.

Yeah. So I've grown with them to be honest as well. They've been a real help for my business. So yeah, I've kind of gone along on the on the journey with them. Yep.

Well, let's dive into that a little bit like your business and people that are that are considering becoming an affiliate for the 5DayDeal or a contributor. You know, some of the more common questions that pop up are, you know, do I have a is my list big enough? Do I have an email list? Is it you know, or do I go out on social? Am I going to oversaturate or are people going to hate me because everyone's, you know, sort of promoting this thing during that five days, they take the first thing first.

You know, how what you know, the MFS or or the truth of having a gigantic list in order to be successful with it with a program like this, is it is it truth or fiction?

I have a smaller less than a lot of people. I would say there's people on there that easily have a list that's 10, 20 times larger than my list. So it's a myth that you need a massive email list. I would say that you do need some kind of email list. But also this is you know, there's lots of ways that you can help grow the list by using the 5DayDeal as well. So we can get into that a little bit later on.

But, you know, yeah, you don't need a big list. What you need is an engaged list.

So you need to find sites, put some parameters around it. What's what's a tiny list, that kind of a you shouldn't bother list. And a you know, you can make money in your sleep list, you know, as the two extremes.

I mean, like so my list is actually split into two because I have two websites have my personal blog and then I have a dedicated photography website and the list on my personal blog. When I started with the 5DayDeal, I probably only had 1500 people on that list, but they were fifteen hundred people. I had an open rate that was nearly 50 percent, which is really good for an email list. So they were engaged people. They weren't people on that list who who had just simply joined this list because they wanted to get some kind of a prize or contest or something like that.

So they were people that joined my list specifically because they wanted to hear from me. So, you know, an engaged list is super important because you can have one hundred thousand people on your list. But if they're all people that just blindly signed up because they wanted to win a free camera or something like that, then what you have is this huge, bloated list of people that don't actually care what you're talking about. So the size of the list isn't important.

It's the engagement that's important. Yeah, that's definitely important for people to understand. Yeah.

You know, that that's a you know, I think truer words were never spoken. It's the you know, because you like like you said, just to put a circle around it, you can have a gigantic 100000 person list that came. You know, people come from all walks of society and income levels and they really have nothing in common with each other other than they came to your list because they wanted some freebie. You know, the so a very small percentage of those people are going to convert or buy the deal versus people that are there because they want to hear what Dan has to say.

And they're loyal subscribers to your list. So you're continuing on the listing. There's two schools of thought. I'm really anxious to hear what you say about those two multiple schools of thought in email marketing. But there's two that I want to draw a circle around. There's the school of thought that says when you create an email, it should be, you know, graphical should look like a newsletter or the graphic on. They're beautiful typeset headline calls to Action and all this other stuff, and then the other school of thought that I'm hearing more and more lately says that, you know, the emails that you send out should look like they came from another person.

You know, just text, you know, with maybe a link in there or something like that. Where do you where do you fall on that?

That's an interesting question, because I use both and I have very specific reasons for using both. So what I'm marketing with a 5DayDeal, typically I will just use the text style of email. I find that works pretty well and I try and keep it reasonably short. So I'm trying to just keep a few bullet points in there. I don't want people to have to scroll too far down. What you have to remember when the 5DayDeal goes out is that most people don't just sign up to the email newsletter, one photographer.

So there's a very good chance I would say, you know, almost 100 percent they're getting multiple emails that day about the 5DayDeal. So nobody is going to have the time to scroll down through big, long emails from multiple photographers. That's my thinking anyway. So with the 5DayDeal, I keep it short. I just do text based throughout the rest of the year. My newsletter is actually revolving a lot around my own photography, so it's important for me to showcase that.

That's why people build a trust in what I have to say, because they look at my photos and they say, OK, this guy knows what he's talking about when it comes to photography, because these are his, hopefully they think beautiful photos. So I do throughout the rest of the year, I showcase my photography and I do more of a graphical style of newsletter throughout the year. But when it comes to the 5DayDeal, I realize it's time limited and I need to get that message across and get people clicking through to the sales page as fast as possible.

So I switch things up at that point.

That's interesting. So it's almost like a pattern interrupt because they're there. There's this beautiful photo, you know, and text and they get used to that sort of pattern. And then when they get the text only, it's like, oh, well, OK, something's going on here. This is and it's quick. So this must really be important. Maybe I should check this out. Right.

When most people click that first email, they may well be expecting to see the usual kind of header image. My normal newsletters are always styled with a big photo at the top of it, so they may be expecting to see that. And then when they don't see it and they see this little sort of text email that looks like it came directly from me, I'm personal with it. I use their first name. I always make sure I get first names from people when I sign up for when I get people to sign up for the newsletter.

I think that's that's a nice thing. So, yeah, they get a different looking email and hopefully that does capture a little bit more attention.

So you do, you do do the you so you capture the first name and then when you, when you send out you do you know, hey John Doe or Hey John comma message and then call to action is at the flow. If I'm trying to really hurry people up towards the end of the sale or something like that, I might not bother with the heejun thing. I might be like, oh very well, hold on. There's only a few minutes that, you know, try and get some scarcity in there for the for the latter ones.

But I start with a more personal one and. Yes, so that's why I always try and get people's first name when they're signing up for the newsletter.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Well let's let's Segway and talk about that sequence a little bit. So the deal lasts for five days. But, you know, typically most most contributors, I believe, start promoting a little bit early to sort of give the cookie and that sort of thing. What's your flow? You know, are you are you a one day email person? Are you are multiple emails per day? You know, you just spam them until they can't take anymore.

What's. Yeah. How do you manage that?

Let's let's ignore the stuff before the sale to start with, because I, I truthfully feel like I'm not the best person to ask about that stuff. I like to go in fairly gently on it. I would say I don't hit people a lot before the sale. Maybe I'm going to send out one email in the week prior, depending on what the schedules are and what we're allowed to send out. But I definitely don't hit people too much before the sale because I, I am definitely wary of, you know, over imposing myself on people's inboxes.

So if the five day days during the sale, I will probably do four days of that. You know, typically what we've seen is is a fairly regular sales curve. I think during these sales and the 5DayDeal team provide some some historical graphics on that before the sale. I think so. Basically, you know, there's always spikes at certain times as we go into the weekend, sales drop down a little bit. And I hold back on my emails at that point and I save up my emails for the time when I know that the sales tend to spike.

So I am a little bit, you know, a little bit worried about sending people too many emails. So I do hold back more than some people, but it seems to work for me.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And that's that's the big worry. Right. Because what you don't want is to sort of piss off your list. Right. And have a gang of unsubscribes every time you send an email. Is that is that been a problem with you? Because, you know, during the 5DayDeal, like we said. Most people are in this in this industry are getting hit by multiple photographers, presumably. Do you see an increase in unsubscribes on your list during the during the emails that you send out during the deal?

So in the first year when that happened, I was like, oh, my God, I lost my subscribers, my hard won subscribers. And then after a while, when you stop building up a larger list and you realize, hey, I'm paying hundreds of dollars a month to have these people on my list and I'm running a business here, and ultimately, ultimately, these people are just part of my business. And, you know, I don't want to be too cold and clinical about it, but it is just it is just part of my business.

And if they don't want to be on my list and they don't want to receive occasional promotions, then, you know, that's fine if they want to leave, I'm totally OK with that. You know, I feel like I do a pretty good job of balancing things throughout the year. I give people great content. I give people tons of free content. I barely sell them anything else during during the year. So when it comes to selling once or twice with these 5DayDeals during the year, you know, if people don't want to be a part of that, that's that's fine by me because otherwise they're just costing me money by being on the list.

So, you know, I want to educate people and help improve people's photography throughout the year. But ultimately, I've got to pay my bills as well. So, you know, if they don't want to be there, that's fine. It's like what Gary Gary Vaynerchuk said in his in his book. Jab, jab. Right. Hook or jab, jab, jab, right hook. That's what you're talking about, is the idea that you're I think of it as kind of like a bank.

Right. You're making deposits throughout the year, giving them free content, free content. Every now and then you make a small withdrawal and run a promotion. If they don't want to participate or they're not the person or they get offended by the fact that you are sending an occasional promotion. You're right. You're paying for them to be on that list. Right. So they buy them, removing themselves from the list. They're making your list stronger and increasing your your your your conversion rate and your deliverability rate and all that stuff.

Right.

You know, when I first started out with it, with I think this is kind of the same thing with like Instagram and Facebook, like like you want to see that number get bigger and it's you know, it helps you feel good to start with. And then you start thinking about a little bit more clearly and you realize, yeah, I just I need the engaged people on the list and the people that are going to bring in some income at some point.

That's what it comes down to.

Let's talk about the cleaning of the list a little bit. I'm curious to hear that. I've heard, you know, the the idea of sort of if you have a dormant list and how do you reinvigorate that list and sort of bring it back to life. But what's the cleansing? How do you how do you clean a list like the technical bits of it?

My basic view is that I will I would jump in there and I'll create a segment of people that haven't opened X number of previous emails, whether that's five emails or 10 emails or something like that. I, I can't remember the exact number that I normally use, but maybe I'll sort of play around with that number until I get a decent number of people in that segment. So then I'll look at I'll just have a set of emails that are just people that haven't opened, you know, the last let's let's call it five emails so they haven't opened the last five emails.

I create a segment and I'll send an email to those people to try and re-engage them and say, hey, you know, I'll I'll provide a big fat unsubscribe button in there as well. So they feel like they have some control over this. And I'll say, hey, you know, if you don't want to hear from me anymore, hit the big unsubscribe button. You know, I don't want to bother you, but don't want to mess up your inbox.

But I'll also include in that, you know, here's some content that you missed out on in those last five emails. So I'll pick my very best pieces of top performing content from those emails and just give them kind of a way to jump back in there and try and re-engage them or or, you know, get off the list. And then if people don't open that email, if they don't even open it. So, you know, if they if they open it, then I'll consider them that they you know, OK, well, the emails are still getting to them.

Maybe I can re-engage them at a later point. But if they don't open that email at all and they don't unsubscribe from it, then I just get rid of those people because they're just costing me money.

And how often are you doing that? The cleaning process? You know, truthfully, not too often.

I would say maybe once every six months. I tend to do it before the 5DayDeal comes around as well, just because that's when I'm every time I have the 5DayDeal on my calendar. As it starts to get closer, I start to be a little bit more focused on my email newsletter and you know, how things are going. They're like it's most of it or a lot of it is kind of gotten me through through the year.

So I don't like to think about it every single day. That's just the way that I like to automate things as much as possible. So as we're getting close to the five day year, I start thinking about it. I'm like, oh, you know, I wonder how many people have sort of unengaged from this newsletter throughout the year. So then I'll do a bit of cleaning.

I love it. I was really cold in the frequency of your the newsletter that you send out. Is it weekly, is it the monthly or is it just sort of random whenever you have something to share with the audience?

I would say between two. Between two and three weeks is is fairly normal for my main one and then maybe monthly for my more personal one, but, you know, ultimately and that this is going to be different for every for everybody. But I, I need to get out and take photos sometimes as well. That's really important for me. And there are certain things that I will never let get in the way of the creative process so much as I appreciate the importance for the newsletter and stuff like that, if I'm off on a photography trip and it's super important to me that I focus on that creative process and get new images, I tend not to interrupt it to send out an email newsletter.

So there is a, you know, a little bit of flexibility in my timings there, but that's just the way that I personally like to work. I do appreciate that. I probably could be doing things better by, you know, what you would think of as industry standards by keeping it a bit more regular. But that just doesn't work for me. So, you know, everybody needs to kind of make up their own mind on that one.

Yeah, it's interesting because you you mentioned automation and you could automate, right. And say, you know, especially with your you said you mentioned using MailChimp so you could plug MailChimp into your blog and say, you know, every Friday at three p.m., pull down this RSS feed and create a post from that. But then that that becomes impersonal and clinical. And, you know, you know, the people that are subscribing to you want to hear from you.

They don't want to hear from a robot that's keeping a blog and sending it out. So, yeah. So when they sign up for either of my websites, I give people the choice. They can either jump in and they can get the personalized newsletter for me or they can just get an automated email every time I put a new post. And that does just go straight into MailChimp and then it spits it out through the RSS feeds. So people do have a choice.

Far more people sign up for the personalized newsletter. It's like 90 percent of people choose that option. But there are some people that just want an email notification of every new blog post and that also runs through the newsletter and through MailChimp. And I find, like I, I definitely through Google Analytics, because I can tell that that that does have some benefits. So, yes, some some people just want that kind of more like a notification that there's a new blog post.

Yeah. Yeah. How did you get your list to where it is now. To the to the size. You know, there's there's different techniques of list building everything from nefarious means, like buying a list to, you know, putting a form on your website with what they call a lead magnet like, hey, download this. You know, Dan Carr, five tips to becoming a better photographer. Enter your email address, that kind of thing. Which do you use?

How do you how do you build your list?

On my personal blog, I just have a little pop up that comes up after people have browsed a couple of pages on the site that says, you know, if you want to hear more from me, sign up for this newsletter. Now, what I'll say about that is I get way less sign ups to that newsletter, but the engagement on that newsletter is much, much higher than the other one. And the other one is elite magnet. And I offer an ebook and I offer various other different things, depending on which part of the website you're browsing.

The engagement on that newsletter is less, but it's it's still pretty good. And the way that I think I'm able to keep the engagement fairly high on that is by having a series of follow up emails after people have got the lead magnet. So I don't just dump a free PDF into their inbox and then leave them alone for a while. Every lead magnet that they have triggers a series of follow up emails. So some of those emails are related to the magnet that they just downloaded.

And some of them are just ways to introduce them to me, my personal brand, my website, you know, one of them is just like twenty five facts about Dan. You know, it just it just just to help people get to know me a little bit better. What I don't want is people to just take the lead magnet and then disappear off and never come back and never engage with me again. So once I've got people's email address, I give them the lead magnet and then I try and get them engaged through a series of those follow up emails.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's good. You know, keeping the list warm is what that's called and using all the responders in those those sorts of tools so that you don't have to physically be out sending messages to people all the time. You can put them on autopilot. We do the same thing. We do the same the same thing as well. On this we can photo because we're you know, we've got a mountain of content back there. So what we do is we there's an autoresponder with three hundred and sixty, not 360.

I'm sorry. Is it three sixty five oh fifty two. Sorry. There's fifty two emails in the sequence when that goes out every single week, you know, and it's sort of hey this is from the TWIP archives. You know, this is an interview I did with the car back in nineteen ninety five, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah that works out, it keeps, keeps the list engaged and warm and that sort of thing.

Here's another question on my list is speaking of lists, subject line. So you mentioned, you mentioned, you know, different ways that people that re-engage using autoresponder and that sort of thing. In the context of the 5DayDeal, how important are subject lines and how do you come up with the subject lines in your email that you're going to send out to your to your subscribers when it comes to planning those?

I really just kind of sit down and just like brain dump for a little bit and stop typing things out. And I'm like, no, that doesn't look good. And then, you know, I guess over the years, I've just got a bit of a sense for what works and what doesn't. But I can't say that I've written that down anyway or anything like that. And typically what'll happen is I'll put two variations of a of a headline in there and I'll get very little difference between the open rate, whether know hopefully they're not both bad.

I'm always assuming they're both pretty good. But yeah, I am a little bit unscientific about that. But the important thing that is, you know, throughout the years I've probably developed that sense of what works and what doesn't through that split testing process. So whilst I guess I'm saying it's not scientific, maybe it has been, but it's just been over a longer period of time. So I always use the split testing ability, you know, but don't you know don't you split test massive differences in, you know, in subject lines as well.

Just sometimes I just will make a little tweak in that. Sometimes I'll throw in an emoji, sometimes I'll throw in that little trick of like putting R.E. at the beginning, you know, or I'll throw in someone's name. But I don't make huge changes to the subject lines.

Interesting. Interesting. That's cool. Yeah. I never thought of using that creative I mean, you have to try that.

So it's kind of like what we're saying before about having the the email that's got the photos in it. And then when the 5DayDeal comes around, it's just a text email. Well, if I don't use that trick for the entire year and then when 5DayDeal comes around, I use a little different trick in the subject line. It'll catch people's attention. So if you've got little tricks like that, save them up for when you really need them.

Very good. Very good. These are golden tips. Dan Carr. OK, so switching gears a little bit. So we've been talking a lot about email marketing, right? An email marketing obviously is important because you own the list. And, you know, we could go on and on and on about email versus social. But is social important to your sort of overall 5DayDeal strategy, you know, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all those guys, or is it strictly an email play for you?

You know, five years ago when I did the first one, Facebook was much more important these days. Engagement without paying for any kind of reach on Facebook is just almost next to nothing. So social media has got less important for me. But it's still you know, it's still definitely makes some money. You know, even if I see 10 or 20 sales through social media throughout the deal, that's still worth my time, which is really only about 10 minutes to post a few social posts.

You know, I schedule them with Buffa, which is a service that can you can just schedule your social posts with. And so I tend to do that before the deal or on the first day of the deal. I'll set everything up once I've got my blog posts created. So it's very little effort to reach my my social followers at the moment. And it's still worth doing it, definitely. But the importance of it, I would say, is definitely tailed off over the years.

As far as reaches our one thing that maybe has got more important is Instagram. You know, Instagram is still a tricky nut to crack because you can't put a link in the description of a photo. So Instagram stories has been what I've been using over the last couple of years. You know, Instagram stories get quite a lot of engagement. So, yeah, I share quite a lot of information and updates throughout the sale on my stories so people can kind of follow along how much money we're making.

And I'll share sort of random products that are in the bundle. And I feel like that is something that has been on the increase. So definitely this year and next year I'm going to be pushing the stories even even harder.

I love it. I love it. Yeah, that's a that's a golden tip as well, you know, because, you know, if you just listen to the first part of this discussion, you would think it's all about email, but Folden Instagram into that fold as well. What about the blog, though? So you mentioned when you when you send out an email or an Instagram post and you're driving people to a euro, is it best to send them directly to the 5DayDeal sales page for checkout, or do you warm them up by sending them to a Dan Carr blog post and then from there send them over to the deal?

Both of those things at the moments when I am predicting there is going to be a higher rate of sales, a higher conversion rate on the 5DayDeal page, for example, the last day, you know, let's say we're getting into the last day. I'm not going to waste people's time by pushing them to my blog and then having them bounce over to the 5DayDeal page. You know, when the time is ticking down and the conversion rate is really high on the 5DayDeal website, I want to get them to that site as fast as possible on other days when I know the sales rates a little bit lower.

I'm going to be writing a blog post on the site that's going to be explaining some of the content, some of my favorite content that I've picked out from the bundle. And I'll send people there because I'm aware that in the earlier parts of the sales process, sometimes people need to hear about things a few different times. So I'm OK with them. Going to my blog towards the start of the bundle, you know, first day, second day.

And then I click through and I'll at least get them cooking at that point, even if they don't purchase. And then later on, when I send them another email, I'm going to be sending them straight to the court and hopefully that's when they convert.

And now with that and as part of that overall flow, are you adding in any any special bonuses like, hey, buy for me and you'll get X, Y, X, Y and Z along with the bundle? Or is it just strictly, hey, go buy the bundle because it's chock full of goodness.

There are some benefits to throwing in something. The only reason, you know, on years when I haven't done that, it's purely been a time factor for me. You know, my business is busy doing other things or life is just busy. You know, I moved across the country not too long ago and that that was kind of happening at the time of the last 5DayDeals. So, you know, I try to to make a decent work life balance, if I can.

So the there is a benefit to offering something if you have the time for it, but you've got to make it good. So it's not something that I would ever rush into last minute. You know, I would I would need quite a lot of preparation time to create something that's worthwhile for that. So, yeah, if you have the time and the skills to put something together, then it's it's worth doing. But yeah, it's got to be good because people need to trust you.

So if you're dangling this carrot in front of them, it's got to be a tasty carrot.

Yeah. Yeah. Or else you run the risk of just sort of losing credibility all around. So we talked a little bit about automation and autopilot, you know, with the with the auto responders and that sort of thing in the beginning of the deal, or when you're in the preparation stages for deploying a campaign that's going to promote the 5DayDeal, how much of that is automated? How much do you load into Buffer and just say, boom, go one day and this email goes out two days in these social posts go out, you know, all that, and then you just sort of sit back and watch the sales roll in, or is it, you know, Dan Carr, you know, sort of playing playing the campaign manually as the thing rolls on for five days.

Like if I've got other things going on at that time in my life, whether that's business or personal, than I do automate a little bit more of it. But I like to be near my computer like I wouldn't ever go on vacation during the 5DayDeal to a place where I couldn't get Internet, for example. You know, I wouldn't automate it to that point. I'd say my social media posts are as automated as they can be apart from Instagram stories, which you can't automate at the moment, as far as I'm aware.

So my social media is fairly automated. But in terms of the newsletters, what I feel is that you need to you need to look at the statistics from your first newsletter that you send out. You need to look at the open, right. You need to look at what people are clicking on in order to build the second one. So I'll have like a framework set out in my mind for how these emails are going to go out throughout the sale.

But I don't I don't automate those because I want to see the success of the previous one and see what people are interested in and how things are going. That usually makes me switch up a little bit of the wording or the structure of the next email. And it also allows me to include how and in terms of charitable donations throughout the sale or charitable income. So in the next email, you know, before that one goes out, I'll, you know, get on with the 5DayDeal team and say, OK, what's total?

You know, we up to ten thousand twenty thousand dollars. Thirty thousand. And I'll stick that information in the email as well. So if you fully automated all your emails, you wouldn't have the ability to do that. And I think that that's important as well. I mean, I want to tell people how much money we're raising for these charities. So, yeah, I don't don't really automate the emails to the full extent. Yeah.

Yeah, that's that's good. But you kind of have it in your head. What's going to go when it's just, OK, let me let me fill in and and put the meat, put the meat in the sandwich so to speak. Yeah. This tracking you sort of winding this up, you know, just speaking of keeping track of things as you progress through the deal, how are you tracking, you know, the leads that come in through, say, Instagram versus the blog versus, you know, various emails that you send out?

Or are you just sending you know, are you just sending one email? And that's you know, if they convert, they convert and you count that number.

So this is an important point. The affiliate system that the 5DayDeal team uses allows you to attach attach a sub ID to the end of your affiliate link so you can tell exactly where or what campaign or newsletter or social media channel a lead came from. So before the sale starts, I open up my notes application on my Mac and I create a ton of different links here. So one will be my affiliate link. Instagram and wannabe's Twitter and want to be on Facebook, and then they'll be email one, email to email three, and those emails will sometimes be reasons of previous emails if people didn't open them.

But I have a long list of all these links that I create before the sale starts. And what's important is that at the end of the sale, you can download all that data and you can see, OK, you know, I ran some sidebar ads on my website and that was kind of a pain in the ass because I had to take out a bunch of Google ads to do that and I only generated one sale. So next year I'm not going to bother with that.

But look at this. On Instagram, I generated 10 sales by just doing this one simple thing. And in my first email, I generated twenty sales or something like that. So I have historical data from previous years that are tied to all of these sub IDs on my affiliate links. So I can basically go back and say, you know, this is what worked and this is what didn't. Because in the same way that I don't want to impose myself on people's inbox, I don't want to completely destroy my website with banner ads and floating things, pop ups and all that kind of stuff as well.

So I'm testing things all the time to see what works. And, you know, there's the WordPress plug in. If people are using a WordPress website that brings up a little timer at the bottom of the screen so you can track how many sales you get from that. And that's actually been a great one for sales in previous years. So that yeah, that's important. You can you can really track where all these leads came from. But equally important is keeping some of that historical data.

So when you set things up next year, you know what worked the previous year, that's brilliant.

So I'd never I'd never considered the idea of using the customized links on a on sort of a chronological basis. You know, in other words. Yeah, OK. You want to know who came in from Instagram? You want to know who came in from email, who came in from your blog, etc. so you can do more of that or different Facebook paid advertising that you might do if you're doing that. But I never considered saying, OK, here's email one and this is how email one performed an email to an email three.

And you're doing it in that way, right? Yeah, that's really, really cool. All right. Well, cool. So let's let's wrap this up any any so people that are considering participating in the 5DayDeal, like we said at the beginning, either as a contributor or as an affiliate or otherwise, what what sort of Parting Shots advice would you give them? Someone sitting there like, hey, I got invite to this thing. I'm not sure what to do next.

What should they do right now?

You are going to need to have a little bit of planning on this, especially if it's your first time doing it. So you're going to need to prepare some content for your blog. You're going to need to structure out some kind of schedule for your emails that are going out. And, you know, before the sale comes out, the 5DayDeal team do make some suggestions on that. They'll give you some documents that have some suggested social posting schedules and email posting schedules.

So take notice of what they're sending you. Make yourself a little calendar that's got all of that stuff on there, because it does have a bit of a habit of sneaking up on you. And, you know, I've been in that boat before where I'm kind of preparing things last minute the night before, and I don't like that. So taking some time to prepare yourself is important and then just being aware that, hey, if you're going to be an affiliate for this thing and you just put a link on your blog and just call it good and you don't promote it and you don't send emails about it, you are not going to make money from this.

You know, I know they have people every year that come in and they just they do the bare minimum and, you know, then they act surprised when they don't make any money from it. So, you know, if you're going to be a part of this, you've got to kind of jump in with both feet and you've got to be prepared to talk to your followers, talk to your subscribers, and you've got to be prepared to do a little bit of sales work for a few days.

You know, that's that's basically what it comes down to you if you. Yeah, exactly. And if you're willing to do that, you're prepared to do that. You schedule a bit of time to do that. Then you can make some good money from this. Whether you've got a big list or a small list, it's it's as simple as that. Very cool.

Very cool. Very, very helpful tips. Man, I appreciate you being so candid and open about this stuff. It's a you know, a lot of a lot of times people look at this 5DayDeal stuff or any sort of marketing as sort of the secret sauce. Am I going to show you my marbles because you might take customers from me. So I really appreciate you being so open and sharing about this stuff. I think it's important. Yeah, no problem.

You're welcome. Yeah.

Oh, cool. So so, Dan Carr, if people want to if people want to catch up with you and check out your work and, you know, maybe reach out to you and, you know, otherwise be engaged, where should they go to do that? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

Those are the places to get hold of me. You know, shoot me a DM on any of those services and I'll get back to you if you got questions. And then Dan Carr photography is is my website for my my sort of more personal stuff and shuttermuse.com is my my big photography blog. So check that out.

All right. Dan Carr, thank you so much for your time today. Man, I appreciate you.

Hey, folks, in this interview, I'm talking with solo-prenuer Blake Rudis, we're going to be talking about how you can be more effective at your affiliate marketing when participating in the 5DayDeal.

Hey, folks, welcome back, we are going to dive into a really, hopefully informative interview discussion about affiliate marketing as applied to the 5DayDeal, how you can use some pretty simple tools. And I don't want to call them tricks because that sounds weird, but just some tools and techniques to maximize your returns when you've been sort of anointed to participate in this deal.

To talk to me about that is Blake Rudis. He's here. He is one of the more successful affiliates and partners with the 5DayDeal folks. He's going to he's agreed to be on the hot seat and his awesome office there and talk to us about how he makes, you know, a couple of bucks on the 5DayDeal. Blake, welcome to the show, man. How's it going?

Thanks. Thanks. It's going good, man. It's going real good. Yeah. Good to be here.

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation because, you know, I participated in the 5DayDeal and I've done a couple of conversations that are specifically about the 5DayDeal and how people can participate in or be more successful in it. And it's interesting that, you know, people come at it from a variety of different angles. But there's one common denominator in there. I mean, can you guess what the common denominator is? Social media?

No e-mail, email marketing. People love the one you beefalo. There you. I know you knew that. So so before we dove in and give us some some just sort of background history on you, what's, what's your sort of cocktail party elevator pitch. Cool.

Yeah. We just kind of talked about the before and I don't have one that you in real quick. Basically back in 2010 I started a blog on photography and Photoshop HDR photography. So don't hate me for that. But I've rebranded out of that and I'm now 60 for Academy. But basically I'm a photo educator. I teach Photoshop and photography online.

Pretty much been so low my my whole career, I guess I can call it that now.

And it started out not really making much of anything at all as far as money was concerned. It wasn't until I flipped the switch on my website to start accepting emails to come in to to basically collect leads for email addresses. I wanted to be this martyr and say I'm not going to collect emails, I'm not going to be that person and ask for email address. Little did I know that you can't make any money if you don't have emails. So once I started to get serious about it, I was kind of on this pivot point of where am I going to go next with this?

And can I even take this to a point of a career? And if I'm not, I'm going to have to stop. So I developed a product, pitched it to my email and kind of the rest is history. I realized just how imperative it is to have an email subscribers list and people that care about your message.

All right. Let's let's take it from there and talk about that a little bit, the whole email piece of it, because a lot of people will say, yeah, email is great, but, you know, it's sort of a necessary means to an end where the real action is, like you said, the beginning is social media. Of course, you got to have a big Twitter following and Facebook and all that stuff. And once you have that, you can monetize it by just saying, hey, Facebook, I have a product and I want to sell it, put it in front of my followers churching.

Right is right, you know, and I'm sort of setting you up for a tee ball swing here. So, yeah, you have to knock this out of the park.

I love it. It's Tom Cruise coming in for the spike.

So do it.

You know, I would say that if if someone were to come to me now and say, OK, I've got a new business for you, and in this business you can either have 5000 email leads or 500000 social media followers, which when are you going to take? I'll take the five thousand email leads any day and I'll leave the five hundred thousand social media to the side. And a big reasoning for that is that social media cost you money.

Now your email list is going to cost you money as well. But if you want to promote anything to that social media to see the people in there, you're lucky. And you can just test this on your Facebook. You're lucky if you get even five percent engagement on that email list versus what you're going to get in an email subscription depending on your messaging. Of course, now you have to set up your messaging the right way as well. But social media, I like to say, is it's for free and for fun.

Now, if anybody does their homework on me, that might be watching this from a contributor's perspective and they look at my Instagram and my Facebook, they're going to see that I have got one thousand five hundred followers on Instagram and I've got maybe five thousand two hundred followers on Facebook. So when you look at that metric, you say this guy is not making any money. Look at that. But if I were to try and put out a course that I create and put it out to those 5000 people on Facebook, I'm going to generate two, maybe three sales from Facebook if I'm lucky, just without doing an ad.

That's just to my current five thousand some people. Now, just to give you some inside perspective and some. As my first launch I ever did was to an email list of twelve hundred people of email subscribers and they were very engaged email subscribers, but twelve hundred email subscribers in six days produced twenty two thousand dollars on one course. So now if you're going to do do the math on that of that twelve hundred, it was a eighty seven course or whatever that that might be a lot of people bought and that opened up a whole new avenue for me, especially in the mindset now where am I going to place my efforts?

So many people are placing their efforts on social media, social media, social media to get that train moving when in reality it should be your email marketing campaigns. And that's where you should put all of your faith into that's going to produce you money. And I say that twenty nineteen. Obviously, there's always marketing trends and how things shift and migrate. It's getting more and more difficult to make those kinds of numbers happen on emails as opposed to one in twenty thirteen, the first launch I ever did.

So you had to kind of take that in consideration, depending on the email providers and what emails they let through. That's a constant struggle.

But you can increase your the word I'm looking for here a reputation with Google and Yahoo! By sending out good quality emails. He knows that people click emails that people open and emails that people take action on. So as long as you set yourself up for success with the email marketing, it will be more powerful than social media, I can guarantee you that.

Yeah, and that's the put that very eloquently because. Yeah, it is. It's it's an asset. Right. So you look at email, your email list is a tangible business asset that you can rely on to, like you said, generate, you know, five figures in six days. Right. So you can do that sort of thing. All things being equal, if you treat it correctly, like you're saying. But the other piece of it is I call the the world of social media.

Like you said, it's it's not you know, it's not serious business. It's more of a party. It's more it's social, right? Yeah. By definition, it's social and it's not yours. You know, it's got a visual of me, like showing up to a part of like, hey guys want to buy this from me. Yeah, exactly. Don't be that guy that shows up with the with the banners, you know, over in and out burger or whatever, saying you're in, you're at a cocktail party and you're like, hey, my name is Bellaigue.

You would buy a burger for me. Yeah. And the other piece of it is the Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, the Twitter people and all. You know, they own your engagement. They own your, quote, customer or your relationship with those people. And if they decide one day, you know, the rules have changed and we don't like the product that you're selling, you're out of business. And then the the other side of that leaf is if the they make a determination on who they're going to show your messages to.

Right. Whereas exactly. Right. So have you had that experience where you're like, hey, I got 5000 people, but only one person is seeing this? How do I fix that? Oh, you've got to pay to play. You know, it is.

And I've actually gone through some email or some social media marketing courses. And one of the the market is Rachel. Rachel Miller is her name.

And she basically said Facebook has this bag of very pixel dust that they give you. And if if you tell people to continue to go to your website from Facebook over and over and over again without feeding the Facebook machine, that's like taking out your fairy dust and throwing it out of your bag until you have no more fairy dust left. And then Facebook says, well, you haven't done anything to generate a community here. Why would we show any of the people your message?

Yeah, so you have to play the game. You have to play that. OK, I'm going to show, you know, fifteen to twenty pictures with no Action. I don't want you to see me Action. I just want you to share this funny quip or whatever that puts pixel dust into your into your bag. Yeah. So that when you do need to get someone to go from Facebook to your website, you can then take some of that and transfer it over without having to pay money for it.

So if you feed the Facebook machine content that doesn't take it away from Facebook, they will treat you very well. If you feed into Facebook content that's constantly going outside of Facebook to your website to try and generate leads. They're going to make you pay to play. Yeah, yeah. And the whole thing is an investment now. No, contrast that with the email side of things. Right. Because, you know, you touched on the idea of deliverability, making sure you're sending good content out to your list, because much like that social media party, if you just jump on with your list of, let's say, 5000 people and just start barraging them with ads, what's going to happen?

They aren't going to take action anymore.

Yeah, so, you know, a big a big when it comes to any of this stuff, when it comes to any marketing, especially Internet marketing, you've got to know psychological triggers like the back of your hand. And there's a couple of psychological triggers that you can use when it comes. The email marketing and most people that are sitting in these positions want to say, I'm an authority figure, I'm an influencer. Well, you're only an authority figure and an influencer if the people that you're servicing trust you and feel like you've given them enough.

So the two big things that you want in order to gain that status of an authority figure to them is trust and reciprocity. So I give you this, and because I give you this, they then feel, wow, this guy has given us so much for free. Imagine what he's going to do or she's going to do when they've got a product to sell. So if this YouTube video that's going up is like 10 minutes long and it solves a huge problem for somebody, they're going to thank you in the back of the head, whether they email you about it or not.

And then a couple of days down the road, if you send out an email that's asking them for money, that's what we do when we promote the 5DayDeal or something else, then they'll be more apt to take action on that because they trust you because of what you've done for them. So it's kind of the same concept of what's going on over at Facebook. The difference is I own that list at any time I can generate a CSFI export file of all the people that are in my list and I've got that.

So if I needed to move houses, so to speak, and pack up, I could pack up that list. I could move and I could bring it to another email marketing provider and I'd be good to go. I can't pack up my Facebook leads and bring them over to Instagram. I can't pack up my Instagram leads and bring them over to Twitter or wherever that might be.

So a big part of engaging with your list, I think, happens two to three months prior to any major event that you want to do. So with the 5DayDeal coming up in October, we're now at August. Am I right? Yeah, I'm right. Wow.

It's going by fast. Yeah. We're now at August.

So if you want to to engage, if you want your list to be engaged with your message come October, you got to start feeding them now and you got to start feeding them free stuff. And good quality quality is the key and value. If you feed them quality and value, they will help you when you need help. OK, so so, Blake, you talk about delivering value in building up their reciprocity over time in advance of the ask or the you know what?

Can you can you give me some money, you know, type promotion? What's the put a final finer point on it. What what are some valuable pieces of content that we can drip out to our audience so that they feel like they're getting value? What can we deposit so that they can get ready for the withdrawal?

That's a great question, because it really comes down to knowing your audience and knowing your audience pretty well. So I've been doing this with my audience for probably six close to six years. And what they can expect is almost every week I'm going to give them something of value. If I've got a hectic month where I'm doing a big launch or something's going on, I got family vacation. I don't put myself through that. But like what I'm doing for Friday, this coming Friday is I do it every Friday.

I do an email and I don't write my emails with, like, a graphic. And like all of this super spammy stuff that you see come from, like big software companies. It's mainly like, hey, good morning, how are you? You know, this month is crazy. I can't believe it's August and my kids are getting ready for school next week. Then I go into, hey, you know, while I'm at it, I was in Photoshop the other day and I came up with this technique that I think you're going to find helpful if you've ever been in a situation like this, then I used this technique to fix this.

OK, so then that will take them over to my website. Doesn't ask them for anything, doesn't even display, of course, that I'm selling or anything. I have one message for them and that's that. I want you to watch this free video. I want you to watch this free video. I want you to watch this free video. And you do that repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, and you give out stuff that they want. Now, I know that my industry is very much the landscape hobbyist photographers.

Yeah. So if I were to come out and do a portrait video, they don't take action because they know that they expect to see landscape photography from me. So I deliver content that's that would help them specifically by knowing who they are and what they need and what they want. Now, you generate that over the course of time, through I do it through a more natural form of selection.

So I don't put like, hey, get my free ebook on X, Y, Z in order for someone to become part of my email list, because then someone's coming on your email list to get a free ebook. Now are you going to make a sale off of them at some point? You might, but I would rather have an organic list. My list is not very big. We're talking sub twenty thousand people, which most people that I even launched.

I do coaching services for people in the industry and most of those people have double, triple my email list and they're coming to me for advice, which is awesome. But I know them very well because they all came in from a very organic place. They came in from YouTube.

They saw that I had a subscription list, subscribers list, and then they became a part of that. So I pretty much know what they want. Every once in a while I can ask them if I'm saying, hey, I'm creating some content for the next couple of weeks. If there's anything that you're interested in, please let me know and I'll put that on my list of things to do. That way, it's it's it's a give and take thing.

And they also see from like a like a I guess like a humility standpoint that you don't know everything, that you even you need help when you're creating the content that you're going to be creating for them. And a lot of people actually feel when you give people an opportunity to talk, you're basically tapping into their greatest gift. You know, they kind of want to give you that information, too, so you can ask for the information as to what it is that you should be giving them, maybe give them some type of guide to the survey so that you can get those results and then feed them what they need, because ultimately that's going to be the best course of action for you to create your your videos and your tutorials.

That's cool. That's cool. And when you're sending out those those questions or the I think I heard you say that the cadence that you send in these emails out are weekly, like every Friday or is it multiple times a week? I've seen emails like shall remain unnamed, but some photographers sent out an email literally every single day and have gotten that attrition into their model. Ah, well, how do you manage that piece of it?

I try to go weekly. I have a lot of automation sequences that happen now. So if I were if I were to physically set something up that goes out daily, somebody might be getting an email from me two to three times a day because of some of the other automation sequences that I have out there that are helping them towards our photographic processes. And I don't really try to convolute that. So I try to make Friday my day. That's, you know, Blake's updates or Blake's new tutorial or you know what?

I'm going to interface with them. And it's funny because I even have subscribers now that email me last one yesterday said, hey, I'm worried about you haven't heard from me in a month. I just went through a product launch. And then right after that product launch, we went on a one week vacation. And then after that I had some other commitments. So it's. And really difficult for me to interface with my audience, but that shows their level of concern because now they're like, wait a sec, you know, are you OK?

I need to do a personnel, a person check on, you know, just to make sure that nothing in your life is going south. And I get those emails quite a bit, which I think is kind of cool. So they kind of expect it to come every Friday. So that's the rhythm that I've gotten myself into over the last several years, is just send out Friday emails and you're writing those yourself.

So you're are you writing them on that Friday? You sit down with your cup of coffee and you write out the email and send it as a broadcast, or do you write them in advance and just, you know, double check and send on Fridays?

I've done a couple of ways. I've done it so that I generate all my content for the month and then I send it out. I have it all kind of pretty canned and ready to go. But that's if I have that content, I'm not going to lie. Yesterday I woke up and I was like, oh, let's do a tutorial on content where Phil.. So I recorded it yesterday. Edit it today and then tomorrow I'll send out the email.

So it's already live on YouTube. And then, you know, I'll put the email out to make sure people caught it. So it depends if you're if you have the ability to create all that content up front, it would definitely make your life easier. So you don't have to worry about it. But I run everything off of damage control now, so it's pretty much, you know, get it out Friday morning and go from there.

Are you writing it Friday morning or you ready when it's in damage control mode, you do it that day, or is it like the night before, like, oh, crap, I'm laying in bed. Let me bring out this quick email.

I'll do it the day of I mean, there's there's there's times I'm doing a product launch. My first the first time I did a product launch, I had no idea what I was doing. And I was reading Geoff Walker's launch formula on how to how to do a product launch.

And literally every day I was making up the emails as it went for that six day launch. Just no idea what I was doing that. But it was very successful. I think I said that first launch I told you about that was, you know, that was successful. That was the twenty. There was a twenty four point twenty eight launch. It was like I woke up and I was like, OK, got to come up with an email.

What am I going to do? I spent all day writing one email. Wow.

Now, do you attribute the success of that first launch? Obviously an email, but do you attribute it to the techniques that you learned from from the Jeff Walker course?

Oh, I pick up from all kinds of people. So Jeff Walker, I picked up the launch stuff from Russell Brunson for a lot of the webinar stuff, Rachel Miller for Social Media.

So I definitely would attribute the success to the knowledge that I have acquired over the course of time. Now, with Jeff Walker's launch, I didn't pay for his like three thousand dollar program. Yeah, a lot of these individuals give you beautiful information in their books. And if you have some type of knowhow and a lot of motivation, you can basically take what they've taught and put it into practice for your own business, which is kind of the stuff that I've done.

You know, I have paid for some other big ticket marketing things, but for the most part, a lot of the stuff that I learned about launching was from Jeff Walker's book and then taking that and putting my spin on it so that it could be more personality driven. I'm a very personable with my audience. You know, I've even had some people for my audience that come in from the UK that say, hey, I'm purposely making a pit stop in Kansas City, can we go get lunch or something like that?

And it's cool. You know, I had them in my house and I'm feeding them dinner and stuff.

And that's the level of kind of maybe I'm too trusting, I don't know. But that's the level of care that I take towards my subscribers.

And I'm going to tell you straight up, if you care about them, they will care about you. If you care about what they need, they will care about you, your message when you're delivering it. So I talk a lot when it comes to these types of things. I talk in a way that sounds like, oh, you're just out there to make money. That's not the case. You know, when we're talking in this environment, I'm going to give you the tips and the strategies that you need to make more money, but also understand that the people that are on the other end of your emails are people.

They eat, they sleep, they breathe. They're a brother or a sister. They're an uncle. They're a grandmother, grandfather, whatever that might be. And they've got morals. They've got values. So I don't send emails that I wouldn't send to my father and my father's on my email list.

So that's like, hey, boy, I saw that email with you up to these days. Exactly. I love it.

Yeah, my dad's on line, too. OK, well, let's talk about that a little bit, the quality of the list, because that's important, especially if you're participating in something like the 5DayDeal, which is, you know, a lot of it is charitable components. And, you know, they don't want any sort of sleazy business practices associated with what they're doing, understandably. So. That said, when someone's listening to a conversation like this or like, OK, well, OK, I get it.

Email is where it's at. But crap, I don't have a list right now, you know. I know understand I think I understand how to build up that list. But, you know, I want to participate in this thing in a couple of months or whatever. I saw somewhere I could go by a hundred thousand. AIMS in 100000 photographers or two hundred or a million photographers, and they do some quick back of the napkin math, if Blake was able to make 20000 from around a thousand subscribers with a million, I should be able to go by my island and retire.

How would you advise that person that was thinking of moving down that road?

Um, it really depends. So I've set up done launch coaching before and I might launch coaching that I do is like this is not like a personal what do you call it, a testimonial testimonial or whatever.

It's I'm not trying to promote my stuff. What I'm saying is that I've taught people how to make a launch with my formula that have an email list of five thousand two hundred and fifty thousand. And you'd be shocked that some of the people that have a 5000 email list can get a better, not more money, but they can get a better conversion rate than someone with one hundred and fifty thousand. And what that comes down to is how well you cater to the messaging that you're putting out there.

And the individual with one hundred fifty thousand might be doing the hey, I've got nine dollar courses all day, every day.

I'm on those lists to know what that says to your audience is, oh, you don't value your education, so you're going to send it to me, sell it to me for nine dollars. Awesome. Yeah, that's what that says. Now, that's different than what we do when we come together for the 5DayDeal, because it's a grouping of artists, photographers that are trying to share their knowledge in a way that also helps and assists charities.

So it becomes a charity event more than it becomes a hey, buy some cheap courses. That's the beautiful part about the 5DayDeal and why it is so successful. So just because you have a bigger list doesn't mean that that is going to help you, because you have to understand that list again, their people. And how have you engaged with them? A perfect example of that is I could walk into a room of one hundred and twenty thousand portrait photographers at some convention and they would all walk right past me and not know who I was.

But I could walk to into a convention of three hundred landscape photographers and all of them be like, Oh my gosh, with Blake, let's go talk to Blake. And that's cool and all. But I'm not saying that to fluff my feathers, but the concept is that just because they're photographers doesn't mean they care about your message. So you have to make sure that the individuals that are on your list are engaged with your message. A lot of us, especially in this ecosystem of marketing, don't have a traffic direction problem.

We have a messaging problem. So I've been in some launch coaching sessions where I assess their list and say, wow, you can definitely drive traffic to a place. I can see that. But they don't take action on what that person is offering. And that's a messaging issue. You can drive the traffic, but they don't take Action. So how do you get them to take action is by again, they have to trust you. They have to have that reciprocity in their mind.

Then you become an authority figure that can actually be an influencer. Just because you have an influence doesn't mean you're an influencer. Right, right. That's a very hard thing for us to wrap our heads around. Sometimes we're saying I'm out there, I'm doing my YouTube, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Why are people engaged with my stuff? Well, there's a messaging issue. Yeah, see, that's brilliant. I want to I want to sign up for your coaching class.

That is it. Let's rewind a little bit and talk about the format of those emails. Right. So you mentioned that you sent a very simple email. It's not very it doesn't look like Target or Wal-Mart or someone like that. Sintered. It looks like it came from you. What does that look like? There are no graphics in there. It is it just text only like, hey, insert subscriber name some text, a link and salutation or is it more is it more involved in that.

It's a mix.

So I put my F sixty four header on the top. That way they know it's coming from me and every email that they see has a sixty header at the top. Then right underneath that is good morning or good afternoon. Yes. Then after the first paragraph I give them some insight on my crazy kids life and what's going on right now with with me. I then go into the meat of what it is I'm going to tell them in this video or whatever I have for them that week.

And then I usually sign it your and then in quotations, something that has to deal with that friend Blake. And I usually put whatever is really pertinent in the piece because that's what people usually read. So a typical email would be like, hey, good morning, my kids are crazy. I'm sure you know that somewhere towards the end, thank goodness. So I got this thing with content where I feel I'd love for you to check it out, click the link below to watch this free video.

Your wish I could use content where Phil in my house friend Blake. P.S. I just started selling t shirts on YouTube. If you're interested, you can take a look at that.

Something like that. Nice. That's clean. I love that.

And three hundred words, Max.

I don't go beyond three hundred words, really, because I've seen some I mean, you seen these these sales letters, right. That are that are just miles and miles and miles and miles long. You're just like scrolling so long that you're the scroll bar becomes like a little dot. You know, your nose is forever content. So you're you don't do that. So 300, what led you to the three hundred number just trial and error or some kind of psychology.

It's mainly psychology. People's inboxes. They want they want things fast and they want you to be to the point. So in the military, we use this term called bluff. Bottom line up front. I give it to me like it is. Don't make it take too long because I don't have time for you. However, in this world, it's more of like, hey, this is what I got. This is what I want to show to you.

The importance is not my email to you. It's where I want you to go. So I try to keep the email short so I can increase my click rate, because if you it's like it's like a preview for a movie. If you're watching Netflix, my wife and I will go through there. When we're in a show home, we're like, hey, let's watch this. And we start watching the preview. If we feel like we watch the whole show and a preview, we aren't going to watch the show.

Yeah, right.

So the same thing happens in your email. If you give away all the goods in the email about what it is that you're taking them to is going to do, then there's no reason for them to go where it is that you're telling them to go. Yeah. So that's why I keep my email short and to the point I also make sure I email around 10:00, whatever is going to be ten o'clock their time that way, because I know what happens with me and my resume in the morning.

I'm just to be fully honest, I wake up, I go p I look at my emails and as I'm being I delete every email that I don't think is going to be important to me even before I click it. Yep.

So, you know, you got to get into their routine and understand that their routine is going to start long before ten o'clock in the morning. They're going to clear out their inbox and then at ten o'clock you're going to be fresh. That's why I usually don't email on Mondays either because their email box is flooded. Why would you email on a day when they just had a whole weekend off and then they're inbox is full Tuesday as a reason why movies come out on Tuesday, not on Monday or Friday, because Tuesday no one's got anything going on.

Yeah, if people want to dove in and sort of see some of the stuff that you're working on Blak and sign up for your list and consume some of your content, what's a good place for them to start at?

Sixty four academy dotcom. That's where you can find me. Just my short dotcom. But yeah it's pretty simple, very cool of sixty four academy dotcom and I'm very, I'm very open with my email.

So even if you're an affiliate or contributor right now and you're like man, I want to get a hold of this guy, anywhere that you see an email coming from me you can reply to and you get me. It's not a Zendesk. It's not, you know, some intern, it's me.

So if you have any questions about this stuff and you want to know how you can make your affiliate launch better for the 5DayDeal, I'm not going to hold back anything from you because I think we all grow by us doing this together. So don't don't hesitate to reach out. If you need anything perfect.

We'll leave it right there. Blake, thank you so much for coming on and I appreciate it.

All right. See you next time. Thanks. Appreciate you having me.