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NOTE: If you’re a brand new customer of mine – I send out a new tutorial every week about running a solopreneur business and copywriting. There's nothing for sale this week.

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Today I’m going to pull back the curtains on my business to a slightly uncomfortable (for me) degree.

This week I’ve been showing you one of my best secret weapons: The 30 Second Survey.

I’ve been using these unique surveys in my business for years, and whenever I’m tasked with a consulting project or helping to grow other businesses, it’s the first step I take.

The entire purpose of this survey is to identify the people in your audience who are desperate to have their problems solved - and are more than happy to pull out their credit cards to do it.

In this email, I’ll show you how I’ll use the data from the 30-Second Survey I ran earlier this week with my list (including you) to decide whether I should promote an affiliate product.

But let me start at the beginning.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you know quite a bit about my business model.

You know that I’ve stripped away everything and now focus exclusively on selling courses.

  • I get people on an email list
  • I deliver as much value as I possibly can muster via email in pre-launch and launch sequences
  • I build and sell courses mainly using the Email Delivered Courses method
  • I sell affiliate products if they’re good, I use them, they’re not part of my expertise, and only if they make sense for my list

You also know that my main source of traffic these days is through affiliates and word-of mouth.

Now, like any source of traffic, affiliate traffic has its pros and cons.

One con is that sometimes in order to get affiliates to send you traffic, you need to send them traffic first. Even though my sales pages convert at above industry standard rates, cross-promotions are still a major “thing” in the affiliate traffic world.

My main problem is this: I can’t find enough good affiliate products to promote.

I’d like to run more affiliate promotions but for the most part, everything out there is dog shit.

(I love Ian Stanley’s products and courses and promoted him a week ago with some good success.)

Generally, in the copywriting, solopreneur, marketing and online business world right now - everyone is selling a B.S. crypto offer or an AI tool that I just can’t get behind (because I’m still not using AI to write any copy. I’m not against AI or AI tools, I’m just not using it yet for copy so I wouldn’t be able to ethically sell it to you.)

Not having products to promote is a real problem for me and my business. So I recently hired an affiliate manager to do some contract work for me.

She was able to track down one of my heroes: Jay Abraham.

When I was first getting started with online business (and through the first several years of CopyHour) I listened to old Jay Abraham recordings on repeat. I absolutely love the guy. He’s a legend, an OG marketer and every guru you know claims Jay as their mentor.

Anyway, I nearly jumped out of my seat when I was “given” the opportunity to promote a Jay Abraham product.

But when I saw the product and the sales page I sat back down and took a breath. I wasn’t sure it’d be a good fit for my people.

The product is called the Founders Circle and is a membership community with monthly coaching calls hosted by Jay and his partner Patrick Gentempo.

I am NOT selling you this product at the moment so don’t worry that this has all been some sort of invisible pitch.

Here’s where I’m taking you behind the scenes of my business…

To my eye initially, this community seemed to be mainly aimed at established entrepreneurs who wanted to extract more profit from their marketing efforts and business.

In other words, I wasn’t sure if this was something my audience would be interested in.

I stopped myself because I quickly realized I was just assuming all kinds of things without really knowing.

So, let’s return to the 30 Second Survey and I’ll show you how I actually use the data to make decisions (in this case, I’m trying to decide if I should promote Jay’s Founders Circle - you are so far backstage right now you’re basically in the green room partying with me).

The first question on the survey is: “How long have you been studying how to build/grow online businesses?”

The results to this one were different than what I expected.
 
 
The largest segment is people who have been studying for 5+ years! That shocked me. And if you look more closely, about 80% of my list (and remember, these are mostly the buyers who fill out these surverys), have 1+ years of experience studying business.

Now, let’s compare that to the next question: “What’s your ONE major dream goal right now?”
 
 
There are basically two audiences here. The first audience, which wants to “start a business,” makes up around 50% of my buyers audience.

And the second audience of people who want to “grow a business” (meaning they’ve likely already started in some way) makes up 35% of my buyers audience.

That about tracks with what I thought.

Let’s start putting some of this information together to make a decision on whether I should promote Jay's Founders Circle.

At first glance, based on these 2 questions, Jay’s Founders Circle appears like a solid match for my list. If I had to put a grade on the “promotional fit”, I’d give it a solid “B”.

It’s solid because according to the first question on my 30 Second Survey my list has lots of experience studying business. The Founders Circle’s sales page is more geared towards an advanced audience.

It would be an A+ if “growing a business” was the more dominant dream goal in question number two.

Jay and his team do have copy that would address the people looking to start versus grow, as you can see in the image below, but “starting” is not the dominant theme.
 
 
Now, I could stop there and already I’d be ahead of most marketers when it comes to understanding their audiences and thinking through promotions.

But luckily I have even more data from the 30 Second Survey that I can read through to help me make my decision whether the Founders Circle is a good fit for a promotion to my list.

I have the third question which includes responses written by my buyers in their own words. That question is: “What’s your biggest struggle right now achieving that goal - and if you could wave a magic wand, what would your dream outcome look like?”

In the next email I’ll go through how I’ll use this question to make my final decision.

(Again, this isn’t some veiled attempt to sell you on the Founders Circle. I just thought it’d be helpful for you to see an over-the-shoulder view of how decisions are made with 30 Second Surveys.)

Talk to you soon!

– Derek
 

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