Day: May 30, 2024

How To Figure Out If People Want Your Digital Product Before You Invest Time and Money Developing It

Micheal O'Neill

How To Figure Out If People Want Your Digital Product Before You Invest Time and Money Developing It

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You have an idea for an online course or membership, but what if nobody buys it?

The last thing you want to do is invest valuable time, effort, and money in creating a program that no one buys.

I’ve helped hundreds of people launch their first online course and membership.

And this is the process I’ve used to help them to quickly figure out if their audience wants their digital product before they build it.

It’s called a founding member’s launch, and it’s the best way to profitably launch your first digital product without wasting money on building something people don’t want.

Here are 3 steps to deliver your founding member’s launch: 

Create your online course or membership outline.

Start by outlining the key modules of your course or your membership success path.

People need to know that you have a proven path they can follow. Your outline is the roadmap to their desired destination. You wouldn’t jump on a ship with a captain who didn’t know where they were going, nor would your audience.

Each step on the journey should be clear and should excite your audience.

Identify the transformation you can help people achieve

Next, describe your audience’s life when they implement your digital product.

What will they see, hear, do, and feel differently than they do today? While you can launch a digital product before you build it, you need to know your process works, and it will get them the results they want. Your job is to describe what the result looks like in the life of someone who has implemented your digital product.

Steps 1 and 2 are the foundation of your offer.

Offer access at a special founding members rate.

The final step is to launch our founding member offer.

Be clear with your audience that you intend to build the digital product with your founding members. Position it as a positive that you will seek their feedback and create content to answer their questions. In addition, they also get access to your course or membership at a much lower rate than people who buy in the future.

The founding member launch is a win-win all around.

Never invest in building a program before you find out if people want it.

Not alone could it be a giant waste of time, effort, and money.

But, it’s also doing a disservice to your students.

When you “build with” your founding members, you will discover many challenges and problems you never knew existed.

Using a founding member launch helps build a stronger digital product that will help future members achieve an even greater result faster.

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3 Must-Track Meta Ad Metrics to Profitably Scale Your Online Course or Membership

Micheal O'Neill

3 Must-Track Meta Ad Metrics to Profitably Scale Your Online Course or Membership

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When I started running Meta ads for online courses, memberships, and service providers, I drove myself crazy tracking every metric and stat.

Now, my team and I manage over $750,000 in client ad spend a year, but we track only three key metrics.

If you want to simplify your ad reporting and run profitable campaigns, here are the only 3 key metrics you need to track.

Metric #1 – Unique Outbound Click-Through Rate

Unique Outbound Click-Through Rate (UOCTR) is the most underrated metric, especially for new ad campaigns.

Your UOCTR is the best metric for the quality of your ad. Your initial goal is 1% – 1.5%. Anything over a 2% UOCTR, and your ad is highly engaging. While UOCTR does not mean that the ad will produce the highest return, I’ve never seen a 0.2% UOCTR with a positive return.

UOTCR becomes less important for established campaigns, but this is a great metric to track as long as you keep your ad copy and creative aligned with your funnel.

Metric #2 – Cost Per Lead

Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a multiple of your cost per thousand impressions (CPM), UOCTR, and opt-in page conversion rate.

Don’t get me wrong, your goal isn’t to get cheap leads. But you can use this metric to calculate if it’s even possible for your funnel to make money. The biggest factor impacting your CPL is your opt-in on-page conversion rate.

Our minimum opt-in page conversion rate target is 40%, but 60% – 80% is more than possible.

Metric #3 – Cost Per Acquisition

The Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is the king of all metrics. It’s the cost of acquiring a paying customer.

If I were to track only one metric per campaign, I would focus on CPA. While a high CTR or a low CPL are directionally correct, they don’t always give you the lowest CPA. If you have a funnel that converts in less than 7 days, this is the #1 figure you should look at every day.

Because the only true sign of a good ad campaign is Profit or Return on Ad Spend.

I love data, but too much data can confuse your day-to-day decisions.

No matter your campaign type or maturity, these 3 metrics will give you all the data you need to make quality optimization decisions.

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My top 5 lead generation funnels for digital product owners and service providers who want to grow their business online

Micheal O'Neill

My top 5 lead generation funnels for digital product owners and service providers who want to grow their business online

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When I started my first business, I believed it was incredibly complex.

After more than 20 years running successful 6 and 7-figure businesses, I see things differently.

I now see that all business activities fall into managing just 3 key categories.

And my job, every day, is to optimize one or other of these categories.

The 3 categories are – Leads, Sales & Fulfillment.

One of the reasons I love helping people build funnels online is that it helps them work on two of the big three categories: leads and sales.

Here are my top 5 funnels ranked from easiest to most complex to implement.

#1 – Meta Lead Ad Funnel

I love Meta lead ads if you’re getting started in lead generation.

Your leads submit their details via a form on Facebook or Instagram. This means you don’t need to worry about landing or thank you pages. Simply hook your Meta business manager to your email platform, and you’re off to the races.

#2 – Lead Magnet Funnel

The next step up is a standard lead manget funnel.

Here, you drive traffic from Meta or Google ads to an opt-in page offering a lead magnet. Your leads submit their details through a form on the landing page, which triggers a delivery and engagement sequence in your email platform.

#3 – Book A Call Funnel

If you need to speak to a prospect before they make a purchase, the book-a-call funnel is perfect for you.

I like to drive traffic to a lead magnet opt-in page and then give people the opportunity to book a call on the thank you page. You can drive people directly to the option to book a call, but you may find you end up on calls with lots of unqualified prospects.

#4 – Webinar Funnel

I love webinar funnels if you’re selling a mid- to high-value ($497+) digital product or service.

You drive traffic to the webinar opt-in page. Registrants join the webinar, during which you make an offer for your digital product or service. Registrants then get entered into an email sales sequence for 5-7 days.

#5 – Front End Mini Product Funnel

This is my favorite funnel of all time, and every business should have a front end mini product funnel.

You drive traffic to a lead magnet. On the opt-in thank you page, leads who opt in are offered a mini product ($27 – $97). The goal of this funnel is for the sales of the mini product to cover the cost of your ads, giving you an unlimited budget for lead generation.

Your business will die if it doesn’t have a consistent and reliable way of generating profitable leads.

The fact is every business has a lead and sales funnel.

It’s just some people are intentional about the design and results of the funnel.

It doesn’t matter which funnel you start with. All that matters is you start today.

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Should I cancel my premium subscription to ChatGPT now that GPT-4o is free?

Micheal O'Neill

Should I cancel my premium subscription to ChatGPT now that GPT-4o is free?

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GPT-4o is now free to all ChatGPT users.

Many online business owners and marketers have been asking themselves the same question.

Should I cancel my $20 monthly paid subscription to ChatGPT if I can get the newest and most powerful model for free?

My simple answer is NO.

Here are 3 reasons I think you need to keep your subscription:

Chat limitations

On the free model, you are limited to 10-16 chats per 3-hour period.

While 10-16 chats sound like a lot, you get the best outputs by breaking big prompts into smaller sequential prompts. You can burn through 5 – 6 prompts for even basic tasks very quickly. The last thing you want to be worried about is hitting your limits.

One of the primary strengths of AI today is unlimited iterations. If you rely on the free version, you lose this ability.

Defaults to GPT3.5 after limits

Once you hit your limit on the free plan, you default back to GPT3.5.

GPT3.5 is a significant step backward from GPT-4 on all fronts. Earlier this year, I noticed that the quality of the pre-work research and brainstorming my team produced for my blogs declined rapidly. After a little investigation, it turned out one team member’s ChatGPT subscription failed, and she was working in GPT-3.5.

Only then did I realize how big the output quality difference between 3.5 and 4 was.

GPT-4o is free to all, but GPT-5 will be pay-to-play

Don’t miss your chance to get first access to GPT-5.

GPT-5 is the release we are all waiting for. GPT-4o is a little step up, but GPT-5 will be a giant leap forward. To test the model and protect server resources, OpenAI will likely only offer GPT-5 to its paid tier first before making a limited version available to free users.

I want to be first in line when GPT-5 is released.

Even if I only use ChatGPT for 5 minutes a month, it will save me and make me more than the $20-a-month subscription. 

OpenAI doesn’t care about the revenue from their premium subscription.

But they will use it as a filter for access to new features and models.

I’m happy to pay $240 a year to be at the front of the line.