How to Be Successful WITHOUT the Hustle featuring Claire Pelletreau (Transcript)
In this episode, I’m chatting with Claire Pelletreau, a self-proclaimed lazy entrepreneur. She’s also a Facebook and Instagram ad consultant, teacher, conversion optimization expert, and creator of Absolute FB Ads.
Claire also LOVES talking about money—profit, loss, the whole shebang. She asks her guests how much they charge—and how much they earn—on her show, the Get Paid Podcast.
This is a transcript of Work Less, Earn More, Episode 37. Listen to the episode here.
How to Be Successful WITHOUT the Hustle featuring Claire Pelletreau
Claire Pelletreau:
I think it’s because, one, the laziness. But tied into the laziness is that in the six years that I’ve been in business, I haven’t made much of an effort to get in front of other people’s audiences. Instead, I’m just like I’m going to run some ads because I know how to do that and then I don’t spend the time researching podcasts to get on to networking with people doing like JV webinars. I’m just like, “No, here’s the ad.”
Gillian Perkins:
We became entrepreneurs because more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn’t always the reality of being a business owner. I’m Gillian Perkins, and I’m on a mission to take back entrepreneurship for what it’s supposed to be. In every episode, I’ll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work, so that you can work less and earn more. Let’s get to it.
Gillian Perkins:
Hey there, friends and welcome back to another episode of Work Less, Earn More. Today, I am joined by Claire Pelletreau who is a Facebook and Instagram ad consultant and the creator of Absolute Facebook Ads. I asked her to be on the show today for a slightly unusual reason. I read on her blog a while back that she considers herself to be a kind of lazy person, which is an unusual admission, I think. And it surprised me also because I see Claire as a really productive person who makes big moves with her business.
Gillian Perkins:
I wanted to get her on the show and talk to her a little bit about how she is accomplishing so much while apparently being a somewhat lazy person. A couple other things that you should know about Claire is that she is the host of The Get Paid Podcast which is a podcast that I listen to myself and really enjoy and she also produces a blog that I read on a regular basis.
Gillian Perkins:
I would say that Claire is definitely an underrated marketing expert because the quality of the content that she puts out is always so high quality. So with that being said, allow me to introduce to you Claire Pelletreau. Hey there, Claire and welcome to the show.
Claire Pelletreau:
Gillian, thank you so much for the best intro I’ve ever heard. I was just thinking the same thing myself that I am an underrated expert.
Gillian Perkins:
I think so.
Claire Pelletreau:
That’s fine. I mean, that’s what happens when you kind of fly under the radar for a while. But don’t worry, I’m flying… What’s the opposite of under the radar? Over?
Gillian Perkins:
Over the radar.
Claire Pelletreau:
I’m going for over, okay?
Gillian Perkins:
You can go over the radar. I think you will still miss the radar, but you can do it. The reason I say that you’re underrated is just because every time I read one of your blog posts or I listen to your podcast, I am surprised by the quality, I’m surprised by the level of detail that you bring because I know how time consuming it is to gather all of those details, all of those facts, say about a launch and put them into a blog post to gather those screenshots and to make the blog post or the podcast episode as useful as you make them. I’m always surprised that more people aren’t talking about you.
Claire Pelletreau:
Well, you know what, I think more people don’t know about me and my work. I think it’s because, one, the laziness. But tied into the laziness is that in the six years that I’ve been in business, I haven’t made much of an effort to get in front of other people’s audiences. Instead, I’m just like I’m going to run some ads because I know how to do that and then I don’t spend the time researching, podcasts to get onto, networking with people, doing like JV webinars.
Claire Pelletreau:
I’m just like no, here’s the ads. But sometimes my own money runs out. There’s sort of a cap whereas all that PR stuff or just like outreach, there’s no financial cap on that. The cap is on your time.
Gillian Perkins:
A major time cap, yeah.
Claire Pelletreau:
Exactly. So could I have done a better job of that? Should I have? Definitely, I would say in the time I’ve been in business. Do I really regret it? Nah, I’m doing fine.
Does a small audience mean less success?
Gillian Perkins:
I think it’s so interesting how there are so many different ways that people can be successful or be connected or be known and I’ve just realized that as my audience has grown. In my case for example, I have a pretty wide recognition on certain platforms and I have a lot of followers who know who I am, but I’m a terribly connected person. I don’t know other people in the industry.
Gillian Perkins:
One of the reasons I started the podcast was to be able to connect with more people in the industry and to learn from them as well and get the opportunity to interview them and things like that. But you on the other hand, your audience I think is relatively small, but you seem to be a fairly well connected person. A lot of people who are in our same space, if I mention you, they totally know who I’m talking about.
Claire Pelletreau:
It’s funny. I would definitely say I have a fairly small audience especially like on my podcast which is almost what I’m best known for at this point, and yet I probably only get about 2,000 downloads per new episode in a week. I like to talk about numbers. I’m really transparent. That’s not that many compared to the big podcasts. I would say compared to how many people reach out to me about it. I’m always like, “Wait, how come I’m not in the tens of thousands if everyone is talking about this episode?”
Claire Pelletreau:
The connectedness, what did it come from? Well, right before I started my business, I was working for one of the better known people in the info product space, Laura Roeder. She’s the founder of MeetEdgar and she is now out of the personal brand saying she has taken herself out of the brand of MeetEdgar on purpose. But a lot of her students or people who I would reach out to, to do partnerships for her, are now some of the bigger names in the online business.
Claire Pelletreau:
I think it impacted my beginnings, but then I would just be, and have been for years so scared of reaching out to people and getting a no. I’ll be just straight up honest. I would say that until last year really, I had extremely low self-confidence in my business and assumed that more people would say no to me or laugh at me for some reason than would say yes.
Claire Pelletreau:
Honestly, stepping out of that has been a huge game changer for me and recognizing that people do know about my work and value it in a huge way, and to sort of assume that more people are going to do that than have a negative reaction to me and my work has been a really important step.
Gillian Perkins:
I think that that’s something we can all learn from right there. All of us have room for growth there I know I certainly do. I don’t reach out to people sometimes for the same reason. Something that has helped me is just that over time as I have slowly reached out to more and more people and about more and more opportunities, I’ve come to see what a numbers game it is and how the fact that I got a few no’s in a row really was just a fluke.
Gillian Perkins:
Sometimes I reach out to someone who has a much smaller audience than me about something and they’ll say no and sometimes I reach out to someone who has a much larger audience than me and they say yes. It’s really just a mixed bag and it really depends on the circumstances of the individual person you’re reaching out to then it has a lot more to do with them than it has to do with me.
Claire Pelletreau:
Definitely, yeah. I’ve let myself be scared for too long and it has certainly kept me playing small, and I would say I only shed that in the past 12 months or so.
Making the most of all opportunities
Gillian Perkins:
And how do you think you have or how have you changed things in these past 12 months? Have you started doing anything differently based on some newfound self-confidence?
Claire Pelletreau:
I started doing more JV webinars. Not just webinars where like I pitch something and people can buy and there’s an affiliate commission. I’ve definitely done more of those, but also just reaching out to people who have enormous audiences and being like, “Hey, do you want to do like a Facebook ad Q&A? Is there something I can do for your audience that there’s no ask at the end or something like that? I haven’t gotten a no yet, since I started doing that. That might have to do with the years of blogging and podcasting and whatnot, but it also just might be because it’s the right offer at the right time and there doesn’t always have to be like money in the middle.
Claire Pelletreau:
I think in the beginning I was like people will only want to do this if they can get a commission. This is what’s really funny, is that I had a real aversion to doing any kind of affiliate thing where I was going to get a kickback. I thought people were going to hate that and hate me for it. Oh my god, they love being introduced to these really brilliant (usually) women, who have incredible things to offer. I’m getting the thank you for that and yes, I’m also getting some money out of it which is great because then it’s not just my time for like, “Hear me, Gillian.”
Claire Pelletreau:
Having changed that mindset, I started seeing I can just offer this knowledge that let’s say so and so has a community. There are always Facebook ad questions in every single community and they don’t know how to answer them or they don’t want to, and I can be that person. I can solve that problem for them.
Gillian Perkins:
Well, that sounds awesome and I love how you’re really just making the most of all those little opportunities instead of waiting for some, perhaps big amazing opportunity to make a lot of money, but you’re just taking the opportunities that are coming your way and reaching out about more opportunities to slowly work on probably even more increasing your confidence and building your audience and reaching new people.
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah, definitely. And I’ve turned on the ads again like more ads just to things that don’t even necessarily send an immediate ROI, but it’s because of that like, “Oh, wow. This is extremely valuable for people.” They appreciate having it and most people will then sign up for something else of mine for free and then the paid thing and whatever. I think it’s funny about ads and confidence as well because you can look at numbers, but then those numbers will make you think like, “Oh, people like me or they don’t, but it’s actually about like bidding how many people are trying to reach the same audience.”
Facebook Ads – how does that relate to being lazy?
Gillian Perkins:
Sure, that makes sense. Let’s get into talking about ads and also how that relates to laziness. As I mentioned earlier that you’re a Facebook ad strategist, you’ve been doing that for a pretty long time haven’t you?
Claire Pelletreau:
That’s been my entire business. I have now twice ventured into different topics to talk about for a short period of time, but it always comes back to the ads and I’ve been selling the same course since 2014. I mean, it’s been updated several times and expanded, but yeah, it’s the same course.
Gillian Perkins:
That really is a quite long lifespan for an online course and I really applaud you for doing the work and putting in the effort to keep it updated so you could continue to sell it because I know as someone who has a lot of ideas and is personally kind of lazy as well, I’ll run with an idea and maybe launch it once or a few times and then especially in the past, I often would just shelve it to move on to my next idea, but you’ve really stayed consistent with your Facebook ads course and so I think that that says a lot about your underlying work ethic even if you don’t like to work a lot, just about the fact that you’re committed to doing that high quality work that I was talking about earlier. Let’s get into talking about that. So how has being lazy affected choices you’ve made in your business and how does that relate to Facebook ads?
Claire Pelletreau:
If you go onto any of my social profiles, Facebook and Instagram namely, you’ll notice that I don’t post very much there about my business. I’ll post maybe once a week about the latest podcast episode. I don’t even always do that and I feel terrible for the guest who’s not getting promoted, but sometimes there’s just not enough time. But when I need people to know about something, I run ads about that thing. I just wrapped up a launch and this happens for every single one of my launches. We do not spend very much time writing social posts, scheduling them, whatever.
Claire Pelletreau:
And by we, I mean if I’m working with more people on my team or if it’s just me, right now it’s mostly me in the business. But I set up the ads and then I forget it. I tell them to stop at a certain time and that’s it. That’s how people find out that the cart is open, the cart is closing. This bonus is happening. I don’t keep posting it on Instagram because I don’t know. I think I have 3,000 followers on Instagram. But what gets the engagement on Instagram, the photo of my baby bump, right?
Claire Pelletreau:
I mean, sure, there’s some reach on these other things and sure, there’s going to be some people who’d make the effort to click on the link in your bio and go. But if you look at the actual traffic, which I wish I had the numbers for you, Gillian, but if we look at traffic from Instagram to my site, that’s not ad traffic, it’s going to be so marginal that it’s just not worth the time. I still don’t understand why people spend so much time on social media marketing during launches. It’s just like you can set up the ads and the ads will let people know. Maybe too much too often.
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah. Between the limited reach that you get on promotional posts because people don’t engage with them as much. If you’re typically reaching say 3,000 people with your average, interesting personal sort of post and then you do this promotional post, you’re probably going to reach maybe half that number of people in the first place and then of that, 1,500 people, the conversion rate from social to even a free offer. Even if I’m promoting a YouTube video on Instagram, the conversion rate will be so low that it’s resulting in a handful of clicks.
Gillian Perkins:
It’s just really not worth it, which is why we’ve transitioned from trying to get any sort of traffic from Instagram over to YouTube to now just posting on IGTV. We just post the video on YouTube and also at IGTV where people can watch it natively and they don’t have to convert. Because I don’t want to waste other people’s time either.
Claire Pelletreau:
Right. That’s very interesting because there are these different strategies about, “No, you have to get them over to YouTube so that YouTube knows that you’re smart or that people like you.” But if you just want to build up the relationship or share your knowledge, perfect. I love IGTV as the answer. So much simpler.
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah. And I think that you just really have to strategically think about why you’re doing what you’re doing, what your goals are and then what is actually having the biggest impact on those goals. So whether you’re trying to convert someone to a be a buyer or you’re trying to get views on YouTube or you’re trying to grow your YouTube channel, whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish, what is really going to be the most leveraged lever that you can pull where you’re going to have to put in the least amount of effort, but you’re going to see the biggest results.
Let’s talk Facebook ad strategy
Gillian Perkins:
You’re talking about your ad strategy for your launches. I’m curious would that work for someone who has a smaller ad budget? How much are you typically spending on your launch and can you share any numbers about your ROI?
Claire Pelletreau:
I actually only spent $300 on this past launch.
Gillian Perkins:
Oh, wow.
Claire Pelletreau:
In my ads I think of them separately as launch ads and simple list building ads because at the time that we’re recording this, ad costs are low, right? I can’t say what’s going to happen with them, but I started running my own ads again kind of after a long time just to basically grow the list and take advantage of these super low costs. Because those ads are about a Facebook ad resource, I did not expect very much crossover like those people to convert in this launch, which was for a course that was about running paid workshops, not ads related. In fact, that course does not talk about ads.
Claire Pelletreau:
I had been spending 2 to $3,000 maybe in the six weeks prior to this launch for list building purposes. But for the actual cart open, I spent $330. It was cart open, and cart is closing because it was only a five day lsales period. I spent $330 and the traffic who clicked on those ads and converted, resulted in, I know it was $1,188 in sales. Yeah, 1,188 in sales. So what’s that? Four from a 297 product? That sounds about right. So not a ton, right? Not a ton of sales at all.
Claire Pelletreau:
I think of retargeting ads during a launch especially a small like this was the chillest launch I’ve ever done. I didn’t even do a webinar. The reason that the ad budget was so small was because I didn’t do a webinar. I didn’t run ads promoting the webinar because that’s where you spend on ads for a launch. I think of that $330 as an insurance policy because I wasn’t really talking about this thing for very long. I was just like, “Oh, hey, guys. Here’s a new thing. Get it quick.” I wanted to make sure that everybody who might be interested in it in my existing audience knew about it.
Claire Pelletreau:
I run ads that were basically optimized for sales and I also ran ads that were optimized simply for reach, to reach everyone in my audience, to give them the opportunity. That was a perfectly good ROI, but not my typical launch like ad strategy.
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean my personal philosophy on spending on ads and ROI is that as long as I’m breaking even, I’m willing to spend money all day long because it’s growing my audience, it’s growing my list. Now, of course we always want to do way better than breaking even, but I’m happy to spend as long as I am at least breaking even.
Claire Pelletreau:
Well, right, And for what it’s worth, that’s my exact feeling on ads as well. But you and I both have an existing audience outside of ads, right?
Gillian Perkins:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Claire Pelletreau:
Usually our revenue is going to come from that existing audience if you spend 10K on ads for a webinar to simply cold audiences, people have never heard of you, and that you get 10K back. For you, that 10K back, like you said, it pays for those basically new subscribers that are probably going to convert even more later, but you made the money off of your organic and that’s where it can get tricky for people who don’t have the organic audience already built in and they’re hoping to make their own 20, 30,000 from like a 5K ad spend, the first time out of the gate. It can happen, but there are so many factors. So I love that thought of just looking at it like ads wise, I’m trying to break even.
Gillian Perkins:
And I think especially when someone is first starting out, going with that being the minimum bar that you’re setting. I mean I say that I at least want to break even. I honestly spend money on ads even if I’m slightly negative because I can afford to spend a little bit of money on marketing. You know what I mean?
Claire Pelletreau:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Gillian Perkins:
To grow my brand. That makes sense. Why wouldn’t I spend, if I’m spending say $3,000 on ads and I’m negative so I’m losing 300 of those dollars. Well, I’d be happy to spend $300 to grow my email list, right?
Claire Pelletreau:
Right.
Gillian Perkins:
That’s not a big of an expense even if you’re a little bit negative.
Claire Pelletreau:
What would be your average cost per lead, Gillian, would you think?
Gillian Perkins:
Oh, it depends so much on what we are promoting. I really can’t even say especially because lately there’s just been so much drama with our ads. We relatively recently had resumed running ads and had really launched a big campaign. I mean, in the broader sense than just a Facebook ad campaign, but implemented that in our marketing probably about four or five months ago. Then coronavirus affecting ad prices.
Gillian Perkins:
Then Facebook with all of their current issues it’s working remotely I think and they are launching a new version of Facebook and just so much going on. Somehow in that mess, they accidentally shut down my ad account completely like restricted my ad access and then told me that it was an accident and that they would fix it and didn’t fix it. So we’ve had to create a new ad account.
Claire Pelletreau:
Are you serious?
Gillian Perkins:
Yes. It’s been about six weeks now of trying to get them to do just what they said they had done of turning my ads back on and to no avail. We finally have just given up and are starting over from scratch. So anyway, so for all of those reasons, I have no idea what my current average lead cost is.
Claire Pelletreau:
But fair.
Gillian Perkins:
In the past it has. We’ve also just been experimenting with a lot of different funnels and we see really different costs in the different funnels.
Claire Pelletreau:
Definitely. I mean just to give people a sense of what we’re talking about here, the thing that I turn back on recently to take advantage of these cheap cost per leads is just a swipe file of audiences to target depending on your niche and also a PDF explaining how do you set up audiences and what what’s important here. That I launched it. I was getting dollar 50 leads. They ended up averaging more like 350 because the first few days can be like, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.” And then they sort of stabilized. But whereas my webinar costs if I’m running ads to just my Evergreen Webinar, I will in a non-corona time, will probably pay $10 a lead.
Claire Pelletreau:
The quality of the subscriber though is very different. Somebody who’s signing up to watch a masterclass is already making this micro commitment to me that signing up for something that they know it’s going to take them no time to look at, it’s not the same.
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah. I would completely just collaborate with your ad, your lead costs and especially for the webinars as well that while I can’t give you an exact number at all, we typically are paying like 2 to $3 per lead for a freebie. But if it’s a webinar, it’s normally more in that 5 to $10 range. I try to keep it as close to five as possible and if it isn’t close to five then we’re writing lots of new ad copy and things like that, but 5 to $10 is pretty average for a webinar.
Gillian Perkins:
My first experience with that was I bought a very expensive course. This was early in my business. I bought a very expensive course about using webinars to launch and did the course, and then was like, okay, now, I’ve got this apparently great webinar. How do I get people to watch it? Their answer was Facebook ads since I didn’t have an audience at all. I start spending my Facebook ads and I’m like, “It’s costing me more than $5 per registration. The people who I bought the course from were like, “Oh yeah, that’s normal.”
Gillian Perkins:
I’m like, “I don’t have money to spend.” I’m just starting my business. I can’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get people on my webinar that I don’t even know if it’s going to convert just kind of like the buggy before the horse. I needed to work on figuring out something that was working with a warm audience first before for me I was able to spend on ads.
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I say this pretty often. So one, I say I’m lazy and two, I say that Facebook ads are like Viagra. They can give you a boost but they’re not going to make you good in bed. If you try to build a business on ads alone and you’re not successful that doesn’t mean that you won’t be successful, it just means that cold traffic, ad traffic behaves in a very specific way. People come into my funnel from my ads and they convert at a pretty low rate whereas organically my funnel has a fantastic conversion rate. But ads specifically are this topic that one people are skeptical about and two, they really, really don’t want to run ads if they don’t have to.
Claire Pelletreau:
I’m not sure why they’re signing up for my webinar, but that would explain $10 cost per lead. The one thing I will say though and I know not everyone is going to agree with me here, but when people ask me if your funnel doesn’t work with cold, is it a good funnel? It depends on what your goals are in your business. If you want to scale to like a million dollars in sales in a year or 18 months, you need it to work with Facebook ads because the-
Gillian Perkins:
And cold specifically.
Claire Pelletreau:
With cold, exactly, because you’re going to max out your warm audiences and maybe all of this is kind of like mumbo-jumbo. But you’re going to max out your warm audiences. You have to turn to cold and if you’re losing money on cold, without a way to recoup that from a warm audience, then maybe your funnel isn’t good. But as somebody who sometimes loses money on her own funnel ads, I’m just like you. I’m like, “Oh, okay. I make back some of the money that subsidizes my list building, I’m down, I’m happy.” But other people are like, “I want a 3X ROI or bust.”
Creating a funnel that converts
Gillian Perkins:
Basically what you’re saying is if you want to scale especially really big, you have to figure out, you have to put in the extra work to make sure that your funnel is converting at a really good rate to a cold audience because otherwise you can only reach so many people and actually make money because your warm audience is a limited size. Cold audience, unlimited size, there’s always people out there who don’t know you. If you can create a funnel that is converting at a good rate with that cold audience, that’s what will allow you to scale big time. But that doesn’t mean that a funnel that isn’t converting at a cold audience necessarily isn’t doing anything for your business.
Claire Pelletreau:
Right, exactly. Because there are certainly other ways to get organic traffic. I know that you’re ginormous on YouTube and I am just starting, so I get a trickle of traffic. But that’s still, like it tends to be higher quality traffic than the Facebook ads.
Gillian Perkins:
Absolutely. And it just converts off of YouTube like on to your website so much better than really any other social media platform that I’ve found, which is why I do invest my time so heavily into YouTube. We were talking about Instagram, how you’re going to get this tiny, tiny fraction of people who actually see your post and then actually get onto your website and then a tiny fraction of those people buy.
Gillian Perkins:
On YouTube, I have a video that converted really well that also was quite popular and so we really paid attention to it. It was a video about how to write a business plan and in it, I offered a free opt-in offer that was a business plan template. That video converted at 13% meaning specifically that 13% of the people who watched the video got on my email list.
Claire Pelletreau:
Whoa.
Gillian Perkins:
And then that video got over 100,000 views.
Claire Pelletreau:
Wow.
Gillian Perkins:
So that one video that took me not very long to make added thousands of people to my email list, which was really crazy.
Claire Pelletreau:
Did you see that coming?
Gillian Perkins:
I would say no, just because I’m always turning out content, I don’t necessarily take the time or have the presence of mind to think about whether or not this is going to convert particularly well. So no, honestly no. But in retrospect, I can 100% see why that video did convert so well. First of all, the topic of the video is very proven by keyword research. How to write a business plan, popular keyword.
Gillian Perkins:
I could have predicted that it would have done well if it was at least a decent video. And then second thing was that the way I presented the opt-in offer in the video really maximized that conversion rate. So what I mean by that is first of all in the video thumbnail. I put the words “plus free template”. So people who clicked on it went into it with the expectation that there was going to be something good for them to get, something that they wanted.
Gillian Perkins:
They went in with that expectation. It wasn’t like this pitch that I just added on at the end. They clicked on the video because they wanted the opt-in offer. And then in the video, I’m actually using the template to show them how to write their business plan. Clearly if they clicked on the videos because they want to write a business plan and then I’m offering them this free tool to do exactly that, so why wouldn’t they opt in.
Gillian Perkins:
It really did make sense that it would have such a high conversion rate. And of course that’s a lot higher than most any videos opt-in rate would be, but it’s a great example of how high it can be if you do check all those boxes and do everything right. But even on just a normal video, where I’m just pitching some related opt-in offers, so it’s like a video about how to start your YouTube channel and then I share… I have this free workshop all about how to get views on YouTube. It still is converting at a good rate of 1 or 2% at least of just the people who watch the video are actually signing up for the workshop for a video that I made and I’m “promoting” for free. YouTube is promoting the video for me so it’s free advertising for my business.
Claire Pelletreau:
Okay. The reason I ask you that is because today I was editing a video of mine that I actually filmed before schools closed and everything. I knew that the whole point would be to promote this one opt-in. So thank you for that thumbnail tip. It’s basically me going through one of my ad copy template.
Gillian Perkins:
You need to put “plus free ad copy template” on your thumbnail.
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah.
Gillian Perkins:
You can see the thumbnail if you just look up on YouTube like Gillian Perkins business plan, you will see that thumbnail and you’ll see exactly what I mean, but it worked like gangbusters.
Claire Pelletreau:
Perfect. What I didn’t do was go through the worksheet myself. That would have been good.
Gillian Perkins:
If you’re still editing the video even if you just literally add a screenshot of the worksheet into the video, even if you’re not using it, it really helps people to visualize what the value of that opt-in offer would be instead of just having it be words you’re saying about like this free thing that might be helpful but they see it and they see how it’s helpful, and then they believe it way more.
Claire Pelletreau:
Okay. I can add in a couple shots of that.
Gillian Perkins:
Very easily, I’m sure.
Claire Pelletreau:
Thank you. I’m getting so much out of this.
Gillian Perkins:
If you’re making YouTube videos and you’re trying to build your email list too, like use these tactics, they work.
Claire Pelletreau:
Well, because I have been really focusing on list building from YouTube and I see that it is working so thank you. I’ve been showing the landing page, the sign up page in the video.
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah, might help too.
Claire Pelletreau:
But I should actually show the thing, at least a screenshot of it. It doesn’t have to be the whole thing.
Copywriting – why it’s important for your conversion rate.
Gillian Perkins:
I’m preaching to myself here too because I do it sometimes, but not always. But it really increases conversion rates. Okay. We are running out of time here. There’s one more thing that I wanted to touch on. Something that I feel really relates to this conversation we’re having about maximizing our results specifically from paid ads here, but really from YouTube videos too, any sort of promotional material you’re creating is clearly the copywriting.
Gillian Perkins:
Someone has to write these ads, someone has to write your sales page if you’re trying to sell something and of course we can write it ourselves, we can work on improving our skills ourselves or we could hire someone to write it for us. I actually really recently recorded an episode about my experience working with copywriters about a couple projects that I did last year that I invested pretty heavily in and the results that I got from that.
Gillian Perkins:
I know that you have worked with a few copywriters over the past few years as well. So I was wondering if you could share with us what some of those copywriting projects that you’ve hired out for have been and what your results and experience have been.
Claire Pelletreau:
Absolutely. Can I name drop the copywriters?
Gillian Perkins:
Yes, please.
Claire Pelletreau:
Okay, fabulous. The very first person who I hired for copy, was Natalie Taylor from the Missing Ink. She’s based out of Australia. She’s fantastic. I’ve worked with her now on several projects. She wrote a sales page for me for my most premium program. I think at the time I was raising the price from 3K to 5K. Until then, I had written all the copy myself. It was a leap, but I knew that 2018 was going to be the year that I focused on learning how to sell this thing.
Claire Pelletreau:
I was going to use it multiple times. And definitely the ROI was insane. Now, she really undercharged me. This was several years ago now. So definitely had lower rates, but she just does fantastic work. Then I used that sales page in multiple launches. Last year, I actually was revamping the program kind of going after a different area like a different niche inside of the already niche down. It’s a program for ad consultants.
Claire Pelletreau:
I brought her back on to rewrite the sales page and also to help me collect case studies essentially. Some of which would go on the sales page, some of which would go on the emails. I also had her write all of my launch emails because while I can and did do that successfully in all of 2018 like write those emails, I always felt terrible like, “Ugh, I have to write another email. Ugh, I don’t know what to say in this.” This could be so much better, and it’s still. It did fine.
Gillian Perkins:
The first time when you hired her for that first sales page, she just wrote the sales page?
Claire Pelletreau:
Just the sales page. I wrote all the emails, yes. I did all the webinar stuff myself. She really helped me with the strategy more for this 2019 launch and there I paid her significantly more. She still undercharged me because instead of revamping the sales page, she ended up rewriting the entire thing, and then wrote a lot of emails. I was actually lowering the price on the program at the time trying out a different time frame, removing some pieces from the program that were not working, but I also felt like oh, I should probably lower the price. That was maybe a mistake just FYI.
Claire Pelletreau:
But I knew that I would use every asset that Natalie wrote for me in an evergreen funnel. This thing is not just for one or two launches, it is going to be for a whole funnel. And that’s exactly what I did at the end of 2019 when I was raising the price for my signature ads course. Same thing. Emails, I knew were going to go into my funnel sales emails. Webinar invite emails actually had a different copywriter write those because these were all done at different points in the year knowing like, “Okay, this can go in the funnel now, but then we’ll use them in the launch because most people won’t have seen them.”
Claire Pelletreau:
New sales page also written by Natalie, fantastic. The new sales page, we would implement for the launch and then in the evergreen funnel, which was already like chugging it along at about a 2.7% conversion rate for organic traffic.
Gillian Perkins:
Not bad at all.
Claire Pelletreau:
With the new sales page and emails were much closer to 4% depending on what kind of global pandemic is out there. Then just recently I started this different technique when my revenue was hit very hard at the very beginning of the crisis that I was like, “All right, I need to generate money fast.” I started doing these live workshops, and at the end of the workshop I would upsell people into my course.
Claire Pelletreau:
All of the assets from my evergreen funnel were then used again. Every single email, that sales page, all these case studies that Natalie had written for me or maybe the other copywriter had done, the sales emails by then, I don’t even remember. Everything I have used now multiple times. I am never really worried about the cost and the immediate ROI when I know that this is just so many emails that I’m not going to have to write again.
Claire Pelletreau:
Many things that I can copy and paste and steal, and repurpose and use the topic of this email for a Facebook live or whatever, that’s now how I look at working with copywriters is like I will never do something. I will probably not pay a copywriter to write a one-off thing ever. It’s got to be something that’s going to get reused a lot. The one takeaway there would be look at what you know is going to be your signature course or a real pillar of your business and hire copywriters to help around that, around selling that, around getting people on that webinar, if you know you’re going to use it for a while.
Gillian Perkins:
The first time you’re trying something, the first time you’re launching a new program and you’re just experimenting, you might want to write it yourself, do something simple, see what the demand is, see if you want to continue to offer, but what you’re saying is basically once you’ve decided this is something, I want to keep doing like we talked earlier about how long you’ve been selling your primary program, Absolute Facebook Ads, then it really makes sense to invest in those launch assets that you can keep reusing in your business because not only are you getting that direct ROI on the sales that are being generated by using those assets, but also I love how you pointed out, you could use it even as like the topic of a Facebook live or things like that. You’re really like buying this business asset that’s going to make your business stronger. It probably can help make you more confident with your messaging and all sorts of other things.
Claire Pelletreau:
Definitely. I think that yes, copywriting can be learned. You can improve yourself and I have, but I would also say that I was a strong writer when I got into online business. I was somebody who already wrote with personality at the time and I’ve learned to do that better. But if that’s not your forte, start out, like you said, if you’re doing something for the first time, I just launched a brand new thing just a couple weeks ago and I certainly wrote every single thing myself and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it again. Just having that conversation with myself over lunch.
Claire Pelletreau:
I’m glad I didn’t pay for anybody. There are great copywriting courses for less than a thousand dollars so you can invest in that skill, which you’re going to need. You’re not going to have a copywriter as much as you’d love for every single thing you have to write. It makes sense to improve that skill yourself. When it comes to something that you know is going to bring in a lot of revenue too. Like a $197 course, probably not the thing to invest in, in a copywriter for, but like a thousand, 997, yeah, for sure.
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah, that makes sense because then there’s bigger stakes there.
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah.
Gillian Perkins:
It definitely sounds like you’ve gotten your money’s worth from the investments that you have made into copywriters. I’m curious though, did you make a positive ROI on your first launch with the copy that you used with that first sales page and then with the revamp of the sales page?
Claire Pelletreau:
The very first one, yes. Oh, yes. I think I paid her $2,000 for that which was a steal and I made 40K. When you’re selling a 5K program, I didn’t get as many people as I was hoping and it actually took me longer. I had to push back the enrollment date because I started enrolling far too late and people were like I really want to do this, but I don’t have 5K just like chilling. I need to make this work. It wasn’t that I paid her 2K in over January and December. Excuse me, December and January, and then made that back immediately. No, I made it back by April, and then some.
Gillian Perkins:
But even the first time you used it.
Claire Pelletreau:
Oh, yes, definitely the first time.
Gillian Perkins:
Your experience working with copywriters has been a slam dunk of an experience.
Claire Pelletreau:
Well, sure. The one thing I do want to say is it’s not like you pay them the money and suddenly you have a completed sales page. There’s a lot of back and forth. Sometimes, I’ve had to be like, “Okay, when is this coming because I got to design this whole thing by myself.” I have never hired a designer for a page and that’s probably my next step.
Gillian Perkins:
Your next act of self-care.
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah. That’s totally true.
Gillian Perkins:
I love doing it, but it takes me so long.
Claire Pelletreau:
You love it? Oh god.
Gillian Perkins:
I do. I also love copywriting actually, but it also takes me so long. It just takes so much energy. I think when you’re deciding, am I going to do this or someone else is going to do it? You have to think about are you good at it, do you enjoy it and also how long is this going to take and the opportunity cost there?
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, same with emails. I kind of thought, “Oh, I’m going to get these emails. They’re going to be done.” Well, you got to edit it, you got to put them all into your thing.
Gillian Perkins:
It’s a never ending process.
Claire Pelletreau:
Right. So it’s really not completely done for you, ever.
Gillian Perkins:
Okay. Well, we got to wrap this up, because I promise the listeners these episodes don’t get too long even though there’s so much more that I would love to talk to you about, I mean, starting with the fact that we’re both 30 something weeks pregnant and we’ve been prepping our businesses for paternity leave. And I wanted to get into that, but it’s going to have to be another episode if it happens at all. So anyway, thank you so much, Claire for everything that you’ve shared with us today. This has been really interesting and informative. If listeners want to find out more about you, what is the best place for them to do that?
Claire Pelletreau:
Well, since your lovely listeners are listening to a podcast right now, just hop over to The Get Paid Podcast. I think that’s where you can continue listening to me rant about stuff. If you just search Get Paid Claire, it’s called The Get Paid Podcast, but that name was not really the best one in terms of search. Get Paid Claire on whatever your podcast app is and you’ll see the red head with the mic. And then follow along if you like solo episodes, if you like interview episodes. We’ve got it all for you.
Gillian Perkins:
Like I said at the beginning of this episode, I really do highly recommend your podcast although I’ll warn the listeners now, if you want short and sweet, Claire’s podcast is not for you. Claire is a talker, but it’s good. I really, really enjoy it because I just get more. But yeah, if you need 30-minute episodes then you’ll have to go to her blog and speed read or something.
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah. I mean you can listen to them in multiple parts, but-
Gillian Perkins:
You can accelerate it to two times speed. That could work.
Claire Pelletreau:
It depends on the guest. It’s funny you say I’m a talker. It’s more that I get my people to talk. I don’t let them off the hook. I say-
Gillian Perkins:
You’re right.
How do you make your money?
Claire Pelletreau:
… how much money do you make?
Gillian Perkins:
You just ask people a lot of questions.
Claire Pelletreau:
Yeah. And they’re nosy questions too.
Gillian Perkins:
Which I appreciate. I really appreciate that.
Claire Pelletreau:
Right. Like how much do you pay yourself and things like that. It’s good but not if you need a quick fix.
Gillian Perkins:
Well, we didn’t really talk about what your podcast is about actually. Can you real quick, explain the premise of your podcast?
Claire Pelletreau:
Oh, yeah. I just want to know how people are making their money. Specifically what are their offerings? How much do they charge for those offerings? How do they sell them? What are their expenses? If you’re making 300,000, how much do you have to spend to get there and how much are you paying yourself personally? I only recently started asking that question. So if you go into the archives, you won’t hear that answer much. It’s just a lot of nosiness, but a lot of transparency, which I find is it’s what people want these days.
Gillian Perkins:
If you who are listening right now appreciate my sometimes nosy questions, and as a reviewer recently put it, my no-pulled punches, then you will love Claire because she is much more confident with her questions actually and much less afraid of offending people in that way than I am. She asks all the questions about all the numbers and I do really appreciate that. Anyway, thank you so much again, Claire for joining me on the show here today and for everything that you’ve shared about Facebook ads and about copywriting, and particularly about these strategies for getting the biggest results with our businesses even if we don’t always put in as much work or hustle 24/7 like some people promote. So thank you so much.
Claire Pelletreau:
Hey, thank you so much for having me. Let’s do it again.
Connect with me!
Gillian Perkins:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Work Less, Earn More. Now, here’s what I want you to do next. Take a screenshot of the episode you’re listening to right now and share it out on your Instagram stories. And when you do that make sure to tag me @gillianzperkins so that I can see that you’re listening. Sharing on stories is going to help more people find this podcast so that they can learn how to work less, earn more, and take back their life. And when you share, I want to add it to my stories so that you can get some exposure that way as well.
Gillian Perkins:
If you really love the show, head over to Apple Podcast and leave it a review to give the show a boost. Every single week, I feature a review on the podcast and I would love to give you and your business a shout out. So if you leave a review, it will help the show, but it can also help your business as well.
Gillian Perkins:
Today’s featured review comes from Tomlin Campbell. Tomlin writes: I was listening to Episode 35 – Reasons You Aren’t Making Money Online for about seven minutes and I had to pause and write this review because I was so excited about the value of this content. Gillian puts it out there plain and simple. This is what I learned right away: the reason I’m not making money online right now is because I’m not visible enough and my videos aren’t high quality enough. Perfect timing, Gillian. No use of me feeling bad. I just got to go handle those two items ASAP, get publicly visible, and take the time to put out quality videos. Amazing takeaways. See ya! Got to go back and hear the rest of her podcast. Sincerely, Tomlin.
Gillian Perkins:
Thank you so much Tomlin for taking the time to write that review. I really appreciate it. And I’m so glad to hear that you’re finding the podcast so practical and helpful. Okay. Let’s wrap this up. I’m Gillian Perkins and until next week, stay focused and take action.
