How Authority Hacker Got 27,627 Opt-ins From a Single Blog Post

Tim: 27,627, that’s the number of leads that one blogpost generated for the folks at Authority Hacker in only six months. Not only did it only require one simple step and happen in such a period of time but it now results in a passive income stream, which would allow most entrepreneurs to focus on their businesses full time. It’s simple, it’s effective and you’ve probably heard me preaching about it for a long time now. You’ll love Gael Brenton’s tactic and I’d love for you to give it a shot in our own site. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Tim: Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

Hey fellow marketer. The episode is coming right up but first don’t forget to join me for this Thursday’s LeadPages webinar. This is an all-new webinar for 2015 that’s going to show you how to turn your site into an evergreen lead generation machine without spending all of your time marketing and it includes our four top list building strategies for the new year. All you need to do to join is text LeadPages all one word to 38470, again text LeadPages, that’s L-E-A-D-P-A-G-E-S  all one word to 38470 and you’ll be registered for the webinar. Oh and if you’re outside the US, don’t worry, you can still join the webinar. Just go to ConversionCast.com/webinar. We’ll see you there and now here’s today’s guest.

Hey Gael, thanks so much for being here today.

Gael: Hey, thank you for having me, Tim. It’s really honor and I’m really listening to ConversionCast all the time so I really feel honored that you invited me.

Tim: Absolutely yeah, happy to have you and I love this case study we’re going to talk about. Can you just – let’s just dive in. Tell us the results from this case study.

Gael: alright, so we just had a very successful blogpost on our site that you know was not doing much else than collecting social shares. So we decided to create a kind of upgrade using the LeadBoxes from LeadPages and that was basically just a free recipe eBook complementary to the blogpost and that got us so far about in about six months 27,627 emails.

Tim: [Laughs]  So one blogpost with a content upgrade generating 27,000 opt-ins for a very targeted niche audience?

Gael: Exactly. Because they read our blogpost and they usually come from Google or social media so they make the choice to go and consume  that piece of content so we know what their problem is and all they had to do is just match them with the solution right?

Tim: Yeah I love it and obviously there’s more behind that. You shared with me kind of some monetization strategies you’ve been using for that. So we’ll dive into that in a bit but first I would kind of love to hear you know, what AuthorityHacker.com is all about and kind of what your role is at the company?

Gael: AuthorityHacker is really about us sharing, we’re figuring out as we’re building our online businesses. So we come from the SEO world where a lot of people were like cheating Google and playing with this bad black hat, backlink etc. and we got tired of it and we got to be honest wiped by Google when they released their [[0:03:06]] [Indiscernible]  we decided to create long term businesses that still use the principles of creating content and building a brand, etc., but without cheating Google. Just building very long-term high traffic properties that we can then use to monetize the traffic from.

AuthorityHacker is just us sharing what we learned from that process that we’ve started about 2.5 years ago now. So that’s what it is. It’s a bunch of blogposts sharing our results, our case studies and our learnings.

Tim: That’s fantastic. Awesome. So I mean that kind of provides the basis for or the foundation for how you got into you know, this experiment and this is on a blog called HealthandAmbition.com and just give us a little bit of kind of what that’s about so that we have the context?

Gael: Sure. So HealthAmbision.com is just about helping people making smarter lifestyle choices for their health. So just understanding what they’re eating, solving you know, general problems so we’re not really trying to solve very serious problems. We’re more helping people living a healthy lifestyle without necessarily being on a diet all the time. And that’s what HealthAmbition is about.

So we’re creating a lot of content that piece of content that we’re talking about today is about juicing actually because juicing is very trendy these days and people are starting to discover the properties of fresh fruits and vegetables. And yeah that was the section of the site that this case study is about.

Tim: I love it and it’s funny because I was you know, I was scrolling through the site and kind of checking out what the different posts were about and it’s cool because they are really, they’re very specific. You know, sometimes  they’re not like these big you know, you’re not trying to cure cancer but some of them are – well they’re all really specific and we’re talking about like using almonds for weight loss. But my favorite one has to be your guide to farting, how to stop farting. I thought that was great.

Gael: [Laughs]

Tim: And it’s funny because you know, it’s like it seems like it’s funny like we talk about farting and that kind of stuff but it is a concern that people have that is a problem that hopefully you can help them solve. So I just think that that’s really interesting and it’s worth noting kind of the style of the blogpost so that people listening understand that when you said you had a blogpost you created you know, a content upgrade for it, it wasn’t a matter of oh I wrote a blogpost I’m putting a content upgrade on it. I’ve got 27,000 opt-ins. It was really very specific.

[0:05:28]

Gael: Yeah I mean that specific blog post is about using juices to lose weight and we’re pretty good at SEO and we manage to also do very good Pinterest marketing call for these posts and so it got a lot of attention both from search engines and Pinterest. If you look at the post right now, it’s has 39,000 shares.

Tim: Wow.

Gael: And so the people that come on that post they want to use juicing and they want to lose weight. And so for us it was very easy to create something that was useful for them , which is you know, a free recipe book of 15 recipes that there’s like four or five on the page but that gave them more. That’s what the content grade is all about, it’s about getting more of what you really like about the post. You know?

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. And so were there any kind of you know, keys to this? Because you mentioned this post was already giving a lot of traffic and you decided to kind of take advantage of that by providing something that was you know, like the recipes like you mentioned. So what was your kind of key to this? How did you decide oh I’m going to write a recipe book? I know that it might seem to be just like oh well you know, it’s a post about juicing, duh juicing recipes but where there any kind of other thoughts behind that?

Gael: I mean the post has a bunch of comments as well so we could really see what people wanted right? You know, when we created that update, we already had something like 30 comments on the post. We received a couple of emails about it as well and so and so we’re able to talk to all these people and you know, people love practical stuff. Like theory is nice and understanding it is great but what they want is they want something they can take and use in the next five minutes to improve their lives and that’s really what we got from these people and that’s why we were like well the most practical thing you can get from juicing is actually making juice and drinking it. You know? And that’s why we came up with the juicing recipe eBook.

Tim: I love it. That’s exactly the thought process that we had behind the most common lead magnet that we suggest , which is just a list of tools or resources. And that’s the exact thought process behind it is that people yes, people want the information. They want to know how to do things and how to improve their lives but if you can give them something that that’s simple that they can go oh I can take action on this right now and see results you know, very quickly then they’re going to want that and that’s going to drive up your conversions, that’s going to drive up kind of the stickiness of them once they do opt-in. and that’s kind of the next thing I want to talk about.

You mentioned that you were able to turn these leads into customers. Can you talk about what you did to do that?

Gael: So yeah let’s go back to the current upgrade right? We were able to give people like some results right away. It’s like hey here’s these juicing recipes and they’ve been proven to help people lose weight because you know, they contain low sugar and all these things. They have vegetables that increase your metabolism and so on. So that helps.

Now they got a little bit of results and now they got into actually making juice. They want to know more about it. They want to do more of it and they want to do it better. So that’s the point where we are able to come in and give them more information , which we started doing with email follow-ups right? So we built an email sequence where we introduced ourselves, we introduced our team, and then we were able to give them even more information about juicing in general and we were able to transition it from just losing weight to losing weight and living a healthy life may be getting rid of sodas and that kind of stuff and replacing it with healthier alternatives.

Eventually, create  more compressive product that regroups all these benefits. [[0:08:55]] [Indiscernible]  was drinking fresh fruits and vegetables juice and sell that to these people after warming them up to the idea that juicing was not just for weight loss but also for many other things.

Tim: Yeah I love that. So you took it, you basically took it and you nurtured that list. you provided them additional value. You showed more of you know, that your team was real people that really gave a crap and then you offered them your book on juicing?

Gael: Yeah that’s basically it. It’s just an extended version. There’s still a section about weight loss because obviously these people still cared about it. But it’s just about many other problems as well. So it’s just like clearing your skin and so on. And you know we also like Mark and I my cofounder we’re actually juice very regularly ourselves quite a lot. We just talk about our journey doing it and we basically build that relationship. so they came for the initial value. They got that burst of value from the current upgrade and it’s like well now you got that value let’s make this a lifestyle. And that’s how we built that product that follows up you know?

Tim: Yeah and I have to bring this up because I talk a lot on webinars and at live events and stuff like that about the importance of providing value and not being afraid to get out there and put some of your best stuff out there. And you know this book clearly the eBook that they’re opting in for provides a lot of value. So what would you say to the people that you know, would say well you can’t give away your best stuff, you can’t give away your best stuff because they won’t want to buy. Obviously that’s not the case for you guys. You know you’re seeing2 to 15 eBook sales every single day from people that opted in to get some free recipes. So what do you kind of respond to them?

Gael: Well I think when people see instant results they’re very motivated in really optimizing that process later. You know so if we are able to move the needle a little bit for them and have them feel the difference then they would be very excited about the whole process and that’s basically your sales process right? Whereas if you just hiding everything and you’re like hey you got to give me money to get a little bit of value and you don’t know where you’re going to get behind the pay wall, you’re not so sure about buying that product. And that’s why I think this is working because we’re able to just provide a bunch of you know, we don’t necessarily break everything down. It’s not super expensive in terms of explanations but if you do that you’ll get some results.

And when they get that, they’re very excited about the process and the email us back. They’re like oh my god, I tried these juices with my family and so on and they’re very excited about it and next thing you know they’re buying your eBook you know?

Tim: Yes. I love that because you know, that’s exactly it. You show them that you have a lot of value to provide and when you know you’ve done a good job, when somebody is checking out your free stuff and their immediate reaction is wow if their free stuff is this good, I can’t imagine how great the paid stuff is. And that’s what I love about kind of what you’ve done here. You’ve taken a post that was getting lots of traffic but wasn’t necessarily converting into leads or sales. You’ve turned that into something that’s generating a really healthy amount of passive income every single day and now you kind of have this process that you could probably  rinse and repeat with future posts am I right?

Gael: That’s basically our 2000 plan. That’s what we’re going to do all this year. We’re just going to be building products or on posts and creating that process again and again. Because it’s extremely passive once it’s ready. You know you have your email autoresponder, people download the upgrade for like automatically and then the sales happen automatically and right now we’re selling through Clickbank  so they handle a lot of those, to go out and refund if they need it etc. And it’s all passive income. We’re just collecting the check at the end of the month at this point and obviously doing customer support when they email us for that. It’s the only thing they have to do.

Tim: Beautiful. I love that Gael. Well this has been great. Thanks so much for reaching out and sharing this on ConversionCast. I know people are going to be excited to hear it.

Gael: Cool, cool. Thank you for having me Tim.

Tim: Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.