Learn how Drew Canole, CEO of Fitlife.tv and Organifi, built an engaged community of over 3 million people in under five years utilizing affiliate marketing tactics he’d learned. Then with this empowered community, launched the world’s best-selling Superfood Green Juice. In his speech, Drew will discuss five proven shortcuts to 10x your business to save you time and increase your bottom line.

Speech by Drew Canole | Founder & CEO, Fitlife.tv

Drew Canole Speech Transcript

Intro Video: The number one reason why people fail in any fitness exercise, juicing regimen, transforming, in general, is that they don’t have a system in place.

And if they do have a system, then chances are it’s not fun.

At FitLife, we like to have fun with everything that we do. And we set up structures in place that people actually look forward to and when you start to look forward to getting in the best shape of your life, people take notice.

Six months from now, when people come up to you and they ask you, “What have you been doing, I want some of that, whatever it is.”

And you say, “We’re in this together, let me hold your hand through this process.”

It creates a ripple effect in the community and the world will transform together.

That’s what this is about.

So I’m Drew Canole and remember we’re in this together.

Hugh Hancock:
Okay, well, I was gonna open this with a juicing joke but I think we’ve already had quite a few of those. So I will just say this, as affiliates, we’re used to the idea that 5-figures a day, 5-figures, 10,000 plus a day, is you’ve made it. You’ve succeeded. Well for our next guest that would be a very, very bad day in the office. Drew Canole is the founder and CEO of FitLife.TV and Organifi. Organifi was listed as a number 134 of Inc. 500’s fastest growing companies in the US. They on track to do 9-figures next year. And apparently, he achieved all this by taking his shirt off and posting its videos on YouTube. There may be a little bit more to it than that. Please welcome Drew Canole!

Drew Canole: CEO of FitLife.TV and Organifi

Thanks, brother! I give hugs.

Alright everybody, thank you. Wow what an amazing, amazing event this is.

I am literally the dumbest person in the room. You all are so smart, so intelligent. I love the speakers.

We had breakfast. My girlfriend and I had breakfast with Neil Patel yesterday. That guy’s just a genius.

And I’m really excited to be sharing this information with you. How we built Organifi. We started FitLife.TV five and a half years ago.

And I was one of the first influencers, I guess, on YouTube.

So I was making videos every single week. I was sharing my story. I was enrolling people in the vision and I was also using direct response marketing back then to build digital products, sell them online, and influence people to transform their health.

I’m excited to talk about that.

Who wants to learn about Facebook video marketing? Can I see a show of hands?

Perfect. So most of the room.

What about YouTube video marketing?

Digital products, Neil talked about. Do you want to hear more about digital products? Digital products? I know you had a question before about fitness, digital.

And then what about physical? Selling physical products online, Amazon, that kind of thing.

Show of hands, anybody?

Cool. So what I have today is the 5 proven shortcuts that have built an 8-figure business.

I also have affiliate information in here that we’ve been using since the beginning of time. And I want to show you how we’ve been doing this.

Building A Launch Pad

Today, we’re gonna talk about number one, building a launch pad.

And the launch pad that we created at FitLife.TV five and a half years ago, I actually drew this.

This is a funny story actually.

My COO, Djamel Bettahar was a rocket scientist and he was building drones for the military.

So I’m on the phone with this guy yesterday, and I’m like, “What can I show these affiliate marketers? They’re super geniuses like you.”

And he drew this diagram that I want to share with you guys in a little bit, for the launch pad, And it’ll make sense to the majority of the people in the room.

When I was going over it with him on the phone, I’m like, “Oh my god, this guy, he is like the rain man with funnels.” And it’s just incredible to see.

Number two, we’re gonna go over the tried and true system that we use at FitLife and Organifi to really scale our company and grow it at 10% every single month for the past 2 years.

Three, how to scale our creatives, the Pareto principle.

And then modeling what’s working at the tail end of that.

So let’s talk about the launch pad. Most of the people in here, if you’re at Coca-Cola, you try to do a marketing campaign that changes the last quarter.

Where you guys, every single person in this room, ladies and gentlemen, know if something’s going to work within 24 hours to 2 days, depending on what type of marketing you’re running.

So we live in a pretty phenomenal time when it comes to that.

Learning Along The Way

But did you know that also outside of all these internet marketing skills, you’re learning the different things that you’re acquiring along the way?

You’ve invested in yourself to be at this event. You’re the cutting edge of internet marketers that are out there.

You can also apply them to different business modalities like we have done.

You see, this was five and a half years ago. I was literally sitting in a coffee shop.

How many people like to work at the coffee shop, like the Tim Ferriss people of the world?

This was me, working from my laptop literally, every single day. I was shooting my own videos with one of those little HD flip cams that you would plug into your computer.

Do you guys remember those? Anybody remember those?

So that was me five and a half years ago.

And what we’ve done, is over the past five and a half years, we built 400,000 subscribers on YouTube, over 2 million followers on Facebook.

We’ve had TV appearances, talk shows, infomercials, and now we’re even getting into retail with Sprouts, working on Whole Foods, and some other big retail stores eventually as well for our product called Organifi.

Has anybody heard of this green juice stuff that we sell online? Few people, alright.

So I need to do a much better job of retargeting your asses. That’s what I’m seeing here.

Why does anybody want any of that?

Building The Trust

Well, what happens in the affiliate world is when we’re consistently putting out good content, when we’re adding value in the fitness and health niche, we’re building trust.

So for me, when it came time to launch Organifi, the green juice, I had already built so much trust with my avatars, with the people that were following me for five and a half years.

By the time it came to launch our product, we sold out within 48 hours.

And what happens when Apple sells out iPhones? As marketers, we know scarcity is one of the biggest things that moves people right.

So when we sold out, it created relationships with other affiliates almost instantly. They wanted to promote it.

And what’s crazy is once you have a brand or a product that you’ve created and you have other affiliates marketing it, you have weekly commissions.

Week after week that you can count on, every single week. And like Neil was talking about, it’s not wondering if a digital product is going to be around in the future or not.

You’re actually creating a legacy, something that lives on.

So as I started as the primary influencer, now we have hundreds of other people in our tribe, we call it that are also promoting Organifi and selling it.

How many people would love to have a brand or something that lives on and they don’t have to go to the coffee shop every day, they don’t have to check into work, and they’ve literally created something that has a life of their own?

Does that sound appealing to anybody in here? Can I see a show hands? Cool.

The Beginning Of The Wheel

So, I don’t know if anybody can read this, but essentially this is what Djamel had sent me yesterday morning.

This is kind of what it looks like.

So the transformation that you guys saw in the video before I came up onstage, that’s the beginning of the wheel.

That was me, at the time I was running a credit and debt settlement company before I started this, in Florida.

And I really didn’t love it. I wasn’t enthused about what I got to do every day.

Instead, I really didn’t look forward to it at all. I was making great money but I had a mentor, one of my best friends, he’s this 87-year-old sage.

He said, “If you do anything at all, make sure you do something you love.”

And I’d always loved health and fitness but I didn’t look like it.

You heard my last name’s Canole. I was a much fatter version of what I am today.

Back in the day, I was just not into health but I loved it. It was weird. It was like this thing that didn’t really work for me.

But five and a half years ago, I made a decision to lose that weight. And I started to post about it online. I started to make YouTube videos.

I was so passionately enthused about what I got to do every single day that nothing could stop me.

I would wake up, I would have this weird looking green juice, the swamp water and I would drink it.

And I realised, when I was doing that, I was literally changing my whole, entire destiny.

I was changing my life because I was doing something that I loved.

Riches In Niches

I didn’t know how I was gonna make money, but there are riches in niches.

You guys ever heard that?

I know Neil was talking about it.

You could take anything, any weird hobby that somebody has in here. And you could turn it into making 6-figures a month like Neil was talking about, online.

If you have enthusiasm, you can build trust, and you have a skill like your competency.

You don’t have to love doing video like I love to do. I mean I’m a freak when it comes to video.

I’ll wake up in the morning and just start.

We did a Facebook Live, my girlfriend and I, before we even came in here.

Give it up for my girlfriend, by the way, give her a big round of applause. We flew all the way over here from San Diego.

I told her I was gonna pull her up onstage and she was gonna do some dancing.

Would anybody like to see that?

Okay maybe we’ll save that for the end.

The Trust Rocket

But back to this trust wheel, the very beginning of this, we’ll call it the trust rocket. I need a better name for it.

If you can think of a better name, let me know, I’ll give you some Organifi, 30-day supply on me.

And so the beginning was posting photos, it was posting a video every single week.

I did this for 3 weeks and I picked up my first sponsorship.

So I was sponsored by a juicing company called Kuvings. And they gave me a juicer every single week to give to my community.

Who’s giving free stuff out online to attract comments, customers, engagement and build an email list? Is anybody doing that in here?

Cool. A few people. That was one thing that was really helpful for us in the beginning.

Saturday Strategy

I did what’s called a Saturday strategy. We have close to 900 videos on YouTube right now.

Every Saturday, I would post a health hack that would show my community, my avatar, which is like a 35 to 55-year-old woman that Shops at Whole Foods, loves yoga, loves her kids, like that’s my audience.

And oddly enough that audience also spends the majority of money online. And they’re the majority of the people that share, especially on Facebook.

Facebook’s the avenue that they use.

So it’s very advantageous for us to do those videos in the very beginning.

And you see the FB, that’s Facebook, Instagram, and then YouTube.

So really, in the beginning, organic reach was what I leverage the most.

Does everybody remember when organic reach was just crazy on Facebook? You could spend like $2 and 5 gazillion people would see your stuff right?

Few people are shaking their heads, laughing.

Who remembers when organic reach died on Facebook? Anybody freaked out when that happened?

Yeah, so I’m gonna get a little vulnerable with you.

When Facebook Organic Reach Died

This happened to us, when was that? Like 3 and a half years ago, when Facebook organic reach died?

I remembered it vividly because at that time, we were not a marketing company.

I was just some guy that loved making green juice and I loved posting videos online.

And up until that point, it worked really well.

We made millions of dollars selling a $97 digital product teaching people how to put vegetables in a juicer.

I don’t even know how that worked. It was awesome though.

And we were inspiring tons of people, which I liked even more than the money.

So we were doing this and organic reach died. I remember it.

I had like 7 employees at the time. I was all pumped up. It’s like, anybody that has employees, it’s like you’re a proud parent. And I love these people, they were like family members.

And I remember losing, for a period of about 9 months, $50,000 to $75,000 every single month because organic reach died.

I had this huge overhead. We had an office at the time. It wasn’t fun.

And it was probably one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever learned in business because we get excited as entrepreneurs. And we do things that we know aren’t going to work long-term.

And for some reason, we think they’re gonna continue to work over and over and over.

So for 9 months, we’re losing all this money.

Becoming Marketers

And then we realised we had to really become marketers.

We had to learn about buying media. We had to learn about cold traffic. We had to learn how to engage other influencers, not just myself.

So as you see this wheel, spinning around, affiliates is at the top.

Once you have a viable product that we had created in the middle, after launching Organifi.

Then, we built partnerships with Clickbank. We were the first-ever, physical supplement to launch on Clickbank last year.

Our affiliate launch did like 2.5 million bucks.

Building Partnerships

So, building partnerships was huge for us.

You see the Kuving’s, Six Pack Shortcuts.

You guys familiar with those guys? Mike Chang, you’ve seen the videos. Has anybody seen that? See a show of hands.

So they were managing some of our inbound calls and our outbound calls to upsell them to more Organifi at that time.

And then the wheel just continues to go.

But it’s based on the very beginning, the niche that I had chose, juicing, everything that I had loved and it was just being me.

So if you can think of something that you love more than anything else and for some of you, it’s probably marketing.

I mean you all love marketing but there may be something in your heart or your mind that you love more than that.

Make Money With The Skills That You Have

And you can make a lot of money doing that with the skills that you have. Like Neil was talking about, a digital product, whatever it is.

So all those arrows, essentially, I like to look at is trust.

We built so much trust in our community of delivering a video a week to having amazing customer service, to engaging with every single person when they post comments on YouTube and Facebook.

And in the beginning, you don’t even have to have an employee that works with you.

I mean leverage VA’s in the Philippines. That’s what we did in the very beginning and most of you are probably doing that now.

And if you’re not, you’re just starting a fitness program or whatever it is. Make your first hire somebody in the Philippines that can manage all that customer service stuff.

It makes a huge difference, especially on Facebook, because now they’re timing you and if you’re not responding to your customers fast enough, you get a poor rating.

And when you do respond, you get a high rating and it helps with everything else on that particular page.

The Primary Business: FitLife.TV

So let’s go into the two businesses. FitLife.TV is the primary business that we started and that’s the media channel. That was what had built all that trust.

And then number two is Organifi, which we launched two years ago.

And that saved our business. We’re losing 50 to 75 grand a month when we started Organifi.

I remember like it was yesterday. We were literally doing, at that time like 35/40 grand a month.

And when we first launched Organifi, I remember the first 2 hours, we had done like 35,000 bucks on sales.

And I was like, “Holy crap! 9 months of having to let people go, people that I was close to and failing.”

As a business owner, sometimes we take that personally, even though we shouldn’t right.

Anybody ever takes a business failure kind of personally and get down on themselves? Can I see a show of hands?

Yeah, so I did that.

And when we started, when we started to turn it around, that’s when everything changed. That’s when our business really started to grow.

Membership Site

So FitLife, without the platform that we had created, all the videos that we were doing, the digital product that I had created, the $97 digital course. We built a membership site, which was awesome.

Does anybody have a membership site in here? Digital product?

Yeah, we were selling that for like 37 bucks a month. And it worked really well for a long time.

The first sales that we had for Organifi were all organic. There were no paid ads whatsoever.

We had to learn real quick how to actually perform and have ads and everything else that converted, and develop a product that the community wanted.

So what we did is we used the launch pad to do that.

We had a viral post on Facebook that told us inflammation was a serious problem in our audience.

We had a YouTube video that said that gut health was a big issue for a lot of people.

Huge. Especially in America, with all the processed food, the sugar, the dairy, the wheat, everything everybody’s eating, gut health was huge.

Facebook Insights

And then Facebook with the insights, told us who our avatar was and how much money they made and everything else. It also told us that people are way too busy to make their own juice.

I mean, how many people juice veggies in here?

Like two people?

But the benefits we all know are there, with all the ingredients, you know the enzymes, the aminos.

I’m a freak when it comes to this kind of stuff by the way. I go to Whole Foods and I just load up on veggies and all the weirdest stuff.

People look at me like I’m crazy.

But you got to have that type of crazy to be successful in some of these niches like we had done with juicing.

Instagram showed us what kind of imagery to use.

And then finally, our emails which we built an email list. Right now, I think we’re getting like a 1,000 to 1,200 opt-ins a day on our email list but it also showed us what type of headlines, what type of copy, what was important to a lot of people at that time.

So in our Facebook posts, obviously, here’s one of them.

Can barely read it down here but you could see 10,000 clicks on the link for one of our Facebook posts. And I believe that was without even boosting it.

I mean, with emails, open rates are diminishing.

Anybody experiencing that with their email servers? How open rates just continue to go down and we have to optimise mobile and all this other stuff.

Have Your Own Audience

But Facebook we’re getting a bunch of link clicks. So with a turmeric product we launched, we had a video that had over 6 million views.

So you can get all these insights to create a product like we had done with Organifi.

And it’s extremely valuable to have your own audience to understand your own avatars and everything like that.

Pareto Principle (Shiny Object Syndrome)

Shortcut number three is Pareto principle.

This is a hard one for me and it probably is for a lot of people in here with the entrepreneurial mindset.

It’s also known as the shiny object syndrome. We want to launch 10 products a month right.

Anybody in here like that? You have so many good ideas of different products you want to create, and you want to get out to the world that you’re always inventing something new. And you’re not really focused on the one thing, more or less.

Anybody like that?

Yeah, I’m a lot like that.

So shiny object syndrome, we had to really look at what was working for us with Organifi.

And that’s one of the things Djamel and the rest of the FitLife team has really helped out with.

We realised affiliates was big. A lot of our launches were driven primarily by affiliates.

I mean, depending on the affiliate, we eventually got a lot of people that would scam and rip apart our videos.

And we actually had one person that created their own green juice and called it Organifi but they added an “i” at the end.

And they stole all of our landing pages and everything else like that.

So we encountered a lot of different people ripping us off and whatnot. And we really had to figure out who were the best affiliates and how to cut through all that riffraff.

So we launched on Organifi, we did $2.5 million in sales during that launch.

One of our top affiliates did $250k without spending any money on media. And here’s why it works so well with affiliates.

Real Results

Number one, we have real results and you can see the Amazon listing. Almost a thousand reviews on it.

And does anybody know what that Amazon choice is?

I took this image off today, I have no idea. My girlfriend used to do a lot of stuff on Amazon. And we have no idea what this is.

Does anybody know what that is? Oh, that’s cool.

So Amazon said that it’s their chosen product. But Amazon’s not our biggest traffic source.

We have 38 media channels online that are all sending traffic to it. Where do people go to search?

Amazon.

So we can afford to pay our affiliates more than most products. Like in the Clickbank marketplace, Linkshare, all these other things.

Because we’ve accounted for some of that backdraft in Amazon and we want to pay our affiliates well.

Does that make sense to everybody? Can I see a few head nods? Yeah, there we go. Cool.

Converts

So number two, it converts like gangbusters.

And if you’re developing your own product, copy is the big thing. You wanna hire multiple copywriters, you want to test multiple angles like they had just spoke about.

We tested everything.

I mean, we tested the conservative angle, their survival angle, we tested so much stuff. And we really honed in on what works across different media channels.

Build Relationships: The Emotional Bank

Number three, when working with affiliates, it’s good to build relationships with them and develop what’s called an emotional bank.

So, if I know a superaffiliate did a quarter a million dollars in sales for me, I’ll gladly, if obviously, I believe in their product and it works and I’ve tested it and everything else, I’ll gladly promote their stuff.

Who wouldn’t? You’re building that relationship.

So that’s what the emotional bank is. I think a lot of people in this business expect and they take, take, take, take and there’s not enough givers.

So that’s what we do at FitLife and Organifi and that’s what’s worked really, really well for us. It’s just the reciprocity end goal.

So real results, product — looks like that’s in there twice.

And then, the extra 10%, going the extra mile. Case in point, the guys that did 250 grand for us in affiliate commissions.

We actually got two infrared saunas for them. $12,000 infrared saunas.

They didn’t even know we were doing this, but we sent it to them as a gift after the affiliate launch.

So there’s always these things that you can do that make a big difference when working with affiliates.

And yeah, that was pretty powerful.

So going the extra mile, Organifi converts not only on weight loss, but health and fitness, cooking paleo, and personal development. Those are the lists that we go after.

Basic Funnel Design

Here’s our basic funnel design. I wanted to show this to you just because I know everyone in here, most people are probably into the basic funnel design. What this looks like.

If you guys want to email me after this too, I can send this over to you.

So don’t worry about it if you can’t see it. Could probably take a picture of it as well.

But the Organifi sales page leads to one bottle subscription, which is our most popular and then a 3 bottle upsell of the same product.

And this took quite a bit of split testing to figure this out, but this worked better than any other supplement product that we had as an upsell.

We just sold them more of this stuff that they bought in the first place.

Is anybody doing this in here? You experience similar results? Yeah.

So this raised how much our affiliates were making and also the 30% lifetime commission on that was very helpful.

Create A Bunch Of Facebook Videos

So in the affiliate backend, we actually have a bunch of Facebook videos. We’re gonna be creating specifically for affiliates as well.

And here is some of the ads that we actually use. We’re very video-centric.

So I’m guessing people are gonna have questions about videos after I get through these slides and I wanted to save some time for that as well.

But videos on Facebook convert really well. We are 5x-ing what we’re spending on some of the videos.

Other ones, it’s a break-even. But there’s a lot you can do with Facebook videos. They just opened up Facebook Messenger ads as well.

Is anybody using those?

And then Facebook Group ads have just opened up, which is pretty cool.

Membership Website On Facebook

And now you can have a membership website on Facebook. Anybody doing that?

Nobody’s even heard of that. Check it out.

So write this down. Organifi.com/affiliate-resources, that’s the link where you can get all this stuff. Even if you don’t promote it, you can kind of see how we laid out our affiliate website.

Some of the resources that we put in there for affiliates. You can check that out as well.

And then how do you make it scale afterward? Because we know that affiliates, we know that organic reach, everything else is great.

If you’re one person and you want a pretty significant paycheck per year. But when you have a team of, we have about 65 people on our team now, you have to scale.

And scaling takes a lot of work. And you’re gonna fail a lot more than you win. But on those wins, that’s when you really start to create momentum and grow a sizable company.

So you have to be fully invested into this to truly scale.

And a lot of you are doing, I heard one guy’s doing like $50,000 a day selling this fat-burning product or something in here.

And yeah, so scaling is great.

My clicker is not working anymore. Here we go.

Direct Response Is King

So direct response is king. Understanding your LTV, understanding your EPC’s, your cart value on every single product, all of that stuff, that was one thing that we focused on big-time to truly grow 10% every single month was the LTV.

So we started and our LTV was around $110 per customer. And now, we finally passed a $300 mark which allows us to spend quite a bit on CPA networks and stuff like that.

So obviously, copy is king.

The YouTube video sales letter, we have four of them. Each one of them, depending on the month, you can do about 50k a month on each video and they’ll work for 2 years.

But there is a natural attrition with YouTube video as well. And you constantly want to be testing new YouTube videos.

A good media buyer on YouTube is key and Facebook as well, Facebook media buyers.

So Facebook’s a lot different than YouTube as far as the videos go.

YouTube, it’s more like those cheesy infomercials that you’d see in the 80’s with all the NLP, those really work.

Facebook, you do that, I mean you’ll get banned in a second. And it just doesn’t convert as well. On Facebook, people want to learn, they want to consume, it’s more push marketing.

So most of our videos are like, the 3 things that you can do to improve your gut health, the 5 ways to be healthy when you’re traveling.

And then at the end of it, then you’re basically pitching your product. That works really, really well for us.

Facebook Ad Videos

We’ve had some Facebook ad videos that have had millions of views and they’ve been converting for months on end, just because people go there, they get educated, and then they buy the product at the end.

And then depending on how much you test it, your interests, all that other stuff, you can literally 5x the money that you spend.

Case in point, my friend Brie, the Betty Rocker, she’s like one of the best Facebook ad influencer buyers.

She buys all of her own media and she literally 5x’s or sometimes 7x’s her money that she’s spending on Facebook.

So we’re just getting into Google, Bing, Yahoo, different text ads, stuff like that. We’re split testing everything.

Email, I’m gonna show you guys a sequence that we use here.

Here’s just a sample of an email that we sent out that does really well with sales. 25% open rate, 3% click-through, it’s all on inflammation.

In our niche, women like to read is what we realised. So it’s a little bit more text heavy than a lot of the emails people are sending out in different niches.

And then here’s the sequence that we use in an autoresponder for Organifi. And it educates, educate, educate, and then pitch them a product, teach them some more, and then pitch them the product at the end.

It’s kind of the way that that looks. And I can email all this to you guys if you want to opt into this.

JuiceWithDrew.com, you can kind of see the emails that are coming out and how they work with selling Organifi.

And JuiceWithDrew.com, actually is my first digital product that I started selling, that $97 digital product that I sold at the very beginning as well.

Testing TV Commercials

Now, we’re getting into testing TV commercials. We’re testing all these different creatives that we’ve built on social which is pretty powerful if you think about it.

Because we’ve done all this work at building this audience, understanding what our demographic likes, understanding the interests, and now we’re taking that to TV just to reach more of that audience, like the Beachbody the P90X crowd that kind of stuff.

My girlfriend’s always given me a hard time. She’s like, “You should just stay on the internet and penetrate the internet more versus going to TV and all these other things.”

But I think there’s definitely a lot more to learn in the marketing aspect of what’s really working.

And to understand what’s really working, being a permanent student, buying everybody else’s products, ripping apart their funnels that have worked really well for us.

And here are some of the tools that we’re using currently.

Tools

Anybody here use SEMrush?

Using that, it’s great for like typing in your competitors, looking at keywords. It gives you a little bit more stuff to actually dig deeper on and see how many links and whatnot.

AdBeat, you can see what ads are running and what your competitors are doing, what’s working for them.

WhatRunsWhere, similar concept.

Unbounce, that’s what we use to build a lot of our landing pages. You could throw up a landing page in like 5 minutes.

And good old Google keyword selector, Buzzsumo. When you’re doing a lot of stuff on social, Buzzsumo will show you what your competitors are doing. How many Facebook likes it has, how many Pinterest likes, how many YouTube views, all this other stuff and you just type it into Buzzsumo.

Is anybody using that? A few people in here.

Clickfunnels, how many you guys have heard of Clickfunnels? Quite a few. Okay cool.

Clickbank for affiliate stuff.

Slack, Basecamp, those are two team management things that you can use.

A lot of people ask what I shoot on. What kind of videos? They think we were using reds and all this other fancy equipment.

Literally, I would say 30% to 40% of them are shot on a cellphone.

Like the Tai Lopez videos that Neil was talking about, but we use of Canon 5D and a Canon C100 with just a little Sennheiser microphone, works really well.

So I guess that wraps that slide up and again.

Creatives

Organifi.com/affiliate, you can see what creatives were using, the email swipes, our top performing landing pages, and a little bit more in-depth about our free trial offer as well.

That’s working really well for us.

You just pay $7.99 for shipping and we’ll send you three Organifi, it goes to your address. And that builds up subscription with our continuity platform as well.

So when it comes to selling physical products, subscription has been key for us. That’s one of the biggest things that’s moved the needle.

So if you are selling a physical product online having a subscription is key.

So that’s that. I wanted to leave some time at the tail end for a Q&A.

If you guys have questions, we’ll rock it out.

Q&A

Hugh:
I’m damn sure I have questions. That was fantastic. Thank you very much.
Drew:
Yeah.
Hugh:
Okay. So actually, the first question that I have — yes.
Drew:
Thank you, thank you.
Hugh:
First question, so as an affiliate, I did all organic, built things the slow way for many, many years before I became an affiliate. One of the things that attracted me to being an affiliate was that organic is slow. Building a following is slow but it works really well, but you seem to have built yours on YouTube and other social platforms in record time. So aside from working your ass off and the aforementioned taking your shirt off and videoing it on YouTube.
Drew:
Yeah.
Hugh:
What are your hacks? How do you make that grow faster? From a zero base.

Making It Grow Fast

Drew:
So hacks for me in the very beginning, were basically developing the $97 digital product. Having low overhead on Facebook. And then rolling that money, what I was making, a portion of it, 20/30% of it, back into a light campaign, where I was getting likes for 3 cents to 7 cents. They’ve gone up a little bit. Some media buyers can get him for less now, but I was actually getting likes to build that social following. Because I knew that if I could leverage that social following with sponsorships, and other TV shows, and other networks at the time that would give me more brand credibility and more social proof that I could turn into money down the road. So as future invested earnings with the way social was moving at the time. Does that make sense?
Hugh:
Yeah that makes a little sense. So you’re essentially making a product early, reinvesting all the money from that into growing the social following. Then getting social proof from that, using that to build the social following even more.

Social Influence

Drew:
Yeah, cause social influence is what everything’s turning to. I mean, social influence is basically, turn yourself into a celebrity and then use that to sell physical products over and over and over again. I could launch another Organifi within the next 6 months. It would be a freaking nightmare because there’s a lot of work that goes into it. But it would be another multimillion dollar brand built on FitLife.TV because the influence that we’ve already built. If that makes sense raise your hand. Alright, cool.
Hugh:
Okay, so the next thing, you mentioned and this is something that’s come up a couple of times today. So I really want to dig into it a bit. The idea that if you have a passion, you can turn that into a business, into a saleable product. Eventually, it’s something that you can exit from for you know vast sums of money and on Inc. 500’s fastest growing etc. So I’m wondering, if I throw like a hobby that some people could have, at you, can you kind of just brainstorm how you would go about taking one guy or one girl with that hobby, to big company?
Drew:
Absolutely. This will be fun.
Hugh:
Okay, so I’m not gonna use any of the hobbies I actually have, cause most of them I’ve already monetised, but I have a couple of friends of mine who do crafting. Like making jewellery or making stuff like that. And they try to sell it, but it goes really badly. So how would you take a guy or girl, who is making jewellery, making crafting things, and turn that into a brand?

Turn Your Passion Into A Business

Drew:
How did I know you were gonna pick jewellery? I just knew it. So what I would do and it’s based based on the same launch pad system that we created in the very beginning, I would probably leverage Instagram, more than anything else right now, just because it’s more image-centric with the photos of the jewellery, everything. I’d integrate it with a Shopify site. We have a Shopify site for Organifi, it’s working really well. I would check out Ezra Firestone’s stuff, if you’re just starting. I know there was another guy talking about Shopify in here in one of the panels.
Hugh:
Yeah, there was one this morning. There’s another one tomorrow morning.
Drew:
Yeah, yeah. Setting up your Shopify site, so you have those products. Are we talking about like, do you want to know how I would outsource it? Like going to China?
Hugh:
Basically how would you turn this one person into this social media giant.
Drew:
Got it. Yeah, so what I would do is basically similar to what I did. I would make videos on Facebook, on YouTube, showcasing the jewellery, talking about other things that these girls like, that are into jewellery as well, right. So the jewellery is just the product, but what else are they into? Well they’re into hair. They’re in the makeup. They’re in the beauty. They’re into — I mean, my girlfriend could probably talk about this all day long, how she would do this. But essentially, the more content that I would put out there to build that relationship with other women that are into this jewellery, then I have that fan, that superfan that’s been following me for 2 years. I’ve been talking not only about jewellery, but other things about life. I’ve been talking about relationships. Women love to talk about relationships. So I would make videos relationships, on all this other stuff.

Consistency Over Time

And all while doing that, that consistency over time is gonna build that subconscious relationship in your audience’s mind over time. I probably have some similar branding throughout the video structure. I would incorporate them on surveys. I would survey that the heck out of them to truly understand what type of jewellery interested them the most. We did surveys when we launched Organifi to see was ashwagandha something people were interested in getting rid of stress? So maybe the purple quartz, more women are interested in that than the sapphire or whatever. I would ask questions like that and that I would make them feel like they created the jewellery. I was just the person that put it together but they actually created it. My community created it. And when you do that, when you give that to your community, as if they were the ones that actually made it, they become empowered.

Build A Tribe

You’re building a tribe. If you haven’t read the book by Seth Godin called Tribes, check it out. But when you have that tribe, it doesn’t matter how many people you have. You have 500 or 1,000 loyal tribes people, that’s a multimillion dollar business. And they’re gonna continue to buy from you over and over and over again because you built that trust. So the videos I would do, I would also teach them how to spot fake jewellery on the internet. You know, I’d do the negative side of things.

Do The Negative Side

So for us, there’s a lot of other green juice powders out there that have a lot of heavy metals, they’re not organic. There’s the opposite side that I would talk about with my jewellery creation and everything else. Maybe even have an e-book talking about it or how to make your own jewellery. I’d have a $97 e-book on how to make your own jewellery and it could come with a kit with beads and all these other things, as an upsell from the jewellery that they’d actually buy. And yeah, I mean, the opportunity is endless. You can literally take any niche, any idea that you have and if you’re enthusiastic about it and you know anything about marketing, you could turn it into a big business.
Hugh:
Yeah and I’ve seen people do this in all kinds of niches. And I’ve seen people use — yeah, I mean that kind of strategy, you could use equally well for thinking about things that are likely to be popular in this audience. Like if you’re really into Brazilian Ju-jitsu or freely into computer games or anything like that.

Invest On Social Influence

Drew:
Yeah, anything. And what people want more than anything else, is somebody who’s enthusiastic as them about that thing that you’re selling. I was selling green juice, a $97 product on how to juice vegetables. And we made millions of dollars doing this. I would literally, at that time, as a high-end coaching consultant, Frank Kern would make fun of me all the time. Anybody know Frank Kernan here? Alright, cool. So quite a few. He would literally, I would go to somebody’s house, teach them how to juice, how to workout, and charge them $10,000 for a day when I first started this because of the social influence that I had. So investing in that social influence in the beginning, made me the expert that allowed me to charge $10,000 a day to do that, to teach somebody how to juice, and make vegetables, and workout. And that was worth my time, back then. But now growing this big business, I wouldn’t even think about doing that. So hopefully that makes sense.
Hugh:
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Okay, I think we’re gonna open up to questions from the audience. If you have a question, come to one of the mics that are spaced around here.
Drew:
Don’t everybody run up here at once.
Hugh:
I think I see movement.

Tip: How To Build Like YouTube Audience And Subscribers

Audience (Jena):
Can you give some tips on how to build like YouTube audience and subscribers? Do you bring them from Facebook? Because you built your Facebook first? How did you grow the YouTube?
Drew:
Yeah, so YouTube. Consistency has been key for us. Treating YouTube like it is its own community, that’s what we dropped the ball on in the very beginning. It was, we’ll focus on Facebook, we’ll focus on the blog, and then we’ll just use our videos and upload them on YouTube as basically a server. So leaving comments, checking in. Talking about controversial topics for us on YouTube has worked really well. Talking about like a workout I did, like the Hugh Jackman workout. It’s got like millions of views on it because it’s somebody who’s a celebrity, somebody that’s credible, people are searching for it.

Verified YouTube Page

And what’s also great about YouTube is once you become a verified YouTube page, you start ranking on the first page of Google. We have the number one video for probiotics on YouTube. Probiotics are selling like gangbusters all over the internet because that’s one of the biggest supplements of last year, if you research it. But on YouTube, that’s a very credible asset that we have. So picking your keywords correctly, building that out, I could talk for days about YouTube strategy.

Creative Ways To Build That Subscribership

But essentially what’s key is figure out what the other top videos are, whatever you’re working with. Link them in your description. Also use the keywords of that, talk about that video, and you can ride viral tidal waves of other videos and like leverage that traffic off of that. So when Tim Ferriss launched his book, The 4-Hour Body, I did a review of the book that I got early, and I used his keywords, I used his link to his video, I pointed it to it. But literally within 2 hours my video was right next to Tim Ferriss’. And I collected like 6,500 opt-ins, at that time when that book launched, which were very valuable to me because then they were on my list. I was using direct response marketing. I was leveraging that to sell my digital product which I was really terrible at back in the day. So there’s all types of creative ways to build that subscribership. Now we have pre-roll ads that run and we’re also all over YouTube with long format video sales letters that convert better than pre-roll ads. So a full 45-minute VSL. Is everybody familiar with those in here?

Video Sales Letter

So video sales letter, essentially is your written sales letter in video format. And you put that on YouTube, with the direct link to your sales page and that converts if it’s done right. So similar to what Neil did on stage when he was talking about price distortion, when you buy it now for $9.97. Using a lot of those processes, there’s what’s called the 12-step sales letter. You can just Google it and that’ll show you what you need in your first video sales letter. You don’t need to hire a copywriter if you’re just starting out. Truth is a lot of them are very expensive. I think we paid one of our copywriters like 700 grand last year. So you got to be careful with that when you’re just starting out. What I would do is probably, if you like writing, maybe write your first one yourself and record it on a phone. You don’t need a high budget or anything like that, that’s what I did for the first Juice With Drew video. And that actually outperformed any single copywriter from the very beginning because I knew more about it than they did. So that might be what you want to do on YouTube. Roll that money back into a light campaign or pre-rolls that target people to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

Tip: Increasing Engagement From The Audience

Audience:
What are your best tips for increasing engagement from the audience? Like on Facebook or something. I mean, it’s cheap to get likes but for the people to actually engage, comment, like the videos, share the videos.
Drew:
Great question. What’s your name?
Audience (Jena):
Jena.
Drew:
Jena, so what we’re seeing now is Facebook Live gets more engagement than anything else. So if you could commit to doing a Facebook Live daily. Make it like the Jena hour or something like that, whatever, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever, you have. And every day, talk to your audience, do giveaways, we do a giveaway on Facebook Live every time, where I’m like 50th comment gets a 30-day supply of Organifi green juice. And then people shuttle in and rush to leave comments as much as possible and that builds the engagement on. So potentially, a Facebook Live that we do, depending on the page that it’s on, my juicing vegetable page has almost 2 million people on that one. It’ll have like a quarter million people that have seen it, within the first 10 or 20 minutes. So that’s the engagement going up and up and up on that particular page.

Facebook Live

Audience (Jena):
Do you do the Facebook Live mostly like a Q&A or?
Drew:
Yeah, Q&A’s are great, how-to’s on Facebook live work very well. So whatever your niche is, let’s say your niche is jewellery, right. And you’re making jewellery. How to find the best stone for your piece, clearly I’ve never made jewellery. I don’t even know where that came from. How-To videos on Facebook or you take your FAQ that Charles was talking about. Remember the FAQ on the sales page? And you address each one of those in a Facebook Live for your audience. So I have an Organifi Facebook page that I have somebody do Facebook Lives on and their Facebook Lives are the FAQ. Answering questions, concerns from the audience, giving them a discount code to Shopify. A coupon code so we can track how well that Facebook Live does. So that’s how we track influencer sponsorships as well, which I could talk about in a second too.

How Long Should You Do A Facebook Live

Audience (Jena):
And how long do you usually do the Facebook Live?
Drew:
Something magical happens after about 15 minutes from what I’ve noticed. It’s like the engagement starts to increase more and more. You start picking up more viewers because from what I’ve seen, that’s enough time for people to really get on Facebook, see it in the feed, get involved in it, get engaged in it. So at about 15 minutes and beyond, that’s when you really start picking up engagement.
Audience (Jena):
And do you market it before the thing? Telling people when it’s gonna be?
Drew:
I should, I should. I don’t. That’s something that I could do, email the list, and post it on all the other Facebook fan pages. Once you get a big enough Facebook fan page too, there’s other Facebook networks that will do share for share deals with you, depending on what it’s in. And one thing that I’m working on is having them share a Facebook Live across all those different networks at once.
Audience (Jena):
You mean just other pages? Or a network?
Drew:
In the network. So once you have a significant following, other people want to share yours with theirs and you’ll just do like trade deals, which is pretty cool because that’ll that skyrockets your engagement. Especially because it’s not free anymore. Facebook will charge the shit out of you for engagement.
Audience (Jena):
Thank you.
Drew:
Yeah, welcome.

Before The Winning Product Was Found

Audience (Alex):
Hey just to have 2 quick questions. When you were going through your downswing and you found, where you kind of founded Organifi and it took off, about how many products did you create, launch, failed and then an experience before you found your winning product?
Drew:
Great question. What’s your name?
Audience (Alex):
My name is Alex.
Drew:
Alex, I was like the digital guy. I had this digital product that was working because of the engagement then organic reach died, right. So I was creating all these digital products thinking that one day this digital product is gonna work for me. It was almost like I was in hamster wheel of creation. I wasn’t putting enough time into copy, in the messaging and the storytelling. All these things that it takes to create one successful piece. So digital, digital, digital. I probably failed on like 8 different funnels. My team was stressed out. I was stressed out. Then we launched Organifi and something was different because it was the first physical product that we had launched. We spent more time developing copy, spent more time developing the story, the creative, the imagery, the testimonials. This was like a baby that we were creating and that’s probably why it works so well, I would say. We probably could have done that with some of the other digital products too but there was just something magical about a first physical product. And the conversions were a lot higher because of the EPCs, everything else that we were creating.

The Right Product

Audience (Alex):
I think you kind of touched on the answer to my second question. But how did you know that product was the one? How’d you know to go all in it?
Drew:
Because we created the world’s largest juicing following, like technically. We had 2 million people almost. On Facebook, our engagement was through the roof on that page. People had been watching me for years talking about green juice and all this other stuff. I didn’t really know that I was gonna do as well as this done guys but intuitively, it’s like I had this little nudge. And we get those every once in a while as entrepreneurs. So that was one of the nudges that I had and we really didn’t go all in in the beginning. I had only ordered like 3,000 units. For me at the time, that was a lot right because I was losing 50 to 75 grand a month to invest another $40,000 or $50,000 in a product. I was like out of my mind but I had to do something.
Audience (Alex):
Make sense, right. I appreciate it. Thanks.
Drew:
Yeah, thank you Alex.
Hugh:
Fantastic. Thank you very much. I’m sure that we could keep asking you questions for about another hour, but unfortunately I think we’re out of time. So thank you very much, that was awesome.
Drew:
Thanks everyone. I appreciate it.