Ranking Revolution

Doug: In this episode, I talked to Alex Horstman about getting started in SEO, learning about SEO, and then working at an eight figure e com brand. But really we focus on email marketing and converting leads to paying clients and overall removing your dependence from Google and focusing a little bit more on email.
This is the first part of our discussion. So be sure to check out part two, where we focus on link building in a slow yet highly effective way. That's really hard for your competitors to recreate. And it's based on ideas from trust me, I'm lying, but that's part two. So let's get into part one and we'll talk about email marketing.

Welcome to the Ranking Revolution podcast, your go to source for strategies and ideas for SEO, organic growth, content creation, and online business. I'm Doug Cunnington, your host. Alex Horstman got his start in SEO eight years ago as a link builder and climbed his way up to becoming the head of marketing for an eight figure e commerce brand.
Doug: Four years ago, he decided to build his own affiliate sites on the side with his biggest one. Reaching 40 K per month. He's now a self proclaimed affiliate marketer turned marketer as he's realized SEO is just one piece of the marketing puzzle. He's had his teeth kicked in by Google many times. Like many of us have, and now he focuses on slow, sustainable growth, both for his projects and his clients. So today we're going to talk about list building. We're going to talk about lead magnet optimization, and we'll also get into link building and brand mentions and a specific approach that Alex has found super effective in the sort of larger media world.
And we'll get into all the details. So Alex, welcome to the show. How's it going?
Alex: Hey, it's going good, Doug. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to chat despite everything going on in the SEO world right now.
Doug: And to just lay the foundation. Yeah. It's May of 2024. So a lot is going on. There's a lot of uncertainty in the SEO world and it kind of, you know, it fits in with some of the topics we're, we're covering, but not specifically, like we want to make sure people can get value from this in six months or 18 months or.
Even a couple of years from now. So Alex, I want to get into the details of how you got started with marketing or SEO. And actually you could even go back to like the education or any kind of training that you had just to let us know how you got to where you are now.
Alex: Yeah. So I was at the university of Missouri.
I was a junior and. There's again, I was at University of Missouri, uh, Mizzou, and they had a job board called hire Mizzou tigers. And I was looking for a part time job and I came across a role for a digital marketing agency to do link building for them. And I had no idea what that meant. But they were looking for someone to do link building for one of their clients that was in the outdoors niche.
And so they're looking for people in the Midwest who are familiar with hunting, outdoors, camping, survival, all that good stuff. And while I wasn't too much of a practitioner myself, I at least understood the topic. So I applied for the position, ended up getting it. Funny enough, I was also in charge of the Instagram, but got let go of that part.
Within three to six months cause I'm a terrible creative. So I was, I got started, I think that was. Eight, almost nine years ago now, when I first started link building. And after I graduated from the university, I moved out to Bali, Indonesia to work underneath the agency's owner, like one on one. It became much more of like a mentorship mentee.
That's kind of what took me from there. Everything just like the growth was exponential because I was able to work underneath someone who scaled SEO, you know, websites and SEO firsthand. I was working underneath them, living in a shack, making very little money. But my skills just grew tremendously.
So from there, I then gave a talk, I was part of a mastermind called Dynamite circle. And so I gave a talk in Bangkok and I kind of got a sense of I just didn't feel authentic when giving the talk because everything I taught was. Not relatable to people within the mastermind who are small business owners or solopreneurs.
I was like, Hey, you know, I'm doing it for this eight figure e commerce brands, like just spend more money and you'll be fine. Just, you know, just buy more links, just write more content. So I ended up building out my own, like after that conference, I went back to Bali. And the next week I built my first affiliate site because I just wanted to put myself in those shoes and actually learn firsthand what it took to build one of these sites.
It's very different building a site from scratch versus, you know, being a senior director or a head of marketing. So after I built that site, you know, it's, I've been kind of down the affiliate marketing Route building my own content sites, you know ever since that was about four years ago when I built my first one.
Doug: Perfect That was my next question. So about four years ago and Shout out to tropical NBA and dynamite circle. I was in there for a couple few years But that's a side story. We could talk about it offline But I realized you know, a lot of people in the DC dynamite circle are they're pretty growth minded or at least on the front face You Of the community, there's a lot of people doing interesting, like, very Again, high growth and scaling in mind, and I'm in a downshift situation.
So I went to an event and I was just like, my goal this year is to do less work, which just doesn't fit very well. I think there's actually a lot of people in the DC that are in this, that have the same mindset. But you don't hear that on the front and you sound weak if you're just like I'm cruising, right?
But it's an interesting brand because you know, part of it is like location independent entrepreneurs Time freedom and then the other side is like I want to have an eight figure business and i'm like I don't want to have an eight figure business. I want to have like what i'm doing and I have a shitload of free time So anyway, that's the story for another day.
Any thoughts? I could I could
Alex: riff on that for You I think I'm reading a book right now called Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, I believe his last name is. And one of the, I won't touch on this too much, but one of the concepts that he talks about is working at a natural pace and how you, you know, it's okay to ebb and flow like, you know, three years ago, if you ask me, I wanted to own an eight figure business this year, if you ask me.
I want to work 20 hours a week and kind of, you know, I'm probably about to get married. Like I kind of want to enjoy my life a little bit more. And then probably next year, maybe I ramp it back up and that's okay. And so it, you know, it speaks to what you're talking about. I also think a lot of people in the DC have at least.
The people who have been around for a long time, a lot of them have kind of downshifted. You see the newcomers who have that energy and that heat, but people that have been around, you know, they're like, man, there's more to life than just making a boatload of money.
Doug: Yep. Money will solve money problems.
It doesn't solve much else. All right. So those are deeper topics we'll have to take to the other show. So couple, couple quick things. So you said you started your first affiliate site four years ago when you were like, Hey, I want to check this out. And it was as a result of speaking at, uh, DCBKK sounds like.
Yep, exactly that. I didn't know you spoke there. That's really cool. I know that's, that's one of their biggest, um, biggest events out there. So when you started the site, how did it go? And we'll just touch on this pretty quick since we're not going to focus too much on it and we'll move into the lead magnet and sort of your email marketing approach, but yeah, 2020, you know, COVID hit there was, you know, it was a different SEO landscape and you got the site up to 40k per month.
It sounds like, so just talk about like the overall approach and what it was like.
Alex: Yeah. So when I first started, I mean, I, again, I got kicked in the teeth, not by Amazon or not by Google, but by Amazon, because during COVID they slashed their commissions from, I think, outdoors because it was in the outdoor niche.
I think it went from like, Eight to 4%. And it was just as I was starting to get traffic. And I was like, Holy shit, what is this affiliate marketing stuff? But it also showed me how little I knew whenever I started that site, you know, again, coming from this, it wasn't a corporate environment. It was still a small business, but doing eight figures you know, there's just a lot of differences in terms of.
strategic planning of what actions you're going to take for what's going to bring in revenue. Again, when you're growth oriented and when you're You know, bootstrapped, you don't have the luxury of being like, we're going to spend 50 grand on links. We know it'll pay off in a year. It's like, well, I kind of need, need revenue right now.
So I actually don't think in terms of SEO itself, I don't think it's changed too much. I think at the end of the day, content and links is still the name of the game. No matter if you're a B2B, if you're a local, or if you're an affiliate or e commerce brand, I still think that. Those two are the biggest levers that you can move.
I think, however the quality of both links and content has been significantly or it needs to be significantly better than what it was in 2020. I think in 2020 and the years before that. If you could build links and if you could put keywords on the right spots within the page, you could get it to rank.
I don't think that's the case anymore as we've seen. But you know, I still think those are the two biggest levers. If that answers the question.
Doug: Sure, that works. Like I said, those are topics that don't fit in this episode so well. And then, everything's changed so much in the last few months.
Yeah. We're not going to cover it, so. Okay, well let's move on because I think, Email list or like even more popular than they were And a lot of people I mean not only saw how well they can do But people are actually shifting because they lost the seo traffic. So some people are scrambling to your point like People need the cash flow depending on how their business was running their personal finances many other details And they can't spend Three years building a YouTube channel.
They need money to pay the rent and pay the bills and buy food and normal stuff that normal people need to do. So let's dive right into email capture and email marketing. So what's your overall approach? If you just had to summarize it at a high level.
Alex: Yeah, the overall approach is whether you're on, you know, whether it's SEO, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Facebook, whether it's LinkedIn.
Get people on your damn email list. Um, you know, because there is always risk. There's always platform risk, no matter where you're getting that traffic from. And the best way to get people on your email list is through a lead magnet. And that changes wildly depending on what. Page you're showing the lead magnet and what industry you're in.
I know you've had Matt from swim university on he, I actually watched a lot of his stuff when building out my first lead magnet. So for blogs, you know, that's really going to be cheat sheets, something quick and easy to digest B2B companies. That's going go look at HubSpot. They kill, they crush at this.
If you just go to HubSpot, you will be able to see. Everything that they do in terms of like, you know, their sub or their sales silo versus their marketing silo versus their HR silo and go look at what lead magnets they're offering. It's usually industry reports, some sort of statistics. Those do really well that industry and then e commerce, the typical.
10 percent off that's still like as much as people think it's dead. It's far from dead and it's still has amazing opt in rates. So that's really my approach is just again, no matter what platform you're advertising or marketing on, get them on your list. That's, that's my main approach moving forward.
Doug: Great example with HubSpot. Do you have any other ways that you get ideas for highly effective lead magnets? And the thing is, like, we can go to chat GPT or Gemini or wherever and actually get a pretty good list of that stuff. But there's no better way than looking at Companies that are already doing it, have a look at the competition and go from there.
So if you have any other examples, that would be great. Or a specific approach. Like if someone's in a, maybe a, they think it's a kind of a unique industry and they're like, well, it won't work for mine. So what approach might they take to go investigate what lead magnets do work?
Alex: Yeah, perfect. Great question.
First thing I'm going to do is if you have any sort of email list whatsoever. Just ask your audience because those people who signed up for your email list and you didn't even give them something for free. If your form just said, sign up for my email and they signed up, you want more of those people.
You don't want people. You don't want to survey people who are coming to your site. You want to survey people who have already signed up for your list. So it's super simple. You just shoot an email to everybody and say, Hey, I'm. Thinking about creating a lead magnet and why offer you all more value. What would you get the most value out of it?
You can, what I do is I use a tool called, I think it's feedletter. co or feedletter. io it's super cheap, nine bucks a month, and it allows you to place this quiz within the email and I give them three to four options and then leave the last option open ended. It will say, you know, you know, if I'm in the fishing niche, there'd be, you know, Bass lures, cheat sheet, or fishing rod tips, you know, bank fishing tips, something along those lines.
And then that last one is. Anything else. And when they click on that link, it takes them, you know, they submit that response and then they can fill it out themselves and be like, actually, I would love to get X, Y, and Z. I really need help with this and build it, you know, whatever wins. Typically I find that there's one thing that really sticks out to people and I just build it.
So the first thing, if you have an existing email list is ask your audience, like, don't look elsewhere, don't look at your competitors, ask who is already on your email list. Now, if you don't have an email list existing right now, that's when I would go and look at competitors in your industry, go look at those authority sites.
So B2B, I like always deferred to HubSpot because of how good they are. For, you know, any sort of blog content, whether, you know, the e commerce section of your blog or excuse me, the blog section of your e commerce store, or if you just have a content site, I would be looking. at paintable. cc is a really good website that offers free lead magnets.
It's all about painting, online painting, and they give you like these online brushes and these workshops and courses and teach you how to actually paint. Gain the skills and those they, I think they have like five to 10 percent often, right? It's really solid. And then for e commerce, I like Gymshark.
Gymshark could be improved, but they just do the classic 10 percent off on the website. Where they could improve is the blog section. So I think right now, if you're on the blog, Of their website you still get that 10 percent opt in box, but you know, it's not necessarily the most strategic opt in and I bet you could increase it drastically.
The example I shared was they, there was an article that they rank really well for about best arm workouts or how to get bigger arms and you know, you land on the page and then after 10, 30 seconds where you try and leave that, like, Hey, do you want 10 percent off pops up. It's like, no, I want bigger arms.
That's why I'm on this article. I don't give a shit about your gym clothing. So, you know, that could be optimized to where it's a cheat sheet or it's a workout, you know, of the 10 best arm exercises. And then you know, you capture that email address, you throw them into a welcome series because clearly they go to the gym, they want bigger arms and they'll probably be in store for gym clothing down the line.
But at that particular point in time, that's not a good lead magnet.
Doug: Perfect. And. I love that example because there's a concept of the lead magnet, right? It's something free, you know, you're talking about a cheat sheet. Generally, there's a couple other examples like the discount code. Sometimes people do like an ebook, which is kind of long, you know, depending on the market, people are not going to read like 50 pages.
Other people do like video courses, which take even more time. And again, people often, depending on the industry, might not spend the Whatever, five hours in your course, you'll read like skim one sheet, you know, that's what you need to do. But to your point, it's the concept of a content upgrade. So it's like a specific type of lead magnet.
And like you're saying, if someone wants bigger arms, it's like download the cheat sheet to make your biceps and triceps, like, you know, whatever, 20 percent bigger, whatever. By summertime or whatever. Right. So then it's exactly, I mean, you know, the person wants that information. So like, why not give them that cheat sheet?
Yeah. Super simple.
Alex: Yep. A hundred percent. And I mean, so it's hard to do like these content upgrades. I wouldn't do it for every, I actually tried this on one of our websites where I was like, okay, we're going to create a content upgrade for every single article that's getting over a thousand visitors a month.
And then I was like, Very quickly. I realized how that was not feasible whatsoever because we would have had to create, you know, a hundred plus lead magnets. So if you can at least find something within the category, going back to the workout example, you know, how to get bigger arms there, I'm sure their hub is just around how to get bigger arms, how to get bigger quads, how to get bigger.
You know, triceps, biceps, all that good stuff. And so it's like, is there at least a lead magnet that can kind of like the 80, 20, get most of those people, maybe it's not super specific, but clearly they want to get bigger or they want gain muscle. So is there some sort of lead magnet there that just speaks to that?
And then on the top 10 percent of your pages make it hyper, hyper relevant. But I find trying to do it for a hundred percent of your pages, you're just going to kill yourself.
Doug: Yeah. I chatted with a friend of mine who has a podcast and. A lot of times, you know, you come up with one or two lead magnets and they're converting good enough and you just leave it, you know, I think you find those examples everywhere, but he came up with, I think about 15 or 20 lead magnets, different categories, like you said.
And through his podcast, he mentions given a relevant statement or even if he has a guest on, he's like, Oh, actually I have a cheat sheet on this. So if people want more information, so in any given episode, he might mention, you know, one to three or four different lead magnets and through, you know, a couple hundred episodes, he went from, you know, whatever, a couple dozen leads.
Opt ins per week to like hundreds and thousands. And it's just through the compounding and just keep mentioning it. But like you said, he didn't do a new lead magnet for every single thing. And it's overwhelming if you already have, you know, whatever hundreds or thousands of pages or topics or something, then it's overwhelming.
Okay. So once someone ops in and they get their lead magnet or content upgrade, what happens next?
Alex: So I typically do a tripwire funnel and that essentially they input their email and that they are redirected to a sales page. And then there's also a email sequence that happens at the same time. So it's a three part sequence 24 hours.
Okay. Um, I think it's four hours, then 24 hours and then 72 hours. And it's essentially going, going, gone. So whenever you input your email address, you get this special offer, right? You're redirected to that sales page. This, the sale is only good for the next 48, 24, 72 hours, whatever you want to put on there.
And. If they go through the process and buy through that sales page, they don't get that, you know, that email sequence, the going, going gone, but if they view that page, but we don't, you know, we don't see their email get added to the buyers list, then they do get that email sequence. And that's what I like doing the most.
The tripwire funnel, it seems to It's been my favorite so far. It's very, it's the most kind of direct way I found or like the quickest way. I think it's a better word to monetize your list. And again, you know, if you want to start running paid traffic to it that's the best way you run paid traffic to your email opted, and then it, that helps offset your ad costs.
And if you can just run that at break even, then, you know, you're growing your email less for, for no money, which is. Best case scenario.
Doug: How much do you charge for trip wires? Can you give us a range what's appropriate?
Alex: Yeah, I would say I don't like going below 10 bucks. I don't think buying decisions really fluctuate between like zero and 20.
So the minimum I would do is about 1990. I think actually sometimes we drop it to 1495, but even then we don't see A conversion difference between 1495 and 1995. So I would keep it for like B2C hobby stuff. 20 bucks is probably where I'd have it. And then on the, you know, on a B2B or some sort of something to help you build professionally, health wealth that would be 90, $99.
I would, I would say, is your entry. And then, you know, afterwards you'd be looking at 500. And then for our B2C sites, it's typically 1995. And then the upsell is around 99. So,
Doug: okay. And if people want to know a little bit more, this is all, I mean, this is a standard, like sort of marketing funnel, but the terminology we're using is from digital marketer and it was probably like a decade ago when they were putting out A lot of this information.
So there's tons of information. If you just go look up like digital market or stuff, is that what you studied originally?
Alex: Yeah. Uh, John Ainsworth with data driven marketing. I think the website is data driven marketing. co their whole business model is helping creators. Monetize their email lists or their websites more and they kick ass.
I love what they're doing over there and they put really like everybody I've mentioned HubSpot Paintable. I've gotten a lot of those ideas from them. So I would go check them out. Their blog, they're straight to the point and they're like, this is what's worked. But like that's it
Doug: perfect. Yep. And I know I've been on john's show and he's been on my other ones.
So yeah, super good information john's great. He's part of the dc2. So yeah,
Alex: that's how I know him awesome
Doug: Okay, so you get the you get the lead magnet you're automatically trying to sell They do get the free opt in and part of the tripwire, you know, you get two benefits. You mentioned the first one, which is around offset the ad revenue or you offset the ad cost to get people to, The lead magnet, but also if someone buys something, they're a customer.
So it's a lot more likely for them to convert and you can see it in the data when you're like, Oh, our conversion rate went up by like 30%. And if someone buys the trip wire, they're like four times more likely. I'm just making up that number, but they're more likely to continue buying stuff from, from you, which is awesome.
So any other details around that?
Alex: Yeah. The only thing I would say. from the mistake that I made initially, Naval, a funny saying where he says, you're doing sales because you suck at marketing. You're doing marketing because you suck at product. And I found myself really good at marketing with these lead magnets where we would tweak the offer.
We would tweak, you know, what the form looks like and we could get those conversions up. But at the end of the day, the lead magnet wasn't that great. And I think that actually hurt us for a few of our sites in the long run, because people were less likely to buy. Cause it was like, wow, you promised. 10, but you gave me six.
So that is the one that the cat key suggestions. Don't skip out on it. View it as product. Don't just view it as a way to capture emails.
Doug: If your trip wire isn't converting, how do you troubleshoot that?
Alex: So we have actually data driven marketing on one of their, I'll see if I can find the URL for you. They share a spreadsheet.
That we just copied and it's a very detailed spreadsheet and basically shows, okay, lead magnets seen, like how many times was it viewed on your website? How many opt ins did you get? And then calculates the opt in rate and then it's, okay, how many people from that saw, you know, got directed to your tripwire page?
Cause actually sometimes. People won't make it to your tripwire page, even though you have it set up just because of, you know, maybe slow load times or just analytic issues. And then you're just tracking every step. You didn't look at page views on sales and then cart and then order page. And you just keep track of that on a week by week basis.
Every single week we, we look at those numbers and you just start testing. Like for us, our sales page was converting very poorly at one point. And we. remove the price from the sales page and just had it on the order page and that almost doubled click through rate. And so, and then actually we removed a timer one time and that helped sales as well.
Not sales, but just the click through rate to the order page. So, and I think it's just because it just seemed so inauthentic and it's outplayed, it could be wrong, but I'm guessing that's why it helped.
Doug: Interesting. Okay. Very cool. I think it's really hard. Cause you're like, Oh, this is going to do great.
And then you get it all set up. Well, the other part is the implementation of this. So we're talking about, it's like, Oh yeah, you get the one time sale. And then if they, you get the downs, uh, offers and the downgrades and then the upgrade, if they do buy and all that kind of stuff, and just to. quickly note.
So like if they do buy the tripwire they get an offer for an upsell for something more expensive, like a true product. Right. Okay. Got it. So again, people can go and research this because in my head, I know how this funnel works. And if you go to a lot of different you know, funnel software or Kajabi does this, right.
So it has it all built in and you can jump into a funnel that's already designed for you, but how do you implement it? And what tools do you like?
Alex: So we've been using, I started out with ClickFunnels of course, and then I switched to Funnelish. I don't, I didn't see a difference between the two. I switched to Funnelish because I had a guy in, when I was living on Bali, he was a good friend of mine and he was just, Screaming about how much faster it was.
I was like, I didn't really improve our sales whatsoever. I guess it's less clunky. So I like using funnel list right now, but you know, as a, like as an MVP. Do it with WordPress, just create a solo page and you can create these with WordPress and add a shopping cart and get it done. But once you want to scale it, yeah, funnel ish.
And then we use active campaign and for the email marketing and then for capturing the emails, we like convert box. The one thing I will say is I absolutely love convert box for 95 lifetime deal. I've bought that damn thing four or five times for different accounts. And it's. Because OptinMonster and these other tools, they just get so expensive.
And the fact that ConvertBox lets me do lifetime, I'm in love with it. So those are the trifecta I've been using.
Doug: Okay, cool. And ConvertBox, that's just a little pop up software.
Alex: It's like OptinMonster. So you can do like the overlay page, X and 10 slide in from the right embed forms, you can just get a lot more creative with it than what Active Campaign or ConvertKit will let you do with their forms.
Doug: I used OptinMonster for years and it was great at the price point that I was paying. paying, but then I think it doubled within like three years and it worked really well, but the quality of the subscribers was lower. So I was like, eh, I mean, I'm getting more people on, but it's actually, they're not as good.
And they're opting in because the pop up is there and the marketing is good, but like, it's not the right people. So do you run into that? Like, how do you deal with the quality? Even if it's like, Hey, we're getting subscribers at a very. Affordable cost, but these are not good.
Alex: Yeah. We run into that a lot when we do giveaways and I've actually really stopped doing giveaways specifically because of that, when we do those, we always make a separate list.
Like we, we do the giveaway, we throw them into a separate list and then we slowly add them based off who's actually engaging. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's a problem that you run into. We just, the only real time I. I had a ton of problem with it was giveaways and we've just stopped doing it, but we also have a sequence set up.
Oh man, this is one of those things where you set up one time and completely forget about it. It's just a list cleaning email sequence where I think after 60 or 90 days of inactivity, I'm shooting them an email and saying if they want to stay on the list or not. And that's, The two ways that we've kind of found a way to combat that.
Doug: And then you just encourage them to click so you could actually track to see what's happening. Click or reply. Okay, perfect. We haven't covered too much as far as like automation I guess an auto responder that is. Yeah. So. Are they in a sequence? And from different software platforms, they, they use different terms.
So it's autoresponder, an email sequence, but it's emails that are sent after some interval, which you could define. So what do you put into your autoresponder sequence? So.
Alex: It depends. So for instance, like shitty SEO advice the newsletter I run, it is as soon as you opt in, you get a email immediately where I ask you to reply to me because the number one thing that you want people to do whenever they sign up for your email list, you know, this is.
Reply to you so that you don't end up in that damn promotion stab, which is the death of us so and you know to get tactical with that email don't ask them make it super simple Just say reply. Yes No reply. Hi. Just so don't say don't leave it open ended. Just be like, please just do this one thing and be, and I like being real with them too.
I'm like, listen, please do this for me. You know why it is. We're all marketers here. Just hit yes. So that I can be in your, your main inbox. So the, my, my entire welcome series is you sign up. That's the first email you get. That's immediate, right? As soon as you sign up. And then after 24 hours, it's a bit more brand building where I tell them the background of me, my newsletter and what they can expect, you know, this, here's what you can expect every Sunday.
You're going to get a newsletter at X, Y, and Z time. And then that's pretty much it for the second welcome email. . The third welcome email is me. Asking questions about them. I have a poll embedded inside the welcome email. So they can actually answer, are you a agency? Are you an affiliate marketer or you're in e commerce? And that just helps me better understand my audience. I'll go back in there and review it once a month.
And I, and again, You're not only getting that information on your audience, but they're clicking. So it's a form that's embedded with Beehive. And so whenever they click, it signals to the, you know, Gmail and the email service providers that it's good. So that is my entire welcome series. Now, again, when we're trying to sell a product and it's one of our content sites that, or or The e com site that I did this heavily on, it was going, going, gone.
So the e com site was 10 percent off and then it was actually like a 68 day welcome series, just all about brand, brand, brand, brand, brand. And I think it could have been optimized, but really what I'd like to see is. The discount and then some sort of going going gone and then a poll asking people even for e commerce brands, right?
This is great If we go back to jim sharkkin and within your welcome series you have a poll you can figure out What size they are you can figure out, you know, are they? Male or female you can figure out, you know, a bunch of information about them so that you can better segment them into two specific lists.
Doug: Right. How many emails do you have in, in your sequence? Specifically because obviously like the 68 day is pretty long overkill. Like that's actually hard to do maintenance on. So yeah. For like a shitty SEO advice.
Alex: Yeah. That's just a, that's just a 40 mile sequence. Super simple. I actually keep those like the, those are super simple.
I haven't gone in depth with those. Um. Even our, like the fishing website where we do quite a bit of email marketing. I think that is a 14 day sequence, but even then it's not. super in depth, to be honest with you. It's, it's like going, going gone, and then a welcome series as well. And between the going, going gone, you know, that takes about 72 hours, three emails, and then the welcome series is about seven emails and another 14 days or 10 days.
So along those lines, and again the welcome series is pretty universal, whether it's shitty SEO advice or an econ brand, it's trying to get people to reply to you, telling them about your brand, what to expect getting them to move you from promotions to primary, and then trying to get some just data on your audience and see who's subscribed to your list.
Doug: Well, we need to move on to the next topic, which is link building, but I want to give you a chance to mention anything else that's super important with your approach to email marketing before we move on. So if you want to close out that section, if we missed anything, if I didn't ask you something that I should have, let us know now,
Alex: I think the only two things I would touch on again is remember that your lead magnet is product.
It's not just a way to get. You know, people on your list, they will either, you know, they could potentially hate your brand if your lead magnet sucks, but you told them it was going to be revolutionary. And then the second part I would say is data tracking. That is, like I said, that spreadsheet that we have, uh, it's, we live and die by it because it, there's so many small tweaks and changes that you can make, and you just got to have all the information in front of you so that you can actually review the data and see what helped because there's so many theories.
In terms of what's going, it's with the same with SEO, right? We have all of these theories, but at the day, I'm not too concerned about your theory. I'm concerned about testing it out and seeing what actually is working. But the only way for me to be able to test that out is having a spreadsheet, having data, implementing it, noting down what the hell I implemented, and then seeing if it hurt or improved conversion rates.
Doug: And it's so hard to know because Maybe the best practices are not working and you have to try something weird that should not work. But then for some reason the combination of your lead magnet, the audience, where they came from, for some reason it converts better. And sometimes it'll surprise you.
Usually not, but sometimes it will.
Alex: Yep. A hundred percent. Like in the case of when we switched from ClickFunnels to Funnelish and Funnelish was definitely faster. I just didn't see that much of a conversion. I sure as heck didn't see a conversion rate increase that justified the hours it spent. Change over to it
Doug: Right, right. I understand that.

Thanks for checking out this episode and thanks to Alex Horstman for sharing his story. If you liked it, be sure to check out part two about link building, and we'll link up to all of Alex's blogs and social and all that stuff. So you could follow him and connect. Otherwise, by the way, if you dig the show, make sure you're subscribed.
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