I'm profitable, for what that's worth. As for how long, it actually didn't take me too long. I was lucky enough to have a strong sense of what my audience would respond to from the start. I got some help from John with dialing in my squeeze page in the beginning, but once that was converting okay, and once I had a good LTO put together, it wasn't too hard. 

The hard part, for me, was scaling. Most of my profitable audiences were only about 100,000 people in size. If you're not aware, we can't realistically spend more than $1 per 10,000 people in an audience without costs rising to unsustainable levels. So I could spend $10 and make $20 every day, but obviously that's not enough to live off of. I was able to stack a few and get up to around $50 spend per day, which was better, but still not what I wanted. 

The answer came in the form of lookalike audiences, which could take a few hundred customers and clone an audience of about 2 million people. Lookalikes are weird for me, sometimes they still underperform for no reason at all, but the size makes up for the inconsistency. 

John's advice on running subsequent additional promotions is spot-on, and you'll definitely have an easier time with this if you do that. However, if you want advice on how to get your initial funnel profitable, I might be able to help since that's been my focus much more than long-term promotions.

Your focus would need to be on obsessively split-testing different variables of your funnel. You'll need to get your squeeze page and ad copy so dialed in that you're able to get subscribers for well under $1. My profit margin tends to be dependent on bringing them in at $0.60 or below, which is totally doable, some campaigns have hit as low as $0.30. If your ads are really speaking to your audience you can easily get $0.10 clicks, and with a squeeze page converting at 30%, you can see how cheap that is. 

From there, you also need your funnel dialed in so that you're selling at 10%. You can get away with less if you have an upsell, but 10% is what we want to shoot for. To do that, the biggest thing is to give your audience a reason to care. It's not enough that your music has to be good, you as a person have to be someone they can feel a connection with. Talk about your struggles and how you've overcome them, and if you've done this right, they'll see themselves in you and feel encouraged. By the time you ask them to support you, they're more than happy to, as long as what you're offering them is worthwhile. 

There's more to some of this, there are some subtle tricks to increase your funnel's conversion rate we can talk about if you want, but these basics should take you a long way already. Let me know if you've got any questions 🙂 

Hi Mike,

I've been at it for a few years, and I confess, having a profitable funnel is something I've never quite managed to achieve. Having said that, I've been quite sporadic about the way I've approached it, and juggling my other commitments has meant not really being able to focus on split testing the various elements. It's really only now (my daytime work was cancelled due to Covid) that I'm taking a more systematic approach to dialing in my funnel.

I do, however, have a substantial size list even though my ad campaigns operated at a loss, I've have managed to get just over 100 into a membership site, meaning I now have an average income of about $500/month, which allows for all my web hosting, Aweber costs etc. and a $10/day advertising budget.

Hope that's helpful!

Rachel