it's completely different to The Way We Run The vsls or the video ads we had like the best margins we had like 40% margins at like 300K per month that was in the first like two months of launching it the research is the most important part Amazon reviews Facebook groups Reddit posts again it's like who can spend more on ads wins if you're cogs are 30% cheaper you can spend 30% more than your competitor hey guys Alex fov here and today we have an amazing guest Harvey Cary um we had a conversation years ago har
is prob with advertorial uh vs sells direct response and he's doing 30k a day right now getting ready for Q4 to absolutely destroy it and we here have a conversation about you know everything direct responds so thank you so much for joining me thanks for having me man thank you and Har jacked I mean look at this guy so um yeah how was um you know we had a conversation like what maybe a two years ago I think it was middle of Q for about two years ago yeah so how um you know advertorial the
spond space has changed from your perspective in these last two years there's a lot more people in it definitely a lot more people trying to be in it anyway we have educated them right we've told them exactly what to do yeah there's a lot more like back when we first spoke I was still kind of figur it out like the stuff I was doing probably was pretty poor but because there wasn't as many people doing it like the competition wasn't that high right whereas now there's so many people a lot of it's just ripping people
off but there's just so much more in the market I think and like even um back then like to speak a lot of people didn't really understand avator they didn't know about them now I feel like everybody knows about them everybody wants them even if they don't need them like I talked to some people that are like oh we need to do avoral we need to do avoral I'm like what's your conversion rate like 7% I'm like you don't need avoral wow that's and and it's so important like in business to have uh critical thinking
yeah you know because you can learn like some certain like tactics and strategies from different people but those tactics and strategies might not be applicable to your business specifically 100% man I think people think they're like the sexy the shiny kind of thing but like you know if you're selling jewelry you're selling stuff like that like you don't really need them you know yeah what is the uh the vssl structures that that they're working for you right now this is something we're kind of playing around at the moment because we were focused like a lot
of our time was on like one core vsl that was like maybe say 8 minutes long not too long and then we were focused on just doing a bunch of leads and in the lead we'd kind of do our Avatar angle testing within that lead you know so the body of the vssl would be kind of straightway intro into like the mechanism and then after that all the other testing would be in the leads but recently we've actually got like a lot more one minute two minute long vsls we uh kind of not did Consulting
but I met Steve Earl at another event about a month ago and kind of had some discussions with him on what he was saying is like you know he's seing the one two minute ones working really well so we've been testing a bunch of them actually static ads are kind of crushing for us as well right now and gifs so a whole mix of them in the ad account right now interesting so uh static ads like image ads yeah oh wow yeah interesting driving traffic so static ad to the advertorial yeah so the play with
it is it's completely it's completely different to The Way We Run The vsls or the whatever the video ads right so with the video ads it's kind of you're building up intent the ctrs they're still good maybe three four 4% not really five and you're building up a lot of it intent and it's all really like intentional traffic that goes totorial right with the image ads it's it's kind of what we spoke about the last time they're really click baity High CTR but there's no real intent behind them so if you were to look at
them on say you were to send them to two different avoral the CTR on Facebook would be super high in the image ad but the avoral CTR typically would be quite low because it's a lot of curiosity clicks so just like a mix of them in the account and when it comes to like advertorial like what changed in the last two years uh in terms of how you're writing those um AI definitely cuz the last time we spoke like I don't I think chat GPT might have just it just popped out when when popped up
like 2022 yeah yeah so I don't think it was a thing so back it's a very similar process that I use now um like what I did to learn them was basically as I said the last time just joined a bunch of affiliate networks found as many as I could and just deconstructed how they work what is the headline trying to do like what are they doing in it what's the lead saying what's the next part saying what's the body how's the cloud structure and then I would go through like you know line by line
rewriting this stuff and kind of you got to know what good copy kind of looks like then now I still think if someone's getting into them they shouldn't just jump in and use AI to do all this because they don't know what it looks like they're just like okay there you go whereas now we because I kind of have done it so many times I'll speed up the process a lot with AI another thing that we're driving traffic to at the moment is what I learned from Stephen Georgie it's called like a caveman page where
basically like what was happening with us was we'd have say like an advertorial that has a really specific angle we then launch some vsls and initially they'd be super closely TI it right so the ctrs everything matched up the messaging was all M matching and then when we go to launch some new vsls gradually the angle will become less and less relevant to that aoral so the caveman page there's no real angle it's kind of like realistical but it's just basically you take all of the most common questions about the product um you know you
go through gorgeous tickets go through Facebook comments even Amazon [ __ ] and then try and handle all the objections someone might have about the product or what they need to know about the product and then we lead them straight to check out oh interesting yeah so it's it's like faq's it's pretty that's pretty much what it is it's just a big FAQ page oh wow that's interesting and you have you have managed to to dial in advertorials uh for for your like you have a gifting product right like for Q4 yeah we do um
that I've tested a bunch because of thinking okay we can run like gifting angles like that to be honest the only one that works with that is uh listicle and I don't know the exact number but most of our traffic goes to product page because again it's one of those things it's converts super high to product page why would you add another step in you don't need it you know what I mean it's it's low ticket as well like our aov and our main brand is like over $200 this the aov for this I think
it's like a 100 bucks but the front end is only $40 so you don't really need one so you you're taking AO from $40 on the front end product to 100 because people buying more than one yeah just no no in the upsells it's the same with our main brand our front end is like sub 100 and our aov is over 200 wow so two a basically the front end AO I think that's you know for a lot of people listening that's uh that's pretty substantial jump and something to aim for um there there's no
way it would' be profitable without that like it's just like our CPA is more than our front end product you know wow what is the what is the structure for otos uh for the abso pages to to help you achieve that objective to help you double the a it depends so it's not like a one size fits all especially if you're selling something that's like consumable like a lot of people say more of the same is the best upsell I don't agree like it depends on the product you know if it's a supplement cream stuff
like that of course more of the same people use them if it's something like you know you've got back pain you only you have one back so like why why would I buy more than one and then why would I try and sell more on an upsell so for us we do it like more logically it's like front end product eliminates the pain upsell one it solves the problem causing that pain upsell two it like gets you the results faster it's more effective and then up s Tre is supplement so that keeps the pain going
oh interesting you so you integrated supplements into your business as well Y how is it working for you really well man it's now it's upsell three so obviously there's not a whole lot of volume there compared to if it was a front- end product but we also have subscriptions on that so the way we have it structured is they can buy they're all long form tsls the first two are vsls third one is a long form TSL and at the bottom they can buy like one three or six and then if they say no thanks
rather than just bringing them to a down sell we just have a popup that allows them to take like you know for $1 trial and then they get build every month oh interesting what is it what what numbers you're seeing there in terms of the stickiness we've only launched that so I don't know about churn just yet um it's not like a scammy type of one so we make it really clear that you know if you take this you're going to be rebuilt we have an email flow that goes out to them like you know
two days before we build them and then send it out so I don't actually have the data to give you on that so yeah I don't really know maybe we should we we'll reconnect in a few months you can yeah it's interesting so um pretty much you know the business model like in the last few years right like you said few years ago like almost like no one was running vssl advertorial right so it was almost like a blue ocean now you have to like innovate and you have to make your your funnels more strategic
to in order to maximize the average other value and be profitable and skill yeah 100% like there's no way if we were to just run like obviously there's people that do it right but if we were to just put our product on a shopy product page and just run traffic to it there's no way we can make it profitable in the US anyway and other there's EU guys doing stuff like that but it just wouldn't work for us anyway so US market is your main market right now yeah yeah so you you didn't do like
Germany No we're we're thinking about it but we've so much we've still we've been running the same thing for 14 months so there's so much more we can do we have a bunch of other front ends we want to launch right now I'm kind of like the bottleneck with it because I'm still writing all the copy so to launch a new front end I got to dedicate time to that and then it takes away from like you know the weekly creative scripts that go out so before going into EU markets and stuff I think there's
a lot more opportunity in the US you know especially for running subscriptions as well our payment processor we don't use payal we just use credit cards so it's another kind of bottleneck there got it and you also you moved from uh Ireland like now you're like in different living like in different countries yeah back in Ireland right now we were in Dubai for I think six weeks at the start of the year then we went to Bali that was good for about two weeks and then there's no the Wi-Fi sucked so we came back and
then we're going to marbay again in the New Year we should be staying there for most of the year then nice what is the uh what is the business environment uh like in Dubai for example it's it's there's a look there's a lot of people doing cool things compared to like Ireland there is some big people in Ireland but like dayto day you don't really run into them everyone in Dubai pretty much is xats they're all there trying to you know do something cool do some big stuff so it's nice to be around but for
me I know a lot of people that get loads of work done in the boy but for me there's just so much going on there's dinners every night there's all this that it's it's hard for me to get like deep work done you know like maybe you get a couple hours done in the morning but it's definitely back home there's not much else to do you know so it's easy to get like when you really want to push say coming into Q4 it's a lot easier for me to be just like locked in back home
you know where do you see the the kind of like the this space is is trending in general like so a lot of people are in pain relief like Health and Beauty uh you know pain relief devices gadgets stuff like that um they see it's moving like towards like supp and and that kind of stuff or like where do you see the let's say in the next two years I don't know I think like it depends there's always going to be the new people that come into the market that they just rip stuff they don't
know they might get something to work but they don't know why for people who actually are building a real business I think most likely it has to be something that has recurring embedded into it recurring Revenue yeah I think so because there's so much competition there's the cpms are only going up and you know Facebook like Facebook this year has been all over the place whereas if you have that recurring embedded into the business it's just it's a lot easier to run you know if you're looking at LTV rather than aov it's a lot easier
than like waking up being like Oh my God what's going on you know and as well if if you're building the business to exit like the multiples you get with business that has like high recurring revenue is so much better you know yeah what is the um biggest like split task or biggest kind of like learnings on the advertorial side you've had in last year I think the the biggest one was that thing with the angles where we we like when we first launched stuff like so when we first launched the brand right I had
just done a ton of research We R an advertorial the messaging that was going to the aatori was just [ __ ] hot it was on point the team was so small everything we ran was like the CTR and Facebook was like like I don't know four or 5% then the avoral click rate was like 55% and usually that would be kind of alarming but when we were watching like the the visitor recordings people were actually reading that told cuz most of the time if something that's that high i' imagine people are just scrolling they're
not reading it they're just going to the next page but people were reading it because the messaging was so closely related like it was the exact same story in the ad and the advertorial and we had like the best margins we we had like 40% margins at like 300K per month that was in the first like two months of launching it then I think the biggest thing was just to make sure that the messages are matching you know like we kept running so much stuff to the same amatorial before we kind of changed went okay
wait we have this winning ad that looks like it still converts here but the row as is may be two but the CTR all the other metrics look really good and then when we crafted a new avoral around that angle it again we got another massive lift the profit margins were better and it was kind of like okay this is what's happening we keep change like testing new angles to the S to a different aatori that has a different message you know what I mean so I think keeping an eye on like make sure that
the messages actually match throughout the whole funnel it has to be kind of congr like the best results you're going to get if you're add is congruent through everything your upsells absolutely everything you know oh interesting so let's say if you're targeting like certain health condition uh or like knee pain maybe specific condition that people have then the ad would talk about that that condition then the L the the first page of the advertorial would would talk about that condition then the whole funnel would kind of just build in that same condition and also the
otos and stuff even more in depth than that because that's easy you know if you've got like planter fastis for example you're not going to have an ad that talks about planter fasciitis and then like you know ankle pain in the aatori I'm talking more about like say the Avatar or the angle could be like um easiest one without kind of giving away too much would be like a gifting angle so you're you're say again it's for foot pain the ad is talking about this is the best gift for your parents who have foot pain
something like that your avoral then also mentions about how this is the best gift for um for parents with foot pain right then on your sales page you talk about gifting and then through your upsells you structure the upsells so it's not the person who has the full pain buying it it's a person that you're giving it to you're talking like all the emotional language will be from watching the person you love in pain you know what I mean rather than just actually the problem it's actually that kind of angle and the Avatar within that
the messaging through the whole funnel interesting interesting so what is the I mean seeing so much competition seeing so many people people are just like ripping each other like where do you see the areas of differentiation you know in this like competitive space is like a new product designs uh like looking I don't know going to China to bring in some new ideas you know for the products to sell like where do you see this kind of you know going if if everyone is pretty much selling the same products yeah like you definitely need an
edge and it can come in like many different ways so like some people could run on Native it's a lot higher barrier to entry cpms are lower so if you crack that you need a smaller creative team cuz it's just image ads so there you've got a massive Advantage like you said going to China if you have a really good relationship like another big thing for us that like helped us out massively was for the long I don't know why I never did but we didn't really negotiate we did negotiate with our suppliers to get
lower cogs but like it got to a certain point where they're like no like we can't get any lower and we kind of just accepted it rather than going and speaking to new suppliers we for 6 months we didn't speak to anyone else then we met William from best for Phil here and they were like yeah now we can't cuz I basically said to them like this is the price we're getting for um I I might have over exaggerated but he was like we can't get it for that but what we'll do is we can
manufacture it for you so we saved 30% on cogs right there oh wow just by moving supplier something we could have done months ago you know what I mean so if you can get a really good relationship with your supplier like unit economics is probably one of the biggest things if you can beat your competitors on unit economics again it's like who can spend more on ads wins if you if your cogs are 30% % cheaper you can spend 30% more than your competitor wow that is that is a great tip for everyone watching so
um when it comes to like vsl what AI tools are you currently using to to help with the process yeah we use chpt plot 11 Labs that's pretty much it and using like real actors not AI generated actors yeah so we use a mix um basically what we'll do is we have an actor if we're doing a Brand New Concept for example we have like an actor will do the script and say it could be like the full vssl and say 8 minutes so rather than pay the actor for the full 8 minutes it's not
like this is where the idea for like you know the 8 minute long vssl and we have the body is always the same because we don't have to keep paying actors we can kind of invest more money in it but at the start what we do is we have our creative strategist go over the whole script that say like 8 minutes long we need the actor say in the start of it so their face has to be in the start of it maybe when they're explaining the unique mechanism it's valuable to have them in it
so it's a person explaining it and there might be like one or two other parts of the video where their face needs to be in it so what we do is the creative strates will go through the script and just take out the chunks where they need to be in it so rather than 8 minutes it could be like 50 seconds so for them 50 seconds we might pay the actor like 150 bucks rather than 6 700 and then what we do is we just use 11 labs to clown their voice and then we'll get
them to read the script and then the rest the fill in the blank part of the script is done with 11 labs and then overlaid with b-roll and stock footage and stuff like that did you find any good like places to find beol like recently we're trying trying to I feel like everyone has access to the same b roll so we're trying to like our creative strategist has done a really good job with with our editors are kind of upskilling them now they can do their own animations they can do a lot of stuff themselves
and then if we are using Boll we try to make it different so it's not recognizable maybe combine it with two bits of b-roll Zoom it in a bit more like I think everyone has access to the same stuff you know what I mean everyone uses the same the same Marketplace for the b-roll what what what ad accounts you currently using and we're using personal still same as last time SP so if we get it banned we just have solutions for and then like we've spent millions of dollars on our own personal ones so I
feel like they're pretty strong we don't have to prepay we can pay you know with credit cards do you have credit cards in Ireland no no no us oh us yeah like AMX not AMX yet we have H Chase and then we kind of mercury kind of has one it's not like a real credit card but they do cash back oh interesting what what is cash back with Mercury 2% oh really yeah did did it give you like any issues you ever had issues with Mercury no not so far oh wow that's nice 2% is
is pretty solid cash back yeah wow um and you you opened the Chase account like remotely you didn't have to travel to United States no wow like on the on the advertorial side like so it's still like CLA CH GPT like in terms of the AI tools yeah man like Claude is the new one that came out I think it's called Opus or something like that the it's the writing it produces inside like I'll tell you after one of the stories it came up with I like to use it like a lot for creative stuff
like so you're not starting on like a blank slate one of the stories it came out like this punch in the gut story this emotional story we haven't run it I don't know whether to put on an aatori or vssl I was like read it and I was like holy [ __ ] this is this is fire um so it's really good for that sort of stuff the other good thing with Claude you can kind of upload a lot of documents to it so you could upload say um export your PDP or your advertorial or
something as a PDF and upload the cloud and say basically like pull out all the information from this pull out the unique mechanism what the product does all this sort of stuff that way cloud has a knowledge base of exactly what your product is it's smart enough to know who the market is mostly by the messaging you have in the PDF and then you can kind of if you like a really quick way to get an advertorial out then you can just upload a PDF of a swipe that you have into Claud as well and
just say rewrite it for my product and it'll literally use all the information it has about your product and then boom it'll write it as an avoral it's not something you're going to just run straight away but it saves you [ __ ] so much time you and again this isn't something you'd run if you just started a brand this is if you've you know you've really dialed your messaging in you've been running it for a while you know this is what converts this is your target audience but it just saves so much time with
chat gbt something I learned from Steve Earl as well is to build out the GPT Bots like the cust custom gpts where you can give it like a massive knowledge base of like you know breakthrough advertising all these Direct Direct response marketing books um and just get it to do like design certain Bots for certain things or certain custom gpts so one just for leads one for like aatori one for headlines and then just feed it the right information just for that and then like that I said with the export of the PDP of your
product page you can feed it that too so it knows your product it's read all these books and then you can get some really cool [ __ ] out of that as well wow so what is your output like if you're using all of these like AI tools like how how many advertorials can you produce like we we tried to slow down on the a production because um we haven't figured out a really good way to test new advertorials again it comes back to like the angle stuff we have that kavan page and that just
does really well um what we're currently doing is we we have like five ones that wear controls at different times and they still all work so what we're doing now is like try not to do too many new ones cuz there's always split tests that can be done with your headline with the top image with the lead like they're already proven it's like with creatives you know if you're just constantly launching net new creative and you're not doing any iterations your success rate is going to be so much lower than if you're like okay this
is a winner new hooks New Leads so we try to focus more on that now um like we had one avoral carry us for like eight or nine months oh wow yeah and then when it comes to the like vsls like also the same kind of cloud GPT like can can craft these scripts pretty pretty good uh definitely not craft but like they definitely will like I I don't really ever start from a blank page anymore it'll normally be like you know some sort of framework like I said with the it's the same way like
I'm probably not great at writing copy it's just I like to break down other ways or other scripts that I know are working you know this is a structure that works let's just use it for our products and it's not like we're in health right we'll take stuff from beauty we'll take stuff from all different places because it's a proven framework rather than like just taking just from our Niche you know what is what are the biggest mistakes you see people making when it comes to advertorials literally just ripping people's advertorials because like I said
again they will just take I think one brand you know that everyone just rips and it's like it can be for any product I've seen that template across every single [ __ ] product and it's like people don't know why it works then you know they might have some success MH and then it dies out and they're like they have no idea why that actually worked for them and then they're just back to square one that or also just using AI to full a tutorials and it's like it's so obvious it's these big huge blocks
of tech that are like this size the the language in it is really complex and just like super weird so if you were like starting out with advertorial let's say you you had you KN knew nothing about advertorial what's the best way would you recommend for people to learn by going through ones that like I went through I did a training on them or like a uh a talk on them like a couple of weeks ago I think I I sent to you like use spy tools go and find people that you know for a
fact are crushing with advertorials um and the way you can do this is like you know if you don't know for sure you can buy the product have a look at the order number refund the order come back the next day buy the product okay they've done a th000 orders these guys are printing have a look um I seen your tool has something that will help with this if you have a look on the ads Library use something like Atri or get hooked you can see where the percentage of traffic is going to what landing
page so it takes all the guess work out of it so if you see they've got 2,000 ads running and 20% of them are going to this one landing page that's obviously the control that's the one that you want to do it then I would go through read that like I said at the start what is the headline trying to do and have and separate Google doc open and just write headline and it's like okay what's it doing it's like authority figure introduces blah blah blah or whatever the headline does Next Step what's happening in
the leader what's happening in the subhe head map that out and then you have to do the research the research is the most important part Amazon reviews Facebook groups Reddit posts um once you do all that spend like a lot of time on that compile all this research and don't use AI for it because we can use AI for it now because I've been doing this Niche for 14 months straight but at the start I spent probably like eight hours just going through stuff next day another couple of hours and compiling keep it knee and
that way when you're going to write it it's like okay headline is this you have all your research mapped out here and it's literally just plug and play any other niches beside like health and beauty that you see like potential in like that are not as are not as competitive or don't use as much advertorial or vsls like they can work for a lot it doesn't like I think as long as it solves a problem it makes sense M you know what I mean like you've seen stuff for like car gadgets Gadgets in general um
like there's a bunch of different type like there's breaking news type advertorials they can work for like a ton of different stuff you know what I mean I think the main ones are like Health and Beauty but I think they can be implemented especially if it's higher aov what we find is like if we were to run our ads to our product page our CPA probably isn't that different but the actual aov is way lower so if you've got a higher aov product I think it makes sense to you them gotcha uh have you seen
uh like a lot of success like or maybe from people that you know like running advertorial in Europe like Germany and Sweden you know Netherlands other countries yeah I I know there's one Big Brand they do a lot in the US but they run listicles in EU um I think a lot of guys don't use them like I know people that run vssl straight to Shopify product pages and they Crush so vs vsl to Shopify prodct P Europe oh interesting yeah it's probably easier with like payment payment process Integrations as well in Europe def so
are you using using checkout champ right now yeah we've moved to checkout champ yeah how do you how do you see it compared to the final is it's a pain in the ass man like it took us to be honest it actually took us probably a year to fully move over so initially we moved and we just couldn't get a Dev obviously the dev could build it out but it was slow as [ __ ] like it was super slow and another thing is like i' I was using funish for so long if we needed
to make a change fast I could jump in I could do everything on fun it's super easy to use right so like if something was wrong or I needed to do something I can jump in and change a headline I can do this I can do that checkout champ is like simple stuff like changing headlines is easy but like anything else like I'm pretty much a literate on it so finding a good Dev training our Dev on it took a long time and it's still we still have some of our avator hosted on funish some
of the older ones that then they push to the checkout champ like sales page because the loud speed we just haven't been able to match funnelish on the upside though the payment processing is better we have call centers we have subscriptions all stuff yes you can do subscriptions in funnelish but there's no CRM for the customer to be able to log in and like pause their subscription or cancel their subscription or anything like that you know gotcha cool um thank you so much I mean so many so many great insights but specifically you know before
Q4 uh thank you so much for joining me thank you for joining us at um Elite Mastermind event and uh we'll have conversation uh next time you know 100% man thank you man good see you man thank you Harvey
