Speaker 1$1.62. That is what I'm paying right now for newsletter subscribers and my ad guy never got close. And I didn't even have to make a single new ad. I didn't touch any budgets. I just handed the entire thing to an AI agent and it beat my ad guy in about two days. So about two weeks ago, I stopped paying a person to run my newsletter Facebook ads and I handed the entire thing to an AI agent. Not to write ads, but to run them. And in this video, I'm going to show you the exact prompt, what happened every day for a week. I'll show you the mistake that it caught that cost me money and five ways that you can copy this for under $100 and stick around because at the end, I'm going to give you my dirty little shortcuts and the $71,000 that proves these cheap leads actually buy stuff. Okay. So let me back up because you're going to need to know how bad this was. I've got a newsletter. It's called the Kerner office. Hopefully some of you are on it. It's on Beehive. It's free and it goes out about once a week and it's got about $200,000 worth of ad money. So I'm going to show you how to copy this for under $100,000. There's 270,000 people on it. And the thing that nobody tells you about a big newsletter is that every time you hit send, you lose people. And in fact, it's better to show, not tell. So if you're watching this, you'll see right here, this is what's happened to my newsletter subscriber growth recently. And these gray bars on the bottom are all of my unsubscribes. Every time I send a newsletter, you see a big burst of unsubscribes because I'm reminding people that I exist and not everyone loves me, believe it or not. You'll see here on the last newsletter I sent, my newsletter has grown by 24%, which is about average for me and equals 256 people in that case. So you're either growing or you're dying. Every single newsletter in the world loses subscribers when they send an email. It's not just me. And then on a normal day, there's always attrition, just people clearing out their inbox. We lose, you know, 50 to a hundred any given day, even if we don't send a newsletter. So call it about a thousand subscribers a week walking out the door. So just to break even and not shrink, I need to add about 150 new subscribers a day organically from YouTube to Twitter and Instagram, whatever. We were adding like 50 to a hundred, which means in August we lost 450 subscribers net. We shrunk. In September, we lost 1,700. And that's the problem that I was paying someone to fix. So I had a guy, I'm not going to name him. He's a good dude. He's not a hit piece. He was running my newsletter ads on Facebook just here recently. And for most of the time, it worked okay. We'd spend money and subscribers would show up and the list would grow. But somewhere in the last few months, the tracking broke. Okay. The ads would say, we got subscribers. Beehive would say we got different subscribers and nobody could tell me which ad brought which person. So my guy looked at it. Beehive support looked at it. I looked at it, which, you know, I'm too ADHD for ads manager. So that lasted like nine and a half minutes. Months went by and I was spending real money every single day. And I couldn't even tell you what it bought me. So I ended up pausing the ads, moved on from the guy. And that's when my list started shrinking. Every time we paused ads, the list shrank. Every time we sent an email, the list shrank. And I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe it. It's how you lose 1700 subscribers in a month. It wasn't just him. On the other side of my business playmakers. I had an actual agency running Facebook ads to get people to book a sales call. I'm going to give you the real number. We were paying $200, $600 per booked call, whether they showed up or not, whether they were qualified or not closer to five or 600, if they marked that they were qualified. And on top of that, they swapped out the guy we liked for a guy who wasn't great. They had very little to no tracking for weeks. And there were just a bunch of other things going on that we weren't pleased with. So I had two problems going on at once, a newsletter bleeding a thousand people a week and an agency charging me 600 bucks per call, whether they showed up or not. And both of them had the same root cause, which was that I couldn't see what was happening. The tracking was broken and I was lighting money on fire basically while sitting in the dark. So here's what I did. And I want to be really clear. I did this on a Thursday night from my couch in like 20 minutes. I opened up Muse. Muse is Meta's AI agent. And if you watched my agents episode like two weeks ago, link below, you've seen it. It's the one that got me eight pool quotes while I slept. And the reason I use Muse for this instead of Clod or ChatGPT is that it's built by Meta. So it can plug straight into ads manager without logging itself out. I can see my campaigns. It can change budgets, et cetera. It already connected to my Beehive account and my inbox for other stuff. So it was frictionless. The first thing I did was not run ads. The first thing I did was fix the tracking. And I'm going to show you the prompts that I use for all of us in the description. So I started a new chat in Muse that I called attribution, where I just tied all of this stuff together. Because what is the point of cheap subscribers if you don't even know they're yours? And if Facebook can't learn that it's the one that I should be thinking, AKA, so it can't get better and more efficient, more affordable over time. So I told this chat, Hey, our Facebook ads attribution has been broken for months. And I'm going to show you the prompts that I use for all of this in the description. Figure out why. And it went and it looked at the links in the ads and the landing page and the Beehive side and found the problem. And then it did something that I thought was really smart. It said, let me test it. And it subscribed to my own newsletter through the ad link, like a fake customer and watch the data show up on the Beehive side with the right source attached. This is the same problem that both a human, a really smart human and Beehive support had been poking at for months and weren't able to figure out, but it was fixed and verified in one sitting. And it was just magical, quite as magical as 10 days ago outside of Monroe, Louisiana, when I hit a radial saw blade on the freeway, true story. My wife witnessed it and it punctured our gas tank. And we were leaking gas all over a dollar general parking lot. And Claude told me to rub a bar of soap in the leak and it plugged the leak. And then I got some JB welding, covered it up and drove 300 miles home so I could sleep in my own bed, wake up. My wife could take it to the Toyota dealership and it was still bone dry. Like that was maybe one of the most magical AI moments I had ever had. True story. It was just magical. This was a problem that had been lasting for months and it was fixed. But let's talk about the prompt that did it. I'm going to read it to you word for word because people always ask and it's shorter than you think. Okay. This was after the attribution was fixed. Prompt is one sentence. Go reactivate my three most popular and profitable newsletter ads of all time and send me a daily report. Okay. That's it. I didn't tell it which ads, I didn't even know which ads. I'm never in meta ads manager. I don't know what they were, images, static. I don't know. I didn't tell it the budget. I didn't make a new creative. I have like a hundred old ads in the account from the last two years. And I just said, go find the three best ones we ever ran and turn them back on. Now ads do go stale after a while, but these hadn't been live in a while. So as far as, you know, people on the internet were concerned, they were brand new. So it went and pick three, set each one at a hundred dollars a day. So 300 bucks a day total. And it set up a report that lands in my inbox every morning with the spend subscribers and cost per subscribers. And here's the thing that the agent got me got right that my agency got wrong. And it's the rule that I gave you in my Facebook ads guide a year ago. That's linked below as well. Goal first, then audience, then creative in that order. Always. Okay. Goal first, then audience, then creative and creative just means the image or the video that you're using in the ad. The agency was in there every week tweaking creative, but the agent never touched the creative. It picked the goal subscribers. In this case, it fixed the audience. And then the old ad was in there every week tweaking creative, but the agent never touched the goal subscribers. And then the old creative that was already proven took care of itself. So instead of starting at the ad, like most people do start at the goal and work backwards. And I want to show you what that report actually looks like, because this is the part that's changed my mornings. You can see, I have it pinned right here at the top attribution, all caps. Here we go. Full snapshot pulled fresh this morning, newsletter ads, another clean day, no flags, $400 is 63 cents spent. I'm not going to read all of it. $1.53 blended. Okay. So it tells me how much I'm going to spend. I'm going to spend $1.53. Okay. I'm paying to acquire a subscriber or a lead for each given ad. And it even says right here, Meta counted 279 subscribers versus Beehive's 276 tracking parody holds for the fifth straight day. And that was the problem that we kept having. So I don't need to go into ads manager anymore or Beehive. If something looks weird, I just reply right here in this chat or to the email where I also get this report. Like why did ad number two double in cost? And it goes and looks and answers me. And then it's like, should I pause it or no? And usually it's like, just hold out. And then sure enough, the next day it'll average back out again. It's like having an employee that never sleeps, never complains, never gets offended when you ask the same question three days in a row. It also went ahead and uploaded lookalike audiences and custom audiences on its own. So it pulled all of my subscribers from Beehive because it has access to that, uploaded them to Meta and said, find me a bunch more people that look like this. In other words, a bunch of people that are more likely to subscribe to this exact newsletter. And then before it even started, it said something back to me. I was not expecting. And it said, Hey, you aren't excluding ads shown to current subscribers. Want me to fix that? A human had been running these ads for months, but I was paying money to show ads to people that were already subscribers. I was wasting money. Like sit with that for a second. 273,000 subscribers for months. My ads have been showing to those same people, people who are already on the list. So every time one of them clicked, I paid for a click that could never turn into a subscriber. And it was like, Hey, I already have your subscriber list. Want me to build an audience to exclude them? And I said, yes, obviously. Yes. Okay. So what happened day by day? I pulled this straight out of Beehive just this morning. So these are real net numbers, new subscribers, minus unsubscribes. The day before I turned this on October 22nd, we had 121 people subscribe because I sent a newsletter that day. And then Friday, the 23rd, the first partial day with the ads running 235 subscribed and 183 unsubscribed because there was still a lot of leftover from the newsletter that was sent. the day before but we had a net positive of 52 subscribers and then the first full day 317 subscribed and 62 unsubscribed and then the second full day 442 subscribed and 68 unsubscribed making for 374 net new subscribers it's just beautiful i was just like i just kept refreshing my phone and it just kept getting better this is one of the best days that my newsletter has had for growth all year and these were like a dollar 40 per subscriber but then you know what happens eventually with facebook ads they get more effective and more affordable to a point but then the same people start to see them more and more and they're less likely to click and you start spending more to get fewer results so you need either a new audience or new creative new ads and usually it's new ads so i started cutting the budget here because the ads were getting a little more expensive and i'm in the middle of running out of time so i'm going to cut the budget here because the ads were getting a little right now of making new creatives so i can restart those fresh go back to a dollar 40 so in the end we're talking about 5400 spent across all four campaigns to get 2600 subscribers so blended that's about two dollars per subscriber but most of these were high intent subscribers i optimized for subscribers that would answer certain questions in a certain way on my onboarding survey to indicate to me that they're more likely to spend money. if these were just plain jane subscribers it would have been closer to a dollar each okay and this is where it gets interesting because cheap subscribers are nice but subscribers don't pay me it's a free newsletter so let me walk you through the math that actually matters and this is the part that i want you to steal so when someone subscribes to the newsletter they get into what's called a welcome sequence and in that sequence there's a question it's basically hey would you be interested in x y or z or are you a business owner or not how big is your business. and based on how they answer those questions they get tagged and go into a four to six step nurture sequence about any number of different things or offers that i might have available for them if they say no then they just get the newsletter which is totally fine because even if they never buy anything i monetize free subscribers with ads right but about 60 of my new subscribers say either yes or maybe two questions in that onboarding survey that indicate interest to buy something okay so let's do the math call it a dollar sixty per subscriber half of them raise their hand to be conservative that's like three dollars per lead but i was spending two hundred to six hundred dollars per booked call from the agency and three bucks per qualified lead from the newsletter that's a two hundred x difference now i will say a lead is not a booked call okay someone clicking maybe or yes on an email is not the same as someone sitting on a sales call so it's not quite apples to apples but when you have two hundred x to work with there's a lot of room there even if only one in twenty of those three dollar leads ever books a call that's sixty dollars per book call again six hundred and i'm not going to lose the other nineteen that don't book a call they're still on the newsletter some of them might book later and all of them can be monetized with ads and here's the thing that made me realize how big this is or how big this could be last week i went back through the entire list this is everyone who had ever answered that question over the last year and there were thirty three thousand people who had said yes or maybe to any of these questions that indicated interest to buy something but i never did anything with them they didn't go through a sequence or an automation or whatever they were just sitting there so i pushed all of them through a nurture automation in one afternoon with a few clicks a series of five to six emails or two weeks to educate them and to see how interested they were and i texted my sales team and said get ready for some calls which this is why i'm telling you that this whole thing is bigger than just ads my goal for next year is for my newsletter to make ten million dollars or i guess i should say for my newsletter being top of funnel to other businesses to generate ten million dollars and when i actually sit down and map that out where will all that money come from it all hinges on three things facebook ads the newsletter and the offer or offers cheap people in the top a question in the welcome email and a real product or products at the bottom so now i'm all that is left to do is for me to just pump out a bunch of creative more ads and i can scale my daily budget from four hundred dollars a day to maybe four thousand dollars a day why not if they're profitable so if you're sitting here watching or listening to this and thinking wait i could run the same setup for a dentist or a roofer or a gym and charge them for it yes you could that's literally what we're i'm talking about here i'm not just telling you all this stuff to talk about cool things i'm working on i want you to steal my homework and by the way if you are going to steal my homework and start a business you're going to need an llc to do it you don't want to get sued personally the ll and llc equals limited liability as in you're protected and the best way to do that is busy.com that's b-i-z-e-e.com formerly known as ink file it's who i use every single time to file an llc any and every time i start a business which is quite often but to file an llc you just use their beautiful user interface so you can avoid your state's terrible user interface and they'll do stuff like file your e-i-n your tax identification number they'll sign you up for registered agent service if you don't know what that is you should you're probably going to need it i can't even tell you how many random letters i get every single day in my mailbox from random government agencies i don't have to worry about them busy is taking care of it i can focus on growing my business so if you've got like a side hustle or a hobby in your pre-revenue or just a little bit of revenue and you don't feel like you need to be legit yet fine but if you're ready to turn your side hustle or your hobby into something that you can deduct against your taxes make legit be protected against frivolous lawsuits use busy.com they are a great partner to the podcast and i've been using them for years okay the attribution thing i skipped over this earlier because i want to come back because this is what i think actually made the money 10 days before all this i asked hey how's everything looking with playmakers where's everyone coming from and the answer was basically i can't tell you everything is broken the tracking was either not installed or it was installed wrong and i've been with an agency and could not tell you where a single paying customer was coming from i assumed the agency was handling it they were not so news fixed it and now i get a daily report these people join playmakers today here's where they came from and sometimes i'm a patient and i'll just ask it in the middle of the day and over and over and over it's usually saying youtube so then i did one more thing i set up an email that goes out automatically to anybody who pays but doesn't come in with attribution with a source of where they found the business i set up an email that just says welcome to playmakers i really want to know where you found us then they reply and when they reply muses in my inbox it sees it and adds it to their record and go high level it is crazy how many customers come from youtube by the way just organic youtube videos which is kind of wild to say in a video all about facebook ads the ads are getting me cheap subscribers the videos are getting most of the buyers you need both they work hand in hand but until two weeks ago i couldn't see either one and quick tangent because someone's going to ask the thing that i'm going to ask the thing that actually broke was dumb it was the links the ads were sending people to a landing page but the link did not carry the source through to beehive so beehive would see a new subscriber and just kind of shrug all we had to do is tag the link if you've ever heard of the phrase utm parameters we just had to add those and make sure that the landing page passed it back to meta so meta could learn from itself it was like a five minute fix so if you want to take something from this video click your own ads and see what your email tool knows about you then spend money okay and here's the part for you to copy five different tactics here plus a bonus at the end that will help pay for the other five i'm going to give you the price the tool and the exact first step for each one and none of these need a 200 000 person email list most of them are free number one the audit cost zero dollars the tool muse or claude or whatever ai agent you can connect to your ad account number one is you're going to open facebook ads manager and your email list side by side and ask the agent one question am i showing ads to people who are already my customers or subscribers and this doesn't just apply to newsletters it applies to any business owner whether that's you or a potential customer of yours that has any emails for any reason if they've been running ads for more than a month or they want to run ads then i would bet the answer to that question is yes yes you are already paying to show ads to people who are already your customers or subscribers you're wasting money that one question paid for everything number two tactic number two the revive this will cost you about a hundred bucks the tool you need is whatever ad account you already have the first step on this tactic is the prompt that i read you right here go find my three best performing ads or if you're doing this as a business owner or an agency owner go find the best performing ads for whoever you're working with joe's plumbing whatever best performing ads of all time and turn them back on at ten dollars a day each and send me a daily report because you probably don't need new creative which is the hardest part isn't that great i'm going to show you how to do that the hardest part of all this you don't have to do you already have old winners sitting in your account turned off tactic number three the test subscription this will cost you zero dollars the tool that you use will be your own landing page and a utm link so before you spend a buck click your own ad link and sign up like a stranger then go look in your email tool whichever one you use and see if it knows where you the subscriber came from if it doesn't then nothing else matters yet fix that first you can use muse instinct or grokbot to fix this for you tactic number four This is the hand raiser. This costs $0 if you're on Beehive's free plan or $0 if you do this just on any social media platform. The tool that you used is your welcome email. So the first step is add one question to the first email new people get. Now, this could be a question that people reply to the email to an answer. It could be in the form of a poll that they click. And what you're asking is something along the lines of, would you be interested in, insert whatever your paid thing is. Yes, maybe, or no. Tag the yeses, tag the maybes, and tag the noes. That one question turned a $1.40 subscriber into a $3 lead for me. It can work for a candle shop, bookkeeper, candlestick maker, lawn guy. Everyone has something to sell. Okay, number five, the daily report. This costs $0. The tool that you use is any AI agent with inbox access that you give it. I mean, even Claude can do this on the scheduled task, right? The first step is to tell it every morning at 6 a.m., email me, spend, results. And cost per result for every active ad campaign. All of this works with Google Ads too, by the way. And flag anything that increased in price by over 20%. Remember, I'm not logging into Ads Manager anymore. I don't want to. I just ask my AI. Tactic number six. This is the one that will pay for the other five. The client, okay? Cost is $0. The tool is everything you just set up in these first five steps. The first step is to find one local business that's already running Facebook ads. How do you do that? You go to the meta ads. Library. Just Google it like I just did. And you're going to see something like this. For those listening, I'm on the meta ads library. And you can search your local area by country. I'm going to click all ads, which is usually what you'll do. And I'm just going to type in Dallas plumber. Okay, why? Because this is going to show me ads from plumbers in Dallas. Okay, here we go. Pure plumbing. Let's take a look at this ad. Started running on October 11th across all four meta platforms. Threads, WhatsApp. Instagram and Facebook, multiple versions. And here's what you can do. You can go sort by impressions, high to low, as in the amount of people that have seen all these ads. And you can even do something very cool and find ones that have been live for a very long time. So look at this. This ad for legacy plumbing is the fifth most viewed ad out of all these hundreds of ads. And it's been running since June 23rd. Okay. Which means this creative, like this ad, everything works. It just works. It either works for the person in charge is completely asleep at the wheel and spending way too much money because they forgot about this ad, which is not likely for one that's received this many impressions. So find a local business running ads in your local area, reach out to them. And you can use an agent to do this. He can reach out in all kinds of different ways. It can use a mailing service to send them a letter. It could send them a jar of glitter, whatever you want, DM them on Strava. All of the above is what I would say until they reply. And once you get ahold of them offer to do the five tactics that I just outlined for you, the audit, the test, click the daily report, and I promise you will find wasted money in the first hour of doing this because every single one of them is showing ads to their own existing customers, then you charge them hundreds of dollars a month to keep that report running that is an AI implementation. And by the way, that's what we do at playmakersai.com. That's what we teach people how to do. And that's what people are doing successfully. And if you do this, you don't have to make a single ad. You're not a Facebook ads agency. Okay. You're implementing AI. So if you have a hundred dollars and an afternoon to spare, here's the exact order that I would do all this in first, the free stuff. Okay. We'd start with tactic number three, the test subscription, then tactic number one, the audit, both of those costs, $0 do those before you spend anything, then you're going to do one ad, not three, one, this will be the single best post or ad that you or your client. Has ever ran. Okay. Spend $10 a day and point it at a landing page with a free offer, a free thing that people can sign up for. That's 70 bucks for a week's worth of ads. Then tactic number four, the hand raised question in the welcome email that's free. And tactic number five, the daily report also free. You've got 30 bucks left, spend it on news or Claude credits so that the agent can actually do the work. Worst case, you spend a hundred bucks, but at least, you know, exactly for the first time. What a lead costs you best case. You find out you've been paying for the wrong thing for a year. Okay. And the last thing is the part that I almost cut, but this is the proof because I can show you cheap leads all day. And you're going to say, Chris, cheap leads that don't buy are just expensive leads with extra steps. Okay. Yeah. But here's what happened for me in the last two weeks, all while this was running, I ran a webinar, one webinar, and we added a guarantee to our offer for the first time ever. And we had a big goal. $400,000 from one webinar. And we did not hit that. Okay. I'll be clear. We didn't hit it, but we did hit $71,600 in sales in five days from the one webinar, 50 calls booked off the one webinar, 13 of closed. And when the last one came in, my sales manager sent a message to the team that said, we've officially beat June, which is the best month we've had since he took over. And the part that surprised me is the guy on my team who's closed the most of those calls. He's a 22 year veteran. He's been on the line of the speaking circuit. He's seen every offer. And he told me flat out, none of the sales I made in the last 10 days were influenced by the guarantee people buy because they've been watching the videos, which brings this all back around cheap subscribers come from the ads, but the trust comes from this, from these episodes, but both end up in the same funnel. Now, not everything is, you know, rainbows and unicorns, because I don't want you to walk away from this thinking that it's all magic and all easy. Number one, the newsletter. I don't want you to walk away from this thinking that it's all magic and all easy. Number two, the ads. Number three, the ads on Sunday. On the 29th of October, we lost 291 subscribers. The next day we lost 251, right? Those are 500 plus dollars worth of subscribers lost. The ads cover it now, but it didn't make the bleeding go away. Number two, the old ads are going to get stale. They're already starting to get stale. I'm running old creative and now it's extra old because people have seen it two, three, five, seven times. The agent can rotate what exists. It can tell me what to do. It could even replace the creative. But unless that creative is gone, it's going to be stale. If that creative is like a talking head video of me, it probably won't be very good. And it can't do that. I don't want it to make an AI avatar of me and post that as an ad possible, but I don't want it to. So I need to sit down and just do it and hit record. Okay. Number three, the agency campaign, I went back and looked and saw that $8,990 were spent in October on this booked calls campaign. And I still can't get ads manager to give me a clean cost per booked call because the tracking was messed up. So when I say two to 600. I don't know how much I'm going to spend on it, but I'm going to be honest with you. I don't know how much I'm going to spend on it, but I don't know how much I'm going to spend on it. I don't know how much I'm going to spend on it. I'm going to spend on it. and i did answer yes when it asked about excluding people that were already subscribers and i do read the report every morning so i'm still spending time on this stuff but i promise you shortcuts three things that i would never pay an agency for and now i don't have to because the agent does them shortcut number one stalk the winners go to the meta ads library again or have muse or rock bot or whatever go to the meta ads library it's free search your biggest competitor again i just showed you how to do this sort by active find the ad that's been running for months that has the most impressions if it's still getting paid for it works and if it's live it's getting paid for and the lazy version of this is to paste the ads library link into the agent and say tell me what these three ads have in common and write me one in that kind of you know shape for my offer that's something that an agency will charge you you know 500 bucks for as like quote-unquote creative strategy shortcut number two the comment trap okay run your ad to your warmest audience first past buyers followers your email list let it collect likes and comments then you take the same post ID and run it to cold traffic. People who have no idea who you are or what your business or offer is because social proof. A stranger will now see an ad that has 40 comments on it instead of zero. And you can tell the agent, find my post ID and reuse it in the cold campaign. It's going to know where to click. Another thing you can do if you don't want to do this to your warmest audience. If you don't have a warm audience, you can run that same ad to third world countries and pay a fraction of a cent it might not be that cheap but cents pennies per like per comment or whatever and get social proof from low intent cheap traffic that is never going to buy from you but you're just using it to get the social proof so then you can reuse the ad on traffic that's more relevant to you okay shortcut number three sell it before you build it before you spend a dime on a product run a ten dollar a day ad to a one page landing page and see if anyone clicks the agent can build a page write the ad and tell you by friday if the idea is dead or not i've lost way more money building things that nobody wanted than i ever lost on ads so here's where i would start if i were you if you're already running ads do tactic number one tonight ask the agent agent if you're paying to show ads to your own customers or if you have a friend that owns a business which of course you do do this for them if you or they are not running ads yet do tactic number three the test subscription so you know that your tracking works before you spend a dollar and if you want the whole thing written down the prompt the welcome email question the daily report prompt the hundred dollar plan yada yada i put it all in a business plan there's a free version that just has the prompts and an email and then a 19 version that has the entire setup walked through step by step with the screenshots the link to both is in the description also if you want to come on the pod if you got a cool story go to tko yes.com and fill it out and come hang with me at my house we'll see you next time on the kerner office
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