Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#68 A New Approach to Marketing On Property Listings

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iniartworksmallThis feels like the 1,000th time I have had a new approach to marketing On Property. But here we go for another round.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just wanted to record an episode to talk about what I’ve been going through in On Property over the last couple of weeks and to flush it out for you guys.

However it’s really for myself to look back on and to say okay here’s where I was at a point in my business where things weren’t going well, here’s the way I was feeling, here are the things that I did. And then hopefully I can look back on this in a year and I can see how I turned it around. It’s actually interesting I started Instructions Not Included about a year ago.

I think I started in December of 2015. So for it to have been a year since I started this podcast is quite amazing. And to think of the things that I’ve tried in those 12 months is quite significant. To think of the success that I’ve had maybe not as significant but I’ve tried a lot of things and I’ve learned a lot and I feel a lot more knowledgeable and I feel like I can take on the world more.

And even though things haven’t necessarily gone my way and I haven’t got everything right I am very grateful for the year that I’ve had in business, the things that I’ve learned and the position that I’m currently in to move forward with my business.

Let’s just talk about where we are with On Property. I talked about in a previous episode how I came to the realization within myself and with my wife. I did the data – I went digging through all of the data – What’s my retention rate for On Property Plus? How long are people staying? I discovered that 90% of people are leaving within a year.

Therefore what I thought was a sticky and a recurring product actually really isn’t because people are gone within a year and I’m not necessarily bringing in a lot of people to replace that. In fact, my customer base has actually decreased in 12 months but my revenue had slightly increased because of the increase in pricing that I had.

So I was kind of going backwards or being very stagnant in my business and so I came to the realization that On Property Plus isn’t going to make money in the way that I thought. It isn’t going to make the amount of money than I thought it was going to make and as a result I really need to rethink this and go back to the drawing board.

What we went back to was the original evergreen launch strategy that I had done with On Property Plus in the past. I was going to redo that and launch it again through an evergreen launch funnel basically using the exact funnel that I used about six months ago. I think it was back in May that I started it and it ran for about four months. Well I’m unhappy to say that it’s been three weeks – now is the fourth week and I’ve had over a thousand people through that evergreen launch funnel and I’ve had one sale of $300.00.

The evergreen launch funnel – I don’t know why it’s not working – I don’t know why the people aren’t as targeted – I don’t know what the go is but definitely it hasn’t been performing as well as it previously performed in the past. What I thought could get me potentially to my goals or get me a decent passive income out of On Property is probably not going to work.

Therefore that means back to the drawing board again. I went through an entire week where I was thinking about this and came to a conclusion and an idea and then actually scrap that idea yesterday. My idea was I could potentially Crowdfund On Property because I do believe that there is an opportunity in this space to provide non conflict of interest advice and education around investing in property.

And I thought some people might be passionate enough to get behind that and to support that because they want someone who is going to give them the information that’s not skewed towards the overpriced properties that are selling or whatever.

So I got on that bandwagon and I was going down that path thinking okay this could be good if I reach maybe $6,000 a month in crowdfunding then I can release all of my products for free. But the problem that I came to in the end was the people that are having success with crowdfunding – and by success we’re talking $10,000 to $20,000 a month and have absolutely massive followings.

We’re talking millions of views on every video that they have on YouTube, millions of subscribers or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Compared to me you might get 400 views a day on YouTube – 10,000 views a month or that sort of thing.

It probably just wasn’t going to be viable for me to do it because so few people would actually put up money for effectively no reason or for the ability to crowdfund this that I just didn’t have the scale or I didn’t think that I had the scale to actually make this achievable.

I therefore went down the path of crowdfunding thinking about it a lot and ended up coming up with the fact that I’m probably not going to be able to crowdfund this because I really just don’t have the volume of people to make this successful. I was then back to square one again thinking, “Oh my goodness what am I going to do? How am I going to turn this business around?”

Basically I have been focusing a lot on my new business which is teaching people educational videos. That’s over at www.pelt.co so you can go and check that out. That is about teaching people how to set up a membership site, how to set up an evergreen launch funnel, a bunch of WordPress staff.

Mostly I will start with internet stuff because I can market referral programs, affiliate programs and make commissions there but eventually I’ll move into broader education for Pelt. I’ve been spending more time on that and really talking to my wife about it. We are thinking that On Property we want to tick away but we’re not going to heavily invest in it.

So we want it to provide us with enough money to get by until Pelt takes over and starts to make the bulk of our income which is where we want to be eventually as a company.

I have a whole bunch of ideas thinking around about what different things I could do. The idea that I finally settled on that I’m creating a sales page for and launching it this week was that I was going to basically roll everything into one again like I’ve been doing and really simplify things in terms of my website.

What I’m going to do as a marketing strategy is take the properties that I’m listing inside my membership site and I’m going to put them on my free site onproperty.com.au. I’m going to put them on the free site but I’m going to have them censored so the images will be blurred, there’ll be some information about it like price range, rental yield, potential cash flow of the property but it will be very limited.

Therefore people won’t be able to understand where this property is or what is the address of this property unless they remember. So the goal is that each post that I put out because I’m already going out and finding a property every single day and that’s daily content for the website and the goal is that people will then be able to peruse these properties and then it will encourage them to become members of On Property to get access to the properties.

That’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to launch the sales page. I’m creating it now so it will probably take me maybe two or three days to finish that.

I then need to set up a new process and some educational training videos for my virtual assistant so she can take things from my membership site and create the free content as well. However, the goal is really that the free property listings are a way to drive people to the members’ area.

I was thinking about it and I was thinking when I had previously looked at properties in the past there was a site that used to do a similar sort of thing called Cash Flow Capital and I used to look at it and they would share property listings but they wouldn’t share the addresses and then you would have to sign up and become a member in order to get access to those addresses.

I saw this and I thought that is actually a much better way to do it. And it just makes a lot more sense because people then see the properties and they create curiosity in them so they get interested and want to know about the property. I don’t even have to explain what On Property is to them necessarily. I just have to go ahead and give them access to the stuff. That’s where I am at the moment.

I just arrived at Melee so I’m going to go in and play a bit. Thanks for listening. I just wanted to get that off my chest to understand where I’ve been, the ideas that I’ve gone through and where I’m at the moment. I will be dropping the price to $99 a year but then I will be having a higher tier pricing so it will $99 a year just for the properties which I think is super affordable and then $249 will be the complete package.

They will get access to properties, they will get access to courses, they will get access to the FaceBook group, they will get access to the calculator and other stuff as well. Hopefully a large portion of people will go for the $249 but even if they would just go for the $99 I’m fine with that as well. That’s my pricing structure at the moment. I was thinking about adding a middle-tier but I’m not sure whether I’m going to do that at the moment so I’ll see how it goes down the track.

If at 99 bucks a year I can get 200 members that’s 20 grand a year and that will at least pay my expenses for my business and give me a little bit of profit as well and allow me to focus on building up Pelt. So hopefully it works. I’ll keep you guys updated obviously.

Until next time, if you want instructions on buy some furniture


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