Let's Level Up Your Copywriting Game with Copy Legend, Jason Hornung

Zach Johnson

Dylan Carpenter

Jason Hornung

Episode
54
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1

Jason Hornung

,

Founder

HJ Media
Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsLive on SpotifyLive on Youtube

Jason is the founder at JH Media. Since 2013 he has been helping entrepreneurs and brands generate over $100 million in profitable sales from paid ad campaigns.

Episode Summary

SUMMARY



  • Looking to step up your copywriting game? BUCKLE UP BABY!
  • Jason is a legend when it comes to writing copy and goes in depth on his course and some actionable takeaways you can implement for your business today.

RESOURCES/CONTACT:

Transcript

1
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Episode
54
Transcript

Zach (00:02):

In this episode, we talk with Jason Hornig about how he's getting a 400% row as on a long form creative Facebook ad to a long form sales page to a dollar trial, no VSL, no webinars, super simple funnel. I think you're going to really love it when he unveils the entire thing. The other thing Jason talks about on this episode is some principles around how to think about how much you should be investing into testing, not only testing funnels, but testing creative testing, uh, your overall media and audiences, and how to really think about being disciplined into allocating budget and managing the finances in your media. So with that being said, let's get into it

Jason (00:47):

For me. I'm, I've scaled as high as at one point I was at about 70,000 a month, pretty consistently. And this was back in 2016 and 2017. I had, I had a webinar for like 18 months that just crushed it. You know,

Zach (01:02):

I remember that. I don't remember that. I remember, are you talking to me about it? And it was just like this, it was like this thing, like, you just didn't touch. It was just like running there. I did like every time I talked to you about it, you're like, Oh yeah, that thing.

Jason (01:17):

Yeah. And then I, and then I just kind of slowly let it die and, and yeah. And then spent two years resuscitating it all after I realized that I should have let the agency go. Instead of my information, product business, go,


Intro (01:43):

[inaudible]

Zach (01:44):

Listening to the rich and poor ed podcast where we break down the financial principles that rich advertisers are deploying today to turn advertising into profit and get tons of traffic to their websites without killing their cash. These advertisers agencies, affiliates brands are responsible for managing over a billion dollars a year in ad spend. You'll hear about what's working for them today. They're rich ads and we'll roast their Epic failures and crappy ads on the internet with poor ads. Let's get into it. Welcome to another episode of the rich dad, poor ed podcast. This is your host, Zach Johnson. And in today's episode, Mr. D C, we're going to be talking with one of the Facebook ad legends.

Zach (02:25):

Oh, the, the founder C O and Xtrordinair of the Academy of advertising, but really he needs no introduction because he's worked with like, literally like all the biggest names in online marketing and info from Frank Kern, Mike Dillard, Sam ovens, like, I mean, the list just goes on and on and on, and we're going to like dive into it today. I think I've known our guests today probably for gosh, maybe at least like five, six years. He was one of the first people I call back in, uh, my days at lead pages when I needed help managing ads, uh, there, so guys guy's been super generous, um, with his time and it's really helped thousands of people. Uh, I think at this point are following his strategies. Um, so yeah, without further ado, I am so excited to have on the show. Should we, should we bring them on or should we just like hype it up, continue to hype it up, hype it up. Jason, how you doing, man? Thanks for being here.

Jason (03:37):

I totally forgot about the fact that you would incessantly private message me when you worked at lead pages.

Zach (03:46):

Jason, you're amazing. You're amazing. Oh my gosh, man. Well, I'm excited to have you on tell every a little bit about like what you're up to these days. Uh, because it's, it's pretty cool, man. I, I, I'm a fan of it. I'm on your site right now. And uh, surprisingly and sadly it's not Facebook ad agency, uh, management services. So give everybody an update.

Jason (04:10):

Yeah. So I got out of the, you know, doing the ads management myself, I, I sold the agency to a business partner of mine, Erin Parkinson, who's really accomplished marketer in his own. Right. And he got like took over the team and because really what I, what I love doing is, you know, training and consulting. So I moved into a consulting role with agency, still technically work there with them, but I just meet with the media buying team, like once a week. And then I talk with them on overall account strategy. Uh, we look at different issues. They may be seeing inside of certain accounts and coming up with plans of action for how we go about tackling those problems. So, you know, that's what I spend my days doing today. These days is, you know, I can have a handful of consulting clients I work with.

Jason (04:59):

And then out of the Academy of advertising, I run a program called profits society, which is basically a coaching program for like entrepreneurs running their own ads, media buyers, and agency owners. And what people get is access to all of my training materials that I am constantly creating and have been creating since 2013. And they get access to me directly through a private Facebook group where, you know, they can get help on anything going on in their campaigns. And I, I just spend my days in the trenches, helping people out while running my own ads for Academy of advertising. Plus I own a company that builds, uh, uh, creates, uh, drinks out of mushrooms actually. And I run the ads for and stuff,

Zach (05:47):

But I did not know this what's the name of that company

Jason (05:51):

Are called. It's called Uplevel. I started it with my buddy, Jeremy Sandow back in, uh, the beginning of 2019. Um, what we did was we created a, we created a product called focus up. That's made out of a bunch of adaptogenic mushrooms, herbs and roots. It's all, it's a hundred percent organic, a hundred percent vegan, a hundred percent keto. And what the main two ingredients are, lion's mane and cordyceps mushrooms. And what, what these mushrooms have been proven to do is when you use them in combination with the other ingredients that in our proprietary blends, they give you they'll you'll can get the same, uh, energy and focus and stuff that you get from drinking coffee. Um, but you don't get any of the downside, uh, like, you know, jitters upset, stomach nervousness, you know, things like, um, my product right now on this podcast.

Zach (06:51):

I'm like, there's only three. There's only three ways. I know my coffee's working. I taste good. I have energy

Jason (07:04):

You get two out of the three with one you don't get

Zach (07:11):

It's the pro and which one's the con we don't know. Uh, yeah, this looks cool, man. Is this Uplevel shot?

Jason (07:17):

Yup. Yeah. I'm going to try it,

Zach (07:20):

But with no vowels, there's no ease in Uplevel. It's just U P L V.

Jason (07:25):

Yeah. That was cool, man, for us to get the trademark, it was also the only way I could fit the whole company name on the license plate on my car too. Hey,

Zach (07:41):

That's awesome, man. Well, I'm excited, man. You get, you've seen a ton of ad campaigns, uh, like, you know, for a long time. So let's dive into this rich end. What's what's working now. Bring it home, man. Break down this breakdown, this ad for us,

Jason (08:02):

[inaudible] this, this ad that I brought to tables one, uh, one of my own, um, and the reason I wanted to show this is because for me personally, for like the Academy of advertising, I'm competing in one of the, the, the strongest markets in the world. I'm selling to people that are hyper aware of every single marketing strategy and tactic that's available. Um, they're super, super, super skeptical, and they're hit with millions of other offers similar to mine every single day. So I re I wanted to show this because what I've seen time and time and time again, is that the strategy that I'm deploying in this ad is one that will always make a product stand out and we'll get conversion in even the most difficult markets now. And with me being a media buyer is that, cause you just lay out the whole structure right there.

Jason (08:59):

You made this super actionable, which I loved about it, where it's like, here's the objective? Here's the bid, here are the audiences. And I'm like, dude, you're giving away some nice little keys to the castle right there. I like it. Yeah. The strategy specifically behind this one is to use long form copy, to deliver and demonstrate actionable, real value to the market. Right? That is what always stands out in crowded markets. Because like, if you look around in this space, there's you guys probably see this all the time. You see all these other ads for people selling courses on how to do ads, right? Everybody in the mother wants to do that in they're all about like the same thing. You know, they, they they're, they're talking, they're just hyping up things, making big promises and telling you to go watch a free training.

Jason (09:45):

Right. Everybody's seeing the same thing and they could just get hit over and over and over the head with it. I see it in, in a lot of comments on other ads that I run that do the same thing. Right. So, you know, for me, what I've always found is, you know, what what's always worked best for me is when I lead with value first, especially in a scaffold market like this. So I just flipped the script a little bit and put the value right in the post. It's funny. I wish I could pull up the comment, but you know, I've only had one comment on this ad and the guy said, Oh, this is real value. I'm going to try this right now. And then he ended up going and buying my thing.

Zach (10:29):

That's so good. So it's basically, I I'm looking at it right now. It says you 30 days of training for a dollar. So at Academy of walk us through the funnel, right? So like it's a long format is a picture of you mugshot. And what are you holding up in this picture by the way?

Jason (10:48):

Oh, um, geez. I'm not

Zach (10:51):

Feeling scaling up. It's the scaling up

Jason (10:54):

The Rockefeller habits. 2.0

Zach (10:56):

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So walk us through the funnel. What happens after they click on that?

Jason (11:01):

Yeah. So the ad actually takes people straight to a long form sales letter on my membership, on my website where people can, uh, take a 30 day trial for a dollar into my Academy of advertising profits, society program,

Zach (11:17):

Straight subscription. Wow. Bold move, man,

Jason (11:22):

Actually. So far then I just actually launched this offer August 7th. And so we're a little over 30 days into it now. And the conversion to the, to the, uh, uh, getting in the trial has been, you know, right where I was expecting as far as our CPAs go. Um, and so far the backend conversion into paying member is heading right where I was expecting. So

Zach (11:51):

That's so riveting really great. Sorry.

Speaker 5 (11:54):

There it goes. Expectations. Fantastic. You want to tell us anymore?

Jason (12:02):

I, I it's, you know, it's working for me. These numbers may not work for somebody else. So I don't, I I'm always worried about setting like expectations. Cause like when I give numbers for my stuff, then people will say, well, this is what I should hit for my funnel. And it might be a whole different industry, you know?

Zach (12:18):

Yeah. Well, I think free trial funnels, you're doing a dollar first thing. That's, that's smart. Right. And that's great. A but I mean, I think we were talking with, um, Mike Phil, same on the show and he was talking about grew funnels and how they kind of do this, like freemium, something like a dollar it's like a freemium and you know, he's really just targeting, like, I want to say a 5% conversion rate from like, uh, like a freemium to like a paid mind. You, it's not like a strip prescription. It's like $1,300 or something like that on the upsell, you know, but we've seen other people in subscription that go for like a 14 day or 30 day trial and in SAS and you know, they're hitting like a 35 to 40% conversion rate at the end of that trial

Jason (13:13):

Doing 22% right now. And that's just with, there's literally nothing that anybody receives after they, you know, as far as like trying to get them to continue on with the payments or upgrade them an annual or anything like that, there's, there's no kind of like value build or trying to get them to convert so far. It's just allowing them to go through the process and letting their card rebill.

Zach (13:40):

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's good, man. You know, my complaint about free trial or dollar trial funnels is the, the, the tracking and the time, right. Like waiting for that rebill and then really getting a grip on your LTV. Uh it's is, um, it's

Jason (14:01):

Remarkably easy to understand once you see the patterns and how they operate. Okay. So what, what, what happens with paint with subscription plans? And this is across like any industry and it's pretty much every price point I've seen from like $47 all the way up to $300 a month, like minus, um, you'll have on average three payments that you'll collect from everybody. Yeah. Okay. So if I got a $300 a month plan that I'm going to, um, when I'm, when I'm plotting my funnel, I'm assuming I'm going to have a $900 LCB

Zach (14:39):

At night.

Jason (14:42):

Right. So that's what I, that's what I operate under. And then I look at, okay, well, if I want to, if I want to achieve at four to one return on my ad, spend over that timeframe. Right. It's not going to be day one, but over that lifespan, then what I do is I set, you know, one quarter of that Mark as my CPA goal on the front end.

Zach (15:02):

Yeah. I mean, I'm hoard a one, a four to one over, well, let's see. It would be, is that 120 days or 90 days? Yeah. Yeah. So nine a four to one over 90 days, I'd say it

Jason (15:18):

You're technically at two. So like if we did it, when I do the math this way, like in those specific numbers, it's $150 CPA, you know, with $900 AOB. Right. So if you have a two 95 payment day 31, you're only Kat you're, you're basically cashflowing that 150 bucks for 31 days. And then on day 31, you're at a two to one return and then day 90 you're at Fordham.

Zach (15:44):

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah. No, that's, that's, that's pretty cool, man. I like it. It's so funny. It's just like we do all these fancy funnel footwork. Uh, sometimes it's just like, Hey, Hey man, we just get your core offer. Right. And get those numbers to work. Um,

Jason (16:05):

But here's the thing, like I could show you, I've done. Like I've literally built every single possible funnel model imaginable this year and tested it with different messages, with variations of messaging, with variations on price points of my offer and the thing that's given me, the like the most consistent results in my business right now is I actually were before the call. I just rewrote my sales letter today again. Um, and when I rewrote it, I cut out eight pages of it too.

Zach (16:45):

Oh yeah.

Jason (16:46):

My site's 23 pages long

Zach (16:51):

In like, uh, in like Google docs or something like that. Yeah. Wow, man. Well, that's cool. I love it. I think, uh, I mean you're the, just the value delivering the ad is not easy duplicatable, you know, for anybody who's trying to fake it before you make it, uh, like it's, it's very obvious that there's years of expertise and battle wounds here. Um, so congrats on that. Now, how much do you think is possible to really scale in this, in this market? Right. Like selling Facebook ads, training, who do you think is scaled that the most in, in terms of spent

Jason (17:37):

The people that I know that are doing it for real are going to be like Billy Jean and funnels. Uh, you know, those, those two guys are like probably

Zach (17:50):

At the top of the mountain, man. We should like, we totally have fashion shanks on here too, from there. I mean, he would have a good one. Good one to ask us about till yeah. I mean like what I've seen in this is, you know, at those levels it gets watered. Like you have to water it down pretty hardcore, you know, to be spending three, three to 400, you know, maybe 500 K a month, you know, on ads in this, in this particular segment for me, I've scaled as high as, at one point I was at about 70,000 a month, pretty consistently. This was back in 2016 to 2017. I had, I had a webinar for like 18 months that just crushed it, you know? And I remember that, I don't remember that talking to you about it. And it was just like this, it was like this thing, like, you just didn't touch. It was just like running there. I did like every time I talked to you about it, you're like, Oh yeah, that thing. Yeah. And then I, and then I just kind of slowly let it die. And, and then spent two years resuscitating it all after I realized that I should have let the agency go, instead of my information, product business, go

Speaker 6 (19:08):

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Zach (20:27):

Check it out@funneldash.com. So let's talk about talking about a poor ed man. You've seen thousands of ad campaigns, thousands of ad accounts. I want to hear, uh, some, some, some awful come to Jesus moments about what not to do.

Jason (20:50):

No, that's funny. I see a lot of real common mistakes from people that they make, where they, you know, and, and they wonder why their stuff doesn't work. Right. And the biggest one is really not understanding who the heck it is that they're writing to and where their, uh, level of awareness is in the market. Right? The biggest, the biggest mistake I see people make is they'll. They always write their ads using what we call, offer copy, right? Where their ad is always just about the offer. And a lot of people do that because that's what Facebook tells you to do. But the problem is, is if you study copywriting and things like that, you'll learn that that type of copy is only suited for a customer or a prospect who is already highly aware of your solution. The fact that there's a solution to the problem that they have, and they should be aware of the fact that you provide that solution already and have a decent solution, right?

Jason (21:55):

People aren't at that level of awareness towards our product or the solution that they're looking for. Um, in fact, a lot of markets are, you know, not even problem aware yet. And if you start shoving an offer down, somebody's face like, Hey, get my thing for 25% off to solve this problem. And they are not even aware of it. The ad will never, ever, ever work. And, and I see people that'll put these ads together like that the ad's not working and there'll be gigging and getting no sales. And they'll see in like their Facebook account, it says learning limited, you should be spending more money to get more conversions. And they'll start literally scaling ads that aren't even selling at all, thinking that it's going to somehow magically start doing that because they're going to get some pixel dust on their campaign. Like, it's the weirdest thing, but like, they're, they're literally not understanding who they're writing to and how they should be writing to that person.

Zach (23:00):

I think Jason, you're just really just a copywriter guys as a Facebook ad expert.

Jason (23:07):

I am start copywriting.

Zach (23:10):

Yeah. Like I, every conversation I had with you in a first year of us getting to know each other, I always just walked away with like, Oh man, like I walked away with more ahas around copy in conversations with you than I did around our conversations around ads.

Jason (23:29):

Yeah. Like, so here's the thing. This is the secret. Like, you know, I'm not a real technical person. And like when people come in and buy my courses and stuff, and then they see how I show them to just set up their largely set up your campaigns and stuff, using the Facebook defaults, they start freaking out because it's not about like, these campaigns are not about the settings. It's not about the pixel. Like a lot of people think you can just, you can take a turd and stick it into the Facebook machine. And it's going to spit out money because it puts pixel dust on it. It's not, that's not what happens. Like the only what, and here's the other thing that people need to understand that pencil dust is going away soon. Next one's is going to be complete soon. And then people are going to be really screwed in their own minds.

Jason (24:18):

But they're not because you don't like what, what makes the conversion is people don't understand. You're putting an ad in front of a person. It's still a person that's sitting in front of their phone or a computer, right. That their brain responds to stimuli no different than it had when that brain was first created tens of thousands of years ago. So what we need to understand to do advertising properly is we need to understand human behavior and psychology, that's it. And if we can pair those two things with copywriting, then we can't help but win because all we have to do is put the right message in front of the right audience at the right time. And it's so infinitely easy to do that with Facebook. It doesn't matter if you got the pixel working. It doesn't matter if you have super detailed targeting or not. It doesn't.

Zach (25:12):

Yeah. I mean, I just want to tell him that Dylan's all kinds of

Jason (25:17):

Excited right now.

Zach (25:19):

I want to point out that what you've pulled off here with Academy of advertising is a long form ad with a picture, no video to a long form sales page to a Donald Trump, no video. Like how freeing is that for you in terms of being able to like optimize, optimize your own funnel. And like, I just love funnels where like, you don't have to go and rerecord it.

Jason (25:48):

Yeah. Another thing that I teach my students, right? Like, cause this, this, this is a huge mistake. I see people make when they're trying to get an offer to work, right. Like, Oh, I need to create a video or I need to record this. Right. But yet again, you'll have no idea what their messaging is that's going to sell. Right. And another thing that's kind of a caveat, that's a secret is that changes over time, really rapidly. Right? Like that's why I was saying, you guys, I just rewrote my sales letter right before we got on this call. And this is literally the fourth version of this sales letter that I've written this year.

Zach (26:24):

Yeah. Wow.

Jason (26:25):

Right. And it's all from, from modifying and adjusting and, you know, learning about what my, what, what my clients are needing, what they're responding to right now and how I can frame my offer properly around that. And the more I dial it in the higher the conversion goes, right. That's it, it's all about them. And you should do that all with text first. And then, because if you can't get, if you can't get somebody, if you can't send somebody from an ad straight to a sales page and get them to convert, ain't going to work in a video homey video. The amount of sound for this podcast is like Epic. This is what I do all day long.

Zach (27:25):

Wow. I love it, man. Well, one of the other things that you're quite talented at Mr. Jason, is

Jason (27:40):

It's really

Zach (27:41):

Well. Like I think you're pretty good with finances and, uh, um, you know, both, both personally and professionally and also, you know, on the media buying side. So this, this podcast hangs at the intersection of, you know, finance and, and Mark. And we're trying to help, you know, those advertisers stuck doing marketing math to get a little bit of education here on how to think about, you know, managing, investing in growth and investing in, um, you know, split tests, investing into creative, investing into their business and managing cashflow. So what are some of the principles that you've learned along the way that you can share with the audience?

Jason (28:22):

I'll share with you a few and I'll, I'll start on like the big picture business level first. Um, so, you know, from a business perspective, I went about this route with being able to make sure that my business always has enough cash flow. Okay. So the first is you got to get profitability, obviously coming into your company. So you focus on profit first. Then as soon as you have profit, if you have any debt service, I take 50% of every profit of the amount of profit every month. And I pay down debt service until that's paid off complete, right. The other 50% gets reinvested back into the business in advertising. And that's, that's how I operate into the get-go.

Zach (29:04):

They had a, we had a war story, I'm sorry to interrupt. We had a war story of a guy on here. You know, that was a, that was an agency. He was a million dollars in debt, um, several years into his agency. And it took him two years, I think, to like kind of crawl back out of it and had to stay incredibly disciplined to, to, to get out of it right now. There's good. And there's bad uses of debt. We're going to get, get into that. But, uh, I feel like, um, there's a lot going out, you know, in the world right now of just like all debt. Like everybody just assumes that debt is used for growth and that it should justify the cost.

Jason (29:50):

Not at all. So I've bootstrapped three seven figure businesses. Now I have never taken a dollar from anybody. I've never gone into debt on any business.

Zach (30:00):

Yeah. Right. So you just like giving out debt advice to everyone else that's in debt. You're like a, you're like a debt coach for your clients

Jason (30:08):

Basically. Yeah, I do that a lot. Like I, you know, and I've, you know, cause here's the thing like you, you, you got like his suit for me anyways. I bootstrapped it. So I just, you know, worked with cash flow and I, I forced myself to make it work. And I started really small. And when I, when I built up my agency, I wasn't buying ads right away. And this is something that I teach people in my seven figure agency blueprint course is we show people how to get to 20 to 30 K a month with, uh, without spending a dime on any marketing. Right. I just got a message from one of my clients today. He's like, Hey, I just got up to 60 K in six weeks using that free strategy that you taught me.

Zach (30:50):

Right.

Jason (30:51):

You don't need to spend any money to make money, especially if you're running a digital marketing agency these days. Um, like that's how I built my thing up. I got to like 20, 30 grand without spending any money, just doing elbow grease working, you know, that my network and using some of the strategies that are available online today. And I got people coming to me, built it up. And then, uh, then I started, I did, I did a lot of all the work and the get-go right. And then I started hiring people. Meanwhile, making sure I could always pay myself. And then once I had profitability coming through, I took 50% paid off all my debt till my debt was paid off. I took the other 50%. I put that into advertising for accelerated growth. And then that, that made my cashflow or my revenue go at a hockey stick growth.

Jason (31:38):

And then I would just take 50% of, of my, uh, of my, uh, profit each month would go towards investing. And then the other 50% would go towards, uh, you know, backing it back into ads. And then my investing pile would get the first wet to creating cash reserves. So I wanted to have six months of business operating expenses and cash reserves. And that's what I went to. I, I built it up to cash reserves. And then once I had six months of business cash reserves, that whole 50% of profit, I withdrew as compensation to myself personally.

Zach (32:19):

Yeah. Oh yeah. That is that's some, that's some gold right there, man.

Jason (32:28):

Well, I was able to take, I was able to take a $200,000 pile of cash they started with in 2016 and I've grown that to like 1.6 million and that's not worth investing with stocks and stuff. Wow.

Zach (32:48):

Yeah, dude. That's awesome, man. We're going to do like a whole nother podcast on your, uh, investing strategies here.

Jason (32:56):

Well, I run my investments a lot. Like I do ad campaigns. You actually alluded to that before we got on the call, but that's exactly how I approach it. Yeah.

Zach (33:04):

Yeah. Oh, that's awesome, man. Do you sit on these? Are they pretty quick, quick pace trades to get into it right now? It's like, Hey, what's your football

Jason (33:18):

Buy and hold. Like I don't, I've only, you know, I've only like sold stuff a few times. So I, I also use some proprietary algorithms that are remarkably accurate. So like for example, I sold all my in cash on February 26th, then avoided the entire market decline. Um, and then I bought back in back in the end of June or something like that, which ended up being like a day or two after the bottom and rode the whole whole ride back up to the top. So I completely avoided all the losses, but got all the gains from this year.

Zach (34:03):

Oh, that's amazing at Dylan. Dylan will be hitting you up after the show. Can you do an audit on my portfolio? Oh my gosh. Okay. So I'll bring it back to ads for a second guys. Talk to me about some of the B just being disciplined in investing in split testing and creative. Cause we were talking about this before the show and I feel like this is it's a solid and everybody's a year

Jason (34:32):

Was the, uh, this was the other D this plan I wanted to share with you guys. So here's where I see people getting really screwed up in their accounts. I'll actually see people. They, they over-tasked, and they don't allocate, they over allocate budget into testing, which will do two things. It distracts them from scaling and putting money into stuff that was already working, which would have increased profits. And to the other thing that happens when we run a bunch of tests, if anybody's ever done ads before, they'll know that only 20% of every test succeeds, right. At best. Right? So when you're running a bunch of tests, you're going to have a whole 80% of them are going to be failures. So you're going to have 80% of all of this money that you're spending. That's going to have a negative return. And so I see people like putting up way too much money towards testing.

Jason (35:21):

Um, especially when they've got accounts that are working and they'll keep their account constantly in this state of like being at like break even, or like maybe 1.2 to 1.4 row. And they just can't figure out why. And I got to tell them, well, stupid it's because you're testing too much. You're spending a thousand dollars a day on the stuff that's working and you're spending 1400 bucks on. That's not right. So in order to have the proper balancing of testing, I tell clients in a scenario where you have a, you have an account where you have stuff that is working, it's producing the results that you're looking for. Right. You need to make sure that you have no more than 20% of whatever's running towards the stuff that's working. You are allocating towards any task period. Right. So if you're testing,

Zach (36:12):

Yes. Well, I want to add to this because yes, this is true on the media testing, but I think it's even worse on the funnel and the creative side.

Jason (36:23):

Oh yeah. I think that you, yeah,

Zach (36:29):

It like exponentially worse, right? Like, uh, like people will throw down crazy amounts on video ads these days, as well as an entirely different funnel. Right. I mean, let's just talk about yourself for a second, Jason, because you, you literally said this year, I tested four different funnels before I found the one that was working

Jason (36:53):

Well, that's four versions of my sales letter. I've tested every tangible this year. Right. So like what,

Zach (37:02):

What was the investment there? Like what did, I mean, I think you're doing a lot of your own stuff these days. So like PR costs out of the door, maybe a little bit more minimal. I don't know. But like how much were you willing to really invest to get the funnel right. Relative to the media. Cause that's where I feel like a lot of people get lost and I'm, you know, definitely one of these people that like, I'll just continue to overinvest in different funnels to get the unit economics that I want. Right. Chasing that.

Jason (37:30):

Yeah. So for me, it's a little bit more, uh, feasible because I have a tech team on retainer that does all my stuff for me. Now it's hard for me to say how much I've spent exactly on those funnels. Cause I play pay a flat fee and then I pay per hour if I go over. So, um, what I can tell you is I'm definitely more than $70,000 into development costs this year. Um, you know, those guys and they build all my funnels for me now. It, what I would definitely say to people is if you run a, you run a test and you somehow determine you need a new funnel, uh, you should really be using this thing, like drop funnels or some kind or lead pages or click funnels or something so that you can deploy those on there and do it yourself versus paying somebody a whole bunch of money to build those funnels for you.

Jason (38:23):

Because you know, like I go through funnels like underwear, you know, like, and that's the thing and the funnel, here's another piece. There's a lot of people think, you know, they put an offer out and they put it in a certain funnel and they think, Oh, it's the funnel that needs to change. No, that's not right. And that's a big mistake. Right? Uh, you know, like, so you really, the reason I have all these different funnels is because I have to use everything and I'm using also different things for different applications, right. In my business, I have to be able to prove that these things do and don't work and what scenarios and show people how right. Well, it's essential for me to keep doing all of these things. Um, I'm not even done with all of them, but I also cycle through all this stuff to find out what works the best for my business. And then once I got something that hits my numbers, I stopped funnel testing entirely. And I focus on that one funnel. That's given me the results that I want and then I fine tune it. That's why now I'm on the fourth version of my sales letter. Cause I find, you know, I settled on the, the, the model that works the best for me is going add to sales letter. Right. And so now my mind,

Zach (39:34):

How much should somebody spend on creative relative to their ad budget percentage wise?

Jason (39:40):

Like almost nothing. I mean, I don't pay anybody to do, to build ads for me, all my photos. I shoot myself on my phone or I, uh, or I, uh, you know, like we'll, we'll, uh, gosh, what the heck I'll use the, the, the, uh, the, the stock photos that they give you inside of there for free. Um, I use the little Facebook video editor thing to like take photos and make them into videos or I'll shoot a, like a little video on my own iPhone, you know?

Zach (40:12):

And now let's assume that not everybody is Jason Hornung who can crush his own Facebook ads. Right. Because let's be honest, like not everybody has that same level of skill set. Right. So like, let's just say for a brand that's working with maybe an agency or they've got a team in-house right. And they've got to work with the creative team. Cause they, they are not, you like, if you were to put a number on it, what, what would it be if I'm spending a thousand dollars a day, 30 grand a month? Give me just like how like dollars, how much should I be spending on creative?

Jason (40:49):

Wow. That's a tough question. Because for me, I would say zero, right? Like zero. I mean, cause you know, like if you've got a, like if you've got an in house team and you're selling a product, for example, your in-house team should be able to get their phones out or a camera out that the company has and take every stink and photo you would ever need. You know, they can't do that. Then you got stock images, you got stock videos. They're like most of the stuff that I'm seeing out there that works has is all just stock. It's not like, you know, custom, super high end 4k video. That's shot by professional cinematographer. You know, that doesn't work

Zach (41:36):

Usually. So you just crushed this episode, man. You've been an amazing guests. Let's just promote your program now. And let's give everybody an affiliate link and pass a hundred percent commission because this has been absolutely sign up. Now the Academy of advertising.com. Um, no really tell everybody what you're up to now. W w what are you looking to do? How they can get in touch, learn more, you know, best way to reach me is, uh, is, uh, Academy of advertising.com. Dan, actually, if you go to the enroll page, you can learn everything about the profits society program, and you know, what you get with all of that. It's basically a, you know, coaching with me personally. And the funny thing is, is if you, you know, there's like a Facebook chat widget. If you chat, if you do that chat, you're going to come to me personally. Like I don't have a, I don't have a team, big team like that. My, I have two people that work in my business. One of them, my 23 year old daughter who does our customer service and the other, my wife, Heather, who does all the financial paperwork and stuff with her. That is amazing. Yeah. People will be all chat with me and they'll, they'll think it's not me, but it really is me. That's, I'm literally sending you all kinds of messages like right now.

Zach (43:03):

All right, man. Thank you so much. You've been an amazing guests. Go check out Academy of advertising.com. Go, go chat with Jason. And, uh, it's always a pleasure, man. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks for having me. I hope this was valuable for everybody and I hope I made you laugh today.

Speaker 6 (43:23):

Yeah. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich ed or ed podcast. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich dad, poor dad.com/podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zack@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review. I'll give you a free copy of the rich add or ed book to learn more about the book. Go to rich ed for a.com to leave a review that a rich ad for at.com/review. Thanks again.


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About The Podcast

Jason Hornung is the founder and Creative Director at JH Media LLC, the world’s #1 direct response advertising agency focusing exclusively on the Facebook ads platform. Jason’s proprietary methods for ad creation, audience selection and scaling are responsible for producing $20 million + of profitable sales for his clients EVERY YEAR

Zach Johnson

Zach Johnson is Founder of FunnelDash, the Agency Growth and Finance Company, with their legendary Clients Like Clockwork solutions. Under Zach’s leadership, FunnelDash has grown to over 5,000+ agency customers managing over $1 Billion in ad spend across 41,000 ad accounts on. Zach’s private clients have included influencers such as Dr. Axe, Marie Forleo, Dan Kennedy, Dean Graziozi to name a few. Zach is also a noted keynote speaker and industry leader who’s now on a mission to partner with agencies to fund $1 Billion in ad spend over the next 5 years.

Dylan Carpenter

Dylan Carpenter

Dylan Carpenter will be diving into what he and his team are seeing in 200+ accounts on Google and Facebook when it comes to trends, new offerings, and new opportunities. With over $10 million in Facebook/Instagram ad spend, Dylan Carpenter had the pleasure to work with Fortune 500 companies, high investment start-ups, non-profits, and local businesses advertising everything from local services to physical and digital products. Having worked at Facebook as an Account Manager and now with 5+ years of additional Facebook Advertising under my belt, I’ve worked alongside 60+ agencies and over 500+ businesses. I work with a team of Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn experts to continue to help companies and small businesses leverage the power of digital marketing.

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