How To Sell Anything To Anyone Online (I Spent $1M Learning This)

I just spent over a million dollars in the past 90 [music] days learning what I'm about to tell you in this video. If you want to sell anything online and make a lot of money, this is for you. But I'm only leaving this video up for [music] 72 hours because I'm going to give you the exact strategy, which I call the 6 M, that I've never shared outside my company. It works in any business, any niche, and will make you a lot of money if you do it right. So, you better watch this video, and you better watch it twice because you're not going to see it again. All right, I want to pull up our highest converting ads and tell you why they worked so you can steal our homework. This was our best performing ad. It starts with I'll let you in on a little secret. [music] That sentence does something very different than here are the five business tips. One is information available to everybody. The other is kind of exclusive. So you value things more when people can't get them. [music] That does not mean you should slap secret on everything. It means you weave it into things subtly. Like I'll show you something I normally only show my clients. I'm opening this only to 100 people. I haven't shared this publicly before. This is true exclusivity, which gives someone a reason to lean in. Let's

look at the second ad. Also, always helps to have an adorable husband in it, but hysterically, the ads [music] with Chris convert better than the ads without Chris. So, they come for the Cody, they stay for the Chris. Second ad, this is our second best ad. Begin with, "If you need to hire more, but your margins won't cover it, this video is for you." Here's why this works. Two things. It identifies the perfect buyer by making someone ask, "Is [music] that me?" It gets them to say their first yes. The fancy term for this is self-referencing. Researchers have found that copy designed to make people relate [music] a message back to themselves can improve attitudes and intentions. Aka, it makes them actually take an action.

So, here's how I would copy this ad. The template is if you are X or if you have X problem, this is for you. Haven't you noticed how all like the pharma commercials do this? >> If you're living with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, >> you're not going to say like our revolutionary platform helps entrepreneurs blah blah blah blah. No, you say if you own a business and you're still answering employee texts at 10 p.m., this is for you. Our third best ad is this. Everyone who comes is going to get a gift. When people receive unsolicited favors, they're more likely to say yes. This is the law of reciprocity. And there are so many studies that prove that a bunch of people will come if you give first. And I don't mean the fake version where you say, "I'm going to give you something for free." And then hold it hostage behind a sales call. I'm going to actually give them something useful before they have done anything useful for you. In our launch, that means I am literally giving a million dollars in cash and prizes away for free. Now, you might not have that kind of money. I also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making a lead magnet called the owner score. It's this personality test,

and we gave it away completely for free. You can see it at ownerscore.com. But if you don't have the ability to give away the million bucks, at least create something, then give it away to them as a lead magnet. At the event this week, when we give away the million dollars in cash and prizes, we are going to give so much value that upfront people are going to be like, "Wow, I already I already feel like I'm getting something." Now, there are a couple rules to make this work. Break one and you become just a donation bank. First, you have to give something with a nameable value. Free training, blah, nobody values that. The exact spreadsheet my team uses to rank our top 100 ads. That's nice. You can picture it. You know what you're getting. Rule two, give it before they have done something for you. If I say, "Buy this and then I'll give you something," that's a transaction, not reciprocity. So, if you want the exact templates for ads and content and access to all this free stuff I'm talking about, you can sign up in the description below. I'm putting together a really special offer that will only be available at the book launch. It will help you make a lot more money. See what I did there? I mean, you actually should do it because it's free for you and I'm just giving you this, but you also

should copy my homework and do this for your offer. Okay. The second M is message. So amateurs, they want to be Luke Skywalker. Pros are Yoda. The customer is Luke, not you. They're the one trying to leave the farm, fight the Empire, be the star, become a Jedi. They're the hero. Your company is the little green man. [music] Why? Because you're just the guide. You have the map. Maybe you have like all the weird gray in the ears. Your job is to help them get where they want to go and you're in the background. And I know this sounds obvious, but every business screws this up, including us. You know, the original Instagram caption for my launch announcement literally said this. My second book, Owner Beyond, is out. Over the past 5 years, my team and I have worked closely with more than 5,000 business owners inside of our scaling advisory firm. We've helped all kind of businesses grow from 500K. I'm asleep.

Are you asleep? Because basically, we end with an HVAC company or an ice cream truck. The playbook is almost identical. I I don't even know. I'm so bored. The problem, it's all about me, me, me. It's all about yours truly. On the surface, okay, we're writing about the value that it makes, the 5,000 owners, the revenue levels, but it's basically a paragraph long resume. Like, what could be more boring than that? Okay, this is this is the caption that was better. New book, Owner Be Own, is out September 18th. If you want more cash, less chaos, more freedom, this book is for you. And you can only get it live on September [music] 18th. Here's why. You don't want to be rich just to flex online. You want to be rich so you can sit on your porch with a coffee [music] for slow mornings so you can go to the gym in the middle of the day. Take long walks and call them meetings. Never miss a single magic moment of your life. That [music] is rich. I will show you how to build a business so good it doesn't need you frantically putting out fires. Way better, right? This is about you, your freedom. The book is a guide to help you get there. So, whatever you're selling,

I want you to remember ideal state first, mechanism second. This is benefit first, feature second. Most businesses this up. Like, we use a proprietary sevenstep AI, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. I don't care. Nobody cares. Sell the benefit to the user. Build them the life that they want to see, not the feature. Now, ask if your customer succeeds, what changes in their actual life? Do they make more money? Save time? Stop worrying. Delete your product from the sales pitch. Sell the end ideal state.

Sell the dream. That's where all the money is. The third M is micro commitment. You have to get to the first yes as fast as humanly possible. I actually sometimes like to track how quickly we do that. For this launch, the first page free. You could register without buying anything. Only after someone had already clicked yes and registered did we offer them the next step, a $47 VIP upgrade. A lot of businesses build this backwards. They immediately ask for the most expensive thing they sell. Then after the stranger says no, they start dropping the price.

Reduce the friction on the first decision. There's an old persuasion finding called um the foot in the door effect. So a study showed 76% of people who had previously complied with the smaller yes later agreed to a larger yes compared with only 16% of people who had not received that initial request. That's why that tiny yes really matters because behavior has momentum kind of like a snowball. Like do you want to see free stuff? Yes. Okay, give me your email to sign up. Do you want the upgraded experience for 47? Yes. want to work with us directly? Yes. Now we can actually have that conversation. This is how you move someone from ticket to a high ticket item. It's a lot of tiny yeses along the way. The first transaction also gives you the information an email opt-in cannot. A subscriber says, "Yeah, I'm interested."

A buyer says, "Okay, I'm going to take out my credit card." Super huge different signal. So, audit your business. What is the easiest valuable yes someone can give you before you ask them for a big yes? The fourth M is make the ask. There's this obsession online with making everything two words long. Comment on. Click here. Get access. Subscribe now. We tried it. It did nothing. One of the captions that converted extremely well though was way longer. We typically find longer captions do better. Let [music] me tell you what it said. If you want to make more money less painfully in business, you're going to want to come to my virtual book launch. I'm throwing the biggest live giveaway of 2026 with a million dollars in cash and prizes.

That's capitalized. given live and my secrets to building six, seven, eight, and nine figure businesses. [music] Comment, own. I'll invite you. That is obviously not short, but it answers the questions somebody actually has like, why should I care? What am I going to get? I'm busy. I don't have time for this. Nobody [music] has time for your things. The lesson is not long CTAs always win. Our lesson was that clarity beats brevity. Clear is kind. So, I gave my employees six more rules that nearly tripled our conversions just by CTAs.

Give me two minutes. Oh, and we put the CTA all over the office because I don't want 47 CTAs. I actually want one so good people keep repeating [music] it back to me. Repetition is key because they need to hear from you at least 12 times to take an action and to show up for an event. We [music] think it's double that. We think you need 24 to 30 times to show up for an event. Number two is surprise and [music] delight. What do I mean? Every CTA should have a little something unexpected. In some of our YouTube videos, instead of like click below, which is white noise, we had a tiny band of characters marching across the CTA. It's kind of stupid. I love it. And those versions converted much better than the plain ones. The third strong verbs use words like claim, secure, grab, start, kill words like learn, discover, see. Explore how we can help your business becomes. Get the 12 profit lovers cheat sheet. Then number four, make it personal. Use words like your and my so the CTA feels like it

belongs to the person clicking to it. Actually kind of crazy. When you use the words your, you get somewhere between a two and 3x higher click-through rate across ads. That's kind of wild. So grab your free guide is much better than grab the free guide. It's like, huh, that's for me. Great. Five, be direct. If you want my email, ask for it. If you want me to comment own, tell me to comment own. It's okay to boss people around. Six, size matters, you know, so match the size of the ask to the relationship you have with the person. Someone watching their first 20 second Instagram video from you should not be asked for more than one free thing. You don't go up to a chick at a bar and ask her to marry you on the first night. You might ask her to go home with you, you know.

All right, number seven. Make it a trade. Subscribe tells me what you get it. Who cares? Give me your email and I'll send you the exact spreadsheet my team uses to rank our ads. Way better. That tells me what I get. The best CTAs feel like an exchange, not a favor. You're asking the audience to do for you. All right, I want to talk about money. So, I gave up millions in publishing deals from one of the biggest publishers in the world for basically two reasons on this deal. And this is really important for you because you've got to protect your money always. So, I don't know if you know this, but their traditional model, the publisher pays you a big advance up front and then gives you royalties on the books that sell, but like a tiny little itty [music] bit. They own the direct to customer relationship, the distribution, the customer data. I hate that. You always want to own your connection to the customer. You want their emails, you want their addresses, you want to be able to text them. I didn't own any of it. And one might say, I was the one that was owned, which was like not super on brand. So, margin is always the most

important thing. Think about it like this. Traditional publishing, the author might keep 10 to 15%. With the self-publishing model, we were looking at keeping roughly 40 to 50% after the costs of all this stuff like the books. That's 3x higher, which is why we have our own little publisher now, Contrarian Thinking Press, right here. This extra margin gives a ton of room to spend more to acquire a customer. That means you can spend more on ads, survive more mistakes, and still make money. I see this all the time in your first business. You only chase revenue and you completely ignore the fact that you're not making any profits. I would rather make less revenue with higher profit margins because it's easier to grow and get more cash in your pocket. The number I care about is this, and you got to obsess on it. Gross margin per customer.

It should be really at least 2 to 3x your customer acquisition cost. If you make 30 bucks of gross margin on a customer, I want to acquire them for 10 bucks or less at least over the course of let's call it a year. But how much money you keep is only one part of the equation. So when the money comes into your business, this is super important and why I'm doing a live event instead of a standard book tour. The old model of launching a book is like try to hit the New York Times bestseller. You present sell a ton of books. You hike up your sales. Then you hit the New York Times bestseller list like ah yay backpack comes with a bunch of publicity and news and features. But then a really big drop off. That is not smart. Don't you want a business that's continuously selling over time? So I think in the future more creators and more authors who have big audiences are switching to a live event release and self-publishing because you own the audience. Someone walks into Barnes & Noble and picks up your book, you have no clue who they are. They sign up for your event, you get their email. If they don't show up

for the event, you can build a relationship to later on offer them something else. I think live events are also going to spike hugely and you should think about it for your business because everybody's online these days. AI is everywhere. But what can you do? You can have sort of a humanto human connection if it's live. And big events also give you the opportunity to level out those huge revenue spikes with evergreen content. So, we're on it right now. This is a YouTube video. You can also do a video sales landing page, which means you reach people who can't come to the live event [music] and you provide this like kind of consistent revenue. So, we use these in this order.

Get people's information for the event. Give them an offer live. Turn what worked into evergreen content that you can use to drip again and again. Also, a secret hack, run ads on Amazon to your book later. Go to your favorite business book and then see who's running ads on top of them. That'll tell you that although yes, they're selling lots of books, they're paying for it. This is the same exact thing you would do with an Amazon product, too. So, anything you sell online, you want to think about what is your continual sales process, not just what is your one-time launch.

This M is for map. This is how you map out all of the content around a launch. I want to talk about full indoctrination. So before you go live with whatever your offer is, we do a 9060 3010 model. What does that mean? 90 days out you're starting to do what's called a drip and really to do teasers. What might that mean? Behind me, there's some red books there. Can you see them? 90 days out, those books were there. [music] Now, we weren't zooming in. You didn't know that that was my book, but I was starting to indoctrinate you with the red. Now, if you see [music] my grid today, there's red all over it. That's for book launch. But back then, we were just doing tiny little moments that you probably didn't even pick up. 60 days out, the rule was you make the announcement. We tell everybody the launch is coming. I like 60 days because it gives you time to mess up. The pros can go like 30 to 45 days, but you don't have enough time for the content that's not going to hit or the ads that are not going to hit. So, go 60 days. At that

period, I'm posting at least once a week, probably twice or three times about your thing that you sell online. At 45 days, you're going to almost every one and four posts and you're going most of your ads are direct [music] CTAs. At 30 days out, it's every other. And you'll start to see that there's red, which is an activation color. That's our color. You're starting to see that there's the logo of the book in a bunch of different places. The logo may be somewhere tiny like [music] here. It might just be really tiny there in an Instagram reel [music] as we get closer to the launch. So, we're How many days are we out, Blake?

>> Eight. >> Eight. We're eight days out for the launch. Which is why literally every single thing I've said again and again in the Slack, if it's not about the book, don't talk about it. If it's not about the book. So, if it's not about your launch, don't talk about it. And this should really start happening, I believe, at least the last two weeks before launch. Everything is read. Everything is me subliminally telling you I have a book to launch. Um, a couple other things that we did that I think are really important and I wish we had done them earlier. We did a lot of photo shoots with quotes in them. Why do I like this? because it allows you to show lifestyle photos, which we know do really well online, but also integrate book launch quotes in them. Then we actually use what's called uh IRL content and real life content. So these big poster boards, etc. to demonstrate something that's not IRL. It's live.

It's virtual. It's worked really [music] well. You want to draft off the cultural conversation. You want to try to get in trends as much as possible, but your version. So, it was my 40th birthday that got hijacked by the book launch. We did a ridiculous trend about 40. But really, what was the ask at the end? The CTA at the end of the video was comment. Come to the book launch. This thing got 1.3 million views. And here is a CTA at the end of it and it got 4,000 shares and 1,200 people signed up. Let's talk about creating a world. So, we have multiple different design characteristics. Super important. So, this one here, you can see this is one of our carousels. This is inside of the book. And then we [music] go brighter. This isn't so in your face, but eventually it gets a lot more in-your-face. We also have what's called a fall guy. [music] So, if you see the grid here, this is somebody, his name is Oxo, uh, which is the Greek word for growth. Little OXO is there because

I'm pregnant and I didn't want to be in every single video doing this all the time. So, I would have OXO doing ridiculous things like this, playing my new favorite video game. It takes me 2 seconds and OXO's got to get inside of our actual video game system. The point here is wherever you can, you want to try to multiply yourself. You don't want to make launches about yourself. [music] You don't want to make your online business about yourself. Even Kim for skims uses a ton of different [music] uh athletes. She uses a ton of celebrities. Subliminal messaging. We do our typical videos or typical content.

You can do lifestyle content, whatever it is, but include the red in the background so that it starts to feel like every time that red comes up, it's a trigger color to think about the product that you're selling. the people who do really good at this. For instance, think about, you know, Dolingo would be a great example of one. Think about Anthropic with the clawed orange everywhere. You don't have to come up with something from nothing. Use trending ideas in different niches and apply them to yours. Another perfect example would be a gender reveal. I'm pregnant. Everybody wanted me to do a gender reveal. I'm not doing one cuz I don't want to know until I have the baby. So, what did we do instead? We did a book launch reveal and it got 2.4 million views. uh 30,000 likes and signed up thousands of people for the book launch. It took about two seconds to film and I think probably 50 60 [music] bucks for all of the stuff that was inside of it. If you want the exact playbooks and templates we use to grow our 9 figureure businesses, sign up at the link below. Also, you are going to

have the chance at over 1 million in cash and prizes along with the [music] best tools I've ever given away. You don't want to miss this. I'll see you there.