What’s goin’ on in my life: Part 2 (+ Marketer’s Mansion review)

I’m on the flight home from my week o’ busy, and what a magical week it’s been.

As I mentioned on my other blog post, I had a week packed full of things going on. I’d planned on meeting with my MistressMind (women’s mastermind), then going straight to Marketer’s Mansion, then to hanging with Jason Fladlien.

Jason had to cancel his visit, so I ended up going to the MistressMind and extending my trip to Marketer’s Mansion.

I’ll go over both experiences and give you some highlights with actionable content you can use right away.

What happened at the MistressMind:

I met up with 6 amazing women last weekend to plan out our 2013. We got an oceanview cottage at the Ritz Carlton and shared our 2013 visions. Each one of us took 45 minutes to share what we had going on, then requested feedback from the group on anything we needed help with.

My goal this year is to inspire 1 million people. The other women in the group gave me excellent advice on how to structure my book, plus helped me drill in a little deeper to the ‘flavor’ of my message.

Why was this such an incredible experience?

A few reasons:

a) It felt great to hang with 6 smart, focused, like-minded women for a weekend. Being with like-minded people nourishes your soul.

b) I got great, actionable information about what I’m working on and was able to contribute the same to other women. Love that.

c) The whole experience “forced” me to get more specific about my 2013 plans. I often tell coaching clients that if you have a big goal, you’ve got to reverse engineer it to get there.  So for example, let’s say you want to make $10k/month. What do you have to do to make that?

Maybe it’s setting up a membership site with 500 people paying you $20/month. Cool. From there, you’d figure out what to include in your site, how to get members, etc… and start creating a workable plan.

I knew my goal was inspiring 1 million people. This experience helped me start to figure out exactly HOW, starting with my book.

d)  Goal setting from the Ritz Carlton was awesome. I like visioning my big goals from a place of abundance. I very much believe that the more emotion you have to your goals, the more real and easier to achieve they become. And goal-setting from Ritz Carlton provided a very different experience than if we were working, say, at Motel 6.

After the MistressMind, I drove to the airport and flew to Vegas for the Marketer’s Mansion.

What happened at Marketer’s Mansion:

As I wrote in my other blog post, I was one of 14 marketers invited to come to a mansion to come and mentor attendees.

I didn’t know much about what to expect. I just knew there were some other really awesome speakers, we’d be partying in a 10,000 square foot mansion, and I’d have to give a presentation at some point. I was looking at it as a fun opportunity to network with the other speakers and take part in a cutting-edge event.

While all that did happen, the event was so much more than that.

Here’s what happened:

Day 1:

I was a ‘Session 2’ speaker, which means by the time I got there, the event was at the halfway point.

I got to catch up with Session 1 speakers and they were positively raving about the event so far. I found out attendees had been performing challenges everyday. They’d been doing “impossible” things like creating finished products in 4 hours.

That instantly impressed me. I’ve been to lots of events, and it’s definitely NOT typical for attendees to walk away having something to show for their efforts.

It was also very clear to me that the attendees and the Session 1 speakers had a deep bond. They grew really attached to each other in a short time.

Coming in as a Session 2 speaker, I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. I wondered if the attendees wished they got to keep their Session 1 mentors the whole time, but I figured we’d all eventually bond too, especially living together.

Because the attendees were exhausted from the past few days of hard work, William + Mark (the people who put on the event) decided to make that day a rest day. Attendees seemed very happy about that, and some of us ended up hanging out during the day.

At night, we had a networking dinner. Mark and William got a party bus to pick us up and take us to Gordon Biersch where we all had dinner. This was a fun way to get to know the attendees better and we all had a good time talking, eating, and dancing on the way home.

Day 2:

Day 2 was our first “work day” as Session 2 speakers/mentors.

Every day, 2 or 3 speakers would present. On this day, Don Wilson and Anthony Aires presented. Don talked about sales funnels and Anthony talked about recurring income streams.

I took a ton of notes from the speakers and I’ll give you a main takeaway I got from each speaker:

Don Wilson:

Don is a master at creating funnels. I took a TON of notes from his presentation. Because it’d take a whole new blog post to explain how he does his funnels, I’ll give you another ‘ninja’ trick he mentioned.

As an affiliate, he often offers bonuses for other peoples’ launches.

For one promotion he offered a huge bonus package, including a webinar training around the course he was promoting.

People loved the bonuses and he sold 1,057 copies of the course. And on his bonus webinar, he gave a high-value presentation with a pitch at the end. The pitch did so well that he ended up making more on the webinar than he did promoting the initial product.

That’s a pretty slick way to support an affiliate on a quality product, give quality content, and then get hyper-focused BUYERS onto your higher dollar webinar.

Anthony Aires

Anthony mentioned a lot of cool things. One of my favorites was how he mentioned he promoted a product on video wearing a huge green leprechaun hat.

He figured that when the video got thumbnailed on Google, people would click it, wondering “Why is this guy wearing a leprechaun hat?”

It worked, and he made lots of sales.

I liked the idea of making unique videos to get more attention to them.

Setting up teams

After Don and Anthony presented, we were assigned teams to work with.

For my team, the mentors were Brian Anderson, Anthony Aires, and I. We were mentoring attendees (in alphabetical order) Vicki Conley, Mario Garcia, Adam Jacobs, Justin Sardi, Ryan Shaw, John Svantner, and Chad Wyatt,.

The other team had mentors Don Wilson, Brad Gosse, and Brad Spencer. That team consisted of (in alphabetical order) Brad Dixon, Jack Hopman, Paul Lester, Nick LaPolla, Bryan Makowski, and Alan Waggoner.

The challenge

The assignment for today was to create and finish products in 4 hours. This time, instead of doing it as a team, attendees could launch products by themselves, in partnerships, or as a team if they wanted.

Then for the next 4 hours, attendees worked on their products while the mentors hung around to answer any questions and give the best support possible.

This was pretty phenomenal for attendees. They literally had access to a pretty spectacular brain-trust, right at their fingertips, every time they had a question.

Boardroom

At night,there was a boardroom where attendees would have to explain what they got done during the day.

There was a ‘reality show’ element to the mansion, so this was filmed with E Brian Rose hosting it. (He’s a freakin’ spectacular host.)

For each board room, 3 people would ‘win’ for the day and get a point. There was a bottom 3 who each got a point deducted.

At the end, winners won cool prizes.

As a mentor, I was supposed to comment on what I saw taking place.

Nighttime

After board rooms, there was a bartender at the mansion every night. We’d have a toast, some stayed and partied, others went to the casinos.

There was no mentor/attendee divide. Everyone hung out together.

Day 3:

Day 3 was when Brad Gosse and I spoke.

Brad talked about the look and feel of sales letters and I talked about copywriting. Here are some of my notes:

Brad Gosse

One of my favorite takeaways from Brad’s presentation was how unapologetically himself he is.

He markets in a way that’s very different from other people. His book is called ‘Chronic Marketer’, which teaches marketing while playing up how much he loves smoking pot.

In his presentation Brad showed his ‘flavor’ of sales letter, which are also unconventional. He has comic-book letter style sales letters that his audience seems to love.

His speech was full of jokes, cursing, and Brad’isms. He’s just very himself, which I respect a lot.

Rachel Rofe

That’s me. :) I didn’t take notes from my presentation, but for the sake of completeness I’ll mention one thing I said here.

I talked about how whenever you’re writing sales material for something, you need to give people a reason WHY you’re offering it. People are naturally skeptical. But the good news is, it’s actually very easy to calm the “this is too good to be true” thoughts if you take the time to give a reason why.

To illustrate this: I read about a study in Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence. In the study there were 5 people standing in front of a copy machine. An experimenter was instructed to go towards the line and ask if he could cut in front of everyone.

The first time he did it, he asked, “Can I cut in front of line?” and 60% of people said yes.

The next day, he came back again. He asked, “Can I cut in front of line because I’m in a rush?”94% of people said yes.

The next day he came back again. This time he asked, “Can I cut in front of line because I need to make a copy?” 93% of people said yes.

Obviously he needed to make a copy. Everyone there did. But people don’t pay attention to the reason why. They just need something for their brains to feel satisfied. And when you do the same thing in copy, give people a reason why you’re offering a great product, or a great price, or whatever, they will be able to relax and truly take in whatever you’re selling.

The challenge

The challenge for today was for attendees to create everything you would need to attract joint venture partners.

They had to make JV videos, a promotional sales page, an opt-in form, and email swipe copy in 4 hours, and they were allowed to use the camera crew to make very professional sales videos.

Everyone had a blast with this. We all came up with fun videos that are sure to get the attention of joint ventures.

I really loved this challenge. On the first day, I was utilized only about half the time. As a mentor, I was instructed not to offer help. The attendees were supposed to ask us. But on the second and third day, I was pretty much utilized nonstop. I couldn’t move without someone else asking me a question. And I loved it.

I loved being able to help so much on the spot and see so much change in real-time.

At night we had our board room again.

Day 4:

This was our last full day. Today Brad Spencer, E Brian Rose, and Brian Anderson talked.

Here’s a main takeaway from each of them:

Brad Spencer

Brad had a lot of great points. One thing I really liked was how he mentioned how you should always support your best 20 affiliates and give them 10x more value than you receive from them.

This can look like promoting them back, creating testimonial videos for them, copy critiques, thank you cards, or whatever you can do to add more value to their business and help them grow.

Brad’s an absolute expert at providing value and helping people and I loved watching him give practical tips on how other people could do it too.

E Brian Rose

EBR gave a talk all about webinars. I took a ton of notes from his presentation.

One of my favorite takeaways was about how to present content. He talks about how if you’re giving a webinar, talk and have PICTURES to match what you’re saying.

When people are on a webinar, it’s easy for them to get distracted and go to Facebook, check their phones, or whatever else they can find as a distraction. This is especially true if you’re the type of presenter who has all their notes up on a PowerPoint so people can just read in advance and know what you’re going to say.

When you have pictures, especially weird pictures, and not as much text, people stay glued to the screen. They have no idea what’s coming up and they stay intrigued.

EBR also said to have LOTS of slides on your presentations and to make each point a new slide. This keeps people engaged, wondering what’s going to happen next.

Brian Anderson

Brian gave a great presentation about how to have greater relationships with your list. He did a spectacular job explaining how marketers can mail to their list WITHOUT pitching all the time.

He gave 3 ideas on how to keep up solid relationships without constantly selling:

1. Send your list daily emails, even when not selling them, just to keep in touch.

2. Tell ongoing stories about your life, your business, and give people get an inside look into what’s going on. Make yourself a real person that people can connect to.

3. Weave email promotions into stories so your list has a fun experience while also learning about new offers.

The challenge

The challenge today was for attendees to create sales copy for their products and to make a mini-webinar for their product, all in 4 hours.

In my presentation, I gave a sales copy template that I think everyone used. It felt awesome to know I was able to contribute something that had such immediate effect with people.

Board Room

At the board room that night, we closed everything up. Every attendee came up and talked about their experience with Marketer’s Mansion and prizes were awarded to winners.

Everyone was REALLY happy with their decision to come. I never heard even one negative muttering about the experience, and I’m generally the type of person that people spill everything to.

Marketer’s Mansion was just a top-notch experience where attendees were “forced” to walk away with products to sell, forged amazing relationships with mentors, and many of them already have some of us mentors agreeing to promote them. And all of them were transformed deeply in one way or another.

I’ve already gotten emails and messages from nearly every attendee, telling me what a great time they had and thanking me for my involvement. It feels incredible to see such transformation and how many happy people came out of this.

All in all, I was very impressed and would definitely go to the next one if invited. :)