How to Dramatically Improve Conversions and Marketing Performance with Justin Christianson: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to dramatically improve conversions and marketing performance. To drop these value bombs, I brought Justin Christensen into EO Fire Studios. Justin is a self-proclaimed numbers junkie and a digital marketing veteran. And today at Fire Nation, we will talk about how leveraging systems and processes can make your life a whole lot easier, how having a long-term mentality is always a winning mentality, and how things are harder when you're not working on yourself.

0:36Pay attention to what you need both physically and mentally and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Justin and our sponsors. Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession-resilient businesses, and create legacy income for their families through franchising. Visit Franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y.com to book a free consultation and start your franchising journey with expert guidance. Justin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:15Hey, John, thanks for having me. Hey, what's up, Fire Nation? One thing that a lot of people disagree with that I have come to learn over my many years as an entrepreneur is you don't need to hustle as hard as people think you do. I'm a firm believer in working smarter, not harder in it, leveraging systems and processes to make your life a whole lot easier because this shouldn't be as stressful as a lot of people make it out to be. You don't need to work 24-7 to get the results that you're looking to achieve. Now, as Fire Nation heard in the introduction, you've had quite the entrepreneurial journey.

1:54What's the biggest personal challenge that you think you've faced on your journey thus far? The biggest personal challenge is really more so me fighting with my lack of patience is I want something now. I want something, you know, well, I mean, yesterday isn't fast enough for me in a lot of cases. So I've had to work really, really hard on just embracing what I can control and working on those aspects and just trying to move the needle. 1 % in the areas that I can control each day. And I live by the firm motto of Kaizen, you know, the principle of, you know, continuous daily improvement. So I've worked really hard on patients and that's come in a lot of different ways.

2:45You know, it's carried over into my home life and my family life with having kids and, and, and doing all of those things. But that's one of the biggest things that I'm very aware of and that I struggle with throughout my, you know, entire career. Patience Fire Nation is such an underrated quality of the successful entrepreneur. I mean, having a long-term thinking mentality is always a winning mentality. The people that I see that have short-term mentalities are doing things right now to win right now in this very moment. These little tiny wins don't often add up to where you exactly want to be in this world.

3:19When you have that long-term thinking, when you're always doing what's right for the long-term for yourself, for your customer, for your client, for your business, then you are going to win. Justin, you've had an aha moment, and that led you to the launch of your current company, Conversion Fanatics. Tell us about that aha moment. I've been in the direct response marketing world for ages. I became number one affiliate for a company, an information publishing company. We grew that company about 500 % in about in a short, you know, less than two year period. And I sold my partnership back to my partners back then because it was just my time to leave.

4:02And based on some of the information that we had published, people kept asking me, you know, what what are you going to do? Can you help me with some implementation? Can you help me with some split testing? Can you do some optimization for me. And that led to a private consultancy. And I just realized then that a lot of companies were focusing on just getting the eyeballs, meaning the latest Facebook ads hacked, the latest traffic tactic, what have you. But they weren't focusing on the big piece of the puzzle that allowed us to really scale that company 500%. And that was the conversion piece.

4:36So we started off teaching it. Nobody wanted to learn it. They just wanted us to do it for them. And with that, partnered up with my longtime friend who had a few people on staff doing similar things. And then Conversion Fanatics was born. And fast forward eight plus years later, and hundreds of companies helped and thousands of split tests conducted. You know, we've been very fortunate to work with some amazing companies that have impacted millions of lives. NBC Sports, Dr. Axe, a personal favorite of mine, Burt's Bees, because I'm actually a Mainer, so I love to see that stuff. Those are just some of the companies that Conversion Fanatics has helped over the years.

5:13Let's get a little more specific. Who does Conversion Fanatics specifically help and how do you do that? I mean, right now, Justin, you're speaking to entrepreneurs, to solopreneurs, to small business owners. Who do you help and how? We basically take the heavy lifting off the shoulders of busy entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing executives that are trying to better market their product or service to their target audience. So really what we do and how we help is kind of a small to up to enterprise or I guess mid to enterprise, kind of the business doing a million dollars or high six figures and up.

5:54we really help them just figure out how target audiences interact with a brand what holds weight and how can they adapt their overall experience on their website to grow and scale their marketing performance so with that really just sums down to is we split test stuff and we really just try to figure out what you know what the visitors truly care about where they're falling off in that process and help evolve brands up to a different level as they grow and scale. And Fire Nation, if you're not doing these things, if you're not testing, if you're not split testing, if you're not trying to optimize what you're doing, then you're missing out so much because everything in this world works on the 80-20 rule.

6:37And if you are consistently focusing on the 20 % of things that are driving 80 % of your profits, 80 % of your revenues, 80 % of your customers, and you keep refining, honing, improving those things, you are going to win over time. And we have so many things we're going to be talking about coming up in this interview. We're talking about the biggest mistakes that Justin sees entrepreneurs and marketers make the best productivity hack, the most important entrepreneur in the world today, which I'm really curious about. And so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Starting your own business can feel intimidating.

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7:41Don't know anything about franchising? That's the beauty of it. Franocity provides personalized one-on-one coaching at no cost to you and they have access to over 600 franchise brands and Franocity doesn't just help you pick a franchise. They help you understand the business model, investment risk, scalability, and operational reality. Ready to explore business ownership through franchising? Visit Franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y.com to book a free consultation and start your journey with expert guidance. Justin, we're back and I want to ask why. Why do companies hire partners like Conversion Fanatics versus just keeping it in-house.

8:17I mean, in the past, we heard a little bit about who you've helped and why you help them and how you help them. But I mean, they could bring this stuff in-house. Why don't they? Why do they use Conversion Fanatics at such a high level? I think we make it easy. We take that learning curve off because it isn't. A lot of companies feel like it needs to be one person. They just need to hire kind of that unicorn employee that can handle all of it. But it really takes a village. to get all of this moving. We have designers and developers and analysts and reporting admin and all of those things to help make the engine run.

8:53And if you're going to effectively optimize in-house, you're going to need five or so different employees to do it. So we kind of take the guesswork out of it. We've seen so much data. We've seen so many things over the years, and we get to see so many trends as they happen that we kind of have the shortcut. You know, we know what buttons to push immediately just through sheer experience. So we just kind of take that heavy lifting off their shoulders because testing can become a burden if you're not doing it effectively. It can be discouraging. So and it can be pushed down the priority list as new fires and new things kind of, you know, come into play in our normal everyday lives, you know, as business owners and marketers.

9:37I personally love that answer because what I see so many times, Fire Nation, is you have some company CEO or whoever it might be in the company be like, oh, just hire that millennial, that 23-year-old, that 25-year-old. They know social media. Just have them come in and they'll do stuff. Just plug it. That person has no business experience. They have no experience in conversions and optimization. Come on. They just got done with their toga parties and they're having fun. I remember where college was. I didn't come out with any kind of practical business experience whatsoever. So you need to hire people who have been there, who have done that, and who have the experience, knowledge, and just overall expertise that are going to take this to the finish line.

10:21And besides what I just shared, which is obviously a huge mistake that businesses and marketers make alike, what is the number one biggest mistake that you see, Justin, marketers make time and time again? I would say it's twofold. One, they try to rush the process. You know, we live in our social world where everybody's shouting their wins and their, you know, their home runs, but they're not showing the journey that got up to there. So I feel like people try to push and rush this process that you're going to end up getting hurt in even the middle run, not even the long run, if you try to rush the process and the journey of it and learning from it and expanding from that.

11:06On the marketing front, a lot of companies I see fail to really push the benefits of their product, meaning as a whole. Everybody is screaming features and all of these elements instead of what's in it for me as the consumer. And I've preached that for years, is just lead with what the outcome and the expectation is coming out of using your product or service. And with that, you're going to win the bigger game versus trying to resort to tricks, gimmicks, tactics that'll maybe artificially inflate your results, but it's not going to build that long lasting customer base and that long lasting growth, exponential growth cycle that you're going to need as a business.

11:52Let's talk about productivity hacks. I mean, we all want to save time. We all want to save bandwidth. We all want to get more done and less time so we can spend time doing what we should be doing business-wise or free time to spend time with family, friends, loved ones. What's the best productivity hack for entrepreneurs? Delegate, I would say, is the big one and one I've had to work on really hard because I was always a person that if it's going to be done right, it's going to done by me. And as I've evolved and grown, you know, our company, I've leveraged what my business partner, who is the opposite of me, is he's all about how can I make this into a process?

12:30How can I get somebody to do it more effectively? You know, even if it's 80 % of the way of what I would have done to really systematize that so you can buy some of your time back. Because I can't be everywhere always. And I'm pulled in a thousand different directions, as many people listening here are. And I've learned to just embrace and let go, just point in the right direction, give some instructions and let them then figure it out. And I've learned that the more patient I am going back to the patient's side of things in that, as long as I'm pointing and I'm setting the stage correctly, I'm going to get a lot more of my time back and it seems to be working.

13:08So we need more than just the word automate. Give us a specific tool, a strategy, a tactic, something that your business has implemented that our listeners can maybe look at applying to their business right now? We time block everything out in our tool of choice is actually ClickUp. So we use project management tool ClickUp, you can use Asana, you can use whatever split test or management tool you want to use. But we really streamline that out and micro block it out. So we the work is never going to stop. So we get to work with a ton of companies and we have a ton of things to do. So we simply block it out for our visitor, you know, our staff is like, we only expect you to get two things done today.

13:54Meaning here are your two tasks. If you have anything above and beyond that, then we'll, we'll figure that out. But we tried to make it very achievable and very easily able to, you know, be done in a reasonable amount of time. That way, they're not stressed and we can push forward and we seem to get more done by trying to, I guess, you know, go fast by doing less, if you will. So that seems to be working really well for our internal processes to really get everything done that we really need to get done. Click up. That's cool. I'm definitely going to check that out. Have not actually heard of that before.

14:32So I definitely will give that a look-see and let me know, Fire Nation, if you check it out and enjoy it for any number of reasons. Now, I was prepping for this interview today, and I came across this, and I had to say I was pretty intrigued. I'm pretty curious. I have a kind of a good guess as to this answer, but I'm not positive. So who, Justin, is the most important entrepreneur in the world today? I would say the most important entrepreneur is the small guy fighting to create those jobs and to work through and to make a name and even just to create something substantial that's making a change in the world.

15:10That was my guess. My guess, Fire Nation, was you. You are the most important entrepreneur in the world today. You're listening to this. You're hearing Justin. You're hearing myself going back and forth about what's working, biggest mistakes, what's not working. giving some recommendations, some thoughts, some guidance, some advice, some support. At the end of the day, it's you. It's you who are listening who is the most important entrepreneur in the world today. And Justin, you have something pretty cool for Fire Nation here today. We're about to kick off a one-year sponsorship with Conversion Fanatics because we love what they're bringing to the entrepreneurial world.

15:46So I wanted to bring Justin on so you could get to know him a little bit better, Fire Nation, before we kick this campaign off. he's got something very special for you and we're also going to be of course offering some really cool things over the next number of months via our sponsorship segments so keep up the heat and listening to those and taking action on them of course so justin what do you have for fire nation today yeah so i was fortunate enough to write a book that people seem to enjoy and it became a number one bestseller. And I want to give everybody a PDF copy of that. So if you just go to conversionfanatics.com slash fire, you should be able to download it.

16:27No opt-in needed, nothing. Just simply click the button, download it, and hopefully you enjoy it like so many other people have. Conversionfanatics.com slash fire. Check it out, Fire Nation. Amazing content awaits. Justin, give us the one single key takeaway that you really want to make sure that Fire Nation gets from our entire conversation today. We talked about a lot of things, let's be honest, but what's one thing you want to make sure our listeners really get from today's conversation? One thing that I have found over the years is anytime I'm struggling, anytime I feel like things are just really hard or business isn't going right, relationships aren't going right, It's because I'm not working on me.

17:14I'm not taking care of myself. And I've went through this this journey. You know, we may or may not cover it. But, you know, I'm eight years sober, recovering alcoholic, eight and a half years now. I used to be 90 pounds overweight. And back then things were struggling. So I have since, you know, at 41 years old, I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm single digit body fat. I find that if I'm not working on myself and I'm not paying attention to, you know, what I eat, you know, if I haven't been to the gym in a few days, things just are harder. And I found it that to be more than one case where it's a direct correlation into how I'm feeling, how the stress is getting to me, how the business growth is happening.

18:04And as long as I'm working on myself and I can going back to that things I can control, then everything just seems to be a lot easier and just a lot less struggle as, you know, the ups and downs and peaks and valleys of business come hit. Well, let me just commend you, Justin, for what you've accomplished over the years. And that health push that you made is so unbelievably valuable. I mean, I'm also 41. So we are of the same age, the same ilk, and I'm standing here today having in 2021, I actually did three multi-day water fasts, a 10-day, a 10-day, and I just finished, as we're speaking, a five-day water fast.

18:43And I am leaner, lighter, and healthier than I've been since 17 years old at 41. Because Fire Nation, your body's an amazing thing if you just let it be amazing. And Justin's done that. I've done that. And it's fantastic to accomplish this. And it just makes everything so much easier. Your business, your energy, your life, your happiness. When you can honestly look in the mirror and say, I feel great. I look great. I'm healthy. Because there's a quote that I love. The healthy person wants a million things. And guess what? I want a million things. I do. But the unhealthy person wants one thing, their health.

19:20So you've got to get to health. So Justin, Fire Nation knows this. They're the average of the five people they spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with Justin, JC, and JLD today. So keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. Type Justin in the search bar and his show notes page will pop up with everything that we've been talking about here today. Best show notes in the biz. Conversionfanatics.com slash fire. Go get that great content that Justin has waiting for you. Justin, thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, knowledge, value with Fire Nation today. I'm excited for our partnership that we have going forward in 2022.

19:55we're going to get a lot of people in Fire Nation using conversion fanatics to improve their life and business and we'll catch you on the flip side hey Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Justin and Fire Nation successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals, huge goals that's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days and we're talking step by step so visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession resilient businesses and create legacy income for their families through franchising.

20:36Visit Franocity.com that's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y.com to book a free consultation and start your franchising journey with expert guidance.