Black Entrepreneur Blueprint 565 - Jay Jones - Why Friction Is Killing Your Business Growth And How To Fix It

[00:00:12] Welcome to Black Entrepreneur Blueprint, the number one podcast and resource for black entrepreneurs. I'm your host Jay Jones and Black Entrepreneur Blueprint was created specifically to educate and inspire black entrepreneurs to launch, build and grow successful, sustainable businesses. Join us as we help build an economic power base in the worldwide black community by building and supporting black owned businesses.

[00:00:41] If you're currently an entrepreneur or want to be an entrepreneur, you're invited to join us each and every week here at Black Entrepreneur Blueprint. Welcome to the BEB family and get ready to elevate your entrepreneur IQ. Welcome to the Black Entrepreneur Blueprint, episode number 565.

[00:01:07] I'm your host Jay Jones and today we have another outstanding and informative show in store for you. Today's show topic is titled, Why Friction Is Killing Your Business Growth And How To Fix It. Why Friction Is Killing Your Business Growth And How To Fix It. Guys, we're going to have friction in our business regardless of what we do. But the more we can eliminate that friction, the more you're going to be able to grow and scale your business.

[00:01:37] So we're going to talk about today what friction is in business, how friction affects growth, signs that your business has friction, and how to remove that friction in terms of practical tips and ideas. Now, before we get to today's show content, I just want to share a few things with the Black Entrepreneur Blueprint family. First and foremost, I want to welcome all first-time listeners to Black Entrepreneur Blueprint. Welcome to the BEB family.

[00:02:06] Please stick around until the end of today's broadcast and I'm going to share all my social media contact information and resource links, such as the link to the new revised updated website, blackentrepreneurblueprint.com. Make sure you guys go to the website, hit the Learn tab. That's a drop-down and you're going to have all types of free resources to help you elevate your entrepreneur IQ.

[00:02:30] We have content on scaling your business, mindset and strategy, e-commerce, marketing, side hustles. So utilize the content, guys. It is totally free. So go to blackentrepreneurblueprint.com, hit the Learn tab and make sure you utilize the content. Also, for all you first-time listeners, we drop a new episode every Monday morning, 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on all your major podcast platforms and YouTube.

[00:03:00] So make sure wherever you're listening to this episode or watching it, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you'll be alerted when the podcast drops. Now, let's get ready for today's show content. So today, guys, we're going to talk about friction as it pertains to business. And we're going to discuss what friction is, how it affects your business, signs your business has friction and how to remove that friction so your business can prosper, grow and scale.

[00:03:29] And I'm also going to give you a case study of friction in one of my product offers and how I had to figure out what was going on to be able to remove that friction and make the offer profitable. But let's start off by defining what friction is as it pertains to business. Friction is a force that resists the motion of one object moving relative to another, acting in the opposite direction of the movement.

[00:04:08] So we all know what friction is. If you're driving down the highway real fast and there's a car that stopped in front of you unexpectedly, you slam on the brakes, you get skid marks, smoke is coming up. That's friction between the road and your tires. Right. So that's what friction is. And in business, it can manifest itself in many different ways. So let's start off by talking about what is friction in business

[00:04:37] and some of the common forms of friction that can block conversion. And when I mean conversion, I'm talking about converting a prospect into an actual customer. So we're talking about the flow of business. So what is some friction in business? Now, here's a couple of common things that you may have in your business right now that are causing friction and are reducing your conversion rates.

[00:05:05] One of the things you want to look at is a confusing message, right? If your messaging is confusing, then people aren't going to know what they're getting or what they need to do next. All right. So we have to talk about confusing messaging. Also a poor user experience. I went on to a website the other day and it looked like it was built in 1990.

[00:05:30] And to be able to move around on that website, find the things that I needed on the website was super confusing. And I basically just left the website alone. So you have a poor user experience. So everything you want to do guys is you want to make make it flow and make it easy for your prospects to be able to convert into paying customers. Another cause of friction is a long or complex checkout process, right?

[00:05:59] You know how Amazon they already have your credit card information on file and you can do like a one click checkout super easy. So this is another cause of friction long or complex checkout process. So one of the things in terms of creating offers guys, you have to make them as simple as possible. You have to make the flow simple, the user experience simple.

[00:06:25] So people can go from A, B, C, D, whatever, and keep it nice and smooth. So another time friction in business is lack of trust or credibility. So when you go to a website or a store or any place that you're not familiar with and you're not sure what the quality of these products or services are or what type of person is selling these products or services, then that's going to cause friction.

[00:06:54] So if you have a website, you want to have testimonials, you know, social proof of people that have bought, purchased or use your products and or services. Another thing guys is misaligned or unclear offers. So let's first talk about misaligned offers.

[00:07:14] So I've talked ad nauseum in many of the podcast episodes about product, price and perception, product, price and perception. So if those things, those three things are not aligned, it's going to be misaligned. It's going to be incongruent. Right. So for example, if you're selling a Timex watch, that's your product.

[00:07:39] If you're selling the Timex watch for $750, that's the price. And the perception of your product is that it's not a high end product. Guess what? It's misaligned and you're not going to be able to convert. But if you had a, say, a Rolex watch, you're selling it for $2,000 and the perception is Rolex is a great brand.

[00:08:08] $2,000 is a great price for Rolex. So that would convert. So you want to make sure that your product price and perception are all aligned. They have to be aligned guys. Another thing is unclear offers. So whenever you present an offer, you have to make it clear what you're going to get. All right. So you get A, B, C, D.

[00:08:33] So a lot of times if you've ever been on a webinar and you know at the end of the webinar, they're going to tell you everything you get. You know, it's not this price, but you get A, B, C, D, blah, blah, blah, with a value of $10,000 for only $999, whatever it is. But what they do, it's called product stacking. But they're very specific about what you're going to get at the end of this webinar. So you have to make sure that you have clear offers.

[00:09:03] So people need to know what they're going to get for spending or investing their money. So these are some of the common friction points that businesses have. So you want to look over all of your offers, your website, anything that you're interacting with, with your community with, and make sure that you don't have any friction. Now, let's talk about how friction affects your growth.

[00:09:28] And I'm telling you right now, and I'm going to give you a case study, but I'm telling you right now, it really affects your growth. The first thing is loss of sales or leads. Loss of sales and or leads. If you have too much friction, you're not going to be able to convert those prospects into sales and even generate your leads. So just for example, what day was it? I think it was about three days ago, maybe on a Monday.

[00:09:56] I was trying to sign up for this webinar. It was a paid webinar about creating some AI products. And it was $27. So I go in, I'm going to pay for this workshop or training class. And every time I got to the payment part, the thing would reset. And it was just going. And then I finally got all my credit card information in. I hit the submit button. And all it did was go around and around and around.

[00:10:25] And I tried it like four or five times. And finally, I said to hell with it. I'm not going to sign up for this thing because the friction in going through everything basically lost them a sale. Now, I went to, and at first I thought, well, maybe it was my internet connection. But everything else was working fine. I even tried it again later on. And guess what? It still didn't work. So that friction basically caused them to lose a sale.

[00:10:56] Another way how friction affects your growth is lower customer satisfaction. Oh, man. Have you ever been on a phone call, right? And you're calling for customer service for a business. And number one, they'll put you through all of these voicemail prompts. Press one for this, two for that. You finally get there. Then they tell you to hold on. You're number 26 in the queue. You'll be on hold for 15 minutes. Then you finally get there.

[00:11:26] And there's somebody that can't speak or understand the language. You know, not trying to, you know, be detrimental. But I can't stand that. I'm trying to explain something to you and you can't comprehend. And so what do you think that does in terms of the customer satisfaction? I mean, I'll be honest with you. And I hate to say this. But sometimes when my wife and I, we're calling somewhere for some customer service.

[00:11:51] And we find somebody that finally picks up after 5, 10, 15 minutes and they can't speak correct or English or understand English. We just hang up and try back again because I've been on the phone and I'm telling this people what I want and you're still not comprehending. And I know a lot of these, you know, U.S. companies will outsource their customer service overseas.

[00:12:17] But damn, if you're going to do that, make sure that they're trained and they understand what the customer is talking about. And so that can really be a drawback in terms of the friction and the effects of that. And that customer service or lack thereof customer service is going to kill you. So another way how friction affects growth is you're going to miss opportunities for word of mouth and retention.

[00:12:45] You know, bad news travels twice as fast as good news. So if you have missed opportunities for word of mouth and retention, that's obviously going to hurt your business. So when you have a very positive experience with a company or a person or something like that, man, you're always going to tell them. Like when people ask me for referrals, oh yeah, man, I need this. Oh, you know what? Yo, my boy is an HVAC guy. He'll come over here, tighten your stuff up.

[00:13:14] He's not going to charge you, you know, ridiculous prices and he's very reliable and he's done great work for me. Right? So what that's going to do is that's word of mouth right there. But that's a missed opportunity. If somebody or a company doesn't have this stuff in order. So these are some of the ways that friction affects growth.

[00:13:37] Loss of sales and leads, lower customer satisfaction and missed opportunities for word of mouth and also retention. Now let's talk about some of the signs that your business has friction. Now guys, to be honest, most businesses have some type of friction. The key is you need to be able to identify it and then smooth that friction out. So you're being as profitable as you can and you're working at maximum efficiencies.

[00:14:06] So here's a couple of signs that your business has friction. So say you have a high bounce rate or cart abandonment. High bounce rate or cart abandonment. So the high bounce rate means people will come onto your page and they're going to jump off real quick. Cart abandonment means somebody has started to check out, but then they stopped all the way through the product before they hit, uh, finish the process. So these are some of the things that you have to, to be focused on.

[00:14:36] So for example, um, I do a lot of AB testing when I do landing pages with lead magnets. And so what I do is if I see that this, you know, test a is not performing well as test B, then obviously I go to test B. Then I start tweaking test B. You know, if I find that there's issues or I think that that, that landing page can be more profitable than I start tweaking things.

[00:15:06] So high bounce rate or cart abandonment. Another sign your business has friction is you have poor engagement in sales pages or emails. So if your emails aren't getting open, if all you're doing is sending junk and no valuable information to your email database, guess what? They're not going to open it. I don't know why I haven't cleaned out my email lately, but there's, there's all kinds of junk

[00:15:33] I get from these email, um, from not from email, but from companies that I've, you know, requested information from. And I'm telling you, uh, the response rate is ridiculous. Okay. And I don't open half of these emails. So as a business owner and entrepreneur guys, I always talk about building your database. You need to make sure that you scrub your database. If people don't open one single email in three months, guess what?

[00:16:01] They're probably not interested in whatever you're selling or whatever you're talking about. Okay. So you need to make sure that you, you prune or pare down your email database. So you have people that are interested and that, uh, respond to your emails and your offers. So poor engagement on sales pages or emails. That's another sign that your business has friction. Ghost leads, right? That's people interested, but not converting.

[00:16:30] And that's probably has something to do with your sales funnel or your sales process. So when you have a lot of ghost leads, people that raise their hand, that have an interest in whatever you're doing, your product and or service, but they're not converting. That means there's a disconnect somewhere through your sales process. Okay. So one of the things, um, in, in my software, when I do webinars, I use easy webinar, right?

[00:17:00] And the reason I use easy webinar is because it will actually show you when people drop off in your webinar presentation. So it could be a live presentation, or it could be a recorded presentation, but it'll actually have a graph and it'll show you where people drop off. So what you can do, you can utilize that information to rewrite or redo your webinar.

[00:17:27] So if there's an area where people drop off, maybe it's a disconnect or, or, or something isn't aligned, right? Then you can fix that. I know there are a lot of webinar softwares out there, but that's the one that I use. It's called easy webinar. But, um, but yeah, you get a lot of ghost leads, people interested, but not converting.

[00:17:48] So what I had to do on one of my webinars, I found there was a certain point when I was trying to transition from the actual teaching I was doing to the offer. That's when people fell out and I couldn't for the life of me, figure it out. All right. I know people are going to drop off when you get to the offer at the end of a webinar, you know, they're like, all right, whatever. I'm not paying for whatever you sell. Right.

[00:18:13] I get that, but it was a super high drop off and it was really the way I transitioned from finishing up teaching in the workshop to the offer. And once I changed that up guys, um, I didn't have as many ghost leads or people dropping off. So some of the signs your business has friction is a high bounce rate on your landing pages or cart abandonment, meaning people that don't complete the checkout process.

[00:18:42] And that could be something as simple as, oh man, I didn't know I had to pay for shipping. So you can actually, and this happened to me before because people are conditioned now with Amazon that they don't have to pay for shipping. What I had to do one time is when I was selling one of my books, I had a, the book was priced at $14.95 then ship plus shipping. So a lot of people were dropping off once again, because they were accustomed to having free shipping through Amazon.

[00:19:13] So what I had to do is I had to adjust my checkout page. And so now the book is $22.95 with free shipping. So I had to make up that shipping cost. Now that was just to the United States. Now, if you were in Canada or other countries, then I was going to hit you with the shipping charge because I can't eat that.

[00:19:33] So once again, um, signs your business has friction, high bounce rate or cart abandonment, poor engagement on sales pages or emails. People aren't responding to your sales pages. People aren't opening your emails. And that's why you need an email database like ConvertKit or whoever you want to use that gives you your open rate. And if you have an open rate of 50% or more, that's, that's good.

[00:20:01] Most businesses or people don't even get that close. So mine, I believe is like 64, 65%, which is a great open rate. Number one, I don't bother people with a lot of junk. And I'm not always trying to sell stuff. I'm trying to add value. I have multiple, uh, email databases based on different businesses, different products and, and services that I'm selling.

[00:20:26] So another, uh, another thing that your business has friction or sign your business has friction. We just talked about ghost leads, people interested, but not converting. So we talked about number one, what is friction in the business? Uh, number two, how friction affects growth. Number three signs, your business has friction. And now number four, how to remove friction. I'm going to give you guys some practical tips.

[00:20:55] Then I'm going to give you a real life case study that happened to me. Right? So how do you remove friction? First thing you want to do is you want to clarify your value proposition, clarify your value proposition value. If people don't see the price versus value proposition, they don't understand that. They're not going to convert.

[00:21:20] If your price is higher than your perceived value for that customer, guess what? People are not going to convert. But if that perceived value for that product or service is higher than the price, then people will convert. Okay. Clarify your value proposition. That also comes into that alignment, right? Aligning, you know, your product price and perception.

[00:21:48] So it has to have that, that value proposition that makes sense. So for example, a value proposition, if you're going to help somebody solve a problem, that's going to save them $500 a month. And that solution costs a hundred dollars a month. That makes sense, right? That means that, Hey, uh, I'm going to spend a hundred a month, but I'm saving $400 a month. Right?

[00:22:15] So in terms of your electric bill, maybe $500 a month. But if I get this new, uh, power saver product, which is a hundred dollars a month, that's going to save me $400 on my bill. Yeah. That's a, that's a good value proposition. Clarify your value proposition. Why do you want this? Why do you need this? Why does this make sense? Okay. And we're talking about how to remove friction.

[00:22:46] Another, uh, idea is simplify your website and offer flow. Simplify your website and offer flow. I had to learn how to do that. And actually I'm in the process of paring that down. When you give people too many choices, they don't make decisions. What do they say? A confused mind doesn't make decisions. It doesn't buy. So simplify your website and offer flow.

[00:23:12] So for example, my new mortgage website, you know, most mortgage websites, they got all of this, this crap on there. We do refis, cash out purchases, you know, uh, home equity lines of credit second, you know, second mortgages, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The top of my website doesn't say any of that. All it is, is a calculator. So I want you to be engaged so you can go and it's just like a lending tree website.

[00:23:42] Are you looking to purchase refinance? All right. Do you live in a single family home or condo, you know, a townhouse, whatever. And it goes through the whole process. So simplify your website and offer flow. When you have too many options on your website or all you are as a big brochure, guess what? People don't move. So my mortgage website is a lead magnet. It's a lead generating magnet.

[00:24:11] It's not a brochure with all of the stuff that we do and you know, all my years of experience and all that people don't care about that. All right. So clarify, excuse me, simplify your website and offer flow. Another way how to remove friction is to build trust with testimonials and social proof. Build trust with testimonials and social proof.

[00:24:36] Now, the biggest question I get is, AJ, I haven't got any testimonials or social proof. So sometimes you might need to do a job or do a service or whatever for free or for a discount to get some testimonials or social proof. Social proof can also be somebody sending you a text message saying, you know, thank you so much for whatever your service or product was.

[00:25:04] And now all you do is you screen shoot that text message and then you put it up on your website. All right. The better testimonials you have, the more you're going to convert. So if you have people with videos giving you video testimonials, not no, not BS people that you hire. I'm talking about real customers. That's great. That's like the highest form. Then you have the written testimonials.

[00:25:31] Then you can have screenshots or whatever you want to do. But you know, you build trust with testimonials and social proof. Social proof could be something like for one of my courses, I've had over 2000 people take this course. You know, that's proof. I can go and show you the numbers of the people that took this course. So make sure you try to get some testimonials and social proof.

[00:25:57] Now, you should have a system to generate testimonials because those are super big when it comes to having people believe in what you're selling or what you're doing. And it does remove that friction. Another thing you want to look at in terms of removing friction, guys, is make your call to action obvious and easy. Make your call to action obvious and easy.

[00:26:26] Call now to get a free quote. All right. Say I'm an attorney or something. Call now for a free consultation. Download the PDF right now. Click here. You know, schedule a call. Click here. You know, anything, whatever your call to action is, make it simple, obvious and easy for them to do. The harder you make it, I'm telling you, that's more friction.

[00:26:55] Also, think about when you're creating funnels or landing pages. Make sure that they look good when you're looking on a phone because the majority of the people, you know, they search on their phones right now. So I was just doing a landing page and I had to switch it up because the image on a laptop or desktop was real good. But when it came to the phone, then it actually changed the way that it was laid out.

[00:27:24] And so I had to go and change everything. So that way, the image and the actual landing page look good on your phone. And so your call to actions need to be obvious. And, you know, you might want to have a button or something like that. But highlight that. OK, make your call to actions obvious and easy. And the last tip to remove friction is offer buyers fewer choices to avoid them being overwhelmed.

[00:27:51] OK, offer your buyers fewer choices to avoid them to be over so they're not overwhelmed. And once again, a confused mind doesn't make decisions. So you may have one, two or three offers. So if you have packages, right, this is the psychology behind packages. A lot of times your lower end package is going to be the DIY. They're going to have to do it yourself.

[00:28:18] The mid-level packages, it could be an online course with a little bit of consultation. And the high-level package could be done for you. We're going to do everything for you. Doesn't have to be those three type of things. But the psychology behind a three-product offer. So if you have three packages, right? The middle package is going to be the one that most people choose.

[00:28:48] So whatever you want to sell the most, you put it in the middle. So the first package, the low-end package, you're going to make it to the point where, you know, they're going to have to do a whole lot of work on their own. The middle package, since this is the one that you're probably or you want to sell the most, is you're going to make that package super sweet. They'd be a fool not to take the middle package. And the third package, you want to price that to the point, especially if it's like a one-on-one thing.

[00:29:18] You want to price it to the point where it actually has to be worth it for you to work with them one-on-one. And let me give you like a real-life scenario in my business. So a lot of times when I'll create an online course, I'll have like three different packages. It'll be the course itself, which is basically, you know, DIY, do-it-yourself. The second package will be a course with the consultation, which is a little higher.

[00:29:46] And the third will be one-on-one coaching. So my one-on-one coaching is $500 an hour. And usually it's going to be anywhere from say six to eight hours. So we're looking at three to $4,000. So I try not to do one-on-ones, right? Because I try not to have my time dictated like that. But if I'm going to spend six to eight hours with somebody,

[00:30:14] then three or four grand, I don't mind doing it for that. So I'm going to make that high because it's the highest value I can give somebody one-on-one coaching. The lower end that has really, I created the course, bam, they don't talk to me, whatever. You can email, whatever. That's the lowest end. That's the less work I have to do. The middle one, which is probably not the most beneficial, but price-wise,

[00:30:43] you know, being able to get the online course and the one-on-one coaching with me is probably, not probably, it is the best seller. So the first product may be for $97. This one may be for $497. And the other one may be for three or four grand. So you kind of drive people to a specific offer, with specific package that you want to sell the most.

[00:31:08] But psychologically, most people will not take the lowest one and they won't take the highest one. They usually take the one in the middle. FYI, if you're creating packages, that's something that you need to remember. Okay. So these are some of the tips or ways to help remove friction. And by removing that friction, guys, you're going to be able to grow and scale your business. Now, before we get to the last segment of the show,

[00:31:37] where I'm going to give you a real life case study of one of my funnels that wasn't working, and I'm going to show you what the friction was and how I changed that up. Let me just share all my social media contact information and resource links real quick. Everything I'm about to tell you guys is on the website, blackentrepreneurblueprint.com. All right. In terms of resources, guys, go to the website, blackentrepreneurblueprint.com. Hit the learn tab.

[00:32:05] We have all types of free resources to help you elevate your entrepreneur IQ, move you from point A to B, give you actionable steps. And I talked about that at the beginning of the show. Now, if you want to connect with me anything long, guys, hit me on my email, jjones at blackentrepreneurblueprint.com. J-A-Y-J-O-N-E-S at blackentrepreneurblueprint.com. Facebook, blackentrepreneurblueprint. Instagram, I have two IG accounts.

[00:32:35] The first one is jjonesforreal, J-A-Y-J-O-N-E-S. The number four, R-E-A-L. Second one is blackentrepreneurblueprint. Twitter or X, you can connect with me at jjones001. J-A-Y-J-O-N-E-S-0-0-1. LinkedIn, just go to LinkedIn and look for Jay Jones Black Entrepreneur Blueprint. Connect with me there. Also, YouTube, guys.

[00:33:03] Make sure you go to YouTube, type in blackentrepreneurblueprint. Hit that subscribe button. We have additional content on YouTube that is not on the show. And once again, for any first-time listeners, please, wherever you're watching this or listening to this, hit that subscribe button so you'll be alerted when new episodes come up. And we drop every Monday morning, 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on all your major podcast platforms and YouTube.

[00:33:32] In this last segment, I want to give you guys a case study of an affiliate funnel that I was running that had all types of friction and I couldn't figure it out. So I want to go through and actually tell you guys how I figured it out and what I did to make that funnel work. Well, one of the things that I will tell you is if you are looking to learn how to drive traffic, affiliate marketing is a great place to start because you don't have to do everything.

[00:34:01] All you want to do is drive the traffic to the offer that has already been created. So if you go on ClickBank or Digistore24 or any of these other platforms that have offers, the hard work is actually creating the offer, be it the video or whatever it is, to convert that prospect into a customer. So this is what was going on.

[00:34:28] So I was working on an affiliate product for a fat-burning product. And so I was driving paid traffic to a landing page. On that landing page, I asked for an email address and a first name in order to get access to the video. The video was created by the company and it was like a 40-minute video.

[00:34:55] So there's different schools of thought here. Some companies that are real big in affiliate marketing do these long, drawn-out 30, 40-minute videos. Other companies do shorter videos. So what I was doing, and I want you guys to pay attention, when I'm driving traffic, you never want to drive traffic directly to the affiliate offer. You want to be able to collect the information, right? Why do you want to collect the information?

[00:35:25] There's two reasons. Most importantly, you want to build your database. So if somebody is interested in weight loss or fat loss, they come through this affiliate offer, you know, that campaign that I set up. Guess what? I have their name and email address. The beauty is, I may come up with my own fat loss or weight loss product later on. Or there may be another affiliate offer for that. So I'm building a database and I'm building a real business.

[00:35:55] That's number one. Number two, anytime you have traffic, be it on Meta, Facebook, Instagram, whatever, Google, they don't like you to send traffic directly to an affiliate sales page or offer. Okay. So a lot of the terms of service for a lot of these platforms don't want you to do that. So some people just, we call it a bridge page, a landing page or whatever.

[00:36:23] But on that landing page, guys, grab the data. So once again, traffic to my landing page, put in your email and your name, and then it would take you to the video. The video was 40 minutes. I couldn't even watch the whole video. I had to, but it was hard. And it was going through all types of stuff that people didn't, number one, didn't really care about. They wanted the solution. What is this going to do for me?

[00:36:51] In addition to that, a lot of times when you drive traffic, if you're on Facebook or you're on Instagram and you see something for fat loss or weight loss, and you go through, you don't have 40 minutes to sit down and watch a whole Cecil B. DeMille video production, Steven Spielberg. You know, there's a reason they do it because they're successful. But what I found was that wasn't working for me.

[00:37:21] So that was the big friction for me. So what I had to do was I changed my landing page up a little and then what I did is I actually went in and created a video for the product. And then after the video, it directed them to the checkout page. So when you do affiliate marketing, they'll give you links to different pages inside their funnel. So they'll give you links to videos.

[00:37:50] They'll give you links to checkout pages. So if you don't want to follow their flow exactly, you can set up your own flow and still be compensated because you'll still have your affiliate links in the checkout page. So what I did is I went and I used AI technology and I copied the web address of the description of the product. I put that into AI creator, video creator,

[00:38:18] and they actually created a new video and I told them to make the video three and a half to four and a half minutes. So now I get this new video out. I have to tweak it a little bit, but that video, let me tell you the numbers first. For every a hundred clicks, right? That, that actually came to my landing page and clicked. I think only three people

[00:38:47] made it to the end of that video and nobody purchased. When I tried or redid the video out of a hundred clicks, 27 people made it to the end of that video and I got three or four sales. So it was a marked difference. And I think my average, uh, my average commission on that was like a hundred and something dollars. So I, when I came into was the friction.

[00:39:15] So whatever your offers are, whatever your website is, you take the friction out of it guys. So people can easily purchase your product or service or whatever your call to action is. Okay. So I want to use the example of a funnel. So what's better? Do you want to put rocks in a funnel or do you want to put water in a funnel? What's going to flow better? Guess what? Water, right?

[00:39:45] Because everything is in alignment. There's less friction. With rocks, you got the different size and shape rocks in the funnel. They may eventually come through, you know, slowly, or they may get blocked up with a big rock on the bottom of the funnel and now nothing is happening. But that's what you want to liken your, your friction to in terms of your business. Make it simple. How many times have you been on a website that took too long to load?

[00:40:15] You know, you're waiting two, three seconds. You're like, man, I don't even want to wait that long. That's friction. You go to a website or you, you, you talk to somebody on the phone or try to talk to somebody on the phone and you're getting to run around. You're going through three different people and none of them can solve your problem. Friction. The reason I don't use Verizon internet anymore was friction.

[00:40:43] Every time I needed somebody to come out, guess what? Oh, we can't come out for two to three days. So I'm not supposed to have internet for two to three days. Friction, right? You're on a website or you're looking at a product or something and they don't give you the answers to your questions. You have, you know, that's what FAQs are for. Reduces friction.

[00:41:11] So when you're selling something online, always have an FAQ of the most asked questions, frequently asked questions. And when you do that, that takes that friction away. Matter of fact, when I create videos, I take all of the negative questions or the friction questions and I try to address them in the video. So if somebody is saying, well, you know, I don't, I don't know about the price of this product.

[00:41:41] I may put something in the video to compare prices of similar products. You know, you want to take away any friction or all the friction you can. And it's not possible all the time, but as much friction as you can to make that a smooth transition from prospect to paying customer. And the easiest way to do that, guys, is make things simple. You have to show value.

[00:42:11] If your value is not there, if your price, like I said, you're buying a Timex watch and you see an ad for, let me use a different example. You see a, I don't know what kind of car, a Toyota Corolla that they're selling for $70,000, right? Price versus perceived value. You're not buying that, right? I don't care if it had leather everything. You're not buying a Corolla for $70,000.

[00:42:41] But if you saw a nice AMG, Mercedes-Benz for $70,000, you'd be like, yo, that, yeah, I see the value. The value is there. So once again, your value, guys, has to be higher. Your perceived value, I'm sorry, has to be higher than the price. If your price is higher than that person perceives your product or service, guess what? It's not going to sell.

[00:43:10] Your alignment has to be in order. Product, pricing, perception. When you go buy Beats headphones or any high-end headphones, their packaging, it's the presentation, it makes it high-end. You go buy a high-end bourbon or liquor, it's in a nice package. It may be in a wooden box. You go buy a low-end bourbon or whatever, then, you know,

[00:43:38] you just grab it off the shelf. So, that's what you have to focus on, guys, and reducing the friction. The more friction you can reduce, the more money you're going to make and the easier you're going to scale your business. Now, I say this each and every week, family, because it's true, we get more and more downloads because of you, the BEB family. I appreciate you guys so much. Guys, please continue to spread the word about the podcast. We drop every Monday, 5 a.m.

[00:44:08] Eastern Standard Time. The books, the whole ecosystem. Make sure you go to blackentrepreneurblueprint.com, hit the Learn tab, and take advantage of the free resources. Remember, guys, we're trying to help you elevate your entrepreneur IQ. It's not about me, it's not about you, it's about us. It's about building an economic power base in the worldwide black community by building and supporting black-owned businesses. Love you guys. See you same time next week.

[00:44:38] Peace.