The Publishing Performance Show

Chris Benetti - The Book Funnel System That Generated 10X ROI in 6 Months

• Teddy Smith • Episode 106

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Chris Benetti is the founder of Smart Author Media and a book funnel marketing expert who has sold over 55,000 books for his clients. Specializing in self-liquidating book funnels and Facebook advertising, Chris helps authors turn their books into profitable lead generation tools that feed into higher-ticket offers and services. His agency focuses exclusively on the Meta suite (Facebook and Instagram) and has generated over $750,000 in revenue for clients while spending $250,000 on ads. Chris's systematic approach combines detailed funnel strategy, conversion rate optimization, and creative testing to help authors build sustainable book-based businesses rather than just selling individual books.

In this episode:

  • Understanding self-liquidating book funnels and how they pay for themselves
  • Why books rarely make profit on their own and need strategic backend offers
  • Building effective book sales pages with headlines, social proof, and bonuses
  • Order bump strategies that convert 40-50% of book buyers
  • Two-step order forms for lead capture and remarketing opportunities
  • Upsell sequences that solve problems created by the book content
  • Facebook advertising strategies focused on creative testing over targeting
  • The ASCET framework for systematic ad testing and optimization
  • Case study: Nigel Moore's 10X ROI with free book funnel strategy
  • Why books should serve business purposes, not just generate book sales
  • Conversion rate benchmarks and key metrics for funnel optimization
  • The importance of having backup offers and multiple ad creatives ready


Resources mentioned:


Book Recommendations:

  • Strategic business and systems books
  • System distillation books


Connect with Chris Benetti:


Connect with Teddy Smith:



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[00:00:00] Teddy Smith: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Publishing Performance Show. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Chris Benetti, who is the founder of Smart Horse Media, and he's a book funnels expert and he has sold over 55,000 books for his clients. So welcome to the show, Chris. 

[00:00:20] Chris Benetti: Oh, thanks for having me. Teddy. 

[00:00:22] Teddy Smith: No problem.

[00:00:23] So tell me about your book funnels, because when we were in the chat before you talked about yourself liquidating book funnels. So what does that exactly mean? 

[00:00:31] Chris Benetti: Yeah, so ultimately when we work with clients, our first kind of goal is how do we offset ad spend as much as possible, if not completely.

[00:00:41] So self liquidation basically is just, making the same amount of money as it costs you to get someone to buy something from you in the first place. So, as an example, if it costs us $20 to get someone to buy a book, how do we make $20? When they buy the book, if not more. And that's, that's through a, self-liquidating book funnel.

[00:01:00] And, and really, to expand on that, that comes in the form of selling the book, but then also selling additional offers alongside the book so that, what we are really doing is increasing the amount of someone's, the, the amount someone spends when they're buying the book in one transaction.

[00:01:17] Teddy Smith: Okay, that makes sense. So you're not talking about just the ad paying for the profit from the book itself. It's actually the other processes and the other services you can add on at the end. 

[00:01:27] Chris Benetti: Yeah. Yeah. So, I think a lot of people when they go to launch a book, they think that they are gonna make all this profit from the book, and it's, it's really never the case.

[00:01:37] I, I've had zero examples, working with a few dozen clients at this point where someone has just sold a book and made profit on a book. And esp, especially when you start to consider advertising costs. You start to consider agency costs and even fulfillment costs if you've got something physical, if there's a lot of aspects that come into play, that basically lower your initial profit when someone buys the book in the first place.

[00:02:04] Teddy Smith: Do you find that the price of the book has any, like, impact on the sales or, you know, books are quite competitive. Do you find that having a more expensive book means that you will get less sales? 

[00:02:15] Chris Benetti: Absolutely. Yeah. So, anything kind of above a $25 price point and, and or euros, you'll start to see traction go down quite a lot.

[00:02:25] So when we start to price things like full priced in the book funnel, we'll, we'll typically see our conversion rates of people who. Come from an ad, to, to lower below 5%. So let's just say we had a hundred people click on our ad. We'll only have five people or less buy the book. If we start to think about doing more creative offers or doing lower priced books, then we can see that conversion rate go higher.

[00:02:51] And usually my sweet spot is in between eight and 12% of cold traffic. everyone who clicks to to see the book sales page, actually buys the book. 

[00:03:02] Teddy Smith: That's a quite a high conversion rate. And so is that all coming from, so I'm guessing it's mostly coming from Facebook ads where you're sending the traffic?

[00:03:09] Chris Benetti: Yeah. Yeah. So we specifically work in the meta suite of ads. And so that's Facebook and Instagram specifically. 

[00:03:16] Teddy Smith: Nice. So let, let's go through what these book funnels look like. 'cause on your website, I know you've got this, these hundreds of resources and I've actually used some of them myself. And it helps you to get those funnels set up in the first place.

[00:03:26] Could. So, could we go through the nuts and bolts of what that funnel looks like? 

[00:03:31] Chris Benetti: For sure. So, the first, the first kind of starting place is a sales page for the book, right? So, this typically includes, things like, obviously you'll have a really good headline to, to sell the book depending on who your niche is for.

[00:03:46] But that's the kind of the, the best part of the page that's gonna, uh, gauge people to start to wanna scroll through the page and, and get more information about whether they should buy the book or not. So having a good hook and utilizing platforms like chat, GPT to help you write that kind of stuff, it kind of knows a lot of copy frameworks, is, is a really good resource.

[00:04:07] Beyond that, we like to include things like, what's inside the book. So. Usually I'll, I'll get the 10 best things inside the book. I'll reference what page they're on. I'll write a little blurb about it so that people can kind of have like a preview insider, insight to what's in the book and if it's gonna be beneficial for them.

[00:04:26] Um, I like to include reasons why someone should buy the book. I like to include social proof, so this is, Amazon reviews or if you've gotten reviews and testimonials from other. Sources. I like to include that in the sales page. I like to include FAQs about the book. So, just reasons, why someone should get the book and, and overcoming any questions they may have around that.

[00:04:49] Obviously, money back guarantees bonuses. If you have bonuses that go alongside the book. Like, if, if I wrote a book, I might give all those resources that. Teddy mentioned, as, as a bonus to the book, so that they can go ahead and access that and, get some more success, uh, with the content of the book itself.

[00:05:06] you'd, you'd probably include an author bio and so on, and so like, there's a quite a few elements that go into the sales page. That's the first kind of step in the book funnel process. Um, usually on these pages I like to do what's called a two step order form. And what this means is it's basically,

[00:05:23] a, a multi-step process in buying. So step one, they submit their, their information like name, email, phone number, address, if it's a physical book. And that basically allows for you to capture their details even if they don't buy the book itself, which is really powerful for us to do, remarketing too.

[00:05:41] So with Facebook ads, we can market to those people who don't actually complete their purchase, and it also allows us to. Um, email market to. This is called typically abandoned cart. So if they don't go through their purchase, then we can go and send them emails about completing their purchase, things like that.

[00:06:01] The second step of this, form is where we can go ahead and include our next offer, which is called an order bump. This is basically just a checkbox on the order, page just after or before they fill in their credit card details, which allows for you to offer them something like an audio book or an additional offer that can go alongside the, the main book product.

[00:06:26] And this is our first point of increasing the average order value that, the amount someone spends with us when they buy the book. And so, I, I typically think of things like, checklist, templates, tools, resources plus an audiobook to include in this offer. And that just allows us to price it at $17, $27 and sometimes $37.

[00:06:48] Ty typically quite high priced, and this is our, like highest converting. Next offer that we have alongside the book. So, I mentioned 12% of conversion rate of all clicks. So if we had 12 buyers, we might actually see this offer convert at 40, 50%. And so of those 12 buyers, they're not just buying the book, they're, six of them are actually buying a a $30 product as well.

[00:07:15] And that drastically increases how much someone's spending with us.

[00:07:22] Teddy Smith: Oh, so I was gonna say that's before you even sort of thought about doing the high ticket offer, which is what you, which is the reason why you do the funding in the first place. So you've got this initial like bump, which actually pays to the ads in the first place. 

[00:07:34] Chris Benetti: Sometimes it pays to the ads, sometimes it doesn't.

[00:07:36] So, we do have other offers as well that, we, we try to include in the book funnels, uh, before anything high ticket on the back end.

[00:07:47] We, we have to kind of capture the percentage of people who don't take upsell offers, to take them so that we can, uh, go ahead and liquidate our ad spend as much as possible. So, that, that kind of leads us well into the next step in the book funnel, which is usually what's referred to as an upsell.

[00:08:07] Offer, and this is where we can kind of go even higher priced. Usually it depends on your niche. If you are more B two, B2C, business to consumer, you might price something at $50, $60 and so on. But this is where we can kind of start to include things like courses and programs and stuff like that, that, they may just be.

[00:08:29] Course versions of the book, they, I like to call them kind of, next steps offers. So like, usually your book creates a problem and then this can help solve that. So for me, as an example, if I was through a book, it might be on book marketing, the, the, the next offer would be like, do you want all of our, templates and, and resources to create your book funnel so that you can shortcut your success to book marketing?

[00:08:54] 'cause without that I can explain the book funnel process, but they wouldn't have anything to actually go ahead and implement it fast. And alongside that, I can do, video training on setting these things up, how to think about the sales copy, how to think about the offers, all the stuff we're talking about right now.

[00:09:09] But I could include that alongside templates so that they can get started faster. And so that is a problem that the book and the content has created and that is getting started fast. Another offer that we can do kind of within that flow is, is a secondary upsell because usually, our first upsell can also create additional problems.

[00:09:32] And so running ads and, Having creative templates and things like that would be another problem that is created from the offers that we've already introduced. And so I could sell like an ads training, a template, creative template solution so that people can get started on the advertising side faster as well.

[00:09:52] Teddy Smith: Right. Okay. So with, with those upsells and those products, so with the first order bump, you've got that one that you said maybe 25, $30, something like that, and then you've got the second one, which is more expensive. What, what would the first one look like usually? 

[00:10:04] Chris Benetti: In terms of price points? 

[00:10:06] Teddy Smith: No. Like what, what would it be?

[00:10:08] Chris Benetti: Yeah. So, for, the example I gave for me would be, funnel templates and, and, and training to support you being able to create and customize your book funnel. So ultimately the, the, the frame is like, how do we get you. Running a book funnel faster or, or creating a book funnel faster.

[00:10:28] And so, like my office suite could be around that. Right, okay. It's not always the case, but that's typically the best frame to think about positioning your first upsell offer in. Sometimes, the, the clients that we work with, they'll have a book that is around bus business and systems and growth, and then they'll offer like a sales and marketing.

[00:10:49] Kind of, product and that's like a training course or a series of workshops that, that someone could go through to be able to help them in kind of additional avenues that they might not get out of the book itself. 

[00:11:02] Teddy Smith: Yeah, nice. But just before we talked about the funnels, we talked about different types of ads that you would try.

[00:11:07] So for example, with the reviews and like, customer proof and things like that. Have you noticed any particular types of ads which you think are the best performing. 

[00:11:18] Chris Benetti: Yeah, I mean, the, the testimonial ads are really good from a retargeting perspective. So if someone goes to buy the book, but they don't, like those kind of ads are really good to overcome, potential objections someone would have around buying the book.

[00:11:31] And if it's worth it, that's really good. Just from a cold perspective, we, we kind of operate in a direct response fashion, so, we just put the book out there. We show the book in our ad images. We, we talk about why it's gonna be beneficial for the avatar to get the book. And we, we typically use long form, ad copy to kind of explain the ins and outs of the book.

[00:11:57] And sometimes we'll include, text testimonials within that, that ad copy as well. But primarily the, the creators we do are very book focused. We don't try to hide the fact that we're selling them a book. We just put the book on the ad image. We promote that and then we've, we just have, hundreds and hundreds of templates that we use for clients, in that respect.

[00:12:18] And, I have some of those resources on my resource page as well that you may have, have seen as well. 

[00:12:26] Teddy Smith: Yeah, the resource pages is really helpful. I've used, I've used quite already to go through some of the ad copy swipe files and the book funnel examples so you can see exactly how a lot of these funnels are broken down.

[00:12:35] I thought that was really helpful. I thought you should have charged that actually. 

[00:12:40] Chris Benetti: I should have, and to be fair actually, we did a cohort of people to help them with writing their book and building their book funnel and doing ads and stuff like that. We charged like 7,000 US per person. We had about 10 join.

[00:12:56] And a lot of those resources that you get on the resource page, they paid. To get, obviously they got coaching and support and stuff as well, but I did a lot of our development through that cohort of people in the book club we called it. And so. I, I technically should be charging you at least a thousand bucks for a lot of the resources redeveloped.

[00:13:18] Teddy Smith: So, on your website, you've got some amazing examples of some of the people you've worked with. Some, some of them have actually been on this podcast as well. But there's some really big names in there like James Shanko and, and others. Could you, let's go through a couple of examples of where your book funnel technique has worked like really well and how that's gone.

[00:13:35] Chris Benetti: Yeah, for sure. I think like a lot of the. A lot of the success of clients has come through them having a really good business. I'll just say that first and almost. Yeah. So without them having like a dialed in backend process without them having, a good systems in their business, like a book funnel wouldn't really be able to support.

[00:13:59] Their growth and success, so probably like, my biggest success story so far was from Nigel Moore, who was my first client at Smart Author Media, three years ago when we started, he raised his hand and said, yep, I wanna do it with you. And, in, interestingly enough, he had a, a free book, so just a book, PDF, we didn't charge for it or anything.

[00:14:21] But because of. His business being super niche and the fact that he offers so much value to the type of avatar that the book is for. And, and, his, his, main offer is for, we actually went through a, a book funnel process where we're giving the book away for free. Just give us your name and email on the second page.

[00:14:43] We still didn't upsell, even though we didn't take any payment for the book. And it was ultimately to trial his membership. His membership is $59 a month for everyone. But if you went through the book funnel, you could actually get a trial for $7 for 30 days. And to date we've, we've given away over 10,000 books.

[00:15:04] We've, we've had about a 7% conversion rate into his trial and he's got about a 96% retention rate. So, spending after spending about $250,000 on ads. Around seven 50 in revenue and we've increased his monthly revenue recurring revenue. By close to $60,000 now. So, he pays us a few grand a month to run his ads.

[00:15:32] He spends a few grand a month on ads, and we've pretty much 10 x that on a monthly basis, plus also the additional revenue he's gotten over time. so it just, it all kind of, it all kind of, culminates and, and just additionally adds up over time, which is pretty cool. I will say, it took us about six months to.

[00:15:51] Be profitable on his book campaign, especially with our retainer and stuff in, in the mix. But after three years of doing it now, we're, we're absolutely just smashing it. You know, we get close to 10 trials a week for his membership, and that's his main offer in his business. 

[00:16:07] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That's amazing. And obviously that's, he's got a successful business beforehand, and as you said, you can't, it's difficult to just run a funnel to something that isn't as successful.

[00:16:16] But say you're just starting out and you've got, maybe you've got one or two of your first nonfiction books and you're looking at creating this funnel to drive more traffic to your books. Where would be the best place to start with that? 

[00:16:27] Chris Benetti: The, the biggest problem I find when people are trying to do their book marketing,

[00:16:33] and, and get their book out there is, they're doing it with, the, the perspective from, how do I, sell books and not the perspective of how does this book serve my business and what I'm trying to accomplish. So, like from my angle, and how we approach book marketing, there has to be a, a purpose that it's solving.

[00:16:55] it has to, has to feed into a business. It has to, work into growing something bigger, because, without those elements in place, the, the expenditure of a book and a book funnel, a lot of people going go into that kind of stuff, hoping to make good profits when the profit really is made on the services and the coaching programs and the high ticket stuff on the back end.

[00:17:19] So there's no problem with book marketing. In isolation, as long as you, you understand that that's the goal that you're trying to accomplish is, is selling books. But if you're going at it from a, a money making perspective, a monetary perspective, then the strategy that kind of we employ, and the, the book funnels and stuff like that, it's not really, it's not really the way, like I would rather you go and use something like Teddy's software to, to go ahead and do Amazon ads and, and get your book out that way.

[00:17:49] Because it doesn't really matter if you're not capturing leads and customers and, and all that kind of stuff, you're still. Gonna hopefully make it a, a profit on marketing and selling the book. But when we look at the book funnel side of things, it, it becomes much more complicated and nuanced.

[00:18:05] And it has to be servicing, uh, a business in a, in a, in a grander scheme, if that makes sense. 

[00:18:11] Teddy Smith: So think about creating that offer first, because a lot of the people I speak to, they write an nonfiction book and they haven't really got a plan for how they can build that business out later on. But I think what you're saying is think when you are writing that book, think about what your offers are going to be later on so that you can, try to make more money rather than just selling the book in the first place.

[00:18:29] Chris Benetti: Yeah, it, I mean, it has to be strategic. if, if you are planning to like launch a book and a business at the same time, then that's all gonna be working together for you. If you just do the book in isolation with no real plan after the fact, then you're just gonna be setting yourself up for failure.

[00:18:43] And, usually my recommendation is like, have a good business first, and then do the book, and then, kind of grow it all together. I've, I've got a few friends and examples who, kind of launch a business with the book. Together to, to grow and, and use kind of the momentum of selling the book and bestseller campaigns and publications and stuff like that to grow the business.

[00:19:05] And that's great. But without kind of any of those elements in place, you're just gonna kind of be throwing money, down the drain in a, in a sense. And it's not actually gonna be really beneficial for you. There's a lot of effort and energy that goes into what we do, mm-hmm. And so, in that case, 

[00:19:21] It's fine to market the books, but I'd, I'd suggest using something like Amazon and, and your, your platform to, to get help with that. 

[00:19:28] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Nice. When you say you've got to be strategic about writing the book, so, what does that, what sorts of books usually do well, and I, I know that's a really broad topic, but you, you are, 'cause you're trying to drive people to, towards like getting coaching and things.

[00:19:41] Are there any particular elements that you think that should be in the book? 

[00:19:45] Chris Benetti: Yeah, I mean, system distillation is, the biggest thing that comes to mind. So it's like if you do something really well in your business, then a book on how you do that well is good. like as an example, a book on book funnels and advertising would be great for me.

[00:20:00] Yeah. I've got friends who, Nigel's book, who I mentioned as a case study before, his book is around packaging and pricing Your. Your managed service provider offers, because that's a big, a gap in the marketplace. And that's one thing he covers in kind of his program plus a bunch of other things.

[00:20:19] I've, I've had clients who have books on real estate investing. So, they have a real estate investing education company and they distill what they do as a strategy in the book. maybe it's flipping properties, maybe it's investing for long term. Maybe it's you're retiring with.

[00:20:35] 200 plus thousand dollars a year. All that kind of stuff is distilled into the book system and processes. And so, that's kind of the meat and potatoes of the book. You obviously have to wrap around other things, like introducing who you are, your credibility, your story, why it matters, why you should listen to me, that kind of stuff.

[00:20:53] And then I think the, the, on the other side of the meat and potatoes is. The next steps kind of thing. So it's like, here's how you implement this information. Here's how you action this information and here's how you work with us if you want some support. So, I just generalize the book, quite simply.

[00:21:09] But like typically it's those kind of three main overarching sections. 

[00:21:15] Teddy Smith: So I think when you're going, so it doesn't typically work, is what you're saying. If you've already got a book, you've written, it is, you don't wanna reverse engineer it, you wanna write the book with this funnel in mind, I think is what you're saying.

[00:21:27] Chris Benetti: Yeah. And I mean, if you have a book that's not a problem. Like you can always republish a book or you can always change a book and re-release it as something different. it's not a big deal. I think a lot of people kind of get caught up in that. And then the other thing people get caught up in is the book is the book, and it's not a book.

[00:21:45] like you can have many books if you wish, and you can kind of focus in one book in a grand scheme of things. As, as a part of the strategy, then releasing other books as different parts of the strategy. So like, you don't have to just like write the ultimate book, the, the, the, the book of all books right away.

[00:22:06] You can kind of, step it out and you can, you can iterate the book that you have, re-release it, do an updated version. You can do any of that kind of stuff. you have the control. And so, I just kind of empower you to, to think about it from that angle. 

[00:22:22] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. Now when you are creating these books and then you've created the funnel, I'm guessing quite a lot of testing goes into try and make sure that you are improving this funnel and making it better, as you mentioned with Nigel over six months or something like that.

[00:22:35] So what are the key bits of data that you look forward to see? Is this working? Are there any ways I can improve it? 

[00:22:42] Chris Benetti: Yeah, so we, I mean we've got two sides of, of the coin for this. we've got the ad side, we've got the funnel side. So I have some good baseline metrics to the funnel. what our book conversion rate should be.

[00:22:55] So of the people who clicked on the page to view the book, how many bought, I've got my, my baseline conversion rates for order bumps. So did at least 25. Percent of people buy the order bump, which is that checkbox on the order form. I've got my baseline conversion rates for the upsell pages. So is it between five and 15%?

[00:23:17] If it's not, in any of those kind of circumstances, if it's not the lowest baseline metric, then what do we do to optimize? And so that's when I go into conversion rate optimization, space. And I'll start to look at. Is the offer, right? It, it are the headlines good, on that specific offer page.

[00:23:37] do, what do we need to change to, to in increase this conversion rate? So that's kind of the funnel end. On the back end of the funnel, it's like, are we getting calls booked? is there, pipeline being built for the sales team and so on? If, if that business has that at that level, but ultimately, is it leading into bigger opportunities for the author and the client?

[00:23:58] On the advertising side that, we've got a few key metrics like, like CPM, which is, cost per 1000 impressions. And this really just tells us like, is the targeting for the ads good? we've got things like cost per click, if that is really high. That's telling me that the ad isn't good, what's, what's the cost per result?

[00:24:17] so what's it costing us to get someone to buy the book? If that's really high? Then there's, there's a, a, a barrier and that typically, cost per result is, um, it's usually related to the funnel, not converting as as we want. So, we've got all these metrics that I kind of look at from both sides.

[00:24:36] The, the ads and the funnels and the data tells us where to go and what to fix. 

[00:24:45] Teddy Smith: Amazing. So I, yeah, I don't, I don't even know what to ask about that.

[00:24:53] Chris Benetti: So we, we can ask about, you can ask me about like. Um, our like testing, how do we like, figure out what else to, to test to improve the results on the ads? 

[00:25:09] Teddy Smith: Yeah. You sort of went into it so thoroughly then I was like, I had, I sort of had some questions and as, as you were speaking, they sort of kept being answered.

[00:25:18] You actually look at any of the ads themselves and where you can optimize the, like things like the copy or the images you use in the ads. 

[00:25:26] Chris Benetti: Yeah, so we've got a, a testing framework that we use for ads. Um, I call it asset, which is A-C-A-S-C-C-T, and it basically stands for, ad sets, uh, copy, creative targeting.

[00:25:42] Um, and in on my website, on the resources page, there's an ad, SOP. It's basically explained in there, but what we do from a testing perspective is we. And this is gonna get very technical and I apologize, but we, we kind of do one ad per ad set. And the reason why we do this is so that we can control the budget on the ad.

[00:26:03] This allows for us to know for sure if that ad is gonna work or not. So we, we will make sure that we're spending the, the 10 or 20 or $30, uh, per day on that ad specifically. 'cause if you were to bunch in a bunch of ads into one ad set, the ad set controls the budget and the ads don't all spend. In the same way.

[00:26:23] So you might find that one ad gets 90% of the budget that we set, and the other ones get the remaining 10%, however, Facebook determines. So that's like the first stage. And then the next one is like, we go from, it's, it's kind of like an up upside down triangle. So we go from targeting to copy to creative, and this basically means that we.

[00:26:44] We do a few different targeting variations. So we'll do things like lookalike audiences, we'll do things, like detail targeting and the broad targeting. We kind of figure out what targeting works the best. And for the majority of the campaign timeline, we can usually stick with that targeting if the audience size is big enough.

[00:27:03] So that's kind of like one of the testing, places that we do is targeting. The second testing place is the copy. To be honest, like these days, I just do five good versions of copy and then I roll them all into one ad. And then, what do you mean by that? Sorry. So with, with Facebook ads, you've got essentially headlines and primary text.

[00:27:27] The primary text is like the long form text you see above the image, and the headline goes next to the button to. And that's below the image. So we do five variations. Facebook allows for five variations in an ad, and we basically put all five variations on every single ad that we run. And for me, like we used to do, one ad image, got one piece of copy.

[00:27:54] Then that same ad image would get a second piece of copy that, that same image would get a third and a fourth and a fifth. And so we would have like five, variations of the ad with all different copy. But I've over time have just found that copy is less important than testing Creatives. And creatives are the images in the videos that show when someone sees your ad.

[00:28:16] So I've kind of built a framework around just like putting five. Five variations of the copy in the ad. And then our biggest testing parameter is the creatives that we, we run. And so we create probably 20 to 30 creatives, per month for different clients. And some clients spend, multiple thousands of dollars, five, six, $7,000 per.

[00:28:41] Per day with us. And so for those clients, we actually have hundreds of creatives being developed a month for them. because we've got a lot bigger budget. We need to consist consistently test new things. And so, to the point of the ad metrics that we look at, if the ad doesn't have a good cost per click, doesn't have, a good cost per result.

[00:29:03] We turn it off and we turn something else on and we test and we're just consi consistently turning ads on and off, on and off. The ones that do hit, we increase the budget sign, so basically so that we can kind of scale the campaign.

[00:29:17] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Wow. So you are literally just checking this stuff all the time, making sure there's like, the different touch points are working well, or like a different image is working better or the, the copying is changing, but you, what you're saying is that the image actually has a bigger impact than the the copy you think?

[00:29:32] Chris Benetti: You can write, those five good variations of copy and you'll be pretty good for probably, Nigel, who's been with us for three years, we're still using the original copy that we launched with, but we couldn't use the same creative that whole time, The copy that we used for Nigel when we first launched three years ago is the same copy we're using today, but we couldn't have used the same creative that whole time like that.

[00:29:58] that's been the biggest linchpin for us to continue getting good results for him. 

[00:30:04] Teddy Smith: Right. Okay. So is, yeah, the, so the image does have a much bigger impact than the copy. That's very interesting. It's quite, the first part you said about the targeting was, was also quite interesting in relation to Amazon ads and the way that I do it, because a lot of people come to us and they say, I want to target this keyword, this keyword, this keyword, this keyword.

[00:30:19] And I'm like, I. You need to take a break. You need to think what is it you're trying to do? Where are you trying to get ranking for? Like, what keywords do you want to appear for? If you put all these keywords in, then your budget is gonna go, uh, entirely. And as you mentioned, like you sometimes see 90% of the spend ends up going on one ad, which means that you haven't got any data to see if the second one's working.

[00:30:39] So that, that same concept works exactly the same in Amazon as it does on Facebook, by the sounds of it. 

[00:30:45] Chris Benetti: Yeah. Amazon's a. It's a, it's a targeting heavy platform. the zero creative if you will. And pretty much all of your budget is going towards keywords, products, categories, or auto, so like, it's, it's primarily a targeting driven platform, whereas Facebook, you can just have a good broad target and it will kind of find buyers within that target that you set.

[00:31:11] And you need to do creative, refreshing to continue to get results for the ads versus targeting refreshing. So they're different in that sense. And I guess it makes sense 'cause the Amazon ad platform is kind of a more aligned to how, like Google AdWords work as an example. It's, it's more like how do we get.

[00:31:31] Someone to click based on what we have set as the targeting parameters. so what are the key words that we want someone to, if they're searching for this either long form or or short form, then we're gonna show our ad. Whereas Facebook, it's more interruption based, so they're just scrolling their feed.

[00:31:49] And as long as we're kind of matching. The, the kind of, the targeting that someone might be interested in from, from that sense. even down to the country, the age, the gender, and, potential interests. Then we're pretty much set, like we've got an audience size of 20 million or so, and so we can probably find a few, few thousand buyers within that pool of people versus having to continuously refresh who we're looking to server the ads to.

[00:32:17] Teddy Smith: Yeah. One thing that's interesting, I, I was trusting someone the other day who is a Facebook ads expert, and he, he hardly does any like targeting when he is trying to find the audience anymore. He says he just lets Facebook algorithms sort of work out exactly who the customer's meant to be. Do you go into quite a lot of detail with the people you're trying to target?

[00:32:37] Chris Benetti: It's getting more and more limited today. So when we started three years ago, with this. Particular agency, detailed targeting was a must. You, you must have good targeting options. Back then Facebook had introduced something called Advantage targeting, plus, which is like, it will go outside your targeting options to find more people to buy, which was good, but it's moving more and more.

[00:33:03] And I think by mid-year this year, they're gonna remove detail targeting completely. So you'll only be able to set the age, the country, the gender. And Facebook will do the targeting kind of with its own algorithm and ai, to find the people who might buy or opt in to your, to your offers. 

[00:33:22] Teddy Smith: Yeah, it is interesting 'cause I, I, I feel like Facebook has so much data on you that it's like, just let them, just let them run with it.

[00:33:30] They know they, they, they want your ad to succeed as well. 'cause the more your ad succeeds, the more you spend with them. So it's not like that. It's in their interest that the ad works. 

[00:33:37] Chris Benetti: Yeah, a hundred percent. It's getting easier and easier, but. They're, they, they're trying to push more and more AI for copy, for the ads and for creatives for the ads.

[00:33:48] And then they're trying to push more and more for like, them kind of managing budgets and campaigns set up and stuff like that, for the next few years anyway. I see, like it's, it's not gonna replace a good media buyer like me and my team. Because you, you, you know, what they're trying to give you from a, a creative and a copy perspective is just, it's not good.

[00:34:11] And you kind of have to feed, you have to kind of feed it first with your own version of copy. Then it will kind of go, Hey, AI thinks you can use this variation of copy, but it's, it's not usually as good as what we can write. And it's, it's most likely, it's just a small tweak on what you've written. So yeah, we, we are not gonna lose a job anytime soon, but they're trying to push more and more to like, how do we get the AI to do it for our customers so that they have success longer term and, and keep spending money with us.

[00:34:37] So it is an interesting paradigm. 

[00:34:41] Teddy Smith: Are there any big mistakes that you see, uh, people make with funnels? You know, you've obviously done thousands now, so there any common mistakes you see people make? Oh, 

[00:34:51] Chris Benetti: yeah. I, I like to. I mean, I think the first thing is like people overcomplicate it, uh, a lot. Like it's not complicated for us anymore, but just because we've done it so many times, but a lot of people still try to overcomplicate it.

[00:35:05] And so when I share, like my book funnel template resources and stuff, I, I try to make those as simple as possible. It's not exactly how we do it in the agency, but it's simple enough and it works, I think people also kind of get caught up on what they can do as upsells and things like that.

[00:35:25] And so, for me, like when we're doing funnels for clients, we usually like to have a few backups of different offers. 'cause it's not always the case where the every single offer converts really well. And if we don't have backups, then we're kind of frantically. Trying to prepare new things to, to put in the funnel, to, to run.

[00:35:47] And so we kind of, these days like to have a couple of backups ready to go, for the funnel, just in case the, the offer doesn't convert as expected. And the same is true for ads, right? So for creatives, like whenever I'm coaching someone on doing creatives, I'll say, you need to have at least 10 ads ready to go.

[00:36:04] Just in case the ads that you do run don't work. And sometimes they don't, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But at least you're prepared for that worst case scenario. 

[00:36:14] Teddy Smith: Yeah, for sure. Now you, what does it look like when people work with you? So let's, let's talk about that step where it's like, besides work with you, what does that process look like from first meeting you to getting their ads up and live?

[00:36:27] Chris Benetti: Yeah. So if they don't have a book funnel, then you know, we have to go through that, project together. So we usually just get a, a manuscript of their book. We will read that, we'll write the, the copy. We'll do a strategy call for the book funnel as well to kind of identify what each offer in the book funnel could be and how it's leading towards.

[00:36:50] You know, getting them more sales calls or whatever on the backend that gets people to convert into high ticket buyers. So we'll kind of do that strategy. We'll write the copy once the copy's kind of done, then we go through a design phase where we will design all the pages, you know, bespoke customer design.

[00:37:08] And it's all based on the copy. So it's really nice. Once that's approved, then we do a development. So we build it in either a platform that they already use, something like Go high level, or, you know, Kartra, Kajabi, ClickFunnels, whatever they use. We'll then go through the development, and then we'll integrate it with their email lists and all that kind of stuff.

[00:37:29] And then we go through a kind of testing and validation phase with the ads. So we'll prep the ads. We'll launch the ads, usually 14, 30 days. We figure out what works, what doesn't work. Then we can kind of double down on what does work. And then we look at scaling opportunities. So, 25 days ago we launched a new funnel for a client and we've done a, an ad budget increase, uh, three times now.

[00:37:54] We've gone from a hundred dollars a day to start and we're at $400 a day now, and so we kind of look at those opportunities. The ads working really well. The funnel's converting as expected. It's profitable or it's, it's breaking even. At least let's increase the budget so that we can get more volume through, so we, we kind of look at those opportunities and then we make the scaling recommendations to clients and, yeah, like I mentioned before, sometimes it goes into the thousands of dollars per day, like we've got one that's at about six grand a day on ads for just their book and other kind of complimentary offers that we're running for them.

[00:38:28] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Wow, that's quite a lot of money, isn't it? Yeah. 

[00:38:32] Chris Benetti: Yeah, definitely. 

[00:38:35] Teddy Smith: Yeah, thanks so much for joining. It's been great to chat about funnels. I know quite a bit about this topic, but it's not as much as you clearly, and not in as much detail as all the analytics that you go into. So it's been fascinating to hear all about that.

[00:38:46] If people wanna get in touch with you to get hold of their resources or also to talk to you about setting up a funnel for themselves, where's the best place to do that? Yeah, for sure. So, socials are good. Facebook is my primarily primary platform that I check. If you send me a friend request, just send me a message as well.

[00:39:00] Chris Benetti: That way I know you are legit and you came from here. So Chris Benetti, you can find me on there. Glasses, long hair, hat. All the stuff that you're seeing right now will be visible on Facebook. 

[00:39:12] Teddy Smith: I've noticed your haircut's changed in a few of your pictures on your website though. So sometimes you've got like quite a neat short haircut and then now you're looking a bit more like a bit more Australian.

[00:39:22] Chris Benetti: Yeah, those are, I do, I do need to do some more photos. Yes. Well socials is good. Smart author media.com. On that website, you'll find there's a resources tab in the menu. You can get pretty much like, like we spoke about $6,000 worth of value in, on one page. And then, there's a green button on there as well.

[00:39:42] If you wanna book a chat with me. So book marketing chat, we can, we can go through what you are doing from a book marketing perspective or what you're trying to do. We can go through your funnel and, and kind of strategize on that together. And if, if you want us to, to work together for more support, helping set that up for you and running ads for you, then obviously we can discuss that on the call as well.

[00:40:02] But it's a value, a value first based call. like I try to, to show up and give you 30 minutes of, as much value as I can. 

[00:40:10] Teddy Smith: Yeah, I think, I mean, you've give away so much for free. I mean, I've, as I mentioned, I've actually used one of your resources already and it was amazing. So yeah. Thank you for.

[00:40:18] Most welcome. Well, thanks Chris for joining the call. It's been great to chat to you and we'll speak again soon. 

[00:40:24] Chris Benetti: Awesome. I'm looking forward to it and yeah, 

[00:40:27] Teddy Smith: thanks for having me. Alright. Thank you so much for tuning into the Publishing performance podcast. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring.

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