The $10,000 Per Month Agency Story

Part 1: The Dream 100 Hit List
Part 2: The Timmy Traffic Outreach Funnel
Part 3: Lemlist Cold Emails

At the end of the post I offer the first person to land a client using my strategy two rewards:

10 minutes later, Justin Brooke drops this comment:

I’m thinking to myself: “Great idea JBizzle, but starting from 0 sounds like a shit ton of work.”

Then one hour later 34 people have reacted to the comment.

Now I’m thinking to myself: “f**k I’m really going to have to do this now, aren’t I?”

I start writing down ideas for a service offer I’ll make.

Content promotion is a good starting spot. Everyone wants more traffic to their content.

Now I just need to focus on the biggest traffic multiplier to content. Content Multipliers, Social Media Multipliers, List Multipliers.

Yes List Multipliers, I grew the Sumo.com list to 10k/month in 5 months. I know a proven strategy to turn traffic into emails. How about --- I offer a performance based content marketing service that turns clients blog traffic into hyper-targeted leads. Bingo!

My new Three Jabs (3J) strategy is born:

Screw $1k/mo. I think I can make $10k/mo profit with this one proven strategy.

The Dream 100 Hit List

I wake up late the next morning and eat some fried rice. I want to start emailing people, but let’s be realistic:

This strategy won’t work for everyone. 

Actually it will, but if I want to charge based on performance (and have a shot at hitting $10k/mo with a handful of clients), I need to get clients with as much or more traffic than Sumo.

So, instead, I open up all the email database tools I know of. LeadFuze, BuiltWith, Datanyze, NerdyData.

My first instinct is to search the databases by tech stack.

What tools would a site with 200k+ organic traffic use? Ahrefs, Clearscope, Moz Pro.

I try all of them. None of the email databases have niche SEO tools listed in their database. WTF!?!?

Late at night (because I live in China), I get on demo calls with US sales reps and tell them my list criteria:

I need a list of websites with blogs getting over 200k organic traffic per month.

They tell me to use keyword filters like “blog” to narrow my search down to websites with blogs, but none have a traffic filter… except one:

Time to build my Dream 100 hit list!

The only problem?

Datanyze pricing starts at $600/mo. WTF Datanyze !?!?

I don’t really want to pay $600 to build a list of 100 people. 10 minutes later I find this thing called “SEMrush Rank” in the Domain Analytics section of SEMrush:

Turns out I’ve hit the jackpot. 

SEMrush Rank is amazing. 

You pick a country and it spits back a list of sites ranked by the most organic traffic.

So I export the top 10,000 sites in the United States onto a CSV on my computer.

These sites are my perfect audience. 

They’ve spent years building strong organic traffic to their sites, and I’m about to spoon feed them a proven strategy to convert that traffic into hyper-targeted leads.

For example, the business pictured below hustled from Jan 2012 to Oct 2014 (34 months) to get their first 1,000 organic visitors. Now, 7+ years after site launch, they get 261k organic visitors a month:

Getting the sites is only half the battle though.

I’ve also got to:

To do it, I copy/paste the domains from my csv file into a Google sheet, and start manually doing it myself.

Starting from the bottom (SEMrush Rank 10,000) and working my way to the top.

Slam on my headphones and listen to Drake “Started From The Bottom,” whilst I lookup site after site after site after site after site.

After four hours and 50 rows of data, I’m exhausted (and start to hate Drake).

So I type up the following message to my ex-Sumo co-worker, Magic Matt (who led Sumo’s SDR team):

Magic responds:

I hit up my homie Bar (ex-Sumo Head of Sales) and we jump on a quick 15-minute call.

Bar gives me the low-down on DataBees:

I was sold.

It’s midnight, so I quickly jump over to DataBee’s website and buy the one-week trial for $99. That gives me one full-time assistant for 40 hours.

10am the next day I check my email for something from DataBees.

Nothing. F*&k. I need leads.

So I go back to their site and use the “Schedule a Call” widget on the bottom right of the site to book a time for 11pm that night (my time).

In the meantime I record a Loom video with specific instructions on exactly what I want my DataBee to do:

On the call I send Joe from DataBee’s my Loom video and tell him to “make me honey".

Joe says his people will start building my list on Monday, and have my Dream 100 hit list done by the end of Wednesday.

Wednesday comes around, but Joe still hasn’t sent me the emails. WTF ?!?!

He sends me an email: “sorry I’ve been sick.” 

Three weeks later I get delivered a list of 81 emails in a Google sheet (with a few different marketing contacts to choose from in each company).

81 isn’t enough. So I:

1- Slam Drake “Started From The Bottom” back on and manually go through another 100 rows of company data to check they have a blog.

2- Download the Clearbit Connect chrome extension for Gmail (gives you 100 email finds per month for free). 

3- Search for the company URLs inside Clearbit to find the emails of people who work in a “Marketing” role in the company.

If I can’t find the email in Clearbit, then I:

• Search the companies on LinkedIn and try to look up “content marketing” people who work there.
• Look on the company’s “Contact”, “About”, and “Team” pages.
• Search on Google for “company.com email” to try and find the email format used at the company so I can derive the email for the decision maker.

Five hours later I have my complete Dream 100 list.

But I can’t send my emails yet. Why?

If over 10% of your emails are bad, less than 44% are delivered.

So I go over to NeverBounce and upload my CSV to analyze it for bad emails.

The results come back:

The Timmy Traffic Outreach Funnel

It’s time to build a cold email sequence.

The whole “Hey {{firstName}}, loved your blog post on {{topic}}! Would love to chat about {{product}}” is overdone.

So I ask Guillaume Moubeche from Lemlist:

I’m all over it like a fat kid with a cupcake (18 of them).

My whole Saturday is spent studying Lemlist’s cold email templates.

I read every word. Study every template. 

Then start merging my copywriting skills with some of Guillaume and Vuk’s ideas from the blog.

Open up Facebook and pretend to write a message to one of my Aussie mates: Joey Big Pig.

Copy/paste the message into a text doc on my computer and move onto email #2.

At this point, there isn’t much to tell you. There’s no magic formula to follow. Just hours on my laptop thinking “If I was on the other end of this email, how would I respond?”

The answer to that one question guides every word I write.

I write. Then rewrite. Then rewrite again. Tweaking sentences all day as I slowly read through all the Lemlist cold email templates for inspiration.

In 2015 I sent 100+ cold emails in a desperate attempt to land more clients for my ad agency. I even shot personal videos. It was time consuming and hard.

I’d just won Australia 30under30 and thought I was top shit.

Then I got slammed:

Again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

I felt like giving up, but I took the hits on the chin and kept moving forward. Haters gonna hate.

I figure if I can give context and frame the information I send in a specific way like Tai:

I’ll be able to influence decision makers judgment and decision-making to hire me.

I start mapping out Charlie Munger’s cognitive biases to every stage of my outreach funnel. Every time I get stuck I go back to YouTube and rewatch Charlie Munger’s speech on The Psychology of Human Misjudgement.

It’s Mayweather vs McGregor. I’m copywriting like Mayweather ducks in and out of punches with Philly shell shoulder rolls. Pivot hooks. Throwing haymakers. Writing hit after hit.

Word after word. Sentence after sentence. I’m becoming better at human persuasion than Tai Lopez himself. Personalizing an outreach campaign Ogilvy would be proud of. And I’m loving every second of it.

Lemlist Cold Emails

I wake up the next morning, rush over to my laptop, and create a new gmail account with the pen name “Timmy Traffic.”

This is the pen name I’m going to use to prove I can get clients with zero testimonials, zero connections, zero social followers, and zero email list.

I tell my wife, “We need to go to Starbucks and order two Grande Lattes With Extra Caramel Drizzle.”

She looks at me weird. I tell her it’s for a marketing project. She gives me that “what are you up to now?” look, but agrees to come if I take her out to a movie.

I take a shower and put on my best button-down shirt. Then jump on an hour long bus ride to town. Walk into Starbucks and tell the waitress:

She grabs two Grande size cups and asks me my name. I tell her:

Waitress looks at me weird. Asks if she can write my name on the back of the cup instead. I say “that’s fine.”

My lattes come out. I find a spot with good lightning. Then I hit my best pose while my wife takes a picture. 54 poses, three location swaps and a lil’ bit of Insta-magic later. I have “the money shot”:

Back at home, I sit down on the couch and open up Chapter 14 of The Boron Letters.

On June 25, 1984 Gary Halbert wrote a letter to his son. In it he wrote about a dirt filled plastic baggie. An “attention grabber” he attached to a real estate investment sales letter. He then tied his sales copy back to the dirt baggie in a relevant way that made sense. 

The result = cold prospects replying to his sales offer.

Then I tie my email copy back to the “attention grabber”:

Ain’t nobody gonna be calling your boi Timmy a spammer after getting this email 🙂

Get the focused attention of my prospect. Check.

Humanize cold email with a personalized image. Check.

Build rapport. Check. 

Now for Step 2.

I open up my AdSkills Ad Journal. Tell my wife to take a pic of me pointing at a blank page in the book.

Then I use it to present a personalized image with the "opportunity gap" I've found on my prospects site:

BOOM! Look at lil’ Timmy go.

To seal the deal I add a diagram of my Three Jabs strategy. Drag the company’s name and logo onto the diagram. Then make a specific ask to meet me tomorrow at 9am EST for 15 minutes.

My second email can now be answered with a simple “Yes Timmy.”

If that doesn’t land me a meeting, I’ve got a wild card up my sleeve for Step 3.

A personalized video.

One click on that video thumbnail. And my fully personalized landing page with company logo, name, first name, video and calendar magically appears:

When the video is played, I blow my prospect away with my Three Jabs strategy.

I spend five minutes giving insane value, then 30 seconds pitching my prospect to get on a call:

In the last second the video finishes, this chat box pops up:

Crazy, right? That’s the power of Lemlist.

Now, what if email one, two, AND three don’t work?

It’s time to say goodbye.

If you ain’t got time for Timmy Traffic, Timmy ain’t got time for you. Simple as that.

Like any good breakup… we let it go (deep breath in, deep breath out).

I woke up with an idea to go order Lattes at Starbucks. I’m ending the day with a 4-step cold email campaign. I’m happy. It’s done. 100% personalized. 100% automated. 100% my own voice and style. 

I hope Gary Halbert would be proud.

I hit up my buddy Guillaume (CEO at Lemlist), and ask him to hop on a call tomorrow to review my sequence. Then I fall into bed.

The next day Guillaume and I get on a Google hangout:

Guillaume gives me some killer feedback:

The only problem?

Shit.

I grab my Dream 100 list and start importing it into Lemlist.

If you want to see how many client meetings I land, enter your email below to ride along.

The form above will subscribe you to the Content Mavericks email list, send you my best traffic tips, and put you on the list to get notified about Part 4 of this case study when it goes live.

PS - Want me to buy you a copy of The Boron Letters? Guess how many meetings I land in the comments. If you’re right I’ll ship you a copy.

PPS - If you're trying to get recurring revenue clients to grow a small, profitable agency, and want a predictable system to get $3,000 to $15,000 per month clients, I teach everything I know here.