Jesse Jacobs, an ASM 2 student, was recently featured on Good Morning America for a baking life hack. After seeing Jesse share this in our Amazing.com Community, we had to reach out and see how he did it. We found out Jesse has struggled with getting his business up and running, but believes that this is his big break, now that he’s getting a lot more traffic to his YouTube show. Read his story and find out how Good Morning America found him, what advice he has for those of you looking to get mentioned in national media, how to use YouTube as a sales funnel, and the most important part about believing in yourself.
Jesse’s Amazing Selling Machine Story
Amazing Selling Machine found me at the perfect time in my life. Right when I was going through a stressful time in my personal life is when I found Amazing Selling Machine. I had just a little bit of money and I showed my parents and I convinced them to go ?halfsies? with me and we bought the course.
My parents are entrepreneurs too, so we were all going to do it together. When I started I was very, very ambitious. Every single week as the modules were going up, I would instantly hop on it. I actually got my product up and running very quickly. It didn’t take me a long time. I think it was like October or late September or something like that whenever the course started and I had my products in by November something. I think it was either on or right before Black Friday. That’s whenever I went live.
The first product that I chose was a very, very competitive baking product. I sold just the regular competitive product with just my logo and name printed on it. That was kind of a dud. I didn’t sell any of them, not a single one. I got my reviews up. I went through and I followed pretty much everything up until module six. Once I got to seven and eight, the only thing I hadn’t done was the YouTube video.
I had this great idea …everyone sells this ?product?, but if you can print a logo on it why can’t you print measurements or baking tips on it?
Creating a Sales Funnel with a YouTube Channel
I then got the idea…What if I make a whole YouTube channel, like a cooking channel or a food channel, and just basically make baked goods on my product? That way, instead of just giving away a recipe guide, I could tell my customers join our YouTube channel and every day you’ll see new ways that you can use your product.
One of my posts went a little viral in the ASM community. It was the 21-day press release strategy. I was doing press releases like crazy. Nothing was happening and basically I had gone through my budget. After the second live event, about a few months later I had saved up enough money from my job and I decided I want to quit and just dedicate myself full time into this.
I wanted to create this YouTube channel. I had a great idea. I decided to build this YouTube channel as a sales funnel. I put a little fifteen minute commercial on every single one of my YouTube videos saying this is the product that we’re using in the video. If you want to learn more about it just click here. That would lead to a sales video and the sales video would lead them to Amazon.
I set up a studio. I invested in lights and cameras and production equipment because I really wanted to have a very high quality look to my YouTube channel. It was also at this time that I realized a deeper goal I had of what I really wanted to do with the YouTube channel. I’ve always been very passionate about food; well, not just food, but I guess nutrition and healthy living. The main brand I want to develop is one in the health and fitness niche.
I’ve always been passionate about the food industry and healthy food and teaching nutrition and inspiring people to cook, because I guess in my philosophy cooking is very important and we kind of depend on processed and synthetic foods. I wanted to find a smaller niche with my YouTube channel. That was really inspiring. That got me to start making more videos and expand the original idea I had for the baking channel, which was just a couple of videos to get sales to a whole network of videos that acts as an online cooking school.
Good Morning America Finds Jesse’s YouTube Channel
Once I launched the YouTube channel, that’s whenever Good Morning America found me. They had found one of my videos on YouTube, one of my baking hacks, and they reached out me.
That was the first validation that my hard work was really paying off. Ever since ASM 2 started, I’ve been working very hard.
I had a lot of really big dreams with this and I still have a lot of faith in myself and my abilities. Because of what I was able to achieve with Good Morning America, everything has changed because I can use that name. I can use this as a huge opportunity for growth.
What I got from Good Morning America was proof that the quality of my work, of what I’ve been doing is actually good enough, decent enough to be represented by a national TV network. And if I keep this up?I have what it takes.
The Importance of Search Optimization on YouTube
My advice is if you want to be featured by media, put your effort into search optimization, keywords, basically make sure that you design and engineer your videos to a point where they can be seen. That means you’re paying attention to optimizing your titles, your descriptions. All of that makes a huge difference and is how Good Morning America found me.
The Importance of Continuously Learning and Improving
Just constantly keep learning. No matter how much you think you know, always look at what you have and see how can you redesign it, how can you optimize your systems to get the highest return on your investment.
The Importance of Quality
The secret to my version of success is quality. I put a lot of focus and attention and detail on quality. If you have quality, you have security. If you don’t have the subscribers, if you don’t have that edge, what you can do is you can have really, really good quality content. If you have quality content and you have a quality product, then you have a better chance with potential partners and media outlets.
Most Important of All: How to Believe in Yourself
Know why you’re doing what you’re doing. I always had that in mind, because that’s the only way I was able to not give up on this, was I was so sold on believing in myself
When it comes to believing in yourself, our instinct is to think that we have to succeed or we have to accomplish something or we have to make it in order to believe in ourselves. What I realized is that you have to believe in yourself in order to succeed, not the other way around.