Selling the Invisible Through Cold Email.

I love reading success stories; especially ones that stem from the evolution of global connectivity; internet.

Headlines like; Paystack hitting a billion naira in monthly transaction, or how Sam Parr of Hustle built a six figure business in six months, appeals to me a lot.

This explains why I spend hours going through Glen’s new project called Gaps. What he does on this new platform is to search for online startup and analyze their success story, taking note of the “gaps” and how readers can plug into the idea for their own benefits.

A particular idea stood out to me while going through several case studies listed on the site. It’s the idea of creating a podcast from popular medium articles. He started the company in fulfillment of his startup challenge.

He would read popular medium articles in the self development niche, literally turning the article into a podcast. He would monetize the podcast through sponsored ads.

A look at the idea makes it interesting; if everything should work out as expected (which did), then he stands a chance of making a 100% ROI of his time and effort on the new startup. Since he’s not paying to get content for the business, all he does is to reach out to authors on medium, who are more than willing to let him use their content for the podcast.

He emailed lots of sponsors (mostly in the finance niche) and after several attempts, he was able to nail down two or three sponsors that would gladly sponsor the show, even though it’s yet to launch.

After reading Glen’s article, I noticed a “gap”. He targeted the wrong set of investors/sponsors, but even at that, he had a reasonable conversion rate. I imagined how high the conversion rate would have been, had it been he had enough time to focus on pitching the right set of people.

So I decided to look into the idea with fresh eyes and see what will happen if the right sponsors are to be pitched.

I would mention the niche, with the hope that someone out there would take advantage of the opportunity that abounds in the niche and make some money from the idea.

I created a website in the supplements/nootropics niche in 2015. It was an amazon affiliate website, and the plan was to target low competition keywords in the niche, rank them with superb content and few backlinks.

The idea was superb to me at start, and I was able to write about twenty eight quality articles, but few months down the lane, I got distracted, I couldn’t market the contents properly, so the site was abandoned.

About a month ago, I got notified that the domain is due for renewal, I had a decision to make; let the domain expire, or renew and see what I can make of the site. I decided, I was going to renew if the ranking looks promising.

I checked via AHREFS, and the site looks great, it has started gaining traction, even though my content marketing effort and SEO has been nothing to write home about. So I renewed.

The timing was accurate, I decided to put a podcast page and pitch advertisers in the niche to see if I can make a business from the podcast section of the site.

I conducted the “experiment” to see if cold email still works, and also to see how hard it is to sell an invisible product using a method (cold email) that is gradually fading out.

“Invisible product” in the sense that, I was going to read out highly researched articles on supplements as a podcast, potential sponsors don’t know if the idea will sell or not, I also choose not to tell them what the Podcast will be discussing. I had no solid plan in place to make them take my proposal very serious.

But I mentioned in my email, that I was going to promote the Podcast with all my strength. That’s my USP to them; nothing but that. No product, no prototype, just a promise to deliver something awesome. After dozens of email, I got three positive feed back from potential sponsors.

The starred messages are the potential sponsors that are willing to buy at least three slots on the program.

What I offered was a 30-seconds ads during the show. And each slot is valued at $50. I know the price is ridiculously cheap, but when you factor other conditions into the equation, you would see that the price isn’t cheap. They’re willing to invest in a product without any prototype.

One of the sponsors requested for a chat via Google hangout, recommended an app for monetizing podcast, then offered to pay for 10 episodes. That’s about $500 upfront.

Another potential sponsor love the idea, and asked that I reach out when I am days from launching.

In conclusion, succeeding online is not as easy as it sounds, but still very much possible. All you need is an angle and a working theory.

If I choose to intensify my effort in reaching out to potential advertisers, I am sure I would have close a thousand dollars in revenue before the launch. This would have given me enough resources to promote the podcast.

I resolve that cold email still works, and people would willingly invest in your idea because no one can say for certain who will build the next big thing when it comes to online businesses.

Targeting small businesses makes things easy. I am not located in the United States, but I am sure If I were to live in the United States, I would have had a better conversion by calling and scheduling a meeting rather than sending cold emails.

This post is to document my effort in replicating Glen Allsopp theory on gap.

I hope someone out there will put in the effort is tearing the idea apart and making something awesome from it.

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