Turning Debt into a Million Dollar Business with Miles Beckler

Background

In 2009, Miles and his wife co-founded Ask-Angels, a spirituality website selling guided meditations and other meditation products. After some success, friends and colleagues started asking Miles how he was able to travel the world while working on his digital marketing projects. This prompted Miles to start his own agency offering insights and coaching via online video on how he was able to succeed as a digital marketer.

Before starting these ventures, Miles had worked in real estate, but when the global financial crisis hit, it was no longer a viable industry. He found himself with a $50,000 student loan debt and without a promising career, but he didn’t let that stop him. He felt a great surge of motivation to jump into digital marketing which offered much higher margins and much more promise.

Miles and his wife Melanie (who is also his business partner) realised that success was most likely to come if they serviced an audience. That’s when they thought of Ask-Angels. To deliver their content, his wife used keyword research and search engine optimisation on WordPress. While she hustled their content, Miles ran his agency specialising in marketing and WordPress services to support their endeavour.

Perseverance and Resilience

There’s no question that Miles is incredibly resilient. He was knocked down a few times throughout his career but managed to fight through it. He uses a “hat over the fence” analogy to describe how he’s able to keep his cool – it means to commit fully to something no matter what gets in your way.

Any challenge that Miles came up against – he was able to figure out. He even says that on the other side of the challenge is the breakthrough you’re looking for. Motivation can come from a desperate situation, whether it’s a dead end job, losing your job or just being fed up with your line of work. When Miles first got into Facebook advertising, what kept him going was visualising getting through to the other side and what that would look like. He discovered how scaleable authority businesses can really be and he now lives an incredibly rewarding lifestyle.

Building an Audience

As mobile devices become more and more prominent, face to face communication is now a very rare thing. A lot of authority businesses have tapped into the human need for a “tribe” and Miles stresses that this is an important aspect to building an audience for your business. This “tribe” is a place where people can interact with their own kind, use the same language and relate around the same topic of conversation (spirituality in Miles’ case).

Another thing Miles talks about is building trust at a large scale – how are people going to trust and continue to trust your online business? This can be a tricky part of digital marketing and is something worth looking into if you’re just beginning your business.

How To Sell Your Product

When Miles was experiencing some career difficulties with real estate, he started meditating. He then met his wife, Melanie, who also had a regular meditation practice and they bonded over their metaphysical interests. Melanie trained with a mentor in “guided meditation creation” and brought this skill to their project. What proceeded was a lot of trial and error.

Melanie created the content and Miles optimised it with keywords and kept putting it out consistently. They published their best content over and over and they eventually were picked up by Google. Miles stresses that one of the keys to getting noticed is being consistent. He followed a 90-day challenge where he posted 90 blog posts in 90 days and 120 videos in 120 days.

If you post every day and commit to it, you will get noticed.

The main products Miles and his wife sell on their website are mp3 recordings of meditations. When they first started, they’d keep track of the people visiting their site and would send them emails creating their first conversion. They then started sending out emails, offering free conference calls and other products. Through lots of testing and consistent content creation, they now receive 30,000 visits a day to their website. Currently, the website sells 180 different products such as training courses, lessons and speciality meditations.

Competitors

Miles’ brand and channel is unique enough that he can post videos only three times a week as opposed to every day. But he is aware that if someone comes along with similar information and posts every day, he could be nudged out. There are several points Miles makes about competitors:

• Stay aware of your competitors’ behaviour.
• There’s room at the top for everyone.
• If you stay focused on giving value to your audience, you will eventually become their trusted advisor.
• Do not underestimate the power of consistency.  In the early years of your business, the hard work that you put in will build trust with your audience and will no doubt pay off.

Using Facebook Ads To Your Advantage

Facebook ads can be powerful. Miles has become an expert on this type of marketing and he says the key is to tell a “story.”

A 700-800 word hero’s journey story will get a potential audience member more committed and interested in your product than a basic ad. People interested in improving their lives will either be able to envision themselves going on the same journey as the hero in the story or they won’t.

You want the right people to be invested in your product emotionally and a story is a great way to do that.

Another way Miles optimises Facebook ads is through a purchase conversion campaign; those who click on the purchase icon are added to a specific opt-in list to receive content that is more specific to them (free offers and shop-related content).

At the end of the day, Miles says long copy and video are the main types of ads that he and his team are focussing on.

What Advice Would You Give A Young Miles Beckler?

Commit fully. When he started Ask-Angels, there was a lot of doubt surrounding content and whether their website was even going to work. As soon as they both decided that this was their purpose, they fully committed to their website and things just seemed to take off. His wife started posting every day and Miles focussed more on his video content as he found he was more effective in writing than creating videos. It’s important to focus on your sweet spot – do what’s in your DNA.

Tune in for that and more on this week’s WP Elevation Podcast!