18:52Sabri Suby · Tutorial
Learn 97% of Meta Ads in Under 19 Minutes
Eight numbered hacks from a founder who claims $300M in Meta spend — and the common thread is that the creative is the targeting now.
June 12thThe argument in one line.
Digital marketing collapses into two skills that never change — capturing attention and converting it — and mastering both means studying old direct-response ads and modern swipe files instead of chasing new platforms or tools.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're starting a business or freelance offer with no audience, no ad budget, and no track record, and want a concrete sequence to follow.
- You run paid ads on Meta or Google and want a repeatable process for writing and testing creative instead of guessing at angles.
- You're building a sales page or funnel and want a structural checklist for what actually needs to be on it.
SKIP IF…
- You already run a documented ad-testing and copywriting process — this is a beginner-to-intermediate framework, not new tactics for an experienced media buyer.
- You're looking for organic or SEO content strategy — this is entirely paid-traffic and direct-response focused.
The full version, fast.
Suby argues that capturing attention and converting it are the only two skills in marketing that never change, so instead of chasing new tools you study 1960s-80s direct-response print ads and build a personal swipe file. From there: build an industry-specific swipe file from competitors' Meta Ads Library entries, research your market's pains, fears, and desires with the 'Halo Strategy,' launch five static image ads a day with broad targeting, and place your market on an awareness spectrum — from already-buying to completely unaware — so your ad angle matches their sophistication. The copy itself follows a 17-step sales-page structure, with the headline and P.S. carrying the most weight. Constant split-testing against a control, not one perfect launch, is what compounds results.
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00:00 – 00:22
01 · Cold open
Suby stakes his credentials ($7.8B in client sales from a $50 start) and previews the 11-step framework.
00:22 – 01:07
02 · Step 1 — The foundation
Argues the only two skills that never change in marketing are capturing attention and converting it.
01:07 – 03:08
03 · Step 2 — Capture attention
Study 1960s-80s direct-response print ads and build a personal swipe file of headline, subheadline, and image structure.
03:08 – 05:39
04 · Step 3 — Convert attention
Splits traffic into demand capture (search) vs. demand generation (interrupt ads), and argues demand gen is the bigger opportunity.
05:39 – 08:34
05 · Step 4 — Study modern media
Introduces the AIDA framework and Ogilvy's 'Man in the Hathaway Shirt' ad as a model for pattern-interrupt creative.
08:34 – 09:57
06 · Step 5 — Build your industry swipe file
Follow competitor ad accounts, mine Meta's Ads Library for long-running ads, and archive their landing pages.
09:57 – 11:23
07 · Step 6 — The Halo Strategy
Research a market's pains, fears, and desires from forums around one 'Colosseum keyword,' then populate a pains/fears/desires template.
11:23 – 14:11
08 · Step 7 — Launch and learn
Write five static ads a day, use broad Meta targeting, start near $20/day, and judge results by ROAS or cost-per-lead.
14:11 – 17:23
09 · Step 8 — The awareness spectrum
Places prospects on a five-stage awareness spectrum from already-buying to unconsciously unaware, and matches messaging to each stage.
17:23 – 25:04
10 · Step 9 — The 17-step selling system
Walks the full sales-page structure from headline through P.S., using a $7.8B-in-sales agency framework.
25:04 – 26:13
11 · Step 10 — Dialing in your funnel
Frames split-testing as a continuous loop against a control, tracked by CTR, CPL, ROAS, time-on-site, and conversion rate.
26:13 – 27:03
12 · Step 11 — Never stop learning
Treats every ad, including ones outside your niche, as ongoing market research.
27:03 – 27:51
13 · Outro
Suby ties the framework back to his own upbringing and points to the 17-step system PDF in the description.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The two marketing skills that never change are capturing attention and converting it — everything else is tactics that expire.
- David Ogilvy's agency reportedly made 80% of its profit from the direct-response division while 80% of ad spend went to the branded division.
- Google search ads convert around a 4% click-through rate, so 100,000 monthly searches yields roughly 4,000 clicks.
- Demand generation (interrupting cold prospects) is where the biggest money is made, even though demand capture (search) converts more easily.
- The three most-shared content types on the internet are news, findings, and gossip — ads that mimic those formats outperform ads that look like ads.
- The AIDA framework — attention, interest, desire, action — is offered as the minimum structure behind any effective ad.
- The 'Colosseum keyword' is the single search term that represents the largest volume of intent in a given niche.
- Static image ads let you test five new creative angles a day, generating far more split-test volume than shooting and editing video.
- A $20/day Meta budget (roughly $140/week) is framed as enough to test around 25 different ad creatives.
- The biggest addressable market in any niche is 'unconsciously unaware' — people who don't know they have the problem yet — but it requires the most storytelling skill to convert.
- The headline, subheadline, offer, sub-headlines, and P.S. are framed as carrying roughly 95% of a sales page's conversion weight.
- Even the highest-paid copywriters in the world reportedly hit only about a 30% success rate on the sales letters they launch.
- Bonuses are recommended to stack at two to three additional items — beyond that, more bonuses stop meaningfully improving conversion.
- True scarcity (a real, disclosed stock limit) is credited with lifting conversion rates by as much as 30%.
- A strong guarantee that removes buyer risk is credited with cutting customer acquisition cost roughly in half.
Two skills carry all of digital marketing: capturing attention and converting it.
WHAT TO LEARN
Suby's eleven-step sequence is one argument repeated eleven ways — study proven direct-response structure obsessively, then apply the same headline-offer-proof mechanics to modern paid ads and landing pages.
02Step 1 — The foundation
- Every tactic on a platform expires; the two skills under all of them — getting attention and converting it — do not, so study those instead of chasing new tools.
- Understanding buyer psychology (what triggers attention and action) is treated as more durable than any specific ad platform or funnel software.
03Step 2 — Capture attention
- Direct-response print ads from the 1960s-80s remain a usable syllabus: pull 5-10 a day and note the recurring pattern of bold headline, subheadline, then a native-looking image.
- Ads disguised as editorial content, not obviously an ad, get read more — a principle that predates digital and still applies to scroll-stopping creative today.
- A personal swipe file, built by saving ads you study daily, is positioned as more valuable than any paid course.
04Step 3 — Convert attention
- Traffic splits into demand capture (search, easy to convert but capped by existing search volume) and demand generation (interrupt ads, harder but where the largest ad spend and profit potential sits).
- A rough 4% click-through benchmark on Google search ads gives a quick way to sanity-check expected click volume from a search-volume estimate.
05Step 4 — Study modern media
- The AIDA structure — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action — is offered as the minimum viable checklist for any single ad.
- The most-shared content on social platforms is news, findings, or gossip, so ad creative mimicking those formats outperforms polished brand-style creative.
- Ogilvy's 'Man in the Hathaway Shirt' ad, built around an unexplained eye patch, is cited as proof that one unexpected visual detail can carry an entire campaign's attention-capture.
06Step 5 — Build your industry swipe file
- Follow competitor and adjacent-niche accounts until the ad algorithm surfaces their paid creative in your own feed, then screenshot everything you see repeated.
- Meta's Ads Library shows how long an ad has run; ads active for months are treated as proof the ad is profitable and worth studying closely.
07Step 6 — The Halo Strategy
- Start market research from one 'Colosseum keyword' — the single highest-volume search term in the niche — then mine forums like Reddit and Quora for emotionally-charged language.
- Organize findings into pains, fears, and desires before writing any copy, so the language in the ad and page comes from the customer's own words, not guesswork.
08Step 7 — Launch and learn
- Static image ads are prioritized over video because they're cheaper and faster to produce, allowing roughly five new angles to be tested a day instead of one polished video.
- Broad audience targeting is recommended over narrow targeting, on the premise that the platform's algorithm finds the right audience faster than manual targeting does.
- Judge ad performance by ROAS when selling a product and by cost-per-lead when generating leads, with CTR as the leading signal an angle is working.
09Step 8 — The awareness spectrum
- Prospects fall on a five-stage awareness spectrum from 'most aware' (ready to buy) to 'unconsciously unaware' (doesn't know the problem exists) — matching messaging to that stage matters as much as the offer itself.
- The most contested, most-aware end of the market responds to price and product specifics; the least-aware end responds only to story and explanation, not claims or discounts.
- The unaware end of the market is framed as the largest opportunity precisely because it requires the most storytelling skill, which keeps most competitors out of it.
10Step 9 — The 17-step selling system
- A sales page is built for one specific reader — the person who represents roughly 80% of the audience — not written to appeal broadly to everyone who lands on it.
- The headline is treated as the single highest-leverage element on the page; a benefit-driven, specific headline is favored over a generic claim.
- Value-stacking (a high anchor price before the real price) and stacking two to three bonuses both raise perceived value without changing the actual offer.
- Scarcity and a strong guarantee are treated as outsized conversion levers — a true stock-limited scarcity claim and a risk-reversing guarantee are credited with lifting conversion and cutting acquisition cost.
11Step 10 — Dialing in your funnel
- Even the highest-paid copywriters reportedly land only around a 30% hit rate on cold sales letters — a single launch failing is treated as normal, not a signal to stop.
- Tracking CTR, cost-per-lead, ROAS, time-on-site, and conversion rate together turns each new ad or page version into a testable hypothesis instead of a guess.
12Step 11 — Never stop learning
- Clicking on ads outside your own industry is treated as ongoing market research — techniques from unrelated niches are a source of new angles.
- The video frames marketing skill as compounding: assuming you've learned enough is presented as the moment growth, and earnings, stops.
Terms worth knowing.
- Demand capture
- Advertising that targets people already searching for a solution — the traffic converts more easily but is limited to existing search volume.
- Demand generation
- Advertising that interrupts people who aren't actively searching and creates desire for something they weren't looking for — a smaller barrier to entry, but where the largest ad spend and profit potential is said to live.
- AIDA
- A four-part ad-writing structure — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action — used to check that an ad moves a viewer from noticing it to acting on it.
- Colosseum keyword
- The single search term that captures the highest volume of buyer intent in a given niche, used as the seed for market research.
- Halo Strategy
- A research method that mines forums, reviews, and complaints to catalog a market's pains, fears, and desires before any copy is written.
- Godfather offer
- An offer built specific enough — guarantees, exact numbers — that a prospect feels they can't reasonably refuse it.
- ROAS
- Return on ad spend — revenue generated divided by amount spent on advertising, used to judge which ad creative to scale.
Things they pointed at.
03:08toolGoogle Image Search ("direct response ads")
09:34toolChatGPT / Claude (competitor research)
12:58toolMeta Ads Library
Lines you could clip.
00:52
“Human beings are simply chimps in disguise.”
07:40
“You wanna look at what people did on the climb, not what they're doing at the summit.”
22:38
“If you don't create urgency for somebody to buy, guess when they will buy? Never.”
25:37
“I get a severe level of anxiety if I go to bed at any given time and I don't have at least five split tests running.”
26:56
“The moment that you think that you've learned all there is to learn, that's the moment you stop learning. And the moment that you stop learning is when you stop earning.”
Word for word.
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metaphorstory
If I had to start over from zero with no audience, no money, and no reputation, and I had to learn digital marketing from scratch, this is exactly what I would do.
I went from a rented bedroom with no more than $50 to generating my clients over $7,800,000,000 in sales. And these are the 11 steps that I would take to master digital marketing if I had to start over from scratch.
Starting with step number one. The first thing that I would be telling my younger self is to close your Mac Book, to stop listening to any gurus, do not watch any more YouTube tutorials, or do any more courses. When it comes to digital marketing, the two foundational things that are never ever gonna change is one, you need the ability to go out there and to capture attention.
And the second thing is to convert that attention. If you master these two skills, you will never ever go hungry. .
And if we understand what are the triggers, what are the psychological elements that we need to use to do both of these two things, then you will never have to worry about money ever again, which is step number one, understanding the foundation, which brings us to step number two.
So how do you actually learn the skill of capturing attention? What we are going to do is we are gonna go back to the nineteen sixties, the nineteen seventies, and the nineteen eighties, and we are gonna start to basically study traditional direct response ads.
I'm talking about old school ads that were placed in newspapers and magazines. So what you wanna do is you wanna go to Google Image Search, and you want to type in direct response magazine ads, direct response print ads.
You're gonna see a whole bunch of ads from the nineteen hundreds. People that are selling skincare, jackets, suits, and even Rolls Royces.
And all you're gonna do is you're gonna read five to 10 of these ads every single day. And when you study these ads, you'll see that they all have a few key ingredients, and that is a big bold headline with a big unique hook in it, then it's followed by a sub headline, and then a native image below.
What these advertisers realized back in the day is if they crafted up an ad that looked like editorial content, that it would dramatically increase the readership of these ads. One of the greatest admin to ever live is David Ogilvie, and he ran what is still one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.
And in his agency, he basically has a brand division, and then he also had a direct response division. And he was famous of saying 80% of the profits that his clients made came from the direct response division in his business, while over 80% of the revenue and the ad dollars that they put was in the branded division. And basically, if you do a Google search for old school direct response ads, you can find people selling these swipe files online for, like, $50.60, $79.
I suggest that you buy them all and study them. The key thing here to do is to start to build a swipe file. Download all of those ads that you can find, chuck them in a folder, read them every single day for 30 And that is step number two, capture attention.
Which brings us to step number three, how do we actually convert that attention? If you have the ability to effectively sell, then you don't need to worry about being the best at traffic. And when it comes to traffic, there's only two types of traffic that exist.
The first is demand capture, and that is where you're going out and you are capturing demand that is already present in the marketplace. And I call these prospects prospects prospects with a bleeding neck.
It's not very hard to sell somebody a bottle of water when they have just completed a marathon. You don't need to be a master salesman in order to do that. But the limitation with it is there's only a certain number of people that are doing those searches every single month.
And if there are people searching for it in the tens of thousands, then Google is typically the place that we start with. It's the lowest lying fruit. It's the easiest traffic to convert.
And when it comes to Google, the rough click through rate on most ads sits at around 4%. Meaning, there's a 100,000 people searching for that every single month, you're gonna get 4% of that overall 100,000 searches, being 4,000 clicks a month.
If you're selling something that there isn't a huge amount of search traffic for, then you wanna look at demand generation. And that's where we basically put an ad out in front of a thousand people, and the job of that ad is to capture their attention and to agitate a problem that they either have that they're aware of or a problem that they're not aware of, but once we start to educate them on it, they're like, oh, yes.
That is a problem. And this is the traffic channel where all the big money is made. Don't get me wrong.
You can make good money on demand capture, but the millions are made in demand generation. But now if you're thinking, do I start with demand capture or demand gen Subri? Either I had a gun to my head or that I had to go back twenty years ago, sit down with younger Subri, and I was like, you can only work on one, I would pick demand generation.
Because even if there isn't demand, you can drum up enough demand. And when it comes to traffic online, Google and Meta, they account for more than 50% of all traffic.
If you master just Meta alone, you will be very, very rich, which brings us to step four. So now we know how to capture attention. We know how to convert attention.
Now it's time to understand, well, what is the way that I can actually put together ads right now in today's day and age? Well, in order to do that, we must look at what is the type of content that people are consuming right now. Meta put out a report every single quarter that shows us what is the most shared content on the platform, what's getting the most traffic, what are those pages.
And you'll see there are things like TMZ, they're like Lad Bible, fitness pages. We wanna look at what is the content that people are sharing and they're consuming.
Just like what they did in the nineteen sixties where they made their ads look like editorial content, we want it to look like the content that people are already consuming on the platform. And what you'll quickly realize is that the three most shared types of content on the Internet is always news, findings, or gossip.
And that's exactly what we're gonna make our ads look like. So when you put together your ad, this is the exact framework that you wanna use. The first one is a for attention.
You have to put something out that's going to get their attention. Then it needs to get their interest. It needs to be of interest to me.
We need to be talking specifically about the problems or the big benefits that that market wants. D for desire.
We want to flame the fans of desire to double click that Apple Pay and ping ping. That's exactly what we want them doing. And then we end with a, which is action.
So whether you're running ads to generate leads or you want somebody to make a purchase, we are going to tell them what we want them to do. And so when you put together an ad, you just cross off ADA, you make sure that you follow that framework, and you will already be miles ahead of 99% of advertisers.
This ad that you can see up on your screen right now is an ad by David Ogilvie, and it's called the man in the Hathaway shirt. And Ogilvie is very famous for they were going to the shoot, and it was a shoot selling these dress shirts.
And on the way, he picked up an eye patch. And when he arrived on the set, he walked up to the model, and he put the eye patch on him. And this shirt went and created record sales for the company.
And the reason that it did that is because first, it captured attention. So the way that you apply this is exactly the way that Ogilvy applied it way back then. If you think about a meta ad, you've got an image, which is your creative.
You wanna use a photo that was taken from your phone. And you might be thinking, but, Sabri, I wanna be the apple of my industry, or you might be looking at Nike and looking at all these massive companies. That is not what you want to be doing.
You wanna . And if you play that game right now, you're gonna lose your shirt and you're gonna go broke very, very quickly. And that is point number four, study modern media, which brings us to step number five.
Whatever it is that you're selling, I want you to basically start up a new Instagram account, a new Meta account, and go and basically start engaging with content and following the celebrities in that niche, the brands in that niche, and then just let the algorithm cook. And when you log in the next day, you will start to see that your news feed becomes littered with advertisers that are all selling similar products to you in your niche to your customer.
And what I want you to start doing is paying attention to the ads that you see the most frequently. And after you see the ads pop up in your newsfeed, this is exactly what it is that I want you to do.
I want you to screenshot that and immediately drag it into a folder onto your computer. The next thing that I want you to do is to click on the advertiser's name and then go to their ads library.
And I want you to pay attention to the ads that have been running for a long period of time. The beautiful thing about Meta Ads Library, Library, it shows you exactly when that ad was published and if it is still active. And if someone has been running an ad for a month, two months, three months, even a year, you know that thing is printing money.
Otherwise, you do not continue to pour money into it. We're gonna create a swipe file of all of those ads. Then we are going to go through to their landing pages, and we're gonna be reading their landing pages.
We're gonna be taking full page screenshots of their funnels and also adding that to a subfolder in our swipe file called landing pages or funnel, and we're chucking them all in there. Then you wanna keep a Google Doc of all those competitors' names. And then what I strongly suggest doing is to basically go on to Claude, go on to Chad GPT, find out who the founder is, and start doing some sniffing and detective work around to see how much revenue that they're doing.
We just wanna study the people that are between 3,000,000 and a $100,000,000, and we wanna look at their ads, we look at their funnels, and we wanna keep them in our swipe file. And that is point number five, build your industry swipe file, which brings us to the next step.
Now what we wanna do is regardless of what it is that I have got to sell, this is the exact step by step process that I do, and I literally wipe the floor with much bigger, more established competitors that have way more money than I do.
So what we wanna do is we wanna sit down with whatever the product is that we've got to sell, and we want to start doing something that I call the halo strategy. And it's where we go out and we forum forage around the Internet, and we start to do some private detective work and find out exactly the pains, fears, hopes, dreams of our marketplace.
What is the number one keyword that people would be searching in order to find what it is that I am trying to sell? And I call this the Colosseum keyword. There's always gonna be one keyword that represents the most amount of traffic in your niche, and you wanna type that in.
You wanna type in digital marketing. You wanna type in protein powders. Then you wanna go over to forums like Reddit, Quora, where you're literally looking for the most emotionally charged comments that people are leaving on these comments.
It could be the complaints. It could be the things that they're searching for. It could be reviews that they've left about other products they've bought.
And you wanna take all of that information, and you wanna start to populate this template you can see on the screen called the Halo strategy, where you put all the pains in one section, all the fears in another section, all their desires in another section, and you start to flesh this up. This is literally how you can go from being an absolute newbie and knowing absolutely nothing about the product or industry that you serve.
And with a number of days, if not hours, you can know more than pretty much anyone knows in that niche. And that is point number six, the halo strategy. How do we actually launch ads and really master this traffic channel?
You are gonna suck unless you get a lot of reps in. So in order to get good, we have to first get frequent. Frequent.
And so if I had to run one type of ad creative, it is only going to be static ads. What we are going to be doing is we are gonna be writing five new ads every single day. And the reason that I love image ads is because you can split test them very, very frequently.
You can test different angles. You can get feedback from the market of what works and what doesn't a lot quicker than sitting down, shooting a video, editing it, putting it out there. I can do 100 times more volume with static ads.
When it comes to the technical stuff and the targeting and the budgets and all of those kind of things, we're not gonna mess around with any of that. We are gonna use broad targeting because Meta's algorithm is so advanced that you can literally put in America, Australia, Germany, and it will determine exactly who that ad is trying to target, and it will do all the heavy lifting for you.
In terms of budget, there's no hard and fast rule. I recommend starting with something like $20 a day. It's roughly around a $140 a week, give or take.
That will allow you to test around 25 different creators. 20 five is a nice clear number for you. We are first gonna look at are we generating leads or are we selling product?
If we're selling products, we're gonna look at the ROAS. Which ad that I am producing that is giving me the highest ROAS? If it's leads, we're gonna look at which of the ads that I'm running that gives me the lowest cost per lead.
So they're the primary metrics that we wanna look at, and we're also gonna be looking at what message, what ad that I'm putting out that has the highest CTR. Because more people are clicking on it to find out more information, which is exactly the goal of the ad.
So if you can see that there's an ad angle that's getting a disproportionate click through rate, that is a good clue that this is a good angle. And then you wanna make sure that that is also present on your landing page. And you might be thinking, hey.
I just jump on a Claude sub brick and just write my ads, and away I go. No. No.
No. No. No.
No. Everybody that doesn't know what they're doing, they use AI, and they feel like it's good.
If you don't know what a good ad looks like and you don't know how to write one yourself, every time you get an output from Claude or ChatGPT, you don't know if it's good. Right? You're like, that looks great, and you run it, and you're just gonna burn money.
You first need to know what good looks like. So when you get an output, you can discern very quickly, is this crap or is it good? And that is step number seven, launch and learn.
So one of the most important things with becoming in the top 1% of digital marketers in the world is to be a student of markets. And once you do that, you're gonna realize that there are certain different markets that react in certain ways, And this all comes down to the market sophistication and competition continuum.
So let me run you through all the different states of awareness in any given market. So the first one is, like, these guys are already sold. Like, they are buying now.
They are completely sold that your solution is exactly what it is that they've been looking for. And because this market is so easy to convert, most of the ad dollars flow into this market, and it has its limitation around scale. Next, you've got people that are product or service aware.
So they know, like, options like yours exist. That market is not as small. It's getting a little bit bigger here.
But these people, again, it doesn't take much to convince these people. And then the next up is solution aware. So these people, they are seeking solution to pain that they have already got.
Then we've got problem aware. They're not aware of all the solutions that exist in the marketplace. They know that they have a problem, but they haven't gone further down the rabbit hole to start to research what all the different solutions are.
And this market is starting to get enormously bigger than the first couple of markets. Then we go to the biggest market of all, which is unconsciously unaware.
So these people aren't feeling any pain. They're not even aware that they have an issue. However, they could be a great candidate for whatever it is that you're selling.
Have you ever woken up in the morning, not even aware that you were gonna buy something, and then seen an ad, and for some reason got sucked into that thing, and you ended up buying? This happened to me when I bought a spinning top that is sitting on my desk. I didn't wake up in the morning and think, today's the day I'm gonna buy a spinning top.
And in any given market, this is the biggest opportunity. It represents the largest blue ocean of any market, but it requires the greatest level of skill. So the people that are buying right now, that is the red ocean.
That is the most contested. All the advertisers flow in there. All the ad dollars fly in there.
Then you have the orange ocean, and they're people that are problem aware. They're even a little bit solution aware. It's not as contested, but there is still remnants of blood.
That's why it is not blue. So when it comes to aware, the red end of the spectrum, the things that these people respond to is things that are product, service, and price. It's like, basically, what is it that you've got to sell?
How much is it gonna cost me? Is there some kind of incentive or offer bundle for me to buy it right now? The middle orange market, these guys are gonna respond to claims and proof, and we are gonna basically be using hero mechanisms to differentiate what it is that we've got and how it's different from all the other solutions that they might be researching right now.
Then in the blue uncontested unaware market, these guys are gonna basically be responding the most to explanation and storytelling.
It's basically you need to take someone from who the hell are you to shut up and take my money, and the best way to do that is through story. You must understand that people are at different places, and you must meet them where they are. And that is step number eight, the market sophistication and competition continuum, which brings us to step number nine.
Now it's time to take all of those insights and to assemble the copy using my 17 step secret selling system. And I have personally used this framework in agency for over 2,000 funnels to generate my clients over $7,800,000,000 in sales.
So it first starts out with calling out your audience. Pick the person that accounts for 80 of your revenue and write your sales page directly for that person.
It doesn't mean that it's not gonna convert other people, but you wanna speak specifically to the bulk of your market. Step number two, this is the most important element of the entire funnel and the selling system. It is the headline.
And when it comes to headline, the thing that is very hard to beat nine out of 10 times is a big bold benefit headline. I e, if you operate in a weight loss market, you can't just say in your headline, lose weight. That is an old offer for a market that is far too sophisticated.
Instead, what you'd wanna do is say, lose 10 k g's in six weeks guaranteed. The job of your headline is to stop your prospect in their tracks and demand attention for them to read the next part of the landing page, which brings us to the third step, which is to back up, expand, and support the main big benefit that you've talked about in your headline in your subheadline.
Is when you give a little bit more details, however, still not the full picture, that once the prospect starts reading, it just glides them through the copy. Which brings us to the fourth point, which is to create irresistible intrigue.
The things that people pay attention to are things that are new and novel and that are intriguing. So you can't lay out your hand and tell your prospect absolutely everything in the jump. You need to slowly unravel the story and the messaging by intriguing them, opening up loops, using copy that then opens another question in their mind, and the only way that they can answer that question is to keep on reading your landing page.
Which brings us to step number five, which is to shine a floodlight on their problem. People are much more motivated to move away from pain than they are towards pleasure. And so you're building up all of this, like, pain and pressure in it where it's like, they're just so thirsty by the end of this.
They're like, just give me the solution. I know that you got the solution because you understand all the problems, and you wouldn't be doing this unless you have the solution, which brings us to step number six, which is to reveal our solutions, how it addresses all the problems with the existing solutions in the marketplace, because that's what people want, and that's exactly what it is we're gonna give them.
Which brings us to the next step, which is point number seven. And this is where we lay out our credentials. Whatever gives you the authority to be actually selling the thing, this is what you want to lean on.
Other credentials can be former clients that you've worked with, case studies, results, any unquestionable proof that the claims that you're making are going to deliver or they have delivered for other people. Which brings us to step number eight, which is to detail the benefits.
What I want you to do is I want you just to create a very basic two column spreadsheet and list out all of the features of everything that you've got. And then next to it, write the corresponding benefit of what somebody gets from that feature.
And the only thing that I want you doing in your copy is talking about the benefits, not talking about the features, which brings us to step number nine, which is social proof. You need to use every single trick that you have up your sleeve.
I'm talking about so much unquestionable proof that you could convince a jury. That is literally the mindset that you must get in, which brings us to step number 10.
You need to have something that I call a godfather offer, which is an offer that is so good that your prospect simply can't refuse it. And in order for your godfather offer to be compelling, it needs to be specific. We guarantee to increase your revenue by 43% or you don't pay, which brings us to step number 11.
We need to now stack bonuses. So you wanna think about what is a bonus in your marketplace that you could offer that your competitors are selling that you can simply stack on as an additional bonus to your main offer.
The more bonuses that you add, the higher your conversion rates will be. However, the sweet spot is around two to three additional bonuses, which brings us to step number 12, which is to stack the value. Realistically, this is what this would cost.
And then you start with that high price, but it's not that price. It's actually not half of that price. It is just 20% of that price.
It just increases the desire for them to want it even more because they were sold at the higher price point, which brings us to step number 13, which is when we actually reveal what our price is. We've built up the value.
Now it's to actually come out and say, but you're not gonna pay anything close to that. This price is just x, y, and z. It's all about value based marketing and providing value to each and every prospect and treating them as if they are a paying client before they even give you a cent.
We're gonna say get a thirty minute, a forty five minute, a sixty minute free consult. And we are genuinely gonna deliver that level of value on that call as well.
Which brings us to step number 14, which is to inject scarcity. If you don't create urgency for somebody to buy, guess when they will buy?
Never. So you must increase scarcity. If you've only got 15 items in stock, you've only got 15 items in stock, so let it be known.
I have seen this increase the conversion rates of upwards of 30%, which brings us to step number 15, which is to give a powerful guarantee. So in any transaction, there is risk present.
And guess what we get in exchange for burning that risk? Sky high conversion rates, and we get to slash our customer acquisition cost usually in half. This brings us to step number 16, which is to insert your call to action.
You want to tell people what to do. These are all the steps that are involved. Break it down in forensic like detail, and it needs to be the tightest.
This is what we call offer copy, where they can read it and they don't need to interpret what you want them to do. They know without a shadow of a doubt what they need to do. Which brings us to the seventeenth and final point, which is to add a PS.
It's like the TLDR, where you get to summarize everything on there, the risk reversal, and it's like a micro little landing page within the PS itself. It's like the final kick of the bruise knee that prompts somebody to act.
And there you have it. That is Sabri Subi's 17 step secret selling system.
But when we're thinking about where do we emphasize, where do we spend a disproportionate amount of our time when we're assembling this? So these are the elements that literally carry 95% of all freight in your funnel.
First, as I've covered already, is the headline, then the sub headline, form what we call the headline complex. If no one reads the headline, they're not gonna read any other element of your entire landing page.
Then the next point is the offer, because this is ultimately what it is that we're offering and that we're trying to sell. The next point is the sub headlines.
These are the sub headlines that are sprinkled all the way through the page. And the way that I think about these is they are additional little hooks. You imagine that you've got somebody that's scrolling, those sub headlines need to open up so much curiosity and so much specificity that it stops them, and they have to kinda read it again.
Then the fifth and final point is the PS. I've already gone through why it's so important. You need to do a very, very good job at summarizing everything and also assigning a cost to your prospect doing nothing.
And that is step number nine, my 17 step secret selling system, which brings us to step number 10. The highest paid copywriters in the world, the guys that get paid $200,000 to write a sales letter, these guys have a 30% hit rate.
The best guys in the world, they do all of this. They write the sales letter. They launch it, and 70% of the time, it fails.
So this is a long journey to get to. If you wanna be making the fortunes, that is what's required. If you want a breakthrough outcome, you've gotta put in a breakthrough effort.
Then you wanna look at all of these numbers, your CTR, CPL, ROAS, time on-site, conversion rates, and you basically wanna come up with a hypothesis of what is happening in your funnel.
And then as you run more split tests, you're basically creating a new hypothesis and going, okay. Let's test this against the control. And you continue that loop forever.
I get a severe level of anxiety if I go to bed at any given time and I don't have at least five split tests running. So if you do this, you will continuously be making more and more money each year.
And that is step number 10, which is dialing in your funnel. And this is the real skill in digital marketing, which brings us to the eleventh and final step.
You are now a marketer. And as a marketer, you need to be a student of markets.
So even when you see an ad that is completely unrelated to what it is that you sell, you must click on that ad because it is all market research. And oftentimes, you get one or two things from another industry, and then you apply it to your industry.
And the moment that you think that you've learned all there is to learn, that's the moment you stop learning. And the moment that you stop learning is when you stop earning. And while the technology changes, the psychology doesn't.
So dedicate yourself to being a life long learner. Those skills are gonna compound throughout your career and through the rest of your life, and you will make more money than you know what to do with, which is step number 11, never stop learning. And if you wonder, hey, why am I making these videos?
Why is this Shark Tank dude putting out all this content on YouTube? I grew up in a single parent household that had a lack of money. And I said to myself, if I ever get to the stage where I have an abundance of money, I am gonna send the elevator back down.
And if one of these videos can help one of the people watching, then all of the content that I put out is worth it. This is everything that I wish I knew when I was getting started. And if you follow these steps, you will get to where I am and fast surpass me a whole lot quicker than it took me.
And just as a parting gift, I have included my 17 step secret selling system as a link in the description. And if you liked this video, you're gonna absolutely love this one, which is seventeen years of marketing advice in forty six minutes. Like, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Sabri Suby opens by staking his authority on a number: clients he's advised have generated over $7.8 billion in sales, starting from a rented bedroom with less than $50 to his name. What follows isn't platform-specific tricks — it's the eleven-step sequence he says he'd personally re-run if he lost everything and had to rebuild from scratch.
Named ideas worth stealing.
06:07acronym
AIDA
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
The four-part checklist applied to any single ad: get noticed, earn interest by naming the market's problem or benefit, build desire, then give a clear action.
Steal forstructuring any Meta or Google ad creative
09:57model
The Halo Strategy
- Pains
- Fears
- Desires
A market-research template built from forum and review mining around one seed keyword, sorted into pains, fears, and desires before any copy is written.
Steal formarket research before writing sales copy for an unfamiliar niche
14:11model
The Awareness Spectrum
- Most aware
- Product aware
- Solution aware
- Problem aware
- Unconsciously unaware
A five-stage model of how close a prospect already is to buying, used to decide whether an ad should lead with price, proof, or story.
Steal formatching ad angle and offer messaging to how sophisticated a market already is
17:23list
The 17-Step Secret Selling System
- Call out your audience
- Headline
- Back up your promise (subheadline)
- Create intrigue
- Shine a floodlight on the problem
- Reveal the solution
- Show credentials
- Detail the benefits
- Social proof
- Godfather offer
- Add bonuses
- Stack the value
- Reveal the price
- Inject scarcity
- Give a guarantee
- Insert the call to action
- Add a P.S.
A 17-step sales-page structure used across 2,000+ client funnels, in order from calling out the reader to closing with a P.S.
Steal forstructuring any long-form sales page or landing page
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
27:40link
“I have included my 17 step secret selling system as a link in the description”
Soft CTA delivered as a value bonus rather than a hard pitch, paired with a like/subscribe ask and a next-video recommendation.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
