Brad Griffin Talks WooConf

WooCommerce Season 2 Ep 2

Gary Leland Show with Brad Griffin WooCommerce Expert” height=”200″ />Gary Leland Show Episode 22

On episode twenty two I continue the WooCommerce Season. I am joined by Brad Griffin. We talk about WooCommerce, WooConf and much more. – Produced By Gary Leland

Brad Griffin is a WooCommerce expert, and runs BradGriffin.me.

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WordPress & WooCommerce With Jaime Jay

WooCommerce Season 2 Ep 1

Wordpress & WooCommerce With Jaime JayGary Leland Show Episode 21

On episode twenty one I start the WooCommerce Season. I am joined by Jaime Jay as we talk about WordPress and much more. – Produced By Gary Leland

Jaime Jay is a WordPress expert, and runs SlapshotStudio.com.

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Talking WordPress with Leslie Samuels

Season 1 Ep 19

Talking WordPress with Leslie Samuel
Gary Leland Show Episode 19

This week I talk with Leslie Samuels of www.becomeablogger.com about WordPress, Woo-commerce, and more blogging advice. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Joe Youngblood Tells Us Why Google Hates Me

Season 1 Ep 18

Google Hates Me, and Joe Youngblood Tells Us Why
Gary Leland Show Episode 18

This week I talk SEO with expert Joe Youngblood of WinnerWinnerChickenDinner.co, and JoeYoungblood.com. Joe joins me to tell me why Google hates my websites. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Talking Social Media with Vernon Ross

Season 1 Ep 17

Talking Social Media With Vernon Ross
Gary Leland Show Episode 17
This week I talk social media with Vernon Ross of VernonRoss.com. I was very happy to have a friend of mine from the DFW area join me on this episode. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Talking Twitter With Gary Loper

Season 1 Ep 16

Talking Twitter With Gary Loper
Gary Leland Show Episode 16

This week I talk about Twitter with Gary Loper of GaryLoper.com – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Leland: Gary thanks for joining me on the show!

Loper: It’s my pleasure! It’s my mission to help people understand what Twitter is and how they can utilize it in their lives and businesses.

Leland: I was asking around to find out who the Twitter expert would be that I could interview and your name came up several times, so I found you there at twitter.com/garyloper and you have 129,000 followers. That’s an expert mode to me!

Loper: I got on early and found ways to get people on there to follow me, by providing great information and I will provide some of those tips along the way. There are some secrets in there of ways to do things, which is one of the services I provide to my clients, is managing their accounts to be able to attract followers and create a bigger audience.

Leland: With so much social media it’s hard to find time to do it all.

Loper: A complication with that are all of the rabbit holes you can fall into. You can probably do all of the things you need to do on Twitter in 2 twenty-minute segments a day if you have less than 50,000 followers. All you have to do is go on, post a few tweets, retweet a few things, comment on a couple of tweets, and you have an established presence. When you start to head above 50,000, it will start to take more time and you may have to train someone on your staff who is familiar with what you are trying to do and allow them to answer tweets in your voice, which is very hard to do. I always tell my clients that the voice is the authentic part of the business that a lot of people don’t realize. This is a people-to-people business and people want to connect with a live person who is the voice of the company.

Leland: So do you think that is why my Twitter is so low? I just send out content basically. I have 22,000 followers, but only follow 23 people.

Loper: What you would look at is that a lot of people are doing the same thing, using a broadcast method. Those niche people who are attracted to your material are going to come and find it but they may not be looking for engagement. If you want to build your business on Twitter, I look at social media as having leveled the playing field. A great example is that I am a student to Bob Berg who is a good friend of mine and business partner. He has the golden rule of business networking, which is a very important thing to remember: all things being equal, people are going to do business with and refer business to people they know, like, and trust. With social media, we have the opportunity with the personal engagement and way that we tweet that creates and unequal advantage in our favor. When they have a need for our products and services, we are in the front of their mind. What’s great is that if you build that rapport and build a larger audience, that if your audience does not need you, but you have built that relationship with them, they are going to be able to refer you to the people that they know which leads to exponential growth in marketing aspects.

Leland: When you say it like that it becomes common sense.

Loper: There are a lot of marketers on social media now who use those 1960’s sales tactics of broadcasting the product. Again, consumers have so many options both on and off line, so you have to make that connection and give them a reason to connect with you. Another important thing to consider is extending your personality. I have a client who is a coach, but is a really big Star Wars fan as well. One day he tweeted some Star Wars quotes and he started to make connections with people based on Star Wars because there was a common bridge. People, whether for business or personal needs, are always looking for a connection and validation. If we give them a little bit of a seed of who we are or why they can connect with us, then it is just like a magnet that got turned on.

Leland: Let’s start with some details. I have our pages side by side right now. You have over 100,000 followers and also follow over 100,000 people. Are you saying that I need to start following people so I can interact with them? Because I only follow 23 people, I’m not interacting with a lot of people who follow me.

Loper: Right, because you can only see the post from those 23 people and you want to be able to interact with some of the people who followed you by following them back. Even determine who your audience and market is and start to attract them to your page and start to follow them back. I think when people see account disparities like that; they think that the owner of that page is not interested in having a conversation with anyone. I really believe that Twitter is so important because it touches people. Any audience you go to, about half of them who have their heads down and are taking notes. The same thing is true on Twitter. The number I heard is that 40% of all active users, which is around 300 million a day, are observing. They are watching us to see how we interact with other people because the way that I interact with my audience is probably how I will interact with them. That creates the unequal advantage because they may want to work with me or refer me based on that.

Leland: I guess my first step is to go to my followers list, because they already like what I post, and start to follow them back and get involved with them. If I start to do that then they will be more inclined to refer me to other people.

Loper: Absolutely. You will be able to go into your notifications column and you will be able to see who has retweeted your posts and who has favorited your posts. Those are the people who you should be following back first because they are already showing you that they support what you are doing and what you are putting out there. Back in the early days of Twitter I would spend probably an hour a day thanking each person who retweeted, mentioned, and commented to me. I think that is what differentiated me from everyone else. People saw that I took the time to interact with them and that helped me from the beginning.

Leland: I noticed on your Twitter page, that your header has all of your information.

Loper: This is probably where I spend the most time with my clients for the first half of our time together working on the first impression. If someone clicks onto your site, you have 4 to 10 seconds who you are, what you do, what you can do for them, and what they can do next. A lot of people just have a pretty picture up there that they haven’t updated in two years. We restated our profile to the center of that banner because the profile is below the picture and not really with natural eye movement. It’s also important that the profile is also SEO, so the words you put on that profile, should be the same words you use on your website because you assume that if someone does an Internet search for you they will put those same words in the search engine. If people don’t see a reason to stick around and interact with you, they will move on because it is all about them and what interests them. We have to be focused on what is in it for that client or customer. What problems are they looking to solve and if we address the way we tweet, it gives them more reason so stay and check us out.

Leland: You mentioned earlier that for those of us with smaller accounts, we should spend 2 twenty-minute sessions on Twitter. What exactly should we be doing and in what amounts?

Loper: You should spend that time retweeting other people’s content about 5-7 times because it shows your audience that it is not all about you and that you will share good content that is not yours. I share a lot of the motivational quotes because those enhance people’s lives. A way to do this easily is to start making lists of people who consistently put out great content. That way I can go to the list when I need something to retweet and don’t have to spend a long time trying to find it. I have several different lists based upon interest, so some lists are bigger than others.

Leland: I sure like your header with this information and links on here. You have short links for free books you give out and I assume that when they follow the link to get the book they sign up for your mailing list as well. On the right here it says Gary’s Networking Party, what’s that?

Loper: A Twitter party is an incredible way to build and audience, build rapport, build a presence, and build a community. It’s basically like a chat room from back in the day, where people would join a conversation about a topic they have an interest in. What we do once a month is a two-hour Twitter party, which are all themed. You follow the party by hash tag. My hash tag is #GLTP, which Twitter uses as a search tool. This is one of the things I love about Twitter is that it’s a huge networking event. When you go to a networking event, you don’t spend all day trying to figure out what every little cluster of people are talking about. You try to find the conversation people are having over a topic you want to learn more about or you want to add to. Twitter works the same way when you use the search box because you can narrow down to the conversation you want to have. I think that is where a lot of people get frustrated is by trying to keep up with everything instead of focusing on what you are interested in.

Leland: So since I am a huge fan of softball, I should look up #softball a couple of times a day to see who is talking about it and what they are talking about.
Loper: Yes absolutely, and you can save that to your lists so it’s waiting for you every day to look at.
Leland: So you’re saying that anyone who is trying to market online is missing the boat if they are not working Twitter for a little bit of time every day?

Loper: Yes it is. It has grown exponentially since the beginning. Some of the numbers I saw on marketing estimates said that by 2020 Internet marketing should increase by 500%. If you’re not on now and creating the presence, carving a niche, and building the relationships with these potential customers and referring ambassadors, you will be way behind when the rest of the world gets on. You have to establish yourself and your business. You will struggle trying to catch up by that time; it’s already hard to catch up!

Leland: What is the secret on being found on Twitter?

Loper: In your profile, you want to have the words people would use in and Internet search to find you, you want to use those hash tags, and you want to put up links for a new blog 5 to 6 times after you put it up, not just once. The reason for that is because we are trying to connect with people in their search to solve their problems. When we blog, the title can have one of two responses: tell me more or so what. You probably look at your email and 95% of it is under the so what category. Look at your blog post and pick out a few different things that people could be looking for because that is what they will search for. Make sure your profile is recent and has a picture because it makes you real as a person. Your business logo may resonate with you but it doesn’t necessarily with your audience. Let your smile be your logo and let them connect with you that way.

Leland: How does sharing a tweet make me get found by other people? Doesn’t it just get shared with my people who already follow me?
Loper: If I find your tweet that you shared and I share it, then my followers might go check you out because it says that I retweeted that tweet from you. It’s important to remember that every tweet is like a mini web page, so it will always be there. Twitter now has a deal with Google that tweets will be Google indexed, so a lot of the tweets will show up in Google searches if you use those SEO keywords. Retweeting is also a way to show people who your mentors are and who has influenced you. Figure out what you purpose is going to be on Twitter and stick with it.

Leland: That makes much more sense to me; that’s a double win to me!

Loper: Your lists also can show who you are. I would have more lists of other things that I am interested in, but they are not in line with my online persona. Sometimes I even have who would be deemed competitors in a list so I can see what they are doing. I want to see what they are doing well so I can do it better and I want to see what they are not doing at all so I can exceed them. Another good use is if you want to follow a celebrity because they don’t follow a lot of people back. If you put them in a list, you don’t have to follow them and they won’t count against Twitter’s 10% rule.

Leland: What is the 10% rule; I’m not sure what that is.

Loper: When you first get on Twitter, you can follow as many people as you want until you get to 2,000. When you get to 2,000, then the people who are following you back has to be in a 10% ratio with those you are following in order to follow any more people. So if you’re following 2,000 people, 1,801 have to be following you back to add one more person. This is one of the things I share in my e-book, “Mastering the Twitterverse”, which you can get at garyloper.com in the center column. With any list in business, 1/3 of the list is outdated and the same thing happens on Twitter. 1/3 of the people who are following me on Twitter are no longer there or no longer active. You want to be able to flush those people out so you can work with that 10% rule. I give some pointers in the book of how to flush those people out of your account.

Leland: That makes perfect sense. You have given me a lot of great information today. It sounds like to me that it would be smart for people to get the free e-books and newsletter from you. That doesn’t hurt anyone.

Loper: If you’re serious about learning how to get the most out of your Twitter account and see what’s next for you, then I would like to offer a free 30 minute consultation where we look at your page and see how we can improve your Twitter persona. If you go to bit.ly/ReviewTwitter you can get on my calendar to schedule a time to take a look at your Twitter. If you feel that it is something you want to go forward with, then we can partner up and move forward together.

Leland: Thank you for coming on and talking to me today. We already know we can reach you on twitter.com/garyloper and on garyloper.com. Is there anything else you would like to direct people to or let them know about?

Loper: That is the best way to find me. If you go to my website and click the contact button you can email me directly.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Talking Google Plus with Lynette Young

Season 1 Ep 15

Talking Google Plus With Lynette Young
Gary Leland Show Episode 15
This week I talk about Google Plus with Lynette Young of Purple Stripe Media – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Lynette, welcome back to the show! I was looking at your Google Plus page today and you have 1.5 million followers, which has to put you as an authority in the world of Google Plus.

Lynette: There are some tricks that work across most social platforms, so we can probably talk about some of those here today.

Gary: Absolutely. Why should we be looking at Google Plus?

Lynette: Its funny that you bring that up because it has not been as much in favor with the general marketing public or even the general public as Twitter or Facebook, but I find that Google Plus is best used by brick and mortar stores. If you think about it, it’s a whole Google ecosystem. They own Google Maps and on Google Maps is Google Local. Google Plus hooks into Google Local, which are all of the pins on the map. So when I go and search for a restaurant in an area, you can hook all of your Google Plus into your Google Maps so that it spans across all of the Google properties, which makes it kind of seamless. In my opinion its one stop shopping for getting your online presence out there and working for you.

Gary: I didn’t know it was that incredible for this! But aren’t there two kinds of Google Plus pages aren’t there? Like one for me as a person and one for me as a business?

Lynette: Well there are three when you think about it. It has the regular profile for the person, an organization page, and the local page. The local page has a lot more functionality because you are a physical location, you can take reviews, you can put directions in there, your own photographs, and you can control what they see about you.

Gary: Ok so I need to get into the right one. How do I know the difference between the three? How do I know if I have the right page?

Lynette: When you first go into Google Plus, you are always going in under your profile. If you look at the upper hand left part of the screen, there is a little blue icon with a person in it and that just shows that you are on your personal page. If you scroll down a little, there is a drop down menu for your pages. When you set up your page that is when you get to choose if you are a business entity or if you are physical location. It’s set up similarly to Facebook, so you do have to set it up in the beginning.

Gary: I spent so much time on Google Plus that I didn’t even realize that when I put an image into one of my communities it automatically comes onto my page.

Lynette: It can because you have allowed that in your security settings. The nice thing is that you can go into your security settings and get pretty granular with it. I think it is pretty solid, but everyone has their own ideas of solid internet security. It doesn’t seem to want to trick you into exposing all of your information so you can go in there and choose where you want your pictures to show up. I have to agree though, that once you are in it so long you get blind to everything else that exists because you go on there for specific things.

Gary: I had been posting a picture of the day on my personal page, my Facebook page, and my community page and didn’t realize that it was posting twice. People must have been getting tired of seeing the same picture twice on my Google Plus and community pages!

Lynette: Here is a big difference between Google Plus and Facebook. I personally feel that Google Plus behaves more like Twitter. When you think about your Facebook wall, like mine for instance at facebook.com/lynetteradio, you see everything that I allow on my wall. If you remember years ago when people would spam people’s walls just to gain the eyeballs of the people on their page. That doesn’t really exist in Google Plus. On my Google Plus page, plus.google.com/pluslynetteyoung, they only see what I post. When you go in, you are looking at your home screen; however, when someone else is looking at your profile they only see the things that originate from you. I check it myself sometimes by opening an incognito window in Google Chrome so that I am not logged in. I put in my URL and can see exactly what other people see. A lot of what I do is behind the scenes in the community pages. Because of the number of followers I do have, I don’t usually blast out posts to all 1.5 million followers. A majority of the activity I do is within those community pages. I also make circles, which are groups of specific people or security groups, and I will put a post out just to that circle. I do that mostly because all of those followers are not interested in the same topics so I don’t want to necessarily share a post with everyone when only a few are interested in a given topic.

Gary: I actually have several groups and they are doing better than my page!

Lynette: I have a few things that I absolutely love in Google Plus. The local pages, like I already mentioned, and the groups and communities are probably more active than the general population because they can hone in and talk about what they are interested in.

Gary: Should someone spend more time working and developing their community than their page?

Lynette: Personally, I think there is more value in the communities and the feedback and interactions that you get from them over the page. The pages are in more of a broadcast mode while the communities are more peer-to-peer. You get more interactions that way. I have been finding that communities are where the gold is in the Google Plus platform.

Gary: What are some of these tips and secrets about Google Plus?

Lynette: Some of them we have already touched on. Local pages, hangouts, events, and communities are my four hidden nuggets of Google Plus. I think that people don’t realize how long it takes to grow communities or to get traction in an area and they just want to show up to a new place and bring over all of the success they have worked for somewhere else. I found the fast track to getting people to start following you are in communities, but my favorite feature is events. If you are a brick and mortar store, you can create events at your store and get people in the door. It doesn’t go away either so people can search and see what you have done in the past. I don’t think that enough people use this feature! They don’t have to be in person events either; you can do virtual events if that works for you better. Let’s say you are going to have a bat sale. You can get people to post pictures on the event after the fact with their new bat, which is user generated content. This type of content makes you much more powerful. Come up with unique ideas or twists on things, even if it is the same 10% off coupon. It is a way to draw people to your community.

Gary: If I did that coupon idea, let’s say for 30% off of bats, would it everyone be able to see it or would it be opened up to the entire world.

Lynette: You can choose actually. You can make it public, which means its open to everyone and the search engines, don’t forget about that, or you can make it private. You can make it only open to a VIP circle of your best customers or members of a team and you can invite them in for exclusive deals. More than likely you would want to make it public so everyone in the world can see you.

Gary: So you would say that the top 2 things to get into with Google Plus are events and communities?

Lynette: Yes exactly.

Gary: So what else do I need to know here? I think I am on the track with the communities I just need to figure out how to get more people on here. I don’t know if my niche is so small or because only a certain number of interested people are on Google Plus. The events are a big deal. I can see where this can be very popular because I could do a sale once a month every month on here. If it is open to the whole world the I can see where this could be a really big deal.

Lynette: The nice thing too is that if it is public on Google Plus and these are all tied together as Google Properties, if you create an event it looks attractive in search. If someone searches for something that has your keywords for your event, it is something that they can find value in and the Google search engine will make it look attractive to them in the results. Where normally on a website you have to use a lot of code to make something look good, you don’t have to do that here because Google Plus and the search engine are connected as Google properties so it will automatically format it to be eye catching. Another cool thing about events is that if a person responds yes or maybe to attending an event it is automatically synced with their Google Calendar, which I live by.

Gary: Should I follow a lot of people? I follow very few people, could that be what is hurting me?

Lynette: I’m going to say it’s not killing you, but it’s not helping you either.

Gary: For instance on Instagram I was trying to get followers and I followed like 5,000 people, got rid of them all, and ended up with 8,000 followers who are very involved by liking and commenting on pictures I post. Even though I only follow 30 people now, I still have 8,000 followers. Is it the same idea with Google Plus?

Lynette: The limit I believe is 5,000 for you to follow and an unlimited amount can follow you. You do have to be diligent with putting people in circles, which are like lists. I have circles that are for local people, professional friends, etc. You want to have manageable lists.

Gary: I would have three circles: personal friends, softball people I want to buy softball stuff from me, and podcast people who are not personal friends.

Lynette: Well there you go! Another interesting thing about these circles is that you can sort your circles into how active people are. That way you are only really paying attention to those who are active and can not look at the rest of the “noise”.

Gary: Is my problem that I am not communicating much? I mean I love Facebook and I communicate on there all day long! I just don’t want to be neglecting these other platforms.

Lynette: It’s because you are comfortable there! It really isn’t possible to dedicate the necessary amount of time to each and every social media platform to make each one powerful. You just can’t dedicate the time needed for each platform, especially when you also run an actual business.

Gary: I want to know how to get the maximum results on each platform with minimal interaction. I think I have done that well on Pinterest and Instagram already.

Lynette: You already have a good thing going with your photo of the day. You are giving people a reason to come back every day to see what you post. You are asking for user-generated content, you are already hitting all of those things that make social media tick and work well. You don’t have to use every single feature in the platform to consider it a success. You are already doing something that is bringing traffic and eyeballs to that community. You may want to come up with a supplement to the photo of the day to keep it interesting and fresh. That could help create more traffic and bring more eyeballs to your page. People might bring their friends in too, which will bring your follower number up. You can ask for themed pictures for holidays or for specific softball equipment and that user generated content will help you out for sure.

Gary: I thought that if I were to search softball on Google Images, I don’t see any of my photos. If I go and search Women’s College World Series, I see a ton of my photos that are on my blog, not directly on Google.

Lynette: Before you load a photograph up to Google, make sure that the file name has a keyword that you would use to search for it on Google. When you upload it to the actual community and you click on the photo and can see the details, it will show your file name. That is what Google is pulling from so make sure it says softball photo of the day with the date or something like that. From there it should start to get into the image search.

Gary: This was a great conversation for me. Is there anything you want to leave us with as a tip that we have not covered yet?

Lynette: Try to follow 20 people a week if you can. Take 5 or 10 minutes and go through your communities. It’s a nice way to acknowledge their interaction in the community.

Gary: Where should people hunt for you if they want to get in touch with you?

Lynette: The best place to get to me is at lynetteyoung.com.

Gary: I do appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today about Google Plus!

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Arlington Social Media Marketing Group

Selling on Amazon With Chris Green

Season 1 Ep 14

Talking Amazon With Chris Green
Gary Leland Show Episode 14
This week I interview Chris Green of ScanPower.com – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

We talk about selling on Amazon. http://scanpower.com

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Gary: Chris, thanks for joining me today. This is a topic that I am really interested in and I think everyone should be really interested in. First please tell us about yourself.

Chris: Thanks for having me, Gary! Talking a little about myself is tough because I have become a little Internet famous for different things. The quick version of it is that I graduated from Texas A&M, worked for Bosh Power Tools for 5 years, got big into EBay and built up a couple of accounts that has over 30,000 in feedback, then I got big into Amazon. Amazon then started the FBA program which stands for “fulfillment by Amazon”, which basically means they warehouse all of your stuff and are eligible for all of their shipping programs. Essentially you are outsourcing your fulfillment, which is incredible in the time that we live in that we can let Amazon handle our products no matter how small. There were no software solutions, so I partnered with a guy I met online and we founded a company called FBA Power, which helps FBA sellers optimize that platform. We then renamed it Scan Power and we are a one stop provider for anything to do with Amazon FBA, scanning products, making money online, optimizing price, and evaluating lists, all of that stuff. We openly market our products with education. I write books, do webinars, YouTube videos, and chats, anything people will need to be good at selling products. If they succeed at selling online then they might want to use our software. The Internet allows us to help people at scale. Take this podcast for example. We record it once but I can help thousands of people down the road when they listen to it. I am happy to help thousands of people! If they decide to buy the software, great, but I am truly happy to help people regardless.

Gary: Now your company website scanpower.com has a lot of information and tools on here. Are all of the tools meant for FBA or can anyone benefit from them?

Chris: They can help anyone, but they are optimized for helping FBA sellers. The first product we put out was our listing product, so you could get a product, scan it with a USB scanner, and list the condition and put notes up about your product. There was nothing like that when FBA first started out.

Gary: I have been doing Amazon for 22 days and I have been using a tool called the Amazon Seller App. Is that similar to your software?

Chris: Well that is a mobile app. Our first program was web based and you had to use the computer to list. Then we came out with our mobile app for Android first and then the iPhone. What you are using is from Amazon themselves and you have to have an Amazon Seller account to use the app. It’s a great program, it’s free, easy to use. You scan a barcode, it will identify the product, show you what it is selling for, show you the fees if you sold it and what you are going to get so you can calculate your profit.

Gary: That is exactly what it does. It shows me the lowest price it is being sold for, what they will charge me to sell the item, what the recommended freight is, and information like that. When I see all of that information and do the math I am able to see if I should even bother selling that item. I have scanned products that show that I would make $1 of profit so I didn’t bother putting that item on my Amazon page because it wasn’t worth selling there. There are other things with the opposite effect.

Chris: The Amazon Marketplace is inefficient as a whole. There are plenty of items on Amazon that people are paying a premium for and a lot of it relates to the Amazon Prime program where people have gotten used to getting free 2 day shipping and sometimes even overnight depending on how close they live to the distribution center. The Amazon Prime customers will choose Amazon over going to a store because it is quick and free shipping. I am a typical Prime customer because basically won’t buy from you if you are not Amazon Prime eligible and my time is very valuable. I do not want to drive 25 minutes to Target to save a dollar because then I have to make that same 25-minute drive home and I have to pay tax. It’s not a better deal for me to go to Target over buying from Amazon with free expedited shipping.

Gary: Let’s say that I have a widget and a competitor has a widget and mine is $2 higher than the other guy. Wouldn’t people go with the other guy over me?

Chris: If you are both FBA, probably, but if he is merchant fulfilled and yours is FBA it’s not the same thing. Yours will be shipped today because Amazon does that, and other guy lives clear across the country from the buyer so it will take longer to get there, plus there is no guarantee the item will go out today. Now there are some people who will wait 3 months for an item just to save $2, but that’s not typical.

Gary: I have 2 questions for you. First, what is different about the Scan Power mobile app compared to the free Amazon app?

Chris: The Scan Power mobile app is designed for sellers. It’s $40 a month so its not free, but what you see in this app are all of the prices: the new offers, used offers, collectible offers, and the payouts for all of those offers. It will also show Amazon as a seller with the picture, the title, the category, the sales rank, the weight, the dimensions, and all of that stuff so you can make an informed decision. You have to price strategically.

Gary: So we are talking about FBA now, which I have not gotten into yet. I do have this one item that I have been selling like crazy and it’s something that I import from China. I am making great money off of it right now. Because I have hundreds of this item, I should be sending say 50 of them to Amazon?

Chris: Are you the only seller on it?

Gary: No, there are other people who have them; they must be importing them as well. They are pricing them high enough that they are making a pretty good margin on them.

Chris: If you have a product you are making a good margin on and you are merchant fulfilling right now, you are going to get FBA boost. You will get more people who buy your product because you are FBA eligible. This number comes straight from Amazon: 50% of all Amazon buyers will not buy from someone who is not FBA. They either buy from Amazon direct or from FBA sellers. They want their free 2-day shipping.

Gary: You’re saying that anyone who is getting into Amazon should seriously consider going with FBA instead of merchant fulfillment on everything they have. If I have for example 1 glove left, then yes I will use merchant fulfillment because I just want to get rid of it; but if it is a regularly inventoried item I should just ship it to Amazon.

Chris: It’s kind of a no brainer. I hate to make blanket statements because there will be items that are not eligible for FBA export, meaning Amazon will not ship it internationally, so you would want to list that clearly so you don’t list those sales. As a general rule, you will sell more units and make more profit or net payout by using FBA on top of the fact that you will do less work. I have done fulfillment I know this happens. When you send your products to Amazon, make sure you put a new barcode over the existing one because Amazon will scan the product barcode and whatever it scans as is what the product is. You can print a new barcode with the information you want the item to have with Scan Power.

Gary: What happens if a product that you thought would sell well doesn’t and a year later they still have all 12 of your item in their fulfillment center?

Chris: Once you send stuff to Amazon, you have to stay on top of it. When you send them items, there is a very small storage fee. If you send them a book for example it is a penny per month to store. They have varying fees for items, so not everything costs a penny because they want to encourage you to send them stuff you can sell and profit from. There are some small, cheap items that they will charge more to keep so you don’t make any profit off of them and in turn will stop sending them. There used to be no limit, but now if your items are left after a year of being in the fulfillment center, they will hit you with a pretty hefty fee. These fees are something along the lines of $45 per square foot your items are taking up in their warehouse. Now they have changed it to 6 months as the time limit. They want you to manage and turn over your inventory. The good thing is that Amazon gives you a lot of tools to help you keep track of your inventory. To answer your original question, if you send them an item that does not sell, don’t wait around for it to sell and then get hit with these long term storage fees; ask for them to be returned to you. Return fees are so much lower than the long-term storage fees. They are only going to charge you 50 cents per unit to get them back to you.

Gary: So if you are at 11 months, you should be getting that stuff sent back to you right away!

Chris: You can do that or you can get more aggressive with your pricing of that item. It may even be a price that would make you take a small loss, but when you think about it that may be the smartest thing to do in some instances. If an item is struggling to sell at that price with Amazon, the story will be the same for you so if you have it returned to you then you have to figure out how to sell it on your own. They also have a disposal fee of 15 cents if you don’t want that item back and you don’t think it will sell. They will either destroy it or they will liquidate it. If you go to a flea market you may see a guy with a whole table of stuff with FBA labels on them because they bought a palate of liquidated items from Amazon. They have a whole part of the business that no one really sees or recognizes.

Gary: So if a person has an Amazon account to sell, do they have to qualify in some way to be FBA?

Chris: No actually you can open an Amazon account tonight and label it FBA and ship them product tonight. There are some restricted categories like shoes and videos because of the counterfeit potential and it’s hard to get approved but if you have enough stuff go ahead and get started.

Gary: What are some really good tips for the new person to Amazon? What things do they definitely need to know or get to help them get started?

Chris: There are two ways to look at this stuff. I love Amazon and believe that it is the best platform to get on and make money. The barriers to entry are really low and you can get in there and compete with the big guys today. You can outsource fulfillment and get Amazon shipping options attached to your items today. Because of that, it is almost bad that the barriers to entry are so low because anyone can get in there to do this and some are a little too quick to get in. Sometimes they don’t really study or know the rules, but at the same time Amazon is more of a do first and never ask questions. If you do break the rules, there is no ignorance of the rules or if your account gets suspended you can’t just make another one with another email without them catching you.

Gary: What is an example of a rule that could cause that to happen?

Chris: If you list a restricted product because you are responsible for your listings against everyone else’s listing. I have seen sellers just not take the time to know what they are doing and what they are allowed to sell or not allowed to sell. There are forums all over the place to ask questions so don’t be afraid to ask questions. You definitely do need to be sure to read the rules and policies and understand what categories you are allowed to sell in. If you are going to sell books, you need to read every word about books so you meet all of the guidelines Amazon has set up for you. Take the time to understand what “like new” or “used” actually means and what criteria it has to meet because what I may think looks “like new” may not meet Amazon’s standards. I could get in trouble for that. Be sure to keep your customers satisfied because if you start to get a lot of customer complaints your metrics will go down and they will pay attention to that. You have to run and treat your Amazon store like a business. It is not something that you can make mistakes and learn as you go. You want to avoid making mistakes on Amazon. Pay attention and read the boring pages of policies and rules they have available to you. If you agree to what is in there, you had better not make a mistake and do something that is against the rules because you will be responsible for that and you may not be able to recover from that.

Gary: So you can make a mistake that was an error and they can shut you down for that? Everything that you had going for you is now gone?

Chris: Absolutely. The worst offense you can make is to sell a counterfeit product. I’m not saying that everyone sells counterfeit product on purpose, but they do need to be able to verify their chain of supply. Just because something is wrapped when you buy it does not mean that it is genuinely that product, it very well could be counterfeit. You have to be able to prove where you get your product.

Gary: So they could ask you for a copy of the invoice from that vendor who makes and distributes those items.

Chris: Yes they can and they will. They pay more attention to high-risk products so if you are selling a bunch of items in one of those categories then they will pay more attention to you. They will slow you down a little to make sure you are selling genuine product. If you have issues or are unsure about what you are doing, join an online forum. Scan Power has a Facebook group where we discuss these things. You can find our group at facebook.com/groups/scanpower. There are both advanced and new sellers so no question is a dumb question, just ask. It’s better to ask than to get shut down for something you did.

Gary: Do you think that Amazon being as strong as they are, having so many shipping locations, having such a large product base and the way the continue to grow it, do you foresee where there is a time where online stores are going to have a hard time because people would rather buy from Amazon because I will get free shipping and will have my item tomorrow.

Chris: Yes and no. There are always going to be ways that stores can compete. So let’s say we have Joe’s Bats and they sell all kinds of equipment. Here is one thing people don’t know about Amazon; they have something called Multiple Channel Fulfillment (MCF) where I can still send my stuff to an Amazon and then use them as a pseudo drop shipping option. So my items are still purchased through my store and the payment is made to my store, but I go into my seller account and have the item sent from an Amazon distribution center. They will charge you for it, but it won’t be nearly as expensive as it is to do it on your own. You can ship a 4-pound box UPS second day air for around $11! I know I can’t get that price on my own UPS account, so it is worth doing in that way. On top of that, you don’t have to pay the commission fee to Amazon this way because Amazon isn’t selling it; they are just shipping it out for you. You can essentially use them as a warehouse and shipping agent.

Gary: Since this FBA seems to be a selling advantage to me, is there a way to tell if anyone else is selling a particular product FBA or if they are fulfilling it themselves?

Chris: That’s the big advantage of Scan Power is that we show you the new, used, and FBA on that product. It might show that no one is selling a particular product FBA. There are some sellers who look for products that are not available FBA and then find out where they can get them so they can be the only person who is selling them FBA. That is a huge advantage because of the 50% of customers who will not buy from non-FBA sellers because they want their free two-day shipping! Here is another tip: there is a tool called the FBA calculator. You input the item and what you want to sell it for and it will show you the pay out for that item, so there should be absolutely no surprises. There is no reason to find out after the fact that you lost money on a product. Use the calculator and figure out if it is worth selling or not.

Gary: Do FBA items have more of a chance of being an add on item that you see because they are already shipping something to a buyer?

Chris: That would be for a whole different show! In short, maybe because the items have to be FBA to be add on eligible so yes it’s possible for that to happen. Add ons are usually small, lightweight, low priced items that Amazon can’t afford to second day air. They would rather throw that small item in that same box because it is worth sending at that point.

Gary: Before we go, do you have any funny stories on your Amazon adventures?

Chris: 6 or 7 years ago when no one really knew what FBA was and I was one of the only sellers using this feature, I was sending in power tools like crazy. I wasn’t packaging the power tools was terrible, looking back now, but I just threw stuff in a box with exposed blades and every other bad way you could ship a power tool. The way I was doing it back then is laughable when you see what I do now. They do also have packing requirements especially with things like this where you have to bag things, cover exposed blades so they don’t hurt the warehouse guys. You want to prep the items so that it arrives to the customer how you think they would expect it to arrive. Be smart about it. Your items have to survive the inbound shipping, the warehouse, and the outbound shipping. They have to go through a lot of stuff so keep that in mind when you are sending your FBA items to Amazon.

Gary: I appreciate your time today, I have certainly learned a lot today.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Facebook Marketing With Mason Pelt

Season 1 Ep 13

mason pelt
Gary Leland Show Episode 13

This week I interview Mason Pelt of MasonPelt.com – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

We talk about Facebook marketing. http://rocksdigital.com/roi-social-media-marketing/

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Gary: Mason, welcome to the show, thanks for joining me. Before we start talking about Facebook, please go into your background with Facebook advertising and your qualifications.

Mason: My background has been all over the place in marketing. I started out wanting to do video production but that didn’t work out and now really love podcasting. My backgrounds in Facebook marketing relates to working with large brands and small business owners on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google ads. I do a lot of stuff around organic content marketing and paid media buys. For example I consider a promoted ad on Facebook ad to be a paid buy. Most of my work is direct marketing.

Gary: I know that next week you are speaking at Podcast Dallas and you are talking about marketing podcasts.

Mason: Yes, I will be talking about how to grow your podcast organically and how to grow your audience using online advertising and marketing automation which are often times under looked items. I have a blog post coming out on Rocksdigital.com in which I talk about how people mess up on social media by not being willing to spend money or posting the wrong content. I think the biggest mistake is not tracking properly though.

Gary: In regard to spending money on Facebook, you don’t have to spend a lot to get decent results.

Mason: You really don’t. Actually one of the things I have been having great success with is a content company who makes a digital publication. What we have been doing are small custom audiences. It is an audience of 50-60 hand-selected people that we have assembled are they are the most passionate fans. If they see us post something, then they will like it. The test is spending $4 with a bid for CPM, meaning cost per thousand impressions to reach an audience of 50 people. $4 CPM and reaching 50 people is a lot of impressions. Usually what happens is we get a ton of organic pick up off of just that little bit of seed money. Think about it, $4 every time you make a blog post or something, to be able to get that type of engagement on social does greatly improve your organic reach.

Gary: So when you are saying 50 people, you are talking about the reach the 50 people give you by liking and sharing your post?

Mason: Exactly because these are hand selected influencers. They are people who like everything we do. They like it, comment on it, an engage. It has improved traffic and our overall visibility on Facebook. What happens when I like something and one of my friends sees it? Well first of all they have seen it, which is one of the beautiful things about Facebook. We run ads also for friend-to-fan targeting which is an ad that says that one of your friends likes this or commented on this.

Gary: Before we get into that, I want to go into the basic uploading of an email list. For instance I have an email list of people who want to subscribe to my blog because they like it. What can we do with that email list, how do we do it, and how do I benefit from it.

Mason: What you are talking about are Facebook custom audiences. There are a few ways to do this. If you go to facebook.com/ads/manage on the left hand side you have the option for audiences on your account. If you click there you have the ability to import several types of files and now Facebook has added the ability to copy and paste and email list in because it was a little complex to change file types. When you upload the list you can target your most passionate fans.

Gary: So when I upload my list I can say that I want these people to see my stuff, it’s not up to Facebook?

Mason: Exactly and you can do some great stuff with this like targeting journalists. I will give you an example of what we have been doing with a company I am working with called Little Black Pants. WE have been doing custom audiences of their existing buyers. So people went to their e-commerce store, purchased a product, gave their email when they purchased the product, and we uploaded it to Facebook as a custom audience. The issue is that they just bought the product and we don’t have a lot of other products to sell them right now, so how do we get them to buy something. The truth is, those people won’t buy, but Facebook allows us to create a look-a-like audience. It’s one click to create. Under the audience tab you have an option to create a look a like audience.

Gary: Is that an audience that basically has all the same demographics as the person you just uploaded?

Mason: Same demographics, but more than just demographics, it’s more complex than that. It looks at the Facebook pages they like, their age, and even off line data like their credit card spending, income, and online spending habits. Facebook has partnerships with several large companies that allow them to find out off line purchase data. It is a little creepy, but your email address is linked to a credit card number somewhere and that data is not given to Facebook but they can mine some of it. I as an advertiser can create a look a like audience of people who have similar characteristics in every way. We are targeting people in several deeper ways than just liking one page. The other best-kept secret with Facebook is remarketing. I can run an ad for people who went to my website and for people who have been to the website, added and item to the cart, and not completed the order. With at least two of my clients right now we have ads running for people who have not completed orders in the shopping cart and we know who they are because of a tracking pixel in the website, not because of an email address because clearly they did not use one of those yet. It’s a Facebook website custom audience, which you can get to through the audience tab. You will get a little piece of java script code similar to Google analytics. You can install that onto your website and assign different behaviors to that, so we can say that people who tried to check out but didn’t can have an ad run to them reminding them that they have an incomplete order. Sending people back to that site can result in extra sales.

Gary: It sounds to me that the strongest one is the look a like audience.

Mason: Look a like audience is the one that will get you the most volume in that I can generate an audience.

Gary: So the bigger the email list the more powerful the look a like?

Mason: Not necessarily. With some companies I segment the list into what types of products they buy because it will let me get more specific with the person who buys that type of product. For example if I were selling hockey equipment, it wouldn’t be a great list for people who buy baseball equipment. Merging the two lists together would confuse it, so I would make two separate lists for one who buys hockey equipment and one who buys baseball equipment and go from there.

Gary: These ads we are talking about now, are they the side ads or the ones in the feed? Or is it both? Is one better than the other in regard to how much it costs for what you get?

Mason: In the feed is a little more expensive but it results in more clicks while the sidebar will result in more impressions. What I tend to do, and Facebook will let you do this automatically, is that you can make one ad and it will go both places. In the last year Facebook made the sidebar wider so it has more real estate there. I actually like to run ads in both. They split pretty evenly between the sidebar and the news feed in regard to effectiveness.

Gary: Let’s say I am going to spend $5 a day, so not big money, I don’t think it matters where I put my ad at $5 per day I am probably going to sell out of my whole $5. Would I be better off to put in the sidebar where I will get 20,000 views plus $5 worth of clicks versus putting it in the feed where I will get 10,000 views and the $5 worth of clicks?

Mason: My honest suggestion would be to test because it depends on what product you are selling and who your audience is. Probably what I would recommend is to do both newsfeed and sidebar. Mobile is kind of tricky because you have to have a mobile ready site and people have to be willing to buy your product off of their mobile device. Even if you put the ad in the sidebar and it doesn’t get as many clicks, it doesn’t have the impression on people that it is the only ad they have seen all day and they are tired of looking at it. People also do respond to impression. Let’s say I am impressioned by your ad in the sidebar for 3 weeks. I have seen your ad in my newsfeed a few times and in my sidebar a lot, now I am getting comfortable with you. I prefer you because I have seen you. It’s basically brain recognition. That being said, I definitely recommend you run your ad in both places because one isn’t better than the other, it’s just different.

Gary: How about boosting a post? That’s the easiest thing for someone to do if they are not Facebook smart, I think.

Mason: It is and it actually works now. It used to be terrible, I would tell people not to waste their money on them, and I think every Facebook marketing person would say not to buy them. Over the last 6 months they have improved the targeting options you have to where it’s not bad. There are still problems, but it is much better than it used to be. There are a couple of things you can do with boost post that are easy and work really well such as targeting your fans, so you can boost it only to people who already like your page. The other way is to boost post to custom audiences, so for people who are not necessarily a fan of your Facebook page.

Gary: So as an advertising agency, what is your starting point for a client? There are a lot of people who don’t have the time and need someone to do these ads for them. Is this the kind of thing that small businesses could use or are medium to large businesses more benefited by it?

Mason: I actually have been catering to quite a few small businesses lately. I have what is called a launch package, which I offer internally, but if someone wants to get a proposal from me they can go to MasonPelt.com to get in touch with me. I almost exclusively work with companies that have a direct sellable product because otherwise it’s too much stuff and it’s difficult to prove that I am making money. At the end of each month, I want to be able to send you a report that says that you spent $2,000 on me, you spent $4,000 on Facebook, and I made you $10,000. For me, if a client has a product that can be sold directly, is a good product, and if they can survive on the product they are selling and shipping. They have to be willing to put a minimum of $1,000 in advertising on Facebook otherwise it is really difficult to shine out there.

Gary: Where can people find you if they have questions about your services?

Mason: You can find me on MasonPelt.com, you can email me directly at Mason@masonpelt.com, and you can Google my name to find me on any social network except for Pinterest.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Arlington Social Media Marketing Group

Setting Up Automation With Christian Psencik

Season 1 Ep 12

Interview with Christian Psencik
Gary Leland Show Episode 12

This week I interview Christian Psencik of ProlificSuccess.com This week I interview Christian Psencik of ProlificSuccess on production and workflow automation. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Christian, before we start I want you to tell me in your words what we will be talking about today.

Christian: We are talking about Automation and how we can take ourselves more out of our business to allow us to dedicate time toward what we want to do. Maybe that is spending more time on things that will grow our business as opposed to spinning our wheels trying to keep up with your business. It could of course also being having more time to spend with your family and friends. There are a lot of tools we can talk about in this Automation arena that I would be happy to go into further. Automation is what I really love to talk about.

Gary: When I think of Automation, I think of robots and George Jetson.

Christian: Yes and I think you should because I think that is where we are going. I think there are a lot of Internet robots out there that we can take advantage of now. On the Internet there is a tool called “if this then that”, which I will get into in a minute, we have Dropbox, Gmail, all of these things have tools that will do things for you. For example there is a spam filter in Gmail is an example of Internet robots doing our bidding. It’s things that we don’t have to manually do anymore so we can spend our time doing something else other than filtering spam out of your inbox.

Gary: I hadn’t considered the spam filters to be like robots before, but when you explain it that way it makes perfect sense.

Christian: It’s allowing you those mental cycles, or mental RAM, to dedicate to something else. I have many more examples of this. Depending on what your business model is, there are different places you can incorporate this. We have all kinds of online services we use in our business. Let’s say you have a booth somewhere where you sell your products and in order to take credit card payments you use the Square reader. You can tie that into other online services by using ifttt.com. You can choose that every time someone initiates a refund through your Square, you will receive a phone call or a text message notifying you that this has happened. You can request to have a spreadsheet created for every time you sell an item. It’s not huge or Rosie taking care of your kids, but it does take care of you having to copy and paste between spreadsheets or emails. It allows you to focus on the things that are more important.

Gary: I did not realize you could integrate that into the Square platform!

Christian: There are other ones like eBay which has it’s own channel. The eBay search itself can be set up as a channel, so you can set up a search for a particular object on eBay that may be pretty rare or hard to find and it will notify you when that item is available for purchase or bidding. You can even set up for your Twitter to notify all of your followers when you have made a sale of your products. It can be seen as spam a little bit if all you’re tweeting is that you sold another item, but it could work for you in the beginning. You could also send it to a special blog post and have a public place that shows all of the sales for social proof.

Gary: How do you send that to a blog post?

Christian: In the service “if this then that”, you can tie the “then that” into Word Press. You would have a whole bunch of little entries for the sales you made.

Gary: So you couldn’t add each sale to the same blog post so they are all in the same place?

Christian: That’s right.

Gary: That could be some bad reading after a while!

Christian: Absolutely it could but it doesn’t have to be on your main blog page. I gave a talk about this the other day and I compared this to Legos. The little knobs on the top of the Legos are like IFTTT because they snap everything together and the blocks themselves are things like Dropbox, Evernote, eBay, etc. You have to decide what you want to build and design. You can make it exactly the size and shape that you want so that your business performs the way you want it to perform. If you think about it in those terms, what is it that you need to do that you don’t like to do or find to be boring? Then you can decide how to use IFTTT to your advantage.

Gary: I set one up so that if I make a post on Instagram, it automatically makes the same post on Twitter. In doing this it saves me a whole step. Now I make the post once and know that it goes to two different places. I could do the same with Facebook.

Christian: As a matter of fact you could have your post to those locations, but you can also use a social scheduler to send it out at a particular time. I use Buffer for social scheduling. The idea is that you want to have a consistent, regular social media presence. People are on and off of their profiles throughout the day and they can very rarely keep up with everything in their social media circle. This is why it is a good idea to post on a regular basis. If you are like me, you also have a life and you don’t want to be posting to social media every hour or two. In order to keep that social media presence, an app like Buffer allows us to sit down for 10-15 minutes and set up a bunch of tweets and Facebook posts for the entire day. There are quite a few other social schedulers out there to be used; Hootsuite is another popular one. I have an example of how I utilize this. Whenever I have a new podcast come out, I have a tweet automatically sent that tells people I have a new podcast with the episode number and a link. I also have a second recipe that runs parallel and schedules a post in Buffer. My Buffer time slots are normal business hours: 8am, 11am, 2pm, and 5pm. So now my tweet gets sent out into one of those open time slots. If I sent it out when I publish a podcast it would be around midnight, which would not help me much since most of my audience is probably asleep. In your case you can set it up to go from Instagram to Facebook and Twitter and you can send it to Buffer and have it queued up to be posted again later.

Gary: I just opened up my Buffer app and it is very interesting. I see that there is a recipe, which is what they call the action with IFTTT, for Instagram to Buffer.

Christian: They actually call them channels and ingredients. The recipe is the whole thing, the IFTTT: if new blog post, then post to Twitter. That is a recipe. The ingredients are the two parts, so in this case the blog post and Twitter and things like Evernote or Dropbox are called channels.

Gary: So I would take the two ingredients, put them together, and I would have a recipe? Then I could post to Instagram, then it would get sent to my Buffer to be sent out to Twitter at a later time?

Christian: Correct. Buffer is designed to have a certain number of recurring time slots to fill. Buffer’s strong suite is not to post something on Tuesday at 2pm, but rather to post something at the next available time slot that I have configured. So if you have two weeks set up, it’s not going to come out for two weeks. Hootsuite has more options on choosing an actual day to put out a post. Also IFTTT has a channel called “time” and you can specify a specific date and time for something to happen. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but this is what I love about this. It’s the creativity we can reach with this.

Gary: I am a big believer in making the same post multiple times. I will take a post and schedule it out over a 6-month period so it will go out each month on a different day at a different time. I believe that more people will have the opportunity to see the post, even if the first time they are seeing it is the sixth time I have posted.

Christian: You do have evergreen topics and post that make that possible to do. I love your strategy and it is amazing what you have done with your pages. There is a Word Press plug in that seems to work similarly to the Facebook scheduler and its called CoSchedule. With this plug in you can choose to have old content shared at multiple times in the future. It would be worth checking out for you, I think.

Gary: Let’s go to Word Press for a second because last episode we talked about Woo Commerce using Word Press. Let’s say I put a new product in my Woo Commerce, we’ll say it’s a hat, and I make a post on my blog. How would I use Word Press to get that hat out to all of my social media platforms?

Christian: What Lego pieces do we have to snap together in this example? I know that there is a Word Press channel on IFTTT and if you activate that, one of the things you can do is to say “image” as one of the objects, you can use the title, date and time, and author of it as well. All of these are pieces of the Word Press components. If I want to send this out to my Twitter followers, we can say that when we have a new blog post, it gets tweeted out with the picture attached to it. I also want a link to the blog post with the title of the post. Everyone knows that pictures interact much better than words on Twitter. How many times do you scan over all of the posts except for those with a picture? If there is a picture, you will more than likely at least stop and take a look at it for a second. This is a great way to get more interaction, by adding in a picture. You can make this recipe of Word Press to Twitter over and over again with different channels, so the next time it will go somewhere else to be seen and hopefully purchased.

Gary: With IFTTT, is there anywhere I can’t send my post?

Christian: Google Plus and Pinterest are always different animals. Google Plus has a very limited interoperability with different tools. There is no direct way to go from IFTTT to Google Plus but the Buffer app does along with a few others. I can simply set up my Buffer app to post to Google Plus as well as Twitter, Facebook, and wherever else you want for it to go. It is a way to get around the IFTTT service. Pinterest is kind of a closed environment right now. They say they are going to develop an API, which is a way for people to program hooks into it to be able to utilize it outside of their direct service. Right now you either have to use their apps or you have to go to their site to send something into Pinterest. They do have a way in Pinterest to set up your board to be a feed source, so if you post something on your Pinterest, it will then be sent to Twitter. It’s like their own RSS feed. Keep in mind that with all of the social media platforms, people interact with them differently. People on Google Plus, for example, expect a more verbose post with more details than the people on Twitter because you are stuck on 140 characters.

Gary: On Buffer, can you say that you want a post to be made every Wednesday at 5pm?

Christian: Not exactly. You can change the times that you want things to be posted on each day. For example, you can choose to only post at 11am and 5pm on Fridays, so those will be the only slots available that day. You can’t schedule to have something post at 5pm on Wednesday though because this app is first come first serve on posting. Your post will fall into the first available time slot. I like to not have to think about my posts and hope that they post at the right time. With IFTTT and Buffer I know it’s going to happen. Think about what you are doing, how you do business, and what you want to accomplish. What is boring and redundant or something that you don’t want to do? What can you be doing better? There is a good chance that at least part of it can be done with one of these types of services. Hopefully the examples we have used will illustrate how you think about this. One reason I use automation is because I have a day job. I come home at night and record a podcast with my wife called “Days of our Lives” after we put our baby to bed. I don’t have a lot of extra time to be posting on each individual social media platform every day. I have it down to a science at this point.

Gary: Do you have a blog where you write about Automation?

Christian: I do, it is at prolificsuccess.com. I blog about these kinds of things and I have interesting use cases on there as well. I have a recipe for how I have set up instant idea capture and how to use voice recognition through your smart phone to keep it organized in Evernote. It will help keep things out of your head.

Gary: If someone wants to start out with Automation, what is the best way to start?

Christian: You can subscribe to my email list at prolificsuccess.com. If you want to get out there and just try it, don’t be afraid. Go to IFTTT.com and bufferapp.com and explore it. Dump the Lego bucket out on the floor and see what pieces there are for you to piece together. We are all busy so if you are looking at and considering automation, you probably need it.

Gary: Thanks for taking the time to come on and talk to me today!

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Learning WooCommerce With Patrick Rauland

Season 1 Ep 11

Interview with Patrick Rauland on WooCommerce Stores

Gary Leland Show Episode 11

This week I interview Patrick Rauland of WooCommerce.com and we discuss running succesful WooCommerce stores online. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Patrick thank you for joining me, this is a topic I am very excited to talk about. What exactly is Woo Commerce?

Patrick: Woo Commerce is a free plug in on Word Press, which will turn your site into an e-commerce store. It has all of the shopping pages, the check out, the payment gateways like PayPal, and order management. It does everything you need for e-commerce.

Gary: Now that is free but a lot of there are purchases you would have to make to use all of the features.

Patrick: Right, we use the freemium model, which we love because it gives people the opportunity to try it out and see if they like it before they start to invest money in it. A lot of people are fine with that but if you want extra functionality we do have extra stuff. If you really want to take your payments with authorize.net instead of PayPal or simplify commerce, we have hundreds of extra add-ons, one of which will allow you to use authorize.net.

Gary: I think that I have one that requires you to have a PayPal Pro account instead of a regular PayPal account, I have one for US Mail shipping that figures out weight and dimensions, and one for sales tax. I added these things right away, so can you explain what comes with the basic package.

Patrick: I think that most people start with the basic model first. What they get with that is unlimited products, they can check out with PayPal or Simplify Commerce for credit cards, and we use flat rate shipping. The reason we have it is because it is the easiest way to get started. For example you charge $5 and then an additional $2 per item. It’s usually pretty simple math. I love USPS, but you have to have an exact weight and exact dimensions for all of your products otherwise it won’t work.

Gary: I had put 30 or 40 items on and we had not done that so we had to go weight each item and measure each one so it would be accurate.

Patrick: We like to start simple. If it is your first e-commerce site ever, having weight and dimensions being required would be a hindrance to using the software.

Gary: So you’re saying that keeping it more basic makes it easier to get into?

Patrick: Absolutely, we make it easy and basic on purpose.

Gary: After you get into it, then you can start to upgrade your store because you are more comfortable with it.

Patrick: Yes, exactly. There are close to 400,000 Woo Commerce sites and we don’t have nearly that many customers, so there are plenty of people who are getting by with the free version of the site.

Gary: When it comes to the plugins, not counting a credit card processor, what would be your top plugins?

Patrick: I will start with my favorite plugin, which is free and can be found on WordPress.org. It is WordPress Google Analytics Integration and a lot of people don’t realize they need this. All you do is put in your Google analytics id and you are good to go. It adds e-commerce tracking to your site. The reason why it is so good is because you can see how many people go to your site from Facebook for example, and can see how much those people spent. It helps you quantify your sources of revenue. So if 1000 people are visiting from Facebook but they only spend $50, that tells you something. If you never get into the data, that’s fine, but you may as well install the plug in just in case you do become a data person at a later date.

Gary: That sounds like a great plugin! Are there any others that are worth checking out?

Patrick: The next one is not great for everyone, but I love it. It’s also on WordPress and is called Pushover and is also free. It basically sends you a “push” like a text message whenever you sell something. I know it sounds silly, but for first time storeowners who may not be selling more than an item a day, that one product is very exciting and can be motivating to continue trying.

Gary: I like that because whether you are a new or old store it is something you like getting. I thought I already had one from you but it’s not Pushover.

Patrick: There is also the iOS app for the iPhone. It works similarly but I have Pushover for several things. If I make money on different stores then you can get pushes into one app. The Woo Commerce app will give you full details while the push will just say that you have an order worth $50.

Gary: That is something that is nice to do when you are out and about with time to kill. You can take a look at it right then and there and analyze it a little more closely.

Patrick: Technically the Pushover app is $5, but it is a one-time investment that makes it basically free.

Gary: That is very true! Your title is Product Manager. What does that mean and what do you do in that role?

Patrick: That is a good question! The role was created about a month ago and I am the person who plans where the product, Woo Commerce, is going. We have a Head of Product who used to do all of the Woo Commerce planning, but now I do the planning and report to him. My sole job is making sure the right extensions are being built and the right features are going to be at Woo Commerce’s core, and that we are catering to all of the right niches. Things like that.

Gary: Have you had a chance to look at my Fastpitch.TV store?

Patrick: I have it pulled up right now. Do you have questions on it?

Gary: From all of your experience and all of the stores you have seen, does this one have a sound layout or do you wonder what I am doing with this store?

Patrick: First of all, the Fastpitch.tv/category/softball-store is your store archive page, which lists all of your products. If I go into a specific one, I think it is okay. Your buy button is several scrolls down when there is a YouTube video on the page. We like to keep our buy buttons near the top.

Gary: That is a great point! So you would recommend that the information and video should be underneath my buy button instead of above it.

Patrick: Yes. I also like to have the product title, price, and short description just as you have it that is perfect. I like to have all of the extra information below the buy button so that people who want the information will keep scrolling to read and watch it, but your customers don’t have to go through it just to hit “buy”.

Gary: So always start out with your purchase and then put the information below it because they may have seen it already on YouTube or Facebook. Let me ask you another question. It took me quite a while to figure out the Woo Commerce set up because I am not a technical person who writes code regularly. Is there a resource that you provide if people do need help?

Patrick: There are a couple of resources. If you go to WordPress.tv, and look for my name Patrick Rauland, I have a two-hour workshop that was recorded. It goes through how to set up the Woo Commerce site step by step. The exact title is “Patrick Rauland: Creating your Online Store. Here is the thing with Woo Commerce. E-commerce can be incredibly complex. There are so many ways to make money, to optimize your site, and to make your products better. Just start simple: listen to a podcast, follow a blog, and you will slowly absorb all of the finer points.

Gary: Getting back to an earlier question, is there an example of a really great looking Woo Commerce store?

Patrick: Yes, there are a couple of those on our home page, woothemes.com/woocommerce. We have three case studies on there right now. One is a person who sells cool socks. That may sound silly, but the way he is selling socks is pretty and attractive and makes it more than just going to Kohl’s and buying socks.

Gary: Do you change these out?

Patrick: Yes we do. There is also another resource of Woo Commerce, which is ProsPress.com. The woman who writes the blog does a wonderful job of writing about Woo Commerce and having occasional case studies that show what you can do. There is one website that I am a customer of because I love it so much. It’s called Smiles for the People. What they do is sell toothbrushes but they are on subscription. Every three months they send you a new toothbrush, which is how often you should be changing out your toothbrush, but no one does that. So every three months they use Woo Commerce Subscriptions to bill you before they send it to you.

Gary: I’m glad you mentioned Woo Commerce Subscriptions, how does that work?

Patrick: This is actually one of the big selling points for Woo Commerce because I think that we have a better subscription than any other platform out there. We have had one person dedicated to this for two years straight. That is all he does is make subscriptions better. What it does is allows you to create a subscription product, like a magazine or shaving club, and it integrates with probably 20 different payment gateways which is a lot. It will bill people at the appropriate times and you just have to fulfill the order yourself.

Gary: My niche is fastpitch softball. Right now for the App store and the Android market I have a magazine that people subscribe to. It is $12.95 a year and they receive a copy of the magazine on their phone or tablet every month, Apple collects the money and keeps the subscriptions open. I have so many people who want to receive that who are not with Apple or Android. So you are saying that I could have people subscribe to it and send it to the people on my list every month.

Patrick: Right. For digital goods it should be done automatically.

Gary: That would work perfectly for that then because I have been trying to find a solution to that issue.

Patrick: Every version this guy releases gets better and better. It’s getting really cool.

Gary: Getting back to the other question: do you have a database or resource for help?

Patrick: If you are looking for help from people like Woo Commerce experts, I suggest going to woothemes.com/affiliated-woo-workers. That site is a listing of people who have shown us that they do really good work and you can reach out to them with any of your issues. I am a really big fan of Codeable because they will sometimes fire you. If you don’t write a good enough product description they will tell you why it was bad, close the request, and make you open a new one. They force you to be very detailed in what you do so you can get an honest quote. You would think that being fired is a bad thing, but it’s not because they tell you exactly what you’re missing and what you need to fix. The whole process is miserable so if you get all of that out of the way ahead of time, then you are good to go.

Gary: Are there any Woo Commerce tips you have for us that we have not covered here today?

Patrick: As I said before, I think the best thing to do is to start simple. If you are trying to start an online store, launch it and start going. You can start to grow as you get experience with Woo Commerce. You will start to find the right shipping formula for example. The longer you wait to launch the store, the more potential revenue you could be losing.

Gary: That is a lot of people’s problem is that they won’t just get started and learn as they go. I learned a lot of great information here today. I really appreciate you spending the time talking with me today and for taking a look at my site and giving the personal tip. Is there somewhere where people can ask specific questions?

Patrick: If you are a paying customer, we have our support portal where we can help you with any problems. We don’t offer this for the free version of Woo Commerce because that is 400,000 websites. We also have pre-sales which will answer your questions about a product and what it is supposed to do and support. We do have a 30 day money back guarantee if you buy some software and it doesn’t work we will give you your money back.

Links mentioned on this episode

http://wordpress.tv/2014/10/13/patrick-rauland-creating-your-online-store/

https://www.facebook.com/sacgroIT

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Aweber Email Marketing With Lynette Young

Season 1 Ep 10

Lynette Young Interview
Gary Leland Show Episode 10

This week I interview Lynette Young of Aweber.com and we discuss Aweber Email Marketing and how to connect better with potential clients online. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Lynette, I appreciate you joining me on another episode of The Gary Leland Show. Thanks for joining me. We go way back, back to the old days of podcasting!

Lynette: Absolutely, glad to be here! We are old school, what has it been 10 years since we all got started?

Gary: I think so. I started seeing people in Podertainment magazine writing articles about what they have learned in 10 years of podcasting. Now you work for Aweber. How is that going?

Lynette: I love it. I have been there for about 6 months and it’s a really good fit for me, which was kind of odd because a lot of people wouldn’t have thought that because I am everything social and content that it wouldn’t work for email. I work at a technical marketing company, which is exactly the right fit for me.

Gary: I thought it was an odd fit too when I heard. As you know I’m late in the game when it comes to my email list, but I have set it up with Aweber, which is why I brought you on. Tell us a little bit about what’s involved with this?

Lynette: Part of the story is why I think email works so well and why Aweber was such a good fit for me. I was using Aweber for about 8 years before I became an employee and team member there. For me, everything I have done online is to help businesses, whether you are a small micro business of one or a big corporation, learn how to connect better with potential clients online. I love small-medium businesses, it’s where my heart is, and it’s what I still am even though I get a paycheck from somewhere else. I think that everything that you do on social platforms like Facebook, MySpace back in the day, Twitter, etc., there are a ton of people out there, but not everyone is willing or able to purchase your product. The more you narrow it down, the closer they get to you, the more they get to know you, and that will divide them down into email. That is why I thought this was such a great fit for me because after you build those relationships and you get that subject matter expertise and people get to know you for what you are selling online, they always go to email from there.

Gary: When it comes to doing email, I am looking for a couple of tips. We know Aweber is the company I am going to recommend because that’s the company I am doing business with. I do want to say that their service is fantastic. I don’t think I have ever had this good of a service before, you will be treated great. I’m just saying this because it’s the truth. Now when it comes to email marketing, give us some guidelines. As an average person, how often would they want to send out an email? Is there a norm where you are giving them enough helpful information without overloading them?

Lynette: I like to ask them how often they want to hear from us. We call that cadence in the content marketing world; what repetition do you want to do, once a week, once a month, etc. You should be paying attention to that on social channels and your blogging. With email, ask people how often they want to hear from you and watch your open rate. If your emails are being opened less and less, you may not want to send as many emails. Aweber actually has plugins that allow you to poll people within your email list to find out that sort of information. I always like to remind people to not overextend themselves. If you say you want to send out an email a day and you can’t keep up that pace, people will notice and you will lose your relationship with those people. If you can’t commit to more than once a month than stick to that frequency. It may not be as often as you want it to be, but it is very important to be consistent.

Gary: I plan on starting once a week and going from there, I figured that would be an easy guideline. Lynette, you just mentioned the open rate, which is something that you can see with Aweber.

Lynette: It seems a little “big brother” but this is something you need to pay attention to. If you have people who consistently open your emails, then you would want to single them out because they are your most dedicated audience. That’s why I encourage you to use that information, see if they are clicking on links, sharing the information, and then reward them with extra or exclusive content.

Gary: What is considered to be a good open rate? What am I looking for as far as numbers? Let’s say I have 10,000 subscribers. How many should I be looking to get to open the email?

Lynette: There really is no industry standard with that. I would say anything over double-digit percentages is good. This is just what I have seen; Aweber has these stats online. In my opinion, anything over 10% is solid. It seems like you would want every single person to read every single email, but it doesn’t work that way, just like every single tweet is not seen by everyone who follows you. If you can consistently get double digit percentages to open your emails, then that is a great place to start. Expecting 50, 60, or even 100 percent of people to open your emails is difficult because everyone gets busy, your message may not resonate every single time. This does not mean they don’t want to hear from you, it just may not work out at that particular time. Consistency and always improving is what I believe to be the most important part. I have seen people with very low open rates, but they don’t get discouraged, they keep plugging away and as long as you are improving that’s what really matters.

Gary: Wow 10%, I wouldn’t have known that a number that low was really that high.

Lynette: I have seen industries at 30-40 percent, but it also depends on how close to the audience that person is. Things like deals and coupons and things that are time sensitive tend to do well. Things that are more personal in nature like a blog post will get varying open rates based upon how much time people have to read what you are sending. Every industry is different.

Gary: Do you read Chris Brogan’s email? Is it a good guideline for me to follow?

Lynette: Yes actually and I will tell you why. I would read his email even if I didn’t know him because the topics he covers are relevant to me. Even though I work at a company now, I am still an entrepreneur at heart. He starts his email as if he is writing to you. He does legitimately write to one person even though he is sending it to multiple people in an email list.

Gary: How does he do that?

Lynette: When you write an email, you don’t want to write it as if you are on a stage in front of 1000 people. You should write it as if you are sitting across the table from someone drinking a cup of coffee. If you think about it, if I send an email to you or you send one to me, you’re talking to me. That is what Chris’s email does; it feels like he is talking directly to me even though I know that it is sent to many other people. I feel a personal relationship with him when I read it and that is the strongest part of what he does.

Gary: It’s funny you mention the cup of coffee because in those emails he mentions that he is drinking a cup of tea or coffee.

Lynette: He does and he will tell you exactly what he is drinking and sometimes will give you link because people want to know. He is also visually framing that relationship. When you read that you think about Chris sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee. Sometimes he even puts pictures of his mug in there and that is building personal rapport with the people he is emailing. He wants you to be part of his business process and part of his professional life. The other thing he does that I really love is he only has one call to action per email. He wants you to do 2 things: he wants to you to learn something and be inspired, which I call the expected outcome, and the call to action is only one link. He doesn’t offer you 16 million things to click on. He is really good at building that conversation with you and at the end of the email when you are comfortable with him he gives a link to the thing he wants you to do or buy.

Gary: He has a huge email list so he must be doing something correct!

Lynette: He has a huge brain and is definitely doing something right!

Gary: Now I have been working on building my list so that I can send out a newsletter. Should I have been sending the email from the beginning even though my list was really small?

Lynette: Your email list is like a cookie jar. If you stockpile them and never eat them, they are going to go bad. You can get cookies but you should use them from the beginning. Before I started at Aweber people would say that they wouldn’t start the email list until their blog was built out or until they have 100 fans on their Facebook page. Those are all good things, but I believe in the social marketing trifecta: social media, blogging, and email are your three horses in the race. You need all three to win. If you pull one or two out there is no way to win. Starting your list early is good. Even if you have 5 people you can send them emails, they can still go back to the archive for those early posts. It also helps sharpen your skills going forward so you are more comfortable with it. I think you should grow your list as you grow. Those first people will be the most loyal ones because they joined you in the beginning.

Gary: Ok so I did it wrong and it’s funny that it happened this way because it is completely the opposite of the way I do everything else and the way I tell people to do things. Let me ask you another question about double opt in. Double opt in is when someone signs up to be a part of your email list, then they get another email asking for them to confirm that they want to get your emails. Is that the only way you can do emails with Aweber?

Lynette: It’s not. If you are coming from a different service and have a list that you have been using, you can generally transfer the list over. Our customer service department is amazing, which is honestly one of the reasons why I wanted to work there. You can generally bring your list in, there are exceptions, but for the most part you can bring it over. Sometimes people will be on email service providers who don’t exactly play by the rules, so you will have a list that is spammier than you want it to be. We do have stoppers in place to make you have a good, clean list where people actually want to hear from you. Having a big list where no one does anything or buys anything is a waste in my opinion. The customer service team we have works really well for that. There are reasons for this and there are laws in place for this. The one we have in the United States is called CANSPAM and there is one in Canada that goes by the acronym of CASTLE. They are in place to prohibit people from spamming you although we all know it happens. The double opt in is in place just to help confirm that you did sign up for this email or newsletter, just in case someone else did it for you or something like that.

Gary: Good to know there is a reason for that. When people are emailing like this, what is your bounce rate?

Lynette: Bounce rate is basically when an email is not deliverable. So if their mailbox is full or their email has changed or something has happened, it is like a return to sender.

Gary: Does that hurt you? Does it hurt your standing with Aweber?

Lynette: Not necessarily because there is some magic that happens behind the curtain that we take care of. We tell you what the bounce rate is, but it is taken care of in the computer system. If an email address is invalid, the system will not send an email to them again.

Gary: Something else I did that I am not sure many people are aware of is that you can just store a list with Aweber for $5. I have a list from Podcast Pickle that has thousands of people on it and Aweber took a look at it. They are going to check it and make sure the addresses are still good before I start sending to my email list.

Lynette: I actually didn’t know about it until recently. People spend time and money driving people to their social media outlets, then to their blog, and then to email. I like to use plug ins or third party products. There is one called Heyo. They run contests on Facebook where they submit their email address to enter the contest and are told that they are now signed up to your email list, so you are going straight from Facebook to your email. You’re skipping over some of the steps. For Twitter, there is something called Twitter Cards. It’s not technical but you have to read into a little bit. You send a tweet and it embeds a little form where they can enter their email address and be added to your email list. There are more people on my social media sites than there are on my email list and blog. Use that big audience to your advantage.

Gary: So I shouldn’t be emailing saying to follow the link to sign up for the newsletter? I should be making it possible to sign up in the post?

Lynette: You can do both, but I like the social aspect better because it is much bigger. You should be getting to people any way you can, so some people you can send an email or you can post a link that goes to your sign in form and you can invite them to listen to your podcast or get your newsletter because it is of interest to them.

Gary: What tips can you give me before you go to help with my email efforts?

Lynette: First tip is to be consistent. Send those emails on the same day or days every week. The second tip is to pay attention to your statistics. Pay attention to what people are clicking on and give them more of what they want. The third tip is to get in touch with your audience any way you can because no everyone loves social media or understands it, so go out and reach your audience where they are comfortable. Tell them about your email right from there; don’t make them go to your blog to sign up, it’s too many clicks. The last tip I have is to be human in your emails. If there is nothing else that Chris’s email has shown us it’s that having an honest to goodness conversation with someone in email is probably the best way to build rapport and trust. When you think about it, Gary, the two things we have on us as modern people every day is our cellphone, which has both our text messaging and emails. Those are the two most intimate ways to get to someone. I know that I don’t want someone texting me all of the time, so if I give you my email and permission to email me, that’s about the closest relationship you can get to me digitally.

Gary: All of those are very good tips. I had not realized the personal conversation aspect of the email. That is probably the biggest tip I got out of this interview. What is your personal thought on the best time of day for your email to go out?

Lynette: That’s a tricky one! I won’t give a best time of day, but I have seen a couple of things. J Bear, who does Convince and Convert, has given this tip over and over again: he likes to send emails a couple of minutes before the hour or a couple of minutes after the hour during business hours. His thought is that when you go to a meeting, you get there a couple of minutes early and you fiddle on your phone to read your email. Right at the top of the hour, either 10 minutes before or 10 minutes after works best because people tend to be reading emails. I would also be mindful of time zones. You can find out where most of your list is located with Aweber, so use that to your advantage. Don’t send your emails at 4 am because people will not be reading them.

Gary: That might be the second best thing I learned today. People can visit you at Aweber.com? Is it easy to find the blog there so people can find all of the great information you are talking about?

Lynette: Aweber.com, yes. It is because we just redesigned the website and it looks fabulous with a big blog tab on the top of the page. Everything that is in there I am extremely proud of because we have an amazing team who is out to please and to give information to businesses to help them along.

Gary: If people want to know more about you they can go to lynetteradio.com?

Lynette: lynetteradio.com or lynetteyoung.com. Lynetteyoung.com is my professional site, or @lynetteradio on Twitter is also a good way to find me.

Gary: Lynette, I really appreciate you spending time with me today.

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Optimizing Leadpages With Tim Paige

Season 1 Ep 9

Tim Paige Intereview on Optimizing Leadpages
Gary Leland Show Episode 9

This week I interview Tim Paige of leadpages.net and we discuss optimizing leadpages and lead generating pages. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Today I have a great interview with Tim Paige of LeadPages.net, which is a great system to help you grow your email list so you can use that list to market your products. Tim, thanks for joining me today. I have a lot of questions about this, but let’s start with a little bit about Leadpages like the history and what it’s all about.

Tim: Thanks so much for having me on; it’s a real honor for me. Leadpages is software that takes what has been tested and proven in the world of marketing and does it for you. Everything we do is based on what is going to get your customers to take action, whether that is to opt in, register for a webinar, purchase your products, or whatever it is. We have opt in pages, sales pages, webinar registration pages, thank you pages, already set up. You can go in there, put in your information, a picture of your product, and much more and it will convert for you. We are always adding new things, for example this past year we created “Leadboxes” which is an opt in form that only appears when someone clicks a button or a link. We are a platform that allows people to do marketing without having to focus their whole lives on it.

Gary: I know there are basically three parts to Leadpages, is that correct? There is a sidebar thing, a box thing, and a delete page, is that correct?

Tim: The three main features you are talking about are Leadpages themselves, which are the templates for the webpages, Leadboxes, which are the opt in forms that only appear if someone clicks a box or link, and Leadlinks, which are links that you can send in an email and when someone clicks on it, it automatically get opted into another list or whatever.

Gary: What does it mean to automatically get opted in?

Tim: Typically if you were going to send an email to invite people to join a webinar, the link you send will take them to another page where they have to enter their email and register for the event. With Leadlinks, if you send them a link and they click on it, they are automatically registered just by clicking.

Gary: That’s really great for webinars!

Tim: It’s also great for affiliate partners or someone else who helps promote your product because they can send an email to their audience with your Leadlink. Then if people on their email list click the link, they are now also on your list automatically. Let’s say you are a product creator and you make a couple of different products in an industry and you get someone gets added to your list for some kind of a light up football. You have a new football that’s coming out that is a specialized kind of ball and you want to know who on your list would be interested in that. You can send your whole email list a link that they can click to get updates and learn more about this new ball.

Gary: The main thing it seems like to me is that Leadpages is the best for signing people up for a mailing list. Am I incorrect on that?

Tim: You are not incorrect. We are mostly known for our landing pages. For me, I am an avid user of the Leadboxes, it is my favorite thing that we have. Definitely we are best known for our pages. You mentioned that opting in is the main thing that people use Leadpages for and we have a narrative that has been around since the beginning and even before that. We were at a point in our business where we were focused on doubling our revenue, getting more sales and doubling revenue. The first way we looked at to do that was to double our traffic, which I think is usually the first thing that is done. There does come a point when you are SEO optimized like we were, we were doing tons of social media like Facebook ads and YouTube. For us, we came to the conclusion that it not the best way to go to double our revenue. The second thing we came up with was double the conversion rate of our sales page; double the conversion rate, double the sales, therefore double the revenue. When we create a sales page we have so much into it. We work with the copywriters; we work with the video producers, and all of those things. We don’t want to do that more than once every six months or so. Honestly looking at it, we couldn’t envision a way of doing that that would double our revenue. The third thing we looked at, which was where the magic happened, was the double the number of people on our website using our email list. The thought was that if everything else held steady like our conversion rates and the value of everyone on our email list, then if we doubled the conversion rate of our landing pages, we would double our revenue that way. The first month we did that, we doubled our revenue. The second month, we doubled our revenue from the first month, which means our revenue increased 4 times in 2 months. The third month we doubled our second month revenue and almost did it in the fourth month as well. What we found is that it was much easier to double the conversion rate on our landing pages instead of doubling the traffic or sales conversion rate. That is what inspired us to focus harder on more opt ins and in doing so it has allowed us to create these awesome tools that help with the generation of opt ins.

Gary: that’s a pretty smart way of looking at it. You’re doubling your list and if all of your metrics stay the same you double your business.

Tim: I think that more people are working on their lists and it’s really important to be doing that. If you don’t have an active list, you can start anywhere and start building that. It should be a focus of your business if you want to sell your product or whatever it is, then you need to build your list. It’s silly not to!

Gary: I can’t believe I have been online since 1996 with a retail store and I just started my list a year ago! I have everything covered, but have the worst list! I should probably have the biggest list of any retail softball store out there and I probably have the worst, which is what got me looking at Leadpages. Now Chris Brogan was on our first show. I was looking at his system of selling, not sure if it is Leadpages or not, and it had a lot of those “click here to buy” and highlighted buttons. I was giving him a hard time about it and he said that he thought the same thing at first, but they really work. The number of people who click on them went up drastically when he had buy buttons everywhere. That was very interesting because I had no concept of that. I noticed that a lot of your pages have that same progression. Is that the standard way of operating these?

Tim: The reality is that the more opportunities you give people to take an action; the more likely they are to do that. It’s interesting because we have found that you can’t take it too far when it comes to opt ins because the more opportunities we had for someone to opt in, the higher our conversion rate was. It can however hurt your perception in the marketplace if you have too many calls to action because it can make you look spammy or like you are out there to just take stuff. One way we have combatted that is by our featured Leadboxes. We have a podcast called “Conversion Cast” which can be found at conversioncast.com. If you go to the website, there are 19 opportunities to opt in by the time you get to the bottom of the second blog post. If that were a bunch of visible opt in forms, that would be the ugliest, spammiest website of all time. If you look at it now, it is beautifully designed, it doesn’t look like a site to just take your stuff, it has great images. The opt in forms are all hidden behind buttons, links, and images. The only way they would see those opt in forms is if they click that, meaning they were hoping to get whatever you were offering with their opt in. There are three reasons why we found this works really well. The first is that when someone comes to a website, they make an immediate determination whether that page is a giving page or a taking page. When they get to a website and the first thing they see is a form to fill out to opt in, they immediately see your page as a “taking page”. When you only give them the opt in form when they ask for it, you are seen as a “giving page”. The second reason is that the two-step opt in, meaning you have to click to get to the form, you are forcing them to make a decision. I get asked a lot what the first goal in business should be. My answer is to get people to make a decision, not to get people to buy or opt in. The reality is that 100% of people, who don’t make a decision about whether or not to opt in or register for a webinar, will not do that. Some percentage of the people who do make the decision to buy will actually do it. If you can make everyone in the world to make some decision about whether or not to take an action on your site, you could have the world’s worst conversion rate, but have the biggest mailing list or most amounts of sales because you made everyone make a decision.

Gary: I began in in home sales, selling stuff door to door. That same approach is used in in-home sales; get the saying yes to decisions. Once they say yes 10 times, at the end of the sale they are used to saying yes and it’s a lot easier!

Tim: I say that on almost every webinar. Its called behavioral inertia. If you can get someone to keep making a commitment, when you ask them to buy they are more likely to do that. It’s very powerful. People think that because the Internet is so relatively new, all of these marketing things we have to learn have to be new. In reality, human psychology does not change; it still works now, we just have to apply it to the new medium of the Internet.

Gary: I am a novice at Leadpages. I am looking for 19 hidden places on this page that are opt ins. Some of them are obvious to me. Are all of these, the review marketing materials, subscribe now, etc., going to the same place or do they go to different places?

Tim: Some are going to the same place and other are going other places. You can see in the header you will see “case studies”, that is a Leadbox that will go one place. Another is “review your marketing materials”; that will go to a different Leadbox.

Gary: So in this top one, this is a Leadbox, it is a whole page. I expected it to be more of a box.

Tim: Case Studies is a box. If you click on case studies it will just be a box. If you click on free webinar, that will take you to a landing page. If you have ever been to a website and have had something pop up after 10 seconds, we know them as annoying pop ups. We all use them, most marketers use them and that’s fine; but this is similar to that except for it won’t pop up until someone asks for it to appear. The person looking at the page made that happen by clicking on something. Its permission based marketing. I’m not giving you an opt-in form until you say that you want this one thing. All I do from there is say that you can have it if you enter your email in this box and submit it.

Gary: You’re giving them something to make them want to opt in. It made me think the other day that I need to find something to give them to be effective on this. I decided to give them the first chapter of a book that I am doing. Is that a good idea? Should I be giving them the whole book?

Tim: No, that’s a great place to start is the first chapter. I will tell you the most effective lead magnet we have ever had. A lead magnet is the thing you give away in exchange for people opting in. Some people call it an opt in bribe, but we call it a lead magnet. I like it better. The highest converting lead magnet we have ever seen was a one-page pdf that was a list of tools. For example, the landing page said that “a free report reveals the five dirt cheap tools I use to create my videos”, and then in parenthesis it said “including my $80 HD video camera”. We have found that the highest converting thing that you can give away that people will really want is a list of tools or resources, doesn’t have to be literal tools, but resources that will solve a problem. So a lot of your audience is product people, right? They sell a product?

Gary: Right, on this show, but a lot of the stuff I do is relating to my fastpitch business, which is selling softball sporting goods.

Tim: It’s some form of sales or selling product. People will say to me that they are selling a physical product, so there are no tools or resources to give my customers. Let’s say for example you sell a cool watch. Your list of tools and resources can be something along the lines of, “the only four tools you need to keep your jewelry looking great for the next 20 years”.

Gary: So it’s just making them information? I was kind of tunnel vision on this. It doesn’t have to be a lot of information; it just has to be useful information.

Tim: Right, yes-useful information. The fact is, the long information you mentioned like an e-book will not convert as well as that short information because people are so overwhelmed and on information overload. They don’t want something big like that; a list of tools are things that they can buy and solve their problems.

Gary: So like a list of the top 10 bats for fastpitch softball this year would be the right idea?

Tim: I would even encourage it to be the top 5 bats for fastpitch softball this year. It would only take about 20 to 25 minutes to create, you can get your designer to go out and make something, and you can be up and running in 30 to 40 minutes. It will convert really well.

Gary: They sign up for it and you send them a PDF right?

Tim: Yes. If you’re using Leadpages it will send the file automatically. If you’re not, then you can go to your email service provider, set up the welcome email, and make sure that email delivers the PDF.

Gary: You have changed my whole thought on how to go about doing this! I went ahead and bought your 2-year program because it was a great deal. If you’re going to use it, you probably won’t quit using it after you get it all figured out! What is the retention rate on this, I would think it is high on people who use it for over 6 months.

Tim: I’m not 100% sure but I know it’s pretty high. We don’t get a lot of people who leave. The people who usually leave the program are those who buy it and never actually use it. Obviously if you don’t use it, you won’t get any benefit from it. The people who go out and create a couple of pages tend to stick with it because it works.

Gary: You have a bunch of templates in there; I used one of them for all of my Facebook pages. It looks like a Facebook page when you click on my header on Facebook that says “free newsletter” it looks like you are going to another part of Facebook, but it is actually my Leadpages where they sign up for the newsletter. That is pretty cool, and there are many more templates to use. What are your top 3 templates for Leadpages?

Tim: Leadpages is the only landing page software to actually let you sort templates within our builder by conversion rate. If you ever want to know what is converting best at that moment, because it is real time, you can click the box for highest conversion rates and it will show you which ones are converting the best. For all of those people who think that they need these crazy, intense landing pages, the third highest converting template right now is called “basic squeeze page”. All it is is a page with a wooden background with an image of your giveaway and a little bit of copy. That is what converts the third best out of all of Leadpages.

Gary: You can actually take the Leadpages and put them in your site?

Tim: You can put them anywhere that your site is hosted. You can put them on WordPress, add them to Facebook, you can download the HTML and publish them wherever, so I get this question all of the time. Anywhere that you go you can publish them. Leadpages allows you to host the page on Leadpages and they will give you a link so you can send people to that link and never have to worry about putting them on your own site. We are on the Google server so it is absolutely lightning fast.

Gary: That’s pretty cool. So as far as putting it on your own site if you want it to look like it is a part of the site, it almost seems as though the Leadbox would be the way to do that.

Tim: Leadboxes is a pretty amazing feature. There is a rule of thumb we use to suggest this to people: if you have to send people from one page to another, use a Leadbox instead. Don’t use a landing page, just use a Leadbox. If you are going to send them from an email or a tweet, then send them to a landing page.

Gary: Okay that makes sense. So if they are already on my website and I want them to sign up for my newsletter, then a Leadbox would be the way to go.

Tim: It is a better approach. We have seen a 30% improvement in conversion rate when we send them to a Leadbox instead of a landing page.

Gary: That is good to know because it’s one of the first things I need to do. How about on the right hand side of pages. A lot of people have things on the right hand side. Aweber for example provides those templates.

Tim: Two things about that. I love Aweber, I use it in my own business, I do voice over work for podcasters. I use Aweber for that business. Their specialty is in the email list itself, in what happens once the email is collected, it’s not in generating leads. Those Aweber forms, to be blunt, are ugly and don’t convert very well. The second thing is that when you remove that sidebar opt in form and replace it with a Leadbox, that one thing alone on average has resulted in over a 30% improvement in conversion rate.

Gary: So you shouldn’t even have that on your page is what you’re saying.

Tim: Yes, get rid of it, replace it with a little image that says, “Free report reveals xyz” or “get the first chapter of my e-book free”. When people click that a Leadbox will appear.

Gary: That makes a lot of sense. When people use that Leadbox, if they are using Aweber, they still have to use the opt in on that email right?

Tim: Yes, they will still have the opt in regardless, but what Leadbox will be is the front-end part of it, it’s the sales person, it’s what gets people to take action. Aweber is the “customer service” in a sense, it’s the back end, and it controls what happens to that email and how you handle it.

Gary: Is there anything else you want to tell us about Leadpages or anything else we need to know.

Tim: I would just say, as a salesperson, just go try it. See if it works for you. Once you try it, you will see results. If you don’t, we do have a 30-day money back guarantee.

Gary: To be honest, I used that money back guarantee a year ago. I signed up for it, didn’t have time to mess with it, asked for my money back, and I had it back the next day. This year I got back in it again and went with the longer program to get myself committed because I do hear so much about this product. Thank you so much for coming on the show to tell us more about Leadpages, I really learned a lot.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Optimizing Youtube With Jeremy Vest

Season 1 Ep 8

Jeremy Vest Interview
Gary Leland Show Episode 8

This week I interview video expert Jeremy Vest of Vidpow.com talking about optimizing YouTube – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Jeremy, thanks for joining me today. We will be talking a little YouTube and I can’t think of anyone who would be better to talk to about this subject than you. Could you please tell us something about your site Vidpow?

Jeremy: Sure, great to be here. The idea behind Vidpow is to teach the average marketing person, someone who has never really used YouTube before, the ins and outs of what happens after the camera starts rolling. What do you do then? How do you grow your subscribership? We have monthly online conferences and weekly online courses all taught by 50 of the best people in the world, superstar YouTubers or just huge people in online marketing. We have gathered them all and made a pretty neat thing. We have been in business a few months but we are one of the largest, if not the largest, online video training company.

Gary: Where Vidpow may be new, you are certainly not new. You have done this for quite a while. Could you please give a couple of examples of companies that you have or do work with on their YouTube campaigns?

Jeremy: Unfortunately I can’t say most of them because we are the back end of the channels, but I can say that I have worked with over 20 of the top brands in America. We helped Adobe launch Adobe Television with a company called xTrain in 2008; we also created the first videos for the books for dummies, and work with a lot of really large companies right now. Unfortunately I can’t really say the names, but if you think of the top 20 or 30 brands that is where the clients are.

Gary: I actually attended one of your conferences and it was pretty cool because the people running the conference used my site as an example and critiqued it for me so I learned a lot from that experience.

Jeremy: It is pretty neat. The cool thing about these online conferences is that they are online as well. Probably 80-90% of our viewers watch these conferences on their own time instead of in real time. The benefit of real time is that you literally get full access to these guys and if we are not able to answer your question right then and there, we are sure to get you an answer. You’re literally in the room with people with up to a couple of hundred million views and more. They didn’t get that success by being pretty; they do know what they are doing.

Gary: I thought you did a great job of making sure that all of the questions were answered. You guys had taken notes on them to make sure they got an answer. Now let’s move into talking about YouTube to help us sell physical product. How can we use YouTube to help us sell product?

Jeremy: First let’s talk about the whole philosophy of how video works into online marketing. If a picture is worth 1000 words than a video is worth 1 million words. Is there a better medium online to promote a product or service? Most of the time there really isn’t anything better. If you have a really clever info graphic or single graphic, obviously you can still capture people’s imagination and get them through the funnel to become a sale. The reality is, video is the most powerful online medium. If you think of that in terms of selling a physical product, how else are you going to show off the great benefits and features of your product? I will give you an example. I worked with a local company here in Dallas called Wasp Barcode and we got their channel up to 1.5 million views. They sell barcodes, barcode scanners, barcode printers, and we came to a point where on of the biggest lead sources was YouTube. A lot of the examples I use most of the time are these huge brands that I work with that get hundreds of millions of views, but the reality is everyone can benefit from YouTube, you just have to understand how to do it. Taking this old school style of company and making YouTube its biggest lead source in company history was not an accident or good luck. It was strategy and a comprehensive plan. It took a few years, but we got there. I think a lot of people look at YouTube as the last social platform, but did you know that YouTube has eclipsed Facebook in the US as the biggest social media platform? 18-36 year old males now watch YouTube more than they watch television – all of television. I still can barely grasp that statistic; I grew up in the television world. The world has changed and television will not continue to be the force that it has been over its years of existence. One of the things I like best about Gary and his channel with over 2 million views, is he does a good job but he doesn’t worry about quality too much, he just gets in there and does his thing. People have this notion that they need to have a $3,000 camera and all of this editing equipment, but the reality is that people procrastinate so much that Gary will get another million views before they even turn on that expensive camera! My suggestion is just to do stuff, test and learn from your mistakes and experiences.

Gary: I am definitely a big believer in that. I tell people all of the time that they just need to do it and to not wait.

Jeremy: Go to youtube.com/softball. Why is Gary successful? What is the trick behind that? The reality is, he is creating stuff that people want to see. The number one mistake that people make on YouTube is that they go create a video around their products or services. Let’s face it: unless if you are really attractive, famous, or funny, no one is going to care about you. Instead think about this: what if you made content that people were actually looking for and created it in a fashion that people like to watch. For example, if you have a spinning logo for the first 7-8 seconds of your video, people are going to leave because people do not like to wait. Get to the point quickly, make sure your eyes are well lit because people engage with your eyes, make sure people can hear your voice, and if you have something good to say that actually helps someone else they are going to stick around and maybe even subscribe to your channel. If you do that a couple of more hundred times and you will start to see results from that effort. Gary would you agree with that?

Gary: Some of my shows are quick to the point, like the shows where I am trying to sell something and I have a product review. My other shows, like the hour-long shows, have about 8 seconds that is nothing special; it’s just fan build up. If they are watching that show then they know what is coming, they know what to expect before their actual content begins. I do believe that it has a lot to do with your content to be honest. If you have an hour show and your fan base is looking to learn something that they know is free, then 8 seconds will not turn them off. It is like the price they pay to get free information.

Jeremy: You’re absolutely correct. Now for someone who has never heard of you before, that 8 seconds could be the difference in whether they stay to watch or not, but there are two schools of thought here. If you have subscribers, it is a different story. If you don’t have a lot of subscribers, then you do need to be quick and to the point. Maybe at the end of the video or somewhere in the middle you try to drive those non-subscribers to the hour-long show. There is a different mentality between Gary’s hour-long show and how to throw a softball. If you are specifically looking for something than you have to get to the point. How long your video should be depends on how long you can engage someone. The videos Gary has on specific items are around 90 seconds, which is a great length and his longer shows are a whole hour. Use YouTube analytics to figure out when people are turning off your video and that will help you find an appropriate length. Most people can’t engage over a couple of minutes, but if you are really funny, entertaining, informative, and engaging, then you can throw out the rules. If you are trying to get people interested in your product, make it interesting, make it short, and make it to the point.

Gary: In all of my hour-long shows, I am only on there for 90 seconds to a minute, and then I cut off to a seminar I recorded. The people who are going to watch these know that it is a seminar and will not be 5 minutes long. The reason why they come to watch is to hear an Olympian talk about how to hit the ball, so I am on the screen for about 90 seconds at the beginning and 30 seconds at the end thanking them and asking them to come back next week.

Jeremy: That’s brilliant. There is always a time and place to do long format videos which has been something that YouTube likes and there is a new ranking algorithm factor that shows that time watched is the number one ranking factor on YouTube. That’s why I’m telling everyone to start as long as you can engage someone because that’s the number one ranking algorithm. There is also a ranking for how many videos they watch from your channel and how many times they come as subscribers to your channel. The amount of videos they watch and the number of times they come to your channel every week or month does matter. Overall view duration of all of your videos is a big deal. The ranking algorithm does seem to favor how many times your channel is visited. Having one video a week is very important. There are 3 types of content you should do. The first is about your products and services, your CEO, etc. The second is how-to tips, which is what people will look for and you can answer people’s questions. The third type is the viral video. Now you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than creating a real viral video. Create something that may go viral, but if it doesn’t its not a big deal. For that reason, I would create 4 or 5 videos and put them out one at the time. As a small business owner on YouTube, I would shoot one video per week and try to legitimately help people instead of shouting my product information from the rooftops. Quite honestly this is a new school format where you don’t have to tell people to buy the product; in fact, people do not like getting sales pitched to death. If you show a cool product with a different use for it and show it against the competitions model of the product, people will be more inclined to buy. If you just tell people how cool it is and don’t visual show them how it can and does work or you are boring and lame, then rethink your approach. Try to be as entertaining as you can, get to the point quickly, do it often, find out what your audience wants from you, and be at the heart of it. If none of that works, there are a million strategies you can use. One I would use is Ad Words for video.

Gary: Let’s slow down. I know Ad Words very well and used it to the point where I was spending $10,000 a month on them. I don’t use them any longer and my business is up due to the YouTube and social media. At 10 cents per ad I wouldn’t have a problem going back into this. I didn’t realize that there was an Ad Words for video.

Jeremy: We are going to have courses on this on the site. There is an Ad Words for Video on Google Ad Words and there are a couple of different types. The first is called Pre-roll, which are those ads that have the “click after 5 seconds” option that everyone is trying to take as soon as the timer hits 0.

Gary: You know I actually watch those to help the person out. I think of it as my way to pay them for the free information they are providing me with.

Jeremy: You know the really cool thing about these 30-second clips is that if you don’t watch up to a certain point, people don’t have to pay you for that view. I have had campaigns where we have had 1 million impressions but only had to pay for 140,000 views.

Gary: So it would be good to have a 60 second one then and get all of my info I want out there?

Jeremy: It is actually a better idea to have a 27 second one and if they don’t watch it 100%, then you don’t have to pay. It’s 30 seconds or 100% to have to pay for the ad. So what I do is a 20 second one with a 5 second in slate and that in slate, which is the subscribe button and other videos they can go watch. What I would do for this specific one is to have an in slate that has a logo that they can’t click on, so they click off and go to another video before 30 seconds so you don’t have to pay at all.

Gary: That’s just in regular Ad Words?

Jeremy: Yes it is. And the other kind is called in display. If you use the search function on YouTube, you can display ads on the search results. On the actual videos of softball for example, you can show up on the right side as an ad. These perform better for me and are keyword centric, so if someone is looking for left handed batting techniques, you ads will come up.

Gary: Is there a way to advertise in ad words and have it appear in the regular search results on Google?

Jeremy: Yes, you can specify that on the actual ad words or YouTube’s ad words for video, you would cross breed those. I wouldn’t combine them though because they are two different platforms. I would have normal ads running on Google and your YouTube ads running on YouTube.

Gary: I was thinking of my 90 second clips on the Fastpitch.TV store where I talk about a product and tell them where to go buy it, If they were searching that item in the regular content you would have other names and my video because I am probably the only person with a video.

Jeremy: In the last few months, I don’t know why or what happened, but you may have heard of Google Authorship. You used to see a lot of video thumbnails on Google and we are not really seeing that anymore. Google kind of just took that out of the algorithm.

Gary: Well that is really great to know about the ad words because I had not messed with that at all. Great tip on the pre roll as well and putting the slate on the end because the chance of people making it to the end is slim.

Jeremy: In fact not only is it slim, but they are pre qualified. Now if they are going on your landing page, they are pre qualified because they want to see your products.

Gary: Do annotations work in pre rolls?

Jeremy: No, but the pre rolls work as a link to your website or landing page so you can click on it and go straight to the page.

Gary: Can you take a look at the annotations on my page and let me know what you think of those? I have them on my product review videos for the duration of the video. Should I have them up the whole time? Is the purchase annotation in the right place?

Jeremy: I have a couple of suggestions for you. First I would move the purchase annotation to the top left because we read left to right, top to bottom. The eyes naturally go that direction. Also, when you hover over the “click here to purchase” the background is black. I would change that to a red, orange, or yellow color because then the annotation will be shaded that color which will make it stand out more. The next thing I would do is not have the annotation up there for the duration of the video. Have it pop up for 10-15 seconds and then disappear for a few seconds. That way, it will catch the attention of your audience and hopefully create more business. The last thing I would change is what your annotation says. Using the word purchase is very intimidating and final. Instead, use phrases like “learn more”, or “save 20%”, or “free shipping”. If you make the annotation less intimidating it will also most likely get more clicks.

Gary: Well, that is some great information I will have to fix those right away.

Jeremy: I also am looking at your Meta description and you only have one line – purchase the zip board at URL. You need to give them a reason to look at your site. Maybe have some nice copy in the 5 lines before the show more button with the URL being the last thing they see before having to expand the section. You have to tell someone why they should click the link and go to your site.

Gary: I thought that being simple would get people to visit my site. Thanks for the extra tip there, it should make a big difference. Thanks for coming on the show today, there was a lot of great information given today. Be sure to visit Jeremy’s site vidpow.com and watch these courses and conferences.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Talking Podcasting With Dave Jackson

Season 1 Ep 7

David Jackson
Gary Leland Show Episode 7

This week I interview podcasting coach Dave Jackson. Long time friend and fellow podcaster, Dave is the creator of “The School of Podcasting” and many other projects over the years I've known him. – Produced By Gary Leland

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Gary: Dave, welcome to the show, I’m excited to have you on here. I think this is the first time I have interviewed Dave Jackson from, “The School of Podcasting”.

Dave: I had you on my show, I don’t think we have ever flip flopped, I’m excited to be on here!

Gary: We have been on the same shows too, but never me actually conducting an interview with the long time podcaster, Dave Jackson, who has been podcasting since 2005. Have you had “The School of Podcasting” going since 2005 as well?

Dave: Yes, I started the first podcast in April of 2005 and had the school going a few months after that because after I got bit by the bug I thought it was just way too cool and started “The School of Podcasting”.

Gary: Would I be correct in assuming then that you have the longest running podcast on training people how to podcast?

Dave: Yes, it’s a great area because you can say “Podcast 411 with Rob Walsh”, and that was him interviewing podcasters. He occasionally would throw out tips on how to podcast, but I think if you were looking for strictly tips and how to podcast, then that would be me.

Gary: Dave’s site is schoolofpodcasting.com. He has been putting lessons on there since 2005 for how to podcast! One thing about your site, Dave, is that your stuff is affordable. You’re not one of these guys who are charging $1000 a lesson. Your stuff is very affordable, even to have regular access to all of your stuff. How much is that?

Dave: It’s $99 for the first month and $10 for each month after that. We tell people, come for the education but stay for the community. The reason I did that is because when I first started out it wasn’t that expensive and as I added more stuff, there was more value so I raised the price. I noticed that any time someone was involved at a lower price, they stuck around for years. So sure, I could keep it at $99 a month and you would stick around for 3 or 4 months, but if I drop that price down to $9 for each month after, you will stick around for years. Not only does that give me the money, but it gives me a better relationship and I get more insights into what you need, which helps me build a better product. That is the way it has worked for me and I love it that way. I do have people who joined in 2005 and are still members today.

Gary: When they join, or get involved with you for $99.95, they get access to 9 years worth of information.

Dave: Yes, there are many different courses. One of them is how to plan your podcast. A lot of that is just self-evaluation, like what makes you, you and then you have to define what the goal of the podcast is and who your listeners are. Then you figure out where all three of those cross each other and that is where you pick your topic. Then there is a lesson about hardware, what kind of microphone to order, all sorts of different questions you have to ask. It just walks you through the entire process including how to upload it into iTunes and how to promote it, how to monetize it if that’s what you want to do. These are all things that I have come across in my 9 years that I found useful. If a question arises that has not been answered then I will make a tutorial for it.

Gary: It’s a great site, tons of information; I highly recommend people go check it out. I know people are wondering about the first month being $99.95 and my thought is that if you charged a lower price for the information then someone could get in and get out of town after they gather all of the information.

Dave: And that is exactly why the first month is a little bit higher. You can go in and basically blow through everything in a weekend if you wanted to binge learn everything. But like I said, we have a great Facebook Group, we have a conference call once a month that is supposed to be 1 ½ hours, but it usually goes for about 3! We get to ask questions and network live, it’s a lot of fun!

Gary: That said, everyone needs to check that out. Let’s get on to helping people out here on this podcasting situation. Someone wants to get into podcasting to sell stuff, how would they start? Besides going to your site, what is the first thing they need to do? Let’s go through the steps of how to get them set up.

Dave: Well, you want to look at who your audience is, who uses your product and figure out what those people want to hear. Let’s say I make antiperspirant. I have to figure out what audience sweats because they need my product. It might be people who are into extreme sports or something of that nature, so I might consider doing an extreme sports show and you can use your product as the sponsor, “If you’re sweating when you’re bungee jumping, check out this product”. You have to identify your audience and figure out what they want to hear, what is going to inspire, entertain, and impact them because ultimately it comes back to your audience. That would be step number 1. A lot of times, you already have that information if you are already in a business because you can get that demographic from your orders. If you have an email list, I have heard of people messaging all of those people and telling them they are trying to make a podcast and ask what they would want to hear about. Let your audience decide what it is because they are the ones who are going to consume it.

Gary: That’s a good tip to let your audience give you an idea or give you information.

Dave: Yeah because you may have wanted to go in one direction, but your audience might say that they want to hear about something else that you hadn’t thought of yet. One company, Evernote, they don’t have a physical product but their CEO, main developer, and the guy who does the podcast will take questions from the users. When you get direct contact with the head of the company and he thinks something is a good idea, it’s a really interesting thing. They let people explain how they are using their product. It ends up being a commercial, it just doesn’t sound like a commercial. It’s an interesting way that they spin that. It gives that direct contact between the customers and the CEO of the company.

Gary: Let’s say we have our subject down, I think that most people who listen to my show already have a business so we definitely know who our customers are, and the interesting point was who to go after. What would be my next step?

Dave: If you already know your audience, then you can go into Facebook groups, Google+ has groups, LinkedIn has groups and you can use these to your advantage. You can go into these groups and see what questions are being asked over and over again, which is usually a good sign of something else that will impact your audience. You can get that reaction of people saying they couldn’t find that answer anywhere else. If you can cover that in your podcast, that would be good content. The other thing is that with a physical product, you have a couple of things you can do. The first, which you don’t want to do too much of it, is describing the product physically and you can play on the theater of the mind. You may be able to help them see it and entice them to go to your website, so they can actually see the product and what you are talking about. Now that they are on your website, they are one click away from buying the product. I don’t know that I would want to listen to too much if it were an audio podcast, but obviously if it’s a video podcast it’s great because they can actually see the product. If you’re using audio podcast, you would describe what it looks like, feels like, smells like, and really get them picturing it in their mind, which might get them to go to your website so they can really see it, but I wouldn’t do it for the whole show because you can’t show them the product without them going to your website. Make it super easy to get to your website. If you are using Word Press, there is a plug in called Pretty Link which makes it easy to remember the website to go straight to the product. The fun about podcasting is your audience is listening to your podcast while they are driving, or walking the dog, or walking on the treadmill, so you have to make it easy to remember. The last episode at the School of Podcasting was episode 426, so I just tell people to go to schoolofpodcasting.com/426 and it will take them right there. If you are talking about a product, for example a super slugger, then you tell people to go to garyswebsite.com/superslugger and it will take them right there. If you get them enticed with the content, then you want to make it easy for them to get back to the website because the website has the buy button.

Gary: With hosting, what do you recommend? They have to have a place to put their show file.

Dave: There are 2 kinds of hosting. One is website hosting, the one I use is Host Gator, and there are plenty of others out there, but that’s the one I have been using. Their support is great. The other thing a lot of people don’t realize is that your media matters. There are many websites that say that they have unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, that’s true, but that’s for a website not for media files. I have actually had a couple of people who have been asked to either move their website or they get shut down in some cases because the webhost is not ready for 1000 people to grab that audio file at the same time. When they try to do that, when they try to serve up that file, it really puts tremendous strain on their hardware. I recommend a media hosting company that is made to take that hit, they are made to go through and serve that file up quickly. I use a company called Libsyn.com and they have been around since 2004. I have used them for The School of Podcasting pretty much since day one and have never had a problem.

Gary: I use Libsyn myself and I have been using them forever. I have a couple of questions. If someone is filling out this Libsyn information on their account, it’s pretty cut and dry like your description, your title, upload photos, and all of that. I don’t understand some things to this day. On the right hand side here, where it goes to category, what does that mean?

Dave: When Libsyn launched, they were trying to be everything that you needed, including your website. Let’s say you have one category for strategies and another for opinion. A category can be used as a filter. So you can put a button on the website that points at all of the posts that are tagged as strategy and then you can add another button or link that says, “click here to view all of the opinion posts”. Most people that I know use Libsyn for their media hosting and not for their website.

Gary: My other question I had for you is about the tags and key words.

Dave: Tags and key words used to be much more important for iTunes, SEO, and other purposes. There is a really popular plug in with Word Press called Power Press where in their next update they are going to take key words completely out because at this point, no one is using them anymore. It used to be something that would raise you in the rankings; iTunes would give them a lot of credibility. From what I understand, now iTunes and everyone else ignores them because people were abusing them, it would just be key words everywhere in all sorts of bazaar things. So to be able to deliver relevant searches, most technology these days are just ignoring them.

Gary: I just heard on a podcast the other day that YouTube is using that information for the first week or two to know where to stick you, but after that they figure it out on their own and they are of no use. They do help right off the bat but six months down the road they don’t mean anything. I have one more question is about the subtitle. Where is the subtitle used?

Dave: You know what? If I find out I will let you know, I have been asking that question for a long time. The only thing I can think of is that Libsyn has their own directory that feeds other technology, but I have no idea where that shows up. When I find out I will let you know!

Gary: Then you are in the same situation, everything else I understood. I thought that maybe that just applies to the Libsyn blog.

Dave: Yeah that might be, it might be something that is only associated with the website. The one thing about Libsyn is they have great support so I will have to send them an email because I have been wondering about this for about 9 years now.

Gary: Let’s go over the other site you named, the Power Press, that is another way that you can work your podcast into your Word Press blog.

Dave: Word Press creates a thing called and RSS feed and I always tell people it’s a little bit as if you were a radio station. Do you have a favorite radio station, Gary?

Gary: No, I haven’t listened to the radio since 2004! The story I always tell, Dave, is that back in 2005 BBC interviewed me and I had to get up at like 4 in the morning to do it. While we were talking, they asked me how I thought that this would affect radio and I told them that I hadn’t listened to my radio in a year! Then BBC Radio moved on to the next subject very quickly.

Dave: So you have this RSS feed and I just tell people it is like your signal if you were a radio station. In Cleveland there is 100.7, so people tune into 100.7 and you hear what’s on the radio. Well on your website you have the RSS feed and iTunes tunes into that. Being that they are Apple and they can do stuff like that, they said that they like RSS Feeds but you have to do all of this extra stuff that we need and we can demand it because we’re Apple. What Power Press does is it adds this extra stuff that Apple needs so it basically takes your standard RSS feed and makes it compatible with iTunes as well as it will put a player on your website and download links and other fun stuff that makes it easier to create a podcast. Libsyn will actually do that as well but they have built in settings if you don’t want to use Power Press, you can do that through Libsyn as well. Back in 2004 there were not many but now there are a couple of different doors to get in there. Power Press is a great because it puts the player right on your website, it puts a player in a new window and a lot of people listen to podcasts at work so they can put it in a new window. Also it allows you to let your listeners download the show for later.

Gary: Well I thought you just put your feed in there and then put a short code on my site and that’s it.

Dave: That’s pretty much it. There are some settings in there where all of that description, key words, who’s the author, what category your podcast is in and things like that, some of that is for iTunes. So you fill that in and then you go into iTunes and you point them at your website and tell them that that is where the feed is, and it’s kind of like tuning into a radio station.

Gary: Ok so you’re telling iTunes to pick up your feed from your Word Press blog, not from Libsyn?

Dave: Right, and you could do either or. I always tell people it’s 6 one-way and a half a dozen the other. There are pros and cons of each. The only thing I sometimes worry about with Word Press is there are so many plug ins, it’s kind of like adding air conditioning to your car; you can add all of these extra features. For the most part, everything plays nice together because each plug in is written by different people and in theory they are supposed to play nice together. For instance, the Power Press plug in itself is fine, but someone can write another thing because maybe you want to add Twitter buttons or something like that and it could conflict with Power Press and your feed goes nuts. For me, I like Power Press, I just don’t use a lot of plug ins unless if I really need them on my website and if I add one the first thing I do is make sure my feed still works. If you use Libsyn’s feed, it’s just Libsyn. It’s plain and simple, you upload your post and media, you type in a few notes and there is nothing that is going to conflict with that feed. Depending on what you are doing, both are fine. I have only had one website that I have every had a problem with and it was because I had this bazaar feed plug in, so that’s why you should use the Libsyn feed. I think they are both fine, you just have to be somewhat cautious with Word Press.

Gary: Now we found out what kind of show we have, we know where we are going to put the file, now how do you get the word out about it? People can figure out how to do it, now where do they put it so it can be found?

Dave: The big gorilla still is iTunes and you just have to tell them once where it is and they will always update it. Another is called Stitcher.com and it is very popular on the Android side of the world because there really isn’t a one size fits all app for the Android. Where the podcast app is great on the iPhone and iPad and iTunes is great on the computer, on the Android side it’s a little light so Stitcher has filled that void. Another really popular one is Tune In, I believe its tunein.com. Microsoft is a bit of a head scratcher at this point, they used to have a directory and at this point it’s very up in the air. They aren’t abandoning it, but you have to already have an RSS feed on your website that is clearly marked and they are going to come by and Bing is going to scrape it so it’s very weird. It seems like you don’t submit anything to Microsoft anymore, they just come and find you. Blackberry is a little bit of a question mark as well, they used to have a directory but are kind of MIA at this point. So those are kind of the biggies right now, Tune In, Stitcher, and iTunes.

Gary: How about Pocket Cast?

Dave: Pocket Cast is another one. If you go to Podcast 411, which is done by Rob Walsh who is another guy who has been doing it since 2004, he actually works for Libsyn and he has a directory of directories that he has been maintaining for a very long time. The thing I like about his is that there are links to every submit page. You don’t have to go to another website and click around trying to figure out where to go. Some of these are helpful, some of them are so small, but if nothing else it gives you a link back to your website.

Gary: Oh absolutely, I wasn’t going over the whole list because there are so many, but is Pocket Cast considered a big one, or is a little one?

Dave: It’s fairly popular. There is Down Cast, there’s Pocket Cast, and what they will do is they are basically able to tie into the back end of iTunes so if you’re already in iTunes they will automatically add you into their software. I think that if you’re in Pocket Cast then you are automatically in iTunes. A lot of those are set up that way. A new one called Over Cast is set up the same way; if you’re in iTunes then you are set up on the back end of iTunes because of Over Cast. It just becomes a big nightmare trying to track all of that, a couple of hundred thousand podcasts at this point.

Gary: So we now know how to get them in there, so how do we get the word out?

Dave: This is the fun part. Everyone is looking for that giant switch that will get him or her 10,000 downloads and I wish I could tell you where to get that, but it doesn’t exist! Because you know who your audience is, you are creating content that is going to impact and engage them and hopefully its in such a way that they tell their friends. You can use Facebook groups, Google+ groups, Meet Up.com has a lot of sites where people meet face to face, and you are going to network with people. I always break this down into four steps: first find your audience, two figure out where they are, and everyone wants to skip the third step, which is to develop relationships with these people. A lot of times that is where your podcast comes into play. Once you walk in and add value to the conversation, then you can tell them about your podcast. You want them to say, “wow this guy really knows his stuff” and then you can reference your podcast and tell them where to find it. That way you have shown them that you have valuable information and then they will be interested to hear what you have on that podcast.

Gary: Before you go, I want you to give a tip for something we did not go over yet that you think that people really need to know before they go into podcasting.

Dave: The big one is that it is a slow burn. Now I could say everyone needs to start a podcast and you will be rich in weeks, but that’s not the case. You’re going to end up monetizing your relationship, so you need to build that relationship and trust but that takes a little bit of time. Plan a couple of months to make that happen. I always say there is a 4 to 1 rule in an audio podcast. What that means is that if you are going to do a 15-minute podcast, times that by 4 and it’s going to take an hour to do a 15-minute show. First you have to figure out what you are going to talk about, then you have to record it, you have to upload it, and you have to write up a little blog post on it. Unfortunately Google doesn’t listen to your podcast so you have to type in some words for when people search for new baseball gloves it will bring them to your site and they explore from there. Know going in that it’s not a great get rich quick scheme but it is a great relationship builder, it will help you understand your audience better, which will help you build a better product. So it will take a little bit of time, but you are reaching a global audience and there is no spam – people won’t listen to your podcast unless if they want to. The people who are listening are just as passionate as you are about the subject, so at that point you will be making that connection because you are literally right in their ears and that connection is what will help you grow your business.

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Social Media Marketing With Paul Colligan

Season 1 Ep 6

Paul Colligan Interview
Gary Leland Show Episode 6

This week I interview social media marketing guru Paul Colligan. Why do I always enjoy talking with Paul? Because I learn something every time I talk to him. Paul is an expert marketer, and a social media expert. – Produced By Gary Leland

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Gary: You are one of the smartest guys I know when it comes to marketing with social media. Every time I talk to you, I come out with ideas. Before we get going, I know your website is paulcolligan.com, but let’s talk about what you’re into before we get into the interview.

Paul: I have always been about helping the little guy expand his reach through the leveraging of tech. It has a lot of flavors associated with it. I started off in web design and was on the Internet before the web started. I actually had a conversation with my wife one night and I said, “Hey, there is this thing called the web and I think it’s going to be big, but it’s going to mean we are going to spend $8 more a month on our internet dial up account. Is that in the budget?” This was in 1994. I started helping “ma and pa” build websites, to e-commerce helping ma and pa implement affiliate programs, to helping ma and pa do podcasting, helping ma and pa do YouTube and social media. People say that I’m all over the place, but I’m not; I’m helping people to expand their reach by leveraging tech, that’s me.

Gary: This show is about helping people sell stuff, physical products. Do you have a tip we can start out with?

Paul: Well first of all, God bless you. A lot of people forget on the Internet that there is a whole world of physical. What you want to do is make the transition as easy as possible. This is why I love podcasting, because the transition is so easy. After they hit the subscribe button, the new episodes are sent straight to your device. Transition is easy. When you sell things online, you want to make it ridiculously easy. Here are some examples. A lot of people have Facebook sites that say, “Visit my site to buy something”; well there are stores that you can put into Facebook. I have heard it said that every day people are leaving the Internet for Facebook. It’s a bit of a joke, but my wife has an email account with 5,000 emails on it that she is terrified to look at, but will go on Facebook every morning to see what her friends are up to. That’s the majority of the world. For you and I, this is our business, this is our life, but for the average person, they are on Facebook all of the time, so why not make it possible to buy on Facebook? A lot of people don’t realize this, but inside of YouTube, there is the ability to click to buy right on YouTube if you partner with the right e-commerce platform!

Gary: Now that sounds interesting, let’s talk about that really quickly. I have been seeing numbers lately about how huge it is and the value of it compared to other things. Everyone knows it is the second biggest search engine there is. That to me is the number 1 place to start with stuff. How do you buy straight from YouTube?

Paul: Let’s take that assumption that YouTube is the second biggest search engine. Let’s do the math: Who do you think is the number 1 search engine?

Gary: Google.

Paul: And you think the number 2 search engine is?

Gary: I think its YouTube.

Paul: Tell me this: have you even seen YouTube results inside of Google?

Gary: Yes

Paul: Have you ever seen Google results inside of YouTube?

Gary: No.

Paul: Who is the number 1 search engine, Gary?

Gary: I guess that is a good way to look at it!

Paul: The amazing thing is that it is so much easier to market on YouTube than it is to market on the regular web because not as many people are doing videos. You put a video optimized to your product, to your audience and YouTube has a thing called “annotations”. What these are, are the little pop-ups in the video. One of the options inside of annotations is that you can link it to a video, a playlist, a channel, a Google page, a subscribe button; but you can also link to a fundraising project like crowd sourcing. You can also link to associated websites, i.e. your website. Now you can say, “to buy now click here” and link that annotation to that specific item on your website. The last option is merch. One of them is Shopify. You can link directly to your Shopify page from your YouTube video!

Gary: I use Shopify! That is mind-boggling. I had no idea Shopify was involved with YouTube’s merch. That’s amazing to me. Now let’s go into Facebook, doing the store in Facebook. Tell me about that.

Paul: Shopify has Facebook plug ins.

Gary: Are you kidding me? For Facebook? I had no idea. Do you know much about Shopify?

Paul: I know a little bit.

Gary: Shopify is like Louisville Slugger, the baseball bat company. Louisville Slugger does not run their own website, they use Shopify. So when someone goes to Louisville Slugger’s website to buy a bat, it goes into the Shopify system; Shopify takes their money, they think they are buying from Louisville Slugger, but Shopify is handling all of the behind the scenes work. Shopify puts this on their website and says, “okay everyone in the country who has a Shopify account and carries Louisville Slugger bats in stock, if you have this bat tell us you have it”. Then whoever is closest to the customer gets the order.

Paul: Actually that’s a different system.

Gary: That’s Shopify. I do it every day.

Paul: That might be an extension inside of Shopify that I am not familiar with.

Gary: That’s the only Shopify website, that’s the only core I know. We do about $500 to $600 a day on Shopify.

Paul: Shopify is also an independent shopping cart system. You can build your own store on there for about $10 a month.

Gary: Okay then we are talking about two different things with the same name. Oh never mind, I’m talking about Shopatron, my mistake. Okay so Shopify, I have a Shopify store, because I have been building a store on every platform. So I can take that Shopify store and put it on Facebook and YouTube?

Paul: These stores are dirt-cheap and they have the integration to take credit card numbers, not that PayPal nonsense, but true swipe integration. So you can build the store, build the credit card integration, build things directly and you are good to go.

Gary: It is so easy to do; I built mine on my phone on Easter Sunday while we were at a bar! I sat there and built the whole thing on my phone and when I got back to the office I only spent about 30 minutes tweaking everything. So I can put that Shopify on pages, but can I also put it on personal pages and groups?

Paul: I don’t see why not, I can’t see why you wouldn’t be able to.

Gary: Well that’s a great deal, so I’m covered there too. So people can come right to your site and buy those products, right there. You don’t have to send them anywhere else.

Paul: Let’s go back to this whole thing about not causing a problem on the way. We are recording this the week of the big “celebrity nude” scandal and a lot of people right now are thinking about privacy and what secure and what isn’t. I definitely wouldn’t doubt that people are wondering about their credit card information being safe. What I think a lot of people forget to do, and we can go back to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest on this, but give an 800 number for your store. That way if they want to order something, they can call for it.

Gary: I quite using my 800 numbers, I just got rid of it.

Paul: Gary, if people are going to call and buy stuff, let them! One of my prime rules is that if someone wants to try to pay you, let them.

Gary: I need to get into that frame of mind because I got to the point that I didn’t want people to call me. I guess that’s terrible when I don’t want someone to call me to buy something. I guess you’re right; I have the wrong frame of mind there. I need to have a more positive outlook on people calling me.

Paul: Those phone numbers in Facebook are hyperlinks. So if someone is looking on your page, they can click the link and call you right from their phone.

Gary: Here is an example: I post a video every morning and I have a Woo Commerce store. I put the video on my Facebook page, so you’re saying I should put the phone number on there. When they see that on their phone and decide they want to buy it, they can click the number and call me right away to buy it. I have had the wrong attitude about that.

Paul: Let’s face it: if you were going to sell one product a day, and you had a full time person sitting by the phone all day, it is not necessarily the best use of your money. But this could change a lot of things. It doesn’t necessarily have to call a full time sales person. You can use of the number redirecting services, or Google Voice, or it can even go to you if you’re a small business owner and you can act like the sales department.

Gary: We just have whomever is standing near a phone will pick it up and take the order. So I have definitely had the wrong attitude on that. I think that may be the most valuable thing you have told me today, that the phone number is a hyperlink.

Paul: If you like that one, you’ll love this. So IOS 8 is coming out in a couple of months and phone numbers in a podcast will now be hyperlinked. That podcast app on IOS 8 is an app that you can’t delete.

Gary: So for my softball product review show, now everyone who listens to it can just touch the number to call me and buy one or more of those products. Looks like I need to get back into the phone business! Is the 800 number totally necessary, Paul? Because people are getting free long distance on their phones these days.

Paul: “Necessary” depends on who your audience is. 800 numbers, to me, make you feel bigger than you are. Portland’s area code is 503. So if I see 503 pop up on my phone, I know it is a Portland company, which isn’t necessarily good or bad, I just know it’s a Portland company. An 800 number does not say where you are located.

Gary: See I have always thought that because there is 800 or 888, mine as 817 can look like a toll free number.

Paul: Make sure you put “call us toll free at”. We get so excited about the tech and the toys that we simply forget that our customers are human beings. We need to make it easy to buy what you are trying to sell.

Gary: See and I haven’t been doing that. I have been trying to make it easy on me, which has made it harder on them.

Paul: Which I understand, and there are times when you have to do that. But if you want to play the game big, then you have to play the game big. You look at everyone who is winning right now: why is Amazon winning? Amazon is winning because of Amazon Prime, which is making it easier for me to order from Amazon, than it is from the store down the street. All that the store from down the street needs to do is make it easier than Amazon and they will win. This is where we have to go and what we have to do. It’s not a Twitter strategy; it’s a sales strategy that is marketed on Twitter. It’s not a Facebook or a YouTube strategy; it’s a sales strategy that is marketed on all of these things. You want to reflect a process of customer-centric sales and marketing that makes everyone feel like you are the kind of person they want to deal with.

Gary: Making more revenues by making it easier to do business with them surely doesn’t hurt either.

Paul: Exactly! The thing is, I have zero loyalty for Amazon. Yesterday, I bought a new Mac Pro, one of those $3000 computers that I will start doing some streaming on, so I got a high end Mac Pro. So I was in the Apple Store and that store annoys me. They have 6 people at the front and they are all waiting for me. I tell them I want a Mac Pro and they tell me I have to see a specialist. All I want them to do is go pick the box off of the shelf and charge me my money so I can go home. They finally get a pro to me, the guy comes out and says, “we don’t sell a lot of these”. I am the business manager, can I please get your email so I can follow up with you to make sure all of your business needs are met?” I went from entering the Apple Store frustrated to leaving saying, “I have a guy at the store”. If I call your store Softball Junk, and you treat me right, I now have a guy. Heaven forbid you follow up and thank me for ordering and even offer me a coupon for next time! What people want is a “guy” or “gal”.

Gary: They want a contact; they want to feel special.

Paul: Exactly. Run the type of business where your customers are special. If there are no margins to how your customers can’t be special be careful. The book on this one is “Lynchpin” by Seth Goden. You have to differentiate yourself or it’s over.

Gary: You have given me a lot of information and I’m trying to absorb it because normally, I learn something here, but you have been teaching me a lot. Like I said at the beginning of the show, I learn something from you every time we talk. I could talk to you forever and still learn something every time. Let’s go back to Facebook. Is there anything else on Facebook, tools like that? I think that Facebook is the place to be, personally. I know a lot of people give it a hard time, but I am on it 24/7 working and making money. So that’s my social media of choice.

Paul: It’s so funny because people have the funniest attitudes about Facebook. They will talk about having 1,000 followers but only reach 200 of them on a post, or something like that. Yet, they will go to a Chamber of Commerce meeting where 3 people show up. It’s a simple concept, but go where your people are. Here is the thing, if you are listening to this show, your people are on Facebook. It’s just the demographics of the situation; 1/6th of the population is on Facebook right now. Your audience is there, and if not then their spouse or kids are. I had a friend who bought into a terrible franchise. It was wretched and almost scam like in it’s approach. One of the deals was that you were not allowed to make a website because that’s what your marketing dollars went to, but when we read the contracts, we realized you can make a Facebook page. What we did was we just did Facebook scanning for the area, and just by targeting Facebook to their audience, they were able to sell the franchise 18 months later at a profit. Facebook is where your audience is; go where your audience is! Right now if you look at the raw numbers right now, YouTube is bigger than Facebook. So your audience is on YouTube, your audience is on Facebook, so go there; then make it easy, don’t make it hard. You’ve been on the web long enough, Gary, so you will remember when we had these website where you had to click a button to enter your website? If I’m here, let’s get to work. On Facebook, they will say “click here to see something interesting”. Why don’t you just show me something interesting, don’t tease and taunt me! There is a famous writer by the name Ann Lamot, she wrote “Bird by Bird”, which is considered to be the quintessential book on writing books by writers. She is an older gal, absolutely fabulous, one of my favorites in the entire world. The funny part is that she is a writer and the assumption is that writers have blogs. Well she doesn’t have a blog! She writes on Facebook and it always blows me away how well she is doing. She has 255,000 followers. Her most recent post has 49,137 shares, 61,000 likes, and 3,933 comments.

Gary: Wow those are some numbers!

Paul: I show these numbers to the top social media people in the world and they freak out. Ann’s secret is not Facebook trickery, or hackery, or a plug in – Ann just knows that that is where her audience is! Ann knows that if she posted on her page that she wrote a blog post and here is the link to read it, that most people won’t. But they are on Facebook! You’re on Facebook, I’m on Facebook for business reasons, and our wives are on Facebook because the Internet is annoying, yet people say they don’t want to put their business on Facebook, its ridiculous!

Gary: Let me give you a scenario of something I am doing here. When I make my videos every day on an item I am selling and people come to the site, see the video, can buy it in my shopping cart there, then I just post an image on my Facebook post with a link to go watch the video on my site.

Paul: Why? Why not just put the video on there?

Gary: That’s what I’m asking, should I just put the video on there? If I just put my YouTube video on there, will the annotation work on Facebook?

Paul: Yup.

Gary: So, I can put that on there, they watch the video, they don’t have to go somewhere else, then they click on the annotation and can get on the page and buy it.

Paul: Yup.

Gary: That sounds like the way I should be doing it and I am really messing that up aren’t I?

Paul: Yup.

Gary: Okay, well that’s amazing.

Paul: Are you having fun?

Gary: I am, I always have fun when I am learning something so valuable. So give me some more scoop on something else. I am like a kid here asking for a glass of milk, give me a cookie.

Paul: this should change the game for anyone who is not going down this path. About 6 or 7 years ago, I was at an event and I was speaking to a guy who had a natural pesticide product and he had a video and we were talking about sales with videos. His bandwidth bill for his video was about $15,000 per month. I asked him, “what if you move to YouTube, what would happen”. And do you know what happened?

Gary: He made an extra $15,000 a month?

Paul: Exactly! Nothing changed, but he got an extra $15,000 a month back.

Gary: He probably picked up some extra sales, I would think.

Paul: Yes, but this simple, calming approach. Ann is a writer and instead of blogging and plug ins and SEO and all of these nerdy things, she said that everyone is on Facebook, so why don’t I start writing there? This is where we need to start thinking and where we need to start going. This is just as much for physical product as it is for anything else. There is a chef at a restaurant, who every day while he prepped the special of the day, he took a quick video of it and put it on Facebook using his phone. Let’s say you really love German food. Who wouldn’t want to watch a 30 second video every day showing how to make some sort of German meal? Of course if you have just seen 24 videos over the last 24 days from your favorite German restaurant and you are going to take your wife out for dinner, you’re going to go to that place because you know who the chef is and you know what he cooks. People are going to ask what camera did he use, or what tripod did he use, or what editing equipment does he have? He doesn’t! He used his phone, he clicked record and he clicked publish, because that is what his audience needed.

Gary: And that is all it takes. Do you use Facebook at all to market?

Paul: Yeah, I totally use Facebook to market.

Gary: What is your page, not your personal page, but the one that you market?

Paul: Let me give you a little tip, this is one that I do and I recommend that everyone do this. I don’t want to market Facebook because Facebook is already doing a fine job marketing Facebook. My Facebook page is PaulColligan.com/Facebook. Guess where my YouTube page is, Gary?

Gary: I already know!

Paul: PaulColligan.com/YouTube, Twitter is PaulColligan.com/Twitter, Instagram is PaulColligan.com/Instagram. I recommend that everyone do this because that’s the marketing. Were you around in the days of City Search?

Gary: Yes I remember City Search.

Paul: One of the biggest scams in the world. I would walk into a store, who would pay City Search good money to get a sign that says “find us on City Search” where all of their competitors were. Don’t market anyone else but you. Paul, where do I find you on Facebook? PaulColligan.com/Facebook.

Gary: It sure makes it easy. If anyone wants to find you and they get the system down, then they will see if you are on Twitter.

Paul: It’s funny because after I joined Pinterest, a guy was looking for me with those URL’s and he couldn’t find me because I had forgotten to do it. He actually reached out to me on Facebook and I fixed it right away.

Gary: Well I am going to get that done tomorrow, too. See, I learn so much!

Paul: About 22 months ago I stopped blogging because I realized it’s very arrogant to tell someone to come to my blog. Why should you come to my blog? What am I doing for you? I started putting everything on my social sites. My blog now is merely my favorite social postings; I put nothing new on my blog at all. I post to Facebook and my audience reads it. Does all of my audience read it? No. Does the audience that care read it? Yes.

Gary: I just liked your page. I was already on your personal page, but I hadn’t liked that page yet.

Paul: That is where I put the stuff and it works great for me. I have sold $1000 products on my Facebook page.

Gary: You have your podcast on here and this looks like a better page to have your podcast on than on your Word Press page.

Paul: We did a whole episode of The Podcast Report on if you need a web page any more. Think about it; give me a big media name, someone huge in the media.

Gary: Pat Flynn.

Paul: Not in the nerd space, like someone that CNN is going to talk about.

Gary: Maybe Obama.

Paul: Okay, Obama. He doesn’t want you to go to WhiteHouse.com. He wants you to read about him at CNN.com and buy his book on Amazon.

Gary: He sure will in 3 years! I guess Bill Clinton would be a better example then.

Paul: The fact of the matter is, they are media stars. Lady Gaga doesn’t want you to go to LadyGaga.com. She wants you to go to iTunes to buy her music, to YouTube to watch her videos, sign up for Twitter to get her updates, and to interact on Facebook with the Gaga Nation, or whatever she calls her fan base. The real big stars don’t have web sites. The big stars are ubiquitous, they are everywhere.

Gary: I like your idea of using the domain names that way because right now I ask people to go to Facebook.com/FastpitchTV. I sure like the way it sounds the other way around!

Paul: Yeah you are marketing Facebook that way, don’t market Facebook. Facebook is doing a fine job of marketing Facebook.

Gary: How are the books doing?

Paul: It’s great! Let me tell you this, my YouTube strategies book, has knocked off 4 different competitors who tried to call their books the same thing. The books are lead generators and the books sell better and better things. The checks from Amazon are great. I always tell people that if someone sends you a check, cash it.

Gary: How are the books lead generators? I think I know, but I think this would be a good topic.

Paul: For example, the YouTube Strategies 2014 book says that YouTube changes all of the time. If you want to be updated for the rest of the year on any changes that happen, register your book.

Gary: So people are just sending you their email addresses left and right?

Paul: Yup. What is the difference between Amazon and Google?

Gary: The difference between Amazon and Google? Google is almost $200 more a share?

Paul: Google is a search engine for people who want free information. Amazon is a search engine for people who are willing to pay for it.

Gary: That is a very good and very true point.

Paul: Where would you rather be? Here is the best part: on any given day, I have the top book on YouTube, Podcasting, and Multicast marketing.

Gary: I know on your Podcasting strategies, and this is a great strategy, you had a live show of people asking questions about podcasting, you answered them, and you took all of that content and made a book out of them. Did you do the same on the other three books?

Paul: Yes basically, but on the YouTube strategies books, I did a live training event that I charged for, so I financed the whole book by charging for the session.

Gary: I’m going to have to get on there and buy those because they are all 4 topics I am interested in.

Paul: Here is a story about selling physical goods. I was asked to speak at an event and typically I do the deal where I sell something and I split the take with the guy who held the event. This particular one was one where I got a pretty nice speaking fee and the organizer asked if I could give a copy of the book to everyone in the house. I own all of the books, not a publishing house, so I can get them for $2 a copy if I want and he knew that. He was paying me enough of a fee that I felt he was hinting to bring 300 copies of the book. At the end of the phone conversation he asked if he should buy the copies on Amazon before the event and I make $6 a book. So I made an extra $1,800 by having a book. When you do an event like that, if he were to hand out a sheet asking for your email address that would be cheesy. Now if they buy a book that asks for the email address it was loved and appreciated.

Gary: How many pages is one of these books?

Paul: 100 to 110 pages.

Gary: How much do you retail the book for?

Paul: I am trying different things, but typically $14.99.

Gary: I have a book the same size, my first book, its $14.95. I just brought them in for $2 and change each.

Paul: Create Space?

Gary: Yes. The back page of mine has all of my websites for more information.

Paul: Do you track how much you get from those?

Gary: No, I don’t.

Paul: You should track those, put in redirects. Put trackers, you want to find out.

Gary: I really don’t track anything but the money.

Paul: A good thing to track!

Gary: I do track our discount codes and see how many are being used. I do need to get into more tracking though. I just wanted to know if I was on the right track there.

Paul: I used to work at a very high-end consulting firm, a place where they laugh at the concept of casual Friday, you don’t bring in outside food so the office doesn’t smell kind of place. We had these business cards that were ornate and beautiful, I think they even had gold foil on them. I think they were $1.80 each and we were told to give them out when it made sense but to not throw them in fishbowls to win a free lunch. 12 years ago I was paying $1.80 for a business card and now I am paying $2.12 per unit for my book, which is a much better business card.

Gary: That is a better business card! Did you do the Podcasting Bible on Create Space?

Paul: That was a long time ago, I used Morgan J Publishing, they were an entrepreneurial publisher, it was fun. I really liked the guys.

Gary: I remember when you gave me copy of that and I thought it was really cool because you were giving out books.

Paul: So all the way back to Ann Lemot. This woman is one of the most respected writers in the whole world and people come to her and she is brilliant, charming, and lovely. I went to an evening with Ann Lemot and they did a Q&A at the end. Someone asked her if she knew now what she knew then what would she do differently and she said self-publish. She wanted to own her own stuff. If she is saying to own her own stuff, we all should. That YouTube book I spent maybe 40 hours on, and that’s every element of every part of it. That book has made me several times as much as a book I did on Front Page that took me 3 months to make. What is your book about?

Gary: The Complete Book of Training Drills.

Paul: I have a challenge for you my friend. I want you to buy 1,000 copies of your book, put a coupon with a tracker code in each book, and I want you to put a copy of your book in the next 1,000 orders that go out of your place. If I ordered a bat from you and you put a copy of the book in my order, I would owe you. Who would not want to order from you again? The feeling they would have for you, the reciprocity that would result in. People would post to Instagram, “look what I just got with this new bat”!

Gary: Ok I’m going to try that with my Woo Commerce site because I am really trying to build that in particular. Would it be okay to have a little slip attached to the book saying “thanks for buying, here’ s a coupon for next time”?

Paul: Yes, absolutely.

Gary: Thanks so much, Paul for talking to us today. I learned way more than I thought I would today.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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My Facebook Social Strategy

Season 1 Ep 5

My Facebook Marketing Strategy
Gary Leland Show Episode 5

On this episode I talk about my personal marketing strategy for Facebook. Social Media is the only way I advertise my business, and my business is growing every year. I talk about the steps I follow in my social media marketing process. – Produced By Gary Leland

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Let’s talk about Facebook. I’m going to pretend we are starting from scratch with your one personal account. It’s your personal page where you have close friends and family. First thing you need to do is make a second account. I have 2 accounts. You need a second account for a lot of reasons. After you build this great marketing network of hundreds of thousands of people who are loyal followers of you and your brand, and Facebook decides to kick you off of Facebook for something you did wrong. Everything that you had is gone, because you are no longer on Facebook and you were the sole owner. So make a secondary Facebook page. Mine has a clever name and I don’t work that page very much, but it is a member of most things I belong to, own, or built, so it’s kind of a back door. It’s a safety valve. Just in case something happens to my other page, I have a way to access everything that I have built. I put tons of time and money into it. Next, build a brand page. This is not a personal page; it is a company page. The reason why you want to make a company page instead of a personal page is because personal pages limit you 5000 friends. For instance, for Fastpitch TV (facebook.com/fastpitchtv), I have close to 75,000 likes. If you start as a personal page and you get to 5,000, you have to try to migrate all of those people over to the new page, and that never happens completely. Start doing your company marketing on a company page. Make yourself an administrator and the other account an administrator, which makes them both you.

Start with a company page and post from that page daily. Start inviting people to your page who you think will be interested in your page. You might even do that on your personal page, is like people with whom you are familiar, not necessarily good friends. Then you can recommend to your friends to join your page. I post my Fastpitch TV blog every day, to get more people coming to the site, to get them enjoying the page, to get them reposting, liking, and sharing information that I give. When I do make a post, I make it quite a few times. Every morning, I make a post on my blog at 9 or 10am. I go to Facebook, put the image I have created for that post because I know that images get more views on Facebook than just regular text. I think Facebook even shows it more because they like images more than text. Let’s say at 9:30, I made the post to my website, Fastpitch.TV; by 9:35 I have made it on Facebook and I have sent a link to read the post to read to the specific blog page. Then in the bottom left hand corner, you see a little icon. If you click it a calendar will come up; that’s your scheduling tool. I will schedule that post to come up every month for the next 6 months because that is as far ahead as they will let you schedule. What I choose are different days of the week and different times of the day, so there is more of a chance that everyone in my audience will see it at least once. It makes it look like I have 6 times the amount of content than I actually do. Doing this has helped me grow my fan base to 75,000 people. It should be up to 100,000 people in no time at all.

I am always experimenting with new things and I just opened a Woo Commerce store on my site at Fastpitch.TV. If you are not familiar with Woo Commerce, it is a plug in you can buy for your site to make it a store. You put products for sale on your Word Press page, specifically on that page. I built a working Woo Commerce store on Fastpitch.TV, which is a Word Press site, and I filmed 5 short videos of products I sold. Each video was 2-3 minutes, explained the product, and told them where they could find it. I put these on once a day on my Facebook page. Now, one of my six posts a day is a product review and tells them they can come to my site and buy the product. Virtually every day I sold out of the product I reviewed. I wasn’t stocking thousands of these items, but I sold in one day what normally takes a month to sell, some items maybe more. I had to say very quickly that I was out of the product, but people still ordered it because I had a back order date listed. I can actually now start marketing products on Facebook for people to come to my site and buy stuff. That is the basic plan behind my marketing, is building an audience and selling them stuff.

I am working on a new approach now, which are the Facebook groups. I like Facebook groups; you can have pages and groups. When groups first came out, I started a few of them. One of them is Fastpitch Softball, which has been around for about a year, and it has over 6,000 likes. I think that when you have a group and it gets big enough, Facebook sees the kind of people that may be interested and put it over to the right hand side of your page saying that you may be interested in joining this group. It does help acquire more people because it did take off all of the sudden. Then I made another group. It’s something I am very excited about. I built a network of groups, there are actually 401 groups in this network and it will be a giant marketing tool for me when it’s all said and done. This network is Fastpitch Search Network, and you can find it at Softball. Directory or Fastpitch. Directory, which are the websites. I have made one main page that the URL directs you to, which is the Fastpitch Search Directory. You can’t post anything on that page; it just has the links to 50 other groups so it functions as a landing page. The 50 groups are the 50 states in alphabetical order. Within each state, it has 7 age groups from 6U to 18U because softball, like many sports, is played in age groups. This search network is for fastpitch players to find fastpitch teams and for fastpitch teams to find fastpitch players. They are all pages you have to join; you can’t just post, which helps with spam. The only thing you can post on this page is to find players or find teams, not for practices, not for tournaments. This way, people don’t have to scroll through a bunch of posts to find what they really want and that is all that is there. I even put it on the rules that if you post about other things I can kick you off and ban you from the group. I did the test run in Texas in the 7 age groups and I am getting close to 1000 members on each one of those groups. This allows me to target those members and market the products I am trying to sell. It will act as a new marketing arm.

Now we have built our personal page, our back up page, our company page, we are posting on it every day, and we have created a network of groups where your members can interact with one another. I have a lot of my stuff automatically post to each of these as well by using If This Then That, IFTTT.com. When I make a post it will automatically post on my group pages. A lot of them at 2000-3000, some have over 6,000, so I post one time with IFTTT, it will post everywhere. Not everyone is a group of all of your groups, which is why it should be posted in all of the groups. If someone sees it more than once, great; it’s just one more opportunity for them to click through and buy product. As the group owner/administrator, yes you have the right to advertise on that page. You take a chance; if advertise too much, people will leave, but I think the average person sees it as a great resource instead. I have been on pages like this and seeing nothing but spam. I think my pages are the perfect example that they will live with it, and even support what you are doing and selling. Don’t put too much stuff to sell right off of the bat. Wait for the page to start to work the way it’s supposed to before you put anything on there to sell. My Fastpitch Player Search pages probably won’t get any spam on them for a year, just so the page can build up with it’s intended purpose.

How do I find time to build 401 pages with my busy schedule? I posted on my Facebook page that I would pay $8.50 per hour to build groups and I had a ton of people volunteer. There are a lot of people who don’t have jobs, are stay home moms or dads, and they can work a couple of hours a day on a subject they like with something they understand. The girl who did it for me did a great job; she built all 401 groups with a lot of information and custom images.

I hope I gave you some information that was of interest and helpful!

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Pinterest Marketing With Cynthia Sanchez

Season 1 Ep 4

Interview with Cynthia Sanchez
Gary Leland Show Episode 4

Cynthia Sanchez joins me to talk about Pinterest, and how to market, and sell stuff using Pinterest. Cynthia is one of the top Pinterest Gurus in the country. You can find her website at OhSoPinteresting.com, take a look. She offers a ton of information to help you with your Pinterest Page. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Cynthia, thank you for coming on the show, I really appreciate it and really appreciate you volunteering to be our Pinterest expert. Have you been with Pinterest since it started, since that came up because you know more about it than anyone I know!

Cynthia: First of all, thank you Gary for having me on the show and actually I was a little bit reluctant when it came to Pinterest at first. I was of the mindset that I was already on Facebook and there were already all of those other social networks, so who really needs another. But then I jumped on it and I was just blown away. I was so amazed at how useful I found it. From there it turned into a blog about the things that I found useful about it. I was then approached by local businesses to manage their Pinterest accounts and help them with social media, and that turned into my business, where I do focus on helping businesses use Pinterest as a tool to help them grow their businesses.

Gary: Not only do you help them, but I see you speaking everywhere in the country and weren’t you just in Europe?

Cynthia: Yes, I just got back from Europe a few weeks ago from speaking over there and talking about Pinterest, really exciting stuff. Pretty much coast to coast this year for sure!

Gary: You must know something if people are bringing you in that much, the audiences are liking what you are having to tell them. Where can people find you if they want to dig into this deeper and find out what you have to offer. I know you have a blog, a podcast, and a lot of things.

Cynthia: The best place to go is ohsopintresting.com where I blog about Pinterest tips and how to use Pinterest and the podcast is sharing stories of people who are using Pinterest successfully in the hopes that the listeners will take away some ideas or inspiration of how they can incorporate what other people are doing successfully on Pinterest into their business.

Gary: Everyone needs to go check that out, because I have learned. This is not the first time we have talked by any means, and you are my go to person. This lady knows herself when it comes to Pinterest. Now I want to dig into a question that people may have, because I have seen and heard this before: Pinterest is really just for women.

Cynthia: Oh that is so wrong! Pinterest is primarily used by women, they are the biggest users of Pinterest for some reason or another women of the Midwest were the early adopters of Pinterest. Typically it tends to be that people on either coast who are the early adopters, but for some people of the Midwest, those hard working women out there really took to Pinterest right away. When you do jump on Pinterest you will see a heavy skew towards women related topics like hair dos, recipes, home décor, and that kind of stuff. That doesn’t necessarily that men aren’t there or that they can’t use it in a useful way.

Gary: So for any product, since that’s what we are really talking about here is someone selling and trying to move their products online, Pinterest will work for them.

Cynthia: There used to be some strategy behind that. Of course, they do have their products online, but we do have to keep in mind the images that are used to represent those products. People use Pinterest to solve their problems, be that what they need to buy, a solution to this problem I have at home or work, or whatever it is. It also allows them to explore things that they are interested in. Let’s say they are really involved with what you are, with softball. What am I looking for? I need a bat, a glove, maybe even a training camp to go to, or whatever. That is a real strong passion for a lot of people. Pinterest is all about passions and interests that they can then organize and categorize on their accounts. Within their accounts each image is organized into what are called boards. I like to think of Pinterest as a big file cabinet. My whole account is the file cabinet and each one of those drawers is a category or board and then within each drawer I can have individual pins, which are images on Pinterest that link me back to a website online. I would say that at least 99% of all of the images you find on Pinterest will lead you somewhere online. That can be really beneficial towards business owners. When you get those images that are really eye catching, whether it be a product by itself with a plain background or maybe that product being used in someway that lets people know that they can use the product in a way they were not aware of. People will be interested by that either because they are already interested in it or just through discovery, which people use Pinterest a lot for, and then click on it and be taken to your site where you can make a sale.

Gary: You mentioned how important the images are. There are many people who do not understand Photoshop and may not have enough time to learn it. What is a simple way for them to make creative images? Pinterest itself is pretty easy for anyone to figure out if they just go there. They can relatively put that together without having a bunch of technical stuff to figure out.

Cynthia: Yes, it’s pretty much fill in the boxes and decide what it is you’re going to pin about. If you are going to go beyond the basics, then that is where you need to do some research and get strategy and that is where I help out. Getting the account set up is very easy; it’s absolutely free.

Gary: Now, I wasn’t implying that it’s so easy to use that they didn’t need help to be the best they can be. What I mean is that anyone can get on there and start using. If they are using it to the best of their abilities, that is a different story. For people wanting to get on there, they need to have images, they have to be a certain size, and I’m sure you have all of this information on your site. If they are not familiar with Photoshop and are not interested in learning it, is there some easy sites for them to go to and create images that will be great on there?

Cynthia: Definitely! When it comes to, let’s say when you do have your physical product; it all starts off with the image of that product. I always recommend that it leads back to your sales pages so people can click on it and buy. Keep in mind the size and the clarity of that image. Let’s say that you’re selling a softball glove and the picture is kind of fuzzy, you can’t really see the details, it’s just not really clear or sharp, then people might not click through to buy it. We have to establish a lot of trust from that first impression that we make on people. You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment; most smart phones will do a great job on taking these initial photographs. Just make sure you get by some good natural light, everyone has some source to the sun, a window is perfect. Get that product with a bright, clear, background and take that first picture. Now you have that picture on your smart phone, so now what? Download it to your computer and go to two of my favorite sources to edit those photos: Canva and Pic Monkey. They are both free online photo editing sources, that you can use to adjust the size, crop it down, adjust the light, there are even automatic fix button on Pic Monkey. If you want to take it further, you can add text over the product with the name of the person who used it or the year it is from, to help make your message come across. Both Canva and Pic Monkey are absolutely perfect and easy, drag, drop, click, very easy to understand. You don’t need expensive software to create great images. Both have a paid version, Pic Monkey has a subscription of about $5 a month, which is not expensive at all and gives you access to more features and filters. Canva all of the features are free for image editing but let’s say that you are writing a blog post that supplements your online business. Then you might want to use a stock photo and they sell those for $1 a piece, so that’s where the money comes in.

Gary: I have used Canva and it’s stock photos and it’s great! I love that. I also want to go over something while you’re on here that you told me about that I thought was great and I use all of the time now. I have gotten so lazy because of it that I never go to Pinterest anymore! It’s a plug in for my WordPress blog and all I do is click on my image and make my post, it’s how I make all of my posts now. I put up my blog post, have the image in the post, hover over it, and choose Pinterest.

Cynthia: That’s the Pinterest “pin it” button plug in for WordPress. There are a lot of options that you have for that. Pinterest themselves offers codes that you can embed on your site so you can have the pin it button. Those third party apps, like Shareoholic, include the Pinterest option. There is one WordPress plug in that I really do enjoy made by a developer named Phil Deirkson. I have used that since the very beginning, I have tested others out but keep going back to his. I do have the pro version which costs $19, nothing crazy expensive. The pro version gives you more flexibility and more customization capabilities, but even the free version I used for almost a year. The thing I really like about it is I can customize the pin description. When a person comes to your site or you go to your site and pin something, it takes the description with it. The plug in allows you to customize that description so it can include all of the key words you want to use. You really need to see Pinterest as a search tool than a social network and that is what makes it so powerful. It’s because people are there to search and discover things and are not necessarily there to have a conversation. We hope that those things that they discover are your products. Even if you do not want to create a Pinterest account, please put that pin it button on there so people who do come to your site and find your products or blog posts can share it with their followers on Pinterest because you never know where it can go from there. I have heard of run away successes on Pinterest where an image was shared thousands upon thousands of times without the image owner even having a Pinterest account.

Gary: You know, I don’t think I do a good job with having key words. I really haven’t thought of Pinterest in that way as being a search engine, but you are right it is a search engine. Can you use hash tags on Pinterest?
Cynthia: You can use hash tags but they are not used in the same way as they are on Twitter. They really don’t help you; in fact, they can distract people from your pins. Let’s say that from your blog you use #softball. The way they work on Pinterest, and this is only on the desktop version, is that if someone clicks on that hash tag, it will take them away from your pins and account and bring up a search page with everything with the words softball in it. It doesn’t have to be in the same context that you had it in; it will just bring up every image with the word softball in it. Sometimes the word only needs to be included in the URL, not even in the pin description so you never know what you are going to get. So I really don’t recommend using hash tags, unless if you can create a unique one for yourself. For example, if you were to use “Gary’s softball”, that isn’t usually a phrase people put together but that would be something really unique to you so only your stuff would come up in that case. I have heard and kind of rumored that Pinterest doesn’t like hash tags so they might not show your results as often if they are in your pin description.

Gary: That’s a good tip to have. Is it more important to have your keyword in your description vs. the title, or just in one or in both?

Cynthia: Anywhere you can have keywords, I would put keywords. It will help out with your Google ranking overall and also with your Pinterest search results. You should put keywords in your blog post title and also your image file name because different pin it buttons work in different ways. This is more of an advanced topic but if you also have rich pins, which is a code that is put onto your site that carries metadata over to Pinterest. It brings over the blog title, the product price, description, if it’s in stock or not automatically. Then you can add additional keywords and information into your regular pin description. Every one of those places it is important to have key words.

Gary: So use them liberally, don’t use them conservatively.

Cynthia: Exactly, but don’t get spammy. Don’t put crazy descriptions that are jam packed with key words; make it make sense. It is still social, there are people reading these descriptions so make it flow naturally.

Gary: Is there any benefit to frequency? Like posting 4 things a day instead of 1?

Cynthia: Definitely. When it comes to Pinterest you want to expose your content to as wide of an audience as you can. We are talking about multiple time zones around the world. Let’s say that your optimum time to pin is at noon of whatever time zone you are in. That could be dinner time or commuting time for other people, so they may not see those pins in their feed, depending on how many accounts they follow. If they only follow 10 accounts, then they may be able to scroll back and probably catch it, but if they are following hundreds or thousands of accounts they may never see your content. So you may want to pin a little in the morning, a little in the afternoon, and a little in the evening. You can get those things organized in the time that you have, let’s say you do have an hour to dedicate to Pinterest a week, then you can get all of your pins organized that you want to pin over the next couple of days. Like you said it only takes 30 seconds to hit “pin it” and get it on the board.

Gary: Is there a way to schedule pins?

Cynthia: There are some scheduling tools available out there. Right now they are really intended for bigger businesses. There is one out there that is about $200 a month, so it is a bit of an investment. I hear that there are more coming out, I’m not sure what their price point will be. Right now it is a little expensive but it is possible.

Gary: But there is not a way to do it like on Facebook, where I can use the calendar on my post to schedule it to post every month for the next 6 months?

Cynthia: Not at this time. It would be nice if they added that to Pinterest the platform itself, but right now they really want you to be there and be involved in the community.

Gary: What is the name of that tool, do you know?

Cynthia: Viral Tag. If you are really serious about Pinterest and are really building an audience there, then I would say it would be worth the investment to have the capability to schedule out content. When it comes to Pinterest, you don’t want to pin just your own stuff. Nobody like sit when they go to a cocktail party and it’s “me me me”; you want to become a resource and build you account to be a resource around the community of your product.

Gary: I appreciate you so much coming on the show to talk to me today. Is there any other tip or anything else we need to know about Pinterest?

Cynthia: When you are creating or managing your Pinterest account, you need to make a business account. According to Pinterest terms of service, if you are going to use your Pinterest account to promote or represent a business, then you need a business account. To do that you just have to go to business.pinterest.com and that is where you would get a brand new account, or convert a personal account. If you convert a personal account, you don’t lose any followers or anything like that, but you do have access to Pinterest analytics, which can be very helpful. It can show you what is being pinned from your site or what is being most repined. So make sure you do have a business account if you are selling online products and you want to have a Pinterest presence. If Pinterest catches that you are selling products without a business account, they can shut down account, you’ll lose whatever followers you have grown, all of the pictures you have pinned and other people have pinned will be taken down, so don’t risk losing your hard work.

Gary: So when you search on Pinterest for say softball, does it show results in order of how many pins they have or which one is the newest or oldest?

Cynthia: I wish I had an answer to that! It seems to be very random. You can search for keywords, individual pins or links, groups, boards, and even pinners. You would hope that your content would show up in each one of those categories. If I were to search that right now, I am probably going to find your account because you do have so much information on that and I know you do have fastpitch softball boards. There isn’t really any ranking system here though.

Gary: Thanks for that information, I learn a little bit every time I talk to you. That’s the wonderful thing about doing this show. I’m not only providing free information for people, but I am learning at the same time, which is so wonderful.
Everybody, make sure you check out Cynthia’s website, ohsopinteresting.com because it is very informative.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Selling on Facebook With Dennis Yu and Alex Houg

Season 1 Ep 3

Interview With Dennis Yu and Alex Houg
Gary Leland Show Episode 3

Dennis Yu, and Alex Houg from BlitzMetrics join me to talk about Facebook, and how to market, and sell stuff using Facebook. These two guys know Facebook inside and out. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Dennis, Alex, I am so excited to have you on the show. First of all, let me say thank you for coming. I am going to do a little talking really quickly and then you will have a lot of the floor. For everyone out there, this is Dennis Yu and Alex Houg from BlitzMetrics. These are probably two of the smartest guys on the planet when it comes to Facebook in my opinion and I think there are a lot of people who think that.

Dennis & Alex: Thanks so much for having us, Gary.

Gary: Tell us before we get into anything else what BlitzMetrics is because many of my audience won’t know who you are, what your company is, and what you do. Let’s talk about that first.

Dennis & Alex: BlitzMetrics is solving two fundamental problems. Businesses don’t know how to attract leads in social ROI; they just don’t know how to drive leads online. We work with people all the way from the Golden State Warriors and Jack Daniels, all the way down to small business. The second problem we are solving is giving students real world experience and giving them the opportunity to learn and get paid at the same time while working in their passion area. We line up students in our program that we call “the untern movement” so they can join in, get free education, and work with clients in their passion area that we gain and obtain through inbound marketing. We create a marketplace where we can match these students with these business and these students are able to follow our frameworks and execute of the products and services we offer, such as our Quick Start Express package which is a $3000/ 6 week implementation Facebook ads program as well as our Quick Start Premium which is $10,000/ 10 week Facebook ad implementation.

Gary: What was the name of that again?

Dennis & Alex: That program is the Quick Start Express for the 6-week program and the Quick Start Premium for the 10-week program.

Gary: So you take people, for no charge, and you train them how to work using these programs and then you set them up with companies that need their services?

Dennis & Alex: That’s correct because we believe there are some fundamental flaws in the education system. We are turning that on it’s head. We are providing education to students for free, we are paying them, and they get to work with clients in their passion area.

Gary: Now, I didn’t even know about this! I find that fascinating! Let’s say someone is interested in that, what would they do?

Dennis & Alex: They can reach out to us, they can go to our website, they can email us at either Alex@blitzmetrics.com or Dennis@blitzmetrics.com, and we would love to get them qualified into our program. The beauty of this is that we like to prepare students before they even get into our leveling system, which is a 15 level system that starts at $10 per hour and goes all the way up to $62 per hour. To get qualified, they have to go through a set of training or modules, take a quiz, create a blog, and then write about their passion area while talking about themselves as well to demonstrate that leadership and expertise. This program is not all about creating Facebook ads, but the training of students and young people to be entrepreneurs, teaching them business skills.

Gary: How long have you been doing this program?

Dennis & Alex: We have been doing this for 3 – 6 months. About 3 months ago we moved 10 or 12 people from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis to work in house to work on clients in their passion area. They are having a great time, doing well, and learning a lot.

Gary: That sounds like an amazing opportunity for people! Am I missing people here?

Dennis & Alex: Well I would think, Gary, if I were a prudent business owner, I wouldn’t want a bunch of kids working on my stuff, especially if some agency is going to mark this stuff up. We have spent years working on Facebook ad campaigns. Even since Facebook launched, a lot of what Facebook built in their ads platform was based on our direct recommendations. You have seen our writing on Inside Facebook and we are in tight with the Facebook engineering folks. In the process of doing ads for the biggest of companies, we have learned certain techniques that work. These are not “magic” things that we are going to hide behind a webinar or a book that we are trying to sell. We are putting it out there for free so that other people can see it. If you are a student, you need to know that there are mechanics. My role as the CTO is to create that software that helps students identify the audiences, that helps them adjust the ads when they are working or not working, that looks at how things need to balance in the analytics system, from Google Analytics if you are trying to sell stuff, or maybe you have infusion software or a shopping cart, Viva Merchant, whatever it is. We want to demonstrate that the traffic that comes through social media eventually converts. It might convert initially through an email list, and as you know Gary with Softball Junk, that eventually when you build up a brand and people know who you are, that eventually results in sales. It is not a one off purchase; it’s an on going relationship. To be able to quantify that, you have to measure the different parts of the funnel and that’s the software, training, and systems that we have been building. Alex runs the company to make sure that everything goes properly because I am a horrible manager; I’m a good technician and programmer. That’s the vision that we have. We have been very fortunate to have the NBA, Rosetta Stone, Jack Daniels, fast food franchises. We are here to share all of the stuff that we know for free, that’s why we put this stuff out there. If anyone has questions, go check that out. We charge for our time and implementation but the information is all out there, we aren’t hiding any of it.

Gary: I’ve worked with you and seen you speak and I’ve never been anything but than impressed with anything you have ever said or done. The first time I met you, you were all over that thing working in your system there – I couldn’t keep up with what you were doing! You guys impress me every time I see you. Our audience is looking for tips and hints and more of an understanding of how to use social media to actually sell their products, and I think you just hit on that a second ago. It’s not just about selling the one item; it’s about building the relationship.

Dennis & Alex: There is a process that we like to call the “Audience Engagement Conversion Funnel”. Some people call it Ida, some people have other names for it, but we like to break it into three areas that we think work very well with Facebook, but they work with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram since those guys have ads too. It works like this. Audience is making sure people know who you are. A lot of people go into doing dumb things like trying get a bunch of fans cheaply by giving away and iPad, that’s a mistake. It’s about making sure the right people see you, the people who are existing customers of course. Maybe they have connected on social, written reviews for you before, seen your stuff on Amazon and there are ratings there, maybe there is word of mouth, maybe they are on your email list but they are not on Twitter. What we want to do is collect up that audience. They don’t have to be a fan, but audience is general awareness. You can get awareness through Facebook ads and unfortunately, these days you have to pay for reach; you don’t have to pay a lot, but you do have to pay for that reach.

The Engagement is when “Gary Leland likes this”, “Gary Leland favorited this item”, “Gary Leland retweeted this or commented on this video”, or did some kind of action. We want to amplify that to all of Gary Leland’s friends, who are also interested in that product that you sell. That’s called old-fashioned word of mouth. There are 4 or 5 ad techniques that happen to work on Facebook: page post ad, domain, story, check in, and combinations of custom audiences where you match your email list and match your web pixel to your Facebook. For people who are confused by what I just said, if that sounds like some weird language: all it means is that you are tying the people you already know into Facebook and Facebook has developed some very simple mechanisms that you can do in a few clicks.

The last part is conversion. Once they become a fan, or have come to the shopping cart check out but didn’t buy, or they are on your email list, then you send them messages. It’s like a loyalty program, “Hey 10% Fourth of July special”. It doesn’t have to be a discount either. It can be a “hey check out this stuff before everyone else knows about it, because we love you guys the most, get the exclusive news before other people”, so you are nurturing those relationships. You post pictures at the World Series of these women playing fastpitch softball and you get hundreds of people liking your stuff because they already know who you are and that builds your brand and your awareness, you get media citations on that. One of our favorite techniques is media manipulation. We can target people who work at the Journal, who work at CNN, who have a particular job title and get press coverage and that creates audience. When people write about you that creates engagement because you get free distribution. When your email list gets bigger, that drives sales. People don’t just buy from seeing a Facebook post. Some small business owners say that the Facebook thing doesn’t drive my ROI, because they keep posting buy my stuff and I wonder why no one is buying my stuff. You know, Gary, it takes a while, it’s not get rich quick, its get rich slow, you have to invest and create content, you have to develop it. There is no magic in what we are doing, it jus means there is a mechanical framework you have to follow, the plumbing that you have to tie together: tie your website together with your social and your email. If you’re not tying those three things together, you are leaking, no magic there! There is some level of programming, like if you have an app and you’re collecting email addresses, something like that, fine. You can hire someone from India or wherever else to do that for you. If you are busy selling stuff then you don’t have to worry about that, unless if you are a geek, then you can ask me those kinds of questions. It’s not about stuff like that; for the audience here that maybe is not as in deep with this sort of thing, but just wants to pull out a few interesting nuggets to help them sell a little more online, it’s about this. The engagement with your audience is about story telling. The reason people buy is two fold. They buy psychologically; they buy because it satisfies an emotion. They buy that wine because they loved the story about where the vineyard is and how it has rocks, and it came from the 1800’s, whatever it is, it’s a story. There is always a story. If there is no story, you are a commodity. If you’re a commodity, you have no business doing social. The reason why our unterns have to be able to write content is because they have to be able to tell the story themselves and eventually tell the story to the client. We have some auto manufacturers as clients, and guess what? We are not going to let anybody who is just all over cars, unless if you are under the hood and all about cars, we are not going to let you touch those auto lines. The same is true for those guys on social. It’s not about buying someone’s software. If you are already selling stuff online I encourage those of you on the podcast to consider, who are your best fans? Can you get them to produce content, to share pictures of them using your stuff, to talk about what they think of the next race coming up, just to participate? The engagement leads to email collection, which leads to sales because of the word of mouth part because then we promote all of this stuff to Gary’s friends! It happens to be the most powerful of Facebook. It’s about story telling and the amplification of that story telling. If you don’t have the good content in there, like we talked about last time in Dallas, then it’s not going to work. No amount of great techniques without the great content and the great community behind it is going to work.

Gary: That is what you have been having me do and that is working. I think last week, I averaged over 400 new likes a day. I’m getting ready to hit 60,000. I have a few questions though. Could I get you to go to facebook.com/fastpitchtv? This top post here I put on this morning, has 16,000 people reached and 74 shares. For my page having almost 60,000, is that ranking “good, ok, or poor”? Where would you say that kind of reach is in 12 hours for a post?

Dennis & Alex: Let’s quantify this because we get this question all of the time. You had 16,000 reached on this post, doesn’t look like you ran any ads, which is about a quarter, about 26%. That is really good because the average of Facebook is 3 or 4% and it’s only going down because people complain because Facebook wants you to make ads now. Because you have a lot of passion around these women that are winning, around pictures, around the stats, and people know who you are. They trust you and are willing to endorse you and that is why you have those 74 shares. It seems like common sense, but people don’t seem to realize that. They are trying to trick the system by making means, or by “please click like if you want to win” – don’t do stuff like that.

Gary: Before you go on, I heard that you get penalized for doing stuff like that, is that true?

Dennis & Alex: Well Facebook says something but then they don’t actually enforce it and the same is true with Google. It’s not our advice to go do something you know is bad, but do stuff that you know will engage the user and the algorithm will not penalize you.

Gary: Am I being hurt by having too much text in their description, having a bunch of links and text, does that hurt anything?

Dennis & Alex: It will prevent you from running ads, but it will not hurt you in organic distribution. Because you are liking, sharing, and engaging, the algorithm will not penalize you no matter what Facebook says. I wouldn’t worry about that.

Gary: I also heard a statement that Facebook ranks your post as whether it’s worthy of more distribution or not. A like would be 1 point, a comment would be 2 points, but a share would be 7 points.

Dennis & Alex: That’s close. We did a study that we released to the LA Time and Ad Week I think and we found that each kind of engagement received a certain amount of exposure and that’s where we came up with this points based system. Every time a person commented, it on average reached 8 times as many people as when you liked. When someone shared it was worth 13 times as much as a like, not because we made up some number, but because we looked across thousands of pages, I think it’s 10,000 we have in our system, to see how much activity it gets. Some people misinterpreted that as their needing to get more shares because they were worth more. On average you will get more likes than you will shares, you have to look at the overall weighting, and it also depends on what kind of content it is. Alex did a webinar recently covering research on the hotel industry and found that pictures of food people were more likely to like and scenery pictures people were more likely to share. It also depends on what you are trying to do so don’t allow the stats cause you to make dumb decisions but know that a share is worth more, just like on Twitter, a retweet is worth more than a mention or a tweet because someone has to put their personality behind it to say that they vouch for that content.

Gary: So that 74 shares is like 1000 likes?

Dennis & Alex: Yeah, that’s the way to think of it.

Gary: I’ve never really understood that. That’s really interesting to me, Alex, that a different image even if you are posting the same kind of stuff can make that big of a difference on what people do on the image itself, not just the content.

Dennis & Alex: We did an example with the Golden State Warriors and we wanted to make sure that Stephen Curry, the starting point guard, would make it as the starting guard in the All-Star game. So we had a post that encouraged people to help him win because whoever gets the most votes and shares will be on the starting team because the NBA said that social media would determine who plays instead of random old people voting. Those got, I want to say over 200,000 shares each which was incredible. They got a lot of likes too, but way more shares and it wasn’t because we necessarily said share if you agree or anything like that.

Gary: How about on boost at the bottom of the page. I probably can’t do that because I have a bunch of links in there, but if I didn’t would it be worth boosting it? Is it a good value for the dollar?

Dennis & Alex: The answer is of course “it depends”. I have written probably 6 or 7 articles hammering why boosted posts are not very smart and I still stand behind a lot of that, but I have been proven wrong in the last 6 months and I will tell you why in a minute. If you go to alexhoug.com you will see examples of when boosted posts work and when they don’t work and why. A boosted post is basically saying to Facebook that they are too lazy to go to Power Editor or the ads tool, would you please try to drive more engagement and target the people that you think will engage with me. Now you can select interest and you can select a few other things, but for the most part you can’t do that in a boosted post. It’s sort of a quick and dirty way to say that you want more engagement and will put 10 or 20 bucks on it. Let’s say you’re posting 20 times a day. You’re not going to sit around and make 20 ad groups with a bunch of ads inside of the ad group, called ad sets every day. Boosting will work if you’re driving engagement, but if you’re driving conversion, if you’re reach is not very big, then boosting your post won’t work because Facebook doesn’t have enough data to tell or if you’re in an area that is not social. Clearly, fastpitch softball is great, no one is against that. What if you’re selling suppositories for people with hemorrhoids? I don’t think boosting posts will work unless if you create memes about pain or something. It really depends on what you’re selling. If it’s very social and you have large engagement on a larger page, and you’re driving for more engagement and not conversion, then boosting posts will work. If you want conversion, you will have to specify a conversion target, you will have to use custom audiences, you will have to use partner targets which include things like income, what kind of car they drive, where they shop, that kind of thing and that is not available in a boosted post.

Gary: So it really depends on audience or what you have. So for someone like me it may be an okay trade out?

Dennis & Alex: Sure and you will see that your fan growth will go up, you will expand your reach, you will see that more people will like comments and sharing. You mentioned that your fan growth was going up 400-500 new fans per day and I would say great; but, are you looking further than that to see if that is translating to more people visiting the website, more people buying stuff, more media citations, more of whatever is further down the funnel in the conversion part of the funnel and I think you’re doing that because we can see your stats. I think the most impressive thing is not that you have so many fans, but that the cost per registration to your newsletter is super cheap. I think that is the most impressive part to me. We only did 3% of the work. You did 97% of the work because you already had great content, people already know who you are. We contacted WCWS all day long; we targeted the media, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, and Scouting Reports, all of the media organizations because you are already well known, because you already have an audience, because your content is good, it was very easy for us to amplify. If your content sucked, if you didn’t have an email list we could match against, if you didn’t have any of these things or didn’t do the stuff that we recommended it would have failed no matter how good you are a technical manipulation. You did the work; we just amplified it.

Gary: I am just amazed at my email list now, at the number of people who are signed up now.

Dennis & Alex: It wasn’t that you said, “Hey anyone who enters this thing will be entered into a drawing for an iPad”. Guess what kind of people you are going to get to sign up? Not people who want to buy your product, but people who want a free iPad.

Gary: Right, people who don’t want to buy my product. I have gone a little overboard on my time here, but only because I find this so interesting. That’s one of the best things about this show is I’m talking to people who have subjects I’m interested in and I think that if I’m interested then other people who sell stuff will be interested in it as well. You guys know more about this than me and I am just so impressed with how my newsletter has gone up and how my page has grown off of the wall because of you guys. Is there any other really great tip for someone who is trying to sell something? We know it’s building a relationship, that’s the whole key. Is there anything else we need to let them know or somewhere they should go to read specifically information from you guys?

Dennis & Alex: So you can go to alexhoug.com and you will see that there are tons of examples. If you have any questions on how to implement any of these things, just comment below. You can also go to Insidefacebook.com/author/alexhoug, which is the #1 site according to Facebook, that’s where they send people. We answer every question, even though it may take a few days.

Gary: You guys actually go over to Facebook, talk to those people, and understand what’s going on.

Dennis & Alex: They tell us what the next stuff is that is coming out. We building software so we are a part of a group called PMD, which is the Preferred marketing developer group. So we know what the road map is for the next 6 months or so.

Gary: That is amazing. So you can’t go wrong listening to you guys, you know it before all of the other people who are so called experts.

Dennis & Alex: Custom audiences baby! If you get anything out of here it’s custom audiences, collect emails.

Gary: Guys, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today. Every time I talk to you or text with you I learn something and I enjoy learning something because when you have a mind like mine it’s hard to learn anything, but you guys are on the cutting edge of this stuff.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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Online Marketing With Chris Brogan

Season 1 Ep 2

Interview With Chris Brogan
Gary Leland Show Episode 2

Chris Brogan joins me to talk about marketing, and selling stuff of course. Chris is an old friend from the early days of podcasting, and I thought the perfect person for my first interview. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com

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Gary: Chris, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. I am really excited to have you on our second episode and our first interview of the Gary Leland Show!

Chris: I am so thrilled to be here, Gary, this is the coolest! Long time fan, first time guest!

Gary: Yes, long time! We have been talking since the old days of podcasting, when that was something no one knew what it was.

Chris: Oh, I know. Like you and others, you have survived, you found a better way to do it, and you’re delivering, so I get goose bumps being here!

Gary: Thanks for the kind words. I am really wanting to talk to you about your session you are giving at Podcast Movement, for anyone who is not familiar with that go to “podcastmovement.com”, that is the seminar to come to for podcasting this year. You’re speaking there and your subject is podcasting as a business driver. That goes so well with the subject of our show, because we on the show talk about selling stuff, making money on the Internet, and just selling stuff. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Chris: It’s interesting framing because I think you’re right, there are so many people who are talking about selling “stuff” and they mean digital products or things that are really fast, one click kinds of things. You know, there are so many other kinds of products out there. My girlfriend Jacqueline for instance, she is a competitive fitness competitor, so she does bodybuilding and that’s her stuff. She shows up to these contests and one of the things they wear besides these really nice suits are costume jewelry, so she made a site. What was fascinating for me about how she did it though, is that she orders her product, she gets a bunch of product in like any other regular “mom and pop” store. She puts together a website using really simple software like Wix, and it takes her an afternoon with her camera, the jewelry, and Wix. She puts the whole thing up, starts a Twitter and Instagram account and starts going. Next thing you know she has a handful of customers. It’s just that easy to be a merchant these days. Once you start to get a little comfortable with some of those technologies, the swipes and squares, and everything of the world.

Gary: Do you see it like I see it right now? When I first started putting this show together, I went out hunting for people who sold stuff, that’s what I call it, “selling stuff”, on the internet. I went to groups on Facebook and asked who was selling stuff here using podcasting or social media? Everyone gave me people who sell e-stuff. That’s it. I didn’t get one person who said they sell “something”. Do you find that to be rare really right now, or am I just not seeing it?

Chris: I have to tell you that part of that is coming from the universe of people who like to say that you can make a million dollars online and here’s how you’re going to do it, you just have to be an authority on something, and you just have to do this, follow my lead. It’s just kind of filling the Internet with a bunch of silly stuff. I think that its not that there isn’t some value in those products, I sell informational products too! For instance I am involved in a network marketing company, and we promote this challenge where the actual product is a bunch of shakes, vitamins, and nutritional stuff to help you with weight loss, helping fighting obesity and childhood obesity, and that’s a hard, physical product. I just started with this company, Gary, and I have been using all of my internet tools and one of the two interesting things I have found is that where all of the cool kids hang out, like the Twitter’s and the Facebook’s have netted me nothing. Jacqueline put links in Craigslist and got way more, 100% more response, than I did with my hundreds of thousands of followers all over the social web.

Gary: That’s really interesting! So Craigslist, with her much smaller following than you have, drove more business than your following did on social media.

Chris: Absolutely. When you think about it, Craigslist doesn’t really have any concept of following or follower numbers, they don’t really know who put the post up unless if you do something to really highlight your profile in the body of the text. Everyone is on an even playing field there. Jacqueline with absolute anonymity beat the hell out of me with notoriety. You know, I have hundreds of thousands of people who follow me on all of these social networks and supposedly love what I do, and I got a handful of people of people and she got twice as many people with just a Craigslist post. The reason why I point this out, Gary, is I know you are a lot like me and you are not about the shiny objects. I also know that you are exploring other modalities. Doing things like podcast is valuable, I’m not saying that any of the new stuff is bad. I’m saying you can’t throw out the old stuff without thinking about it a little more.

Gary: That is such a good point. To me, right there, this time period was worth it. It’s amazing how long I have been selling stuff on the Internet and I have never done something as simple as go to Craigslist and make a post. I consider myself pretty intelligent on selling stuff!

Chris: Every meeting I have ever had with you, you seem like a grown up! The first time I ever had an inkling of this was when I was talking to Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded Reddit. She said, “Do you know where I am making my biggest success? I have a Hip Monk billboard. I put up a billboard in San Francisco and it drove crap tons of traffic to me.” I asked, “a billboard billboard? Like a physical one? With something weird like a QR code or something?” She said, “No, just a phone number and a URL.” I don’t know; it feels like everything old is new again. 70% of my business, even the Internet stuff I sell, 70% of it comes through my email list, which is a 1990’s technology. Everyone says that email is dead. Email is not dead, bad email is dead.

Gary: I have just started using email; I have never used it. I’ve been missing the boat, so I hope it’s not dead, I just started building my list in the last year. Is there anything else that y’all have done? That was such a simple tip, which I find many great tips are. Is there anything else that you may have experimented with on her jewelry line?

Chris: I just had this conversation, it’s a digital example but you can use it for something physical, something as simple as posting up a landing page. People get so wrapped around the easel about what that really means, but if you have a blog, you click add page, make sure there is no side bar and make sure that the content explains what it is that you are selling and you point people to that. People aren’t even doing that. People are doing much more muddy things to get things sold. They are worrying about the technology. Like I said, she used Wix; it’s free to join, you can buy a premium version. I think she bought the premium version and that fixed a few things and took off the ads that support free sites and all of that. None of it was high tech, she is pretty good with software, but she didn’t have to be. I think that there is so much opportunity really that you can do good stuff with. Start simple. You don’t have really simple landing pages for your products, real easy ways to explain what you are doing. I have a friend who is an EBay seller and the way I worked with her was I said, “listen I have a bunch of stuff I need to get out of my house. Why don’t we just split it 50/50, you do all of the work and I will bring all of the product”. All she does is she goes on and tweaks her ads and if they are not getting any kind of traction she takes them down and rewrites them again. She is like a little micro copywriter. She is having great results selling on EBay, it is so not dead. Marsha Collier wrote a great bunch of books including the “EBay for Dummies” series. She sold over 2 million copies of those books, so I would say she must know what she is doing or at least a lot of people think that is the best way to start learning. She has a mountain of advice in those “EBay for Dummies” books; she would be a good guest for this show.

Gary: You just went over landing pages. I wanted to ask a question that I have had on my mind for a while. Most people who have landing pages just go on and on forever. You just keep scrolling and you never finish the page, it’s like 10 pages worth. Is that the best way to handle a landing page or is it better to keep it a little bit simpler?

Chris: This is embarrassing to tell you, but it works. I can tell you from my own experiences that the minute I started putting longer, not as long as those scary yellow highlighter pages, landing pages, it worked. It converted way better than what I thought would work, which is small, brief, and to the point. What happens is this: there are a bunch of tire kicker, hem and haw, chew on the inside of their mouth kind of people who wonder “what if this”. You have to put as many “what if this” answers on the page as you possibly can to get them to click the buy it button. I think that it starts with maybe you should consider buy this buttons and by the time you’re at the bottom you’re cursing. I think that if you stick enough “buy” buttons in there as well so that people don’t have to scroll 300 miles to find the one that tells you the price. Just numerically through my testing, that’s what works. Just like when people hate pop ups on websites, the reason there are pop ups on websites including mine is because they work. There is hockey stick growth to newsletter subscription once you start to have pop ups. Christopher Penn said to me years ago, “You can hate it all you want. Once you put it on you will not take it off”.

Gary: When you say that the information is in there over and over, you are really closing all of the doors that could be negative reasons not to buy this product. They are just covering every negative reason why I wouldn’t buy, and making sure they are giving more reasons not to say no, to say yes.

Chris: You’ve got it. Jacqueline a long time ago made an excuse removal system. You have to come up with as many reasons to remove excuses as possible. She used it for exercise. If you remove all of the reason to not exercise, you will have a better shot at actually doing it. In this case you want every reason why not to buy to be handled as best you can and that will give you a shot. So if you are selling softball equipment, people could wonder if the gear is league qualified because he is in the south and my league is in Montana, maybe there are different rules. You would want to say “league certified in all 50 states” or whatever the language is. There are all of these things where you can mind read a little bit and scatter those around. If you charge a little more, you can do something like guarantee that they will get exactly the product you want and not a random substitute. There are all kinds of things you can throw in there that will help people get over their mental barriers and hurdles. The best way to think about this, especially if you sell things in the physical world, you want to think about what you would say across the table, if I were elbow to elbow with this person, what would I say to them to make them feel better. The other thing they are getting at that moment is they are looking in your eyes and they can’t do that on the net sometimes, so what are you going to make them feel like they can.

Gary: That’s a really good point. Let me ask you about your book. I heard Michael Selznick interview you about your book. I even sent you a comment, which I never do to anyone, because that book hit with me so much with what you were saying. Your book is “The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth”. Can you tell us what that means?
Chris: I wrote a book about entrepreneurship and it is for the not standard person, for weirdos, misfits, world dominators. The kind of person who wants this book is the kind who has gone to the bookstore and saw a book on entrepreneurship and saw two guys with suits shaking hands with briefcases and thought they were not that. A freak is someone who has a tattoo level obsession with doing business the way they want to do it, with the people they want to do it, and where they want to get it done. For instance, Reebok is a freak company because they like to work with the CrossFit people and the Spartan Race people, while Nike just says we just have a lot of shoes, we have you covered. I am looking at anything from solo businesses, to people who are employee-preneurs still working for the man, to companies who are looking at the world through this mindset of wanting to do business with a very specific tribe and I am going to love on them and I know that means I will miss some customers who don’t see themselves in what I am selling, but I know I will have so much fun selling to people who get me and know what I’m into.

Gary: We don’t have enough time to get into the book in depth, but you may want to Michael’s show and listen to the interview on this book because it’s great. You’re talking about something so basic to entrepreneurs. This gave “freak” a whole new meaning to me.

Chris: To me, one of the reasons I called it that, Gary, is because I wanted to dissuade some people. That is a really weird thing to think about as a seller but I have a really important opinion about this. My opinion is that you don’t want to sell to everybody. You want to sell to people who are like you, who get you, who are the kind of people that you would like. I want to do business I would want to have a beer with. I want to do business with someone I might actually like. That may not work the same way for someone with a hot dog stand because he probably just wants to put hot dogs in your mouth, but you’re in the softball world for instance. You like that world. You like the people, you like the game, you love talking to the folks that are there, the ones who really like softball and who can talk the inside game with you are who you like to surround yourself with. If I said Gary, that’s really cool, I need you to help me sell refrigerators, it’s not going to work the same way.

Gary: It wouldn’t have quite the meaning for me. But you know that hot dog guy would probably rather have people hanging around his stand eating the hot dogs that had something to converse about.

Chris: I would think so, and he would want people who would refer him. Referral and word of mouth is old as there is something to sell. I would imagine that thousands of years ago that if Ukluk had better berries than Mockmock, then Ukluk would get more traffic because someone said that he gives them the good berries and Mockmock gives them the rotten ones.

Gary: Where can people find the book?

Chris: It’s easy, just go to callingallfreaks.com and you can find it in whatever form you want it.

Gary: And if people want to follow you or join your mailing list you were talking about, where would they go for that?

Chris: Go to the same URL and it’s in the upper right hand corner. I will tell you that I like the book a lot, but the newsletter that I give out ever Sunday is the best thing I do period. If you get it, you’ll agree with me.

Gary: I heard the other day that your newsletter only goes out to your newsletter people. It’s not information that is rehashed from your website during the week, it’s information you have written just for the newsletter.

Chris: 100% right, Gary. Here is my thinking on that. If I am going to have you over to my house for dinner, I should probably not serve you leftovers.

Gary: That’s exactly what I am doing then; I am serving my guests leftovers! I’ve never thought about it and it hit me when I heard that you were putting original content in that newsletter. That’s a lot of work for that newsletter!

Chris: What I do is I make the website for Google and the non-believers and I make the newsletter for the people who did a little more than just stop and look. If I owned an art gallery and you stop in for the Ritz crackers, then you are not my buyer. I want to talk to the person who wants to understand what the brushstrokes were. I will make my website kind of easy and understandable so people can get it and I make my newsletter stuff you can make money from.

Gary: Chris I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show, and I will see you at Podcast Movement very soon.

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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