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A year and a half after returning, ad industry icon Alex Bogusky is exiting the field once again. Bogusky re-joined CPB, the agency he co-founded, in August 2018 in the role of chief creative engineer. Before leaving the advertising industry in 2010, Bogusky was one of its most high-profile creative voices, building CPB’s reputation on…
Did you know:
Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions.
Talk about buying power!
Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest.
Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the world’s largest visual discovery platform.
And there are a lot of opportunities for brands.
We had a chance to chat with the team over at Pinterest about some of their best practices for brands looking to increase sales. We’re excited to share those lessons with you!
Here’s what we learned…
According to one survey, “47 percent of social media users saw Pinterest as the platform for discovering and shopping for products—more than three times higher than those who cited Facebook or Instagram.”
Seventy-seven percent of weekly Pinners have also discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest, and according to Pinterest, “people actually want to see content from brands while they’re on the platform–78 percent say it’s useful.”
Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.
Pinterest lives in a unique space on the internet where users are discovering content related to themselves and their aspirations rather than focusing on others, and this has turned it into a powerful platform for users to make purchasing decisions and discover new brands and products.
Clearly, Pinterest is not one to be ignored when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can use the platform to drive sales.
There are some really simple ways that you can start leveraging Pinterest to reach new audiences and optimize your pins and profile for sales. Some of these tips might be easy to implement immediately while others might play into later strategies, let’s dive in!
A whopping 97 percent of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the Pinterest team. For brands, this presents an opportunity to stand out and gain brand recognition through the platform.
Pinterest recommends adding a small logo in one of the four corners of your pin, this can be done really easily in a tool like Canva. You can play around with the design, of course, and add your logo wherever it feels best. In this example from Quip, they went with top centered to fit with the rest of the text on their image.
As with most sites, mobile is extremely important on Pinterest. Eighty-five percent of Pinners are using the mobile app, so it’s important that your content appeals to them while they’re on their phones and appears properly in their feeds. If you’re linking back to your own content, it’s also important that the page that you’re sending users to is mobile friendly as well.
A tip from Pinterest here is to tailor your font size to phone rendering to make sure your fonts are legible on small screens and to design for a vertical aspect ratio. The ideal dimensions are 600 pixels x 900 pixels.
Have you ever clicked on a beautiful image on Pinterest only to be taken to a website that looks nothing like the pin? I have, and it left me really confused.
According to Pinterest, the best practice is to make sure your pins and your website have a similar look and feel, and that doing this pays off. In an analysis from Pinterest, they found that “Pins that went to landing pages with similar imagery had a 13 percent higher online sales lift.”
This example from Ettitude is really great. The pin they are sharing fits seamlessly in a lot of home decor and design tags on Pinterest.
And although their website uses different photos, it still has a similar feel to the pin.
A big element to social media marketing and campaigns is timing. When are people online and when are people talking about the things you want to talk about?
Luckily in the case of Pinterest, they release annual ‘Seasonal Insights,’ which helps take away some of the guesswork. A report that contains more than a dozen specific moments that take place throughout the year.
For example, their 2019 report shared that users start sharing holiday content in June all the way through December and that content related to the Summer starts getting pinned at the beginning of February.
They also have monthly trends reports. Here’s their latest for December 2019 trends on Pinterest, it shares specific trends like the search term ‘peach green tea’ is up 320 percent YoY!
These are great free resources that you can leverage to start timing seasonal campaigns around when people are starting to make specific seasonal purchasing decisions. I would never have thought that people start looking at holiday content in June but that’s super-specific information that can go a long way to help with timely campaigns.
One of the main ways for Pinterest to help generate sales is for the products you are selling to be easily available through Pinterest. Luckily, the platform makes this really easy for brands to set up and feature prominently on their profiles.
Every Business profile on Pinterest has the ability for users to create a “shop” tab.
The shop tab is just what it sounds like, a place where users can go to see all of the products your brand is selling. On the flip side, brands can leverage that tab to share pins that link directly to their sales pages for the specific product.
Pinterest makes this whole process quite easy, they even have a method for importing new products through Pinterest Catalogs. All you have to do is have your data source approved and then as you add new products to your website, they get automagically added to Pinterest as well.
We hope this guide helps you get started with or double down on your efforts with Pinterest. Let us know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments!
If you want even more Pinterest resources, the Pinterest team has created a free Pinterest Academy with tons of lessons in there.
I was talking with my friend who works at Keap (formally known as Infusionsoft) and he was breaking down how people still make millions of dollars selling info products and ebooks.
Now, I don’t sell info products as heavily as I used to, but when I focused on it 100% of the time, my numbers were great.
Just look at the screenshot above. It’s my revenue on a bad
month of selling info products.
So today, I thought I would do something different.
Instead of just blogging about marketing tactics, I thought I would share my old business model with you and give you the exact emails, power points, and everything you need so that way you can replicate my results.
Are you ready?
Don’t worry about traffic. Instead, I want you to figure out what you want to sell.
Whatever it may be, it needs to solve a problem for people.
For example, I’ve sold marketing courses that teach people
how to get more traffic. This is a problem businesses have as they need traffic
in order to generate sales.
You can literally sell almost anything online, just make sure you are passionate about it and know that subject well.
For example, Grant Cardone sells sales training. Sam Ovens teaches you how to make money through consulting. Ezra Firestone teaches you how to create an ecommerce business.
Once you figure out what you want to sell, you need to
create it. You don’t have to finish creating it, you can do that as you generate
sales.
Before you start creating anything though I want you to read
this guide by Kajabi, which specializes in online courses…
Mega-Guide
to Creating an Online Course
Here are some general rules I’ve learned about creating a handful of info products:
You need to create a presentation that helps you sell your
product.
The presentation should look something like this:
If you want, you can just use my slides and modify them to
whatever product or service you are selling. You can download
my slides here.
I know looking at slides can be a bit confusing but watching
this video may also help as it breaks down the process.
Once you have created your PowerPoint, you’ll need to use a software like Webinar Jam to present to people who are potential customers (don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to get traffic in a bit).
What Webinar Jam does is make it easy for you to create a
Webinar that people can join and you can then sell them through it. That’s what
almost all of us do to sell info products… it works really well.
Emails are key to generating income through info products.
And in order to succeed with email marketing when it comes to selling digital products, the right CRM will make all the difference in the world.
Without the right emails, you won’t do well. It’s really that simple.
There are 8 types of emails that you need to create:
I know that sounds like a lot of emails to create and it is, but don’t worry, just click the links above that contain the emails I used and just modify them for your product. 🙂
The key with the emails is to just not mail them out, but it’s to use automation. You can easily set that up with Keap.
The reason most of us marketers use Keap (aside from being a great and efficient tool) is because it connects with other tools that help us maximize our email revenue while also providing the most flexibility.
The flexibility you’ll gain by using Keap will help you make more money. Here’s what I mean:
One of the key ingredients to making money through info products
is to have traffic.
And I know what you are thinking to… “Neil you did well because
you have a ton of traffic”.
Well, people like Sam Ovens and Grant Cardone don’t rank well on Google, yet they make 8 figures a year. They profitably sell info products through ads.
If you want to grow your traffic, go through the following
steps:
You now have a handful of ways to generate sales. Facebook ads are probably the quickest way to generate sales and usually, for every dollar, you spend you should generate at least 2 dollars in revenue.
If you want a longer-term approach, consider SEO and content
marketing.
And a good mid-term approach is leveraging Instagram and
building a personal brand.
Or if you really want to see your numbers grow, consider
doing all of them. 😉
I know everything I broke down may seem overwhelming, but it
shouldn’t be. Just take one step at a time.
Plus there are a lot of tools that make your life easy and do most of the hard work. I pretty much mentioned them all above and you can get them to play nice by using Zapier, which can connect them easily if you aren’t able to figure it out.
And if you are wondering why I stopped focus most of my efforts on info products it isn’t because it was bad business.
It’s the opposite. It’s a good business… but to scale it to
millions a month in revenue is tough and you’ll find that your profit will
drastically drop.
In other words, your upside is limited and it’s not hard to
make a few million a year in profit, but anything above that gets really tough.
So, what are you going to do with the information above?
Are you going to try and sell info products?
The post You Can Have My Old Business That Makes $381,722 a Month appeared first on Neil Patel.
I was talking with my friend who works at Keap (formally known as Infusionsoft) and he was breaking down how people still make millions of dollars selling info products and ebooks.
Now, I don’t sell info products as heavily as I used to, but when I focused on it 100% of the time, my numbers were great.
Just look at the screenshot above. It’s my revenue on a bad
month of selling info products.
So today, I thought I would do something different.
Instead of just blogging about marketing tactics, I thought I would share my old business model with you and give you the exact emails, power points, and everything you need so that way you can replicate my results.
Are you ready?
Don’t worry about traffic. Instead, I want you to figure out what you want to sell.
Whatever it may be, it needs to solve a problem for people.
For example, I’ve sold marketing courses that teach people
how to get more traffic. This is a problem businesses have as they need traffic
in order to generate sales.
You can literally sell almost anything online, just make sure you are passionate about it and know that subject well.
For example, Grant Cardone sells sales training. Sam Ovens teaches you how to make money through consulting. Ezra Firestone teaches you how to create an ecommerce business.
Once you figure out what you want to sell, you need to
create it. You don’t have to finish creating it, you can do that as you generate
sales.
Before you start creating anything though I want you to read
this guide by Kajabi, which specializes in online courses…
Mega-Guide
to Creating an Online Course
Here are some general rules I’ve learned about creating a handful of info products:
You need to create a presentation that helps you sell your
product.
The presentation should look something like this:
If you want, you can just use my slides and modify them to
whatever product or service you are selling. You can download
my slides here.
I know looking at slides can be a bit confusing but watching
this video may also help as it breaks down the process.
Once you have created your PowerPoint, you’ll need to use a software like Webinar Jam to present to people who are potential customers (don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to get traffic in a bit).
What Webinar Jam does is make it easy for you to create a
Webinar that people can join and you can then sell them through it. That’s what
almost all of us do to sell info products… it works really well.
Emails are key to generating income through info products.
And in order to succeed with email marketing when it comes to selling digital products, the right CRM will make all the difference in the world.
Without the right emails, you won’t do well. It’s really that simple.
There are 8 types of emails that you need to create:
I know that sounds like a lot of emails to create and it is, but don’t worry, just click the links above that contain the emails I used and just modify them for your product. 🙂
The key with the emails is to just not mail them out, but it’s to use automation. You can easily set that up with Keap.
The reason most of us marketers use Keap (aside from being a great and efficient tool) is because it connects with other tools that help us maximize our email revenue while also providing the most flexibility.
The flexibility you’ll gain by using Keap will help you make more money. Here’s what I mean:
One of the key ingredients to making money through info products
is to have traffic.
And I know what you are thinking to… “Neil you did well because
you have a ton of traffic”.
Well, people like Sam Ovens and Grant Cardone don’t rank well on Google, yet they make 8 figures a year. They profitably sell info products through ads.
If you want to grow your traffic, go through the following
steps:
You now have a handful of ways to generate sales. Facebook ads are probably the quickest way to generate sales and usually, for every dollar, you spend you should generate at least 2 dollars in revenue.
If you want a longer-term approach, consider SEO and content
marketing.
And a good mid-term approach is leveraging Instagram and
building a personal brand.
Or if you really want to see your numbers grow, consider
doing all of them. 😉
I know everything I broke down may seem overwhelming, but it
shouldn’t be. Just take one step at a time.
Plus there are a lot of tools that make your life easy and do most of the hard work. I pretty much mentioned them all above and you can get them to play nice by using Zapier, which can connect them easily if you aren’t able to figure it out.
And if you are wondering why I stopped focus most of my efforts on info products it isn’t because it was bad business.
It’s the opposite. It’s a good business… but to scale it to
millions a month in revenue is tough and you’ll find that your profit will
drastically drop.
In other words, your upside is limited and it’s not hard to
make a few million a year in profit, but anything above that gets really tough.
So, what are you going to do with the information above?
Are you going to try and sell info products?
The post You Can Have My Old Business That Makes $381,722 a Month appeared first on Neil Patel.
Did you know:
Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions.
Talk about buying power!
Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest.
Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the world’s largest visual discovery platform.
And there are a lot of opportunities for brands.
We had a chance to chat with the team over at Pinterest about some of their best practices for brands looking to increase sales. We’re excited to share those lessons with you!
Here’s what we learned…
According to one survey, “47 percent of social media users saw Pinterest as the platform for discovering and shopping for products—more than three times higher than those who cited Facebook or Instagram.”
Seventy-seven percent of weekly Pinners have also discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest, and according to Pinterest, “people actually want to see content from brands while they’re on the platform–78 percent say it’s useful.”
Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.
Pinterest lives in a unique space on the internet where users are discovering content related to themselves and their aspirations rather than focusing on others, and this has turned it into a powerful platform for users to make purchasing decisions and discover new brands and products.
Clearly, Pinterest is not one to be ignored when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can use the platform to drive sales.
There are some really simple ways that you can start leveraging Pinterest to reach new audiences and optimize your pins and profile for sales. Some of these tips might be easy to implement immediately while others might play into later strategies, let’s dive in!
A whopping 97 percent of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the Pinterest team. For brands, this presents an opportunity to stand out and gain brand recognition through the platform.
Pinterest recommends adding a small logo in one of the four corners of your pin, this can be done really easily in a tool like Canva. You can play around with the design, of course, and add your logo wherever it feels best. In this example from Quip, they went with top centered to fit with the rest of the text on their image.
As with most sites, mobile is extremely important on Pinterest. Eighty-five percent of Pinners are using the mobile app, so it’s important that your content appeals to them while they’re on their phones and appears properly in their feeds. If you’re linking back to your own content, it’s also important that the page that you’re sending users to is mobile friendly as well.
A tip from Pinterest here is to tailor your font size to phone rendering to make sure your fonts are legible on small screens and to design for a vertical aspect ratio. The ideal dimensions are 600 pixels x 900 pixels.
Have you ever clicked on a beautiful image on Pinterest only to be taken to a website that looks nothing like the pin? I have, and it left me really confused.
According to Pinterest, the best practice is to make sure your pins and your website have a similar look and feel, and that doing this pays off. In an analysis from Pinterest, they found that “Pins that went to landing pages with similar imagery had a 13 percent higher online sales lift.”
This example from Ettitude is really great. The pin they are sharing fits seamlessly in a lot of home decor and design tags on Pinterest.
And although their website uses different photos, it still has a similar feel to the pin.
A big element to social media marketing and campaigns is timing. When are people online and when are people talking about the things you want to talk about?
Luckily in the case of Pinterest, they release annual ‘Seasonal Insights,’ which helps take away some of the guesswork. A report that contains more than a dozen specific moments that take place throughout the year.
For example, their 2019 report shared that users start sharing holiday content in June all the way through December and that content related to the Summer starts getting pinned at the beginning of February.
They also have monthly trends reports. Here’s their latest for December 2019 trends on Pinterest, it shares specific trends like the search term ‘peach green tea’ is up 320 percent YoY!
These are great free resources that you can leverage to start timing seasonal campaigns around when people are starting to make specific seasonal purchasing decisions. I would never have thought that people start looking at holiday content in June but that’s super-specific information that can go a long way to help with timely campaigns.
One of the main ways for Pinterest to help generate sales is for the products you are selling to be easily available through Pinterest. Luckily, the platform makes this really easy for brands to set up and feature prominently on their profiles.
Every Business profile on Pinterest has the ability for users to create a “shop” tab.
The shop tab is just what it sounds like, a place where users can go to see all of the products your brand is selling. On the flip side, brands can leverage that tab to share pins that link directly to their sales pages for the specific product.
Pinterest makes this whole process quite easy, they even have a method for importing new products through Pinterest Catalogs. All you have to do is have your data source approved and then as you add new products to your website, they get automagically added to Pinterest as well.
We hope this guide helps you get started with or double down on your efforts with Pinterest. Let us know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments!
If you want even more Pinterest resources, the Pinterest team has created a free Pinterest Academy with tons of lessons in there.
For many of us, New Years Resolutions likely include less social media, more time with friends, or a renewed focus on health and wellness (which is probably why my gym is packed throughout the month of January … ).
And, as it turns out, there’s another popular New Years Resolution for many people in 2020 — a career shift.
In fact, a new study from Fiverr and YouGov shows over half of American workers (59%) want to make changes to their careers in the new year.
Among other things, these changes include location shifts, industry shifts, the ability to work remote, or a desire to pursue a passion.
If you’re one of the 6 out of ten interested in a career shift, you’re in luck. Here, we’ve interviewed top Fiverr freelancer Charmaine Pocek — who’s made over $3 million on Fiverr helping people with career moves — to determine her five tips for drastically changing your career in 2020.
“Our likes and dislikes change a lot over time, whether it’s the food we eat, the music we listen to, or even the people we choose to hang out with. That’s why before making a change, it’s always a good idea to reflect on what you feel strongly about in your life and career. Think about what you like to do outside of work. But, also, think about the things you like about your job and how those could transfer elsewhere.” Pocek advises.
She continues, “Do you travel a lot, does your company give you the opportunity to work remote, or do you get to pursue passion projects? Even if the company you work for or the work you do isn’t something you want to continue with, maybe there are aspects about it that you enjoy and want to hold onto.”
“It’s also important to have a clear and meaningful purpose that you find emotionally engaging. What do you really
need from your work? To make a difference? To become financially independent?”
“You should be able to answer these questions before pursuing a career change.”
Think you might be interested in marketing? Take a look at HubSpot’s Ultimate Guide to Marketing Jobs.
Pocek says, “After you’ve identified your passion and thought about what you really need from a job, it’s time to network, network, network. But it’s not always about going to meet-ups and expensive conferences. For instance, let’s say someone has decided they want to move into the world of photography. A great way of networking for them would be to direct message influencers they follow on Instagram, and ask them how they got started.”
Alternatively, if you’re interested in pursuing a career in marketing, Pocek advises, “Reach out to someone that works at your favorite company on Linkedin, or via email, and introduce yourself. In many cases, people will appreciate the extra effort you’ve put in to connect with them 1:1 and are more likely to be willing to share advice, tips, etc.”
Pocek suggests, “Let’s use the photography example from above. You may not be able to quit your job and travel the world taking photos just yet — but that said, if that’s what you’re looking to do, make an effort to travel more and take photos on the weekends. Whatever your end goal is, whether it’s to change the company you work for, increase your flexibility at work, or work remote more often, every time you muster up the confidence to ask your boss to work from home, or every time you send out your resume to a new company, reward yourself.”
Additionally, Pocek adds, “One thing I did for myself this year was to buy myself a Pandora bracelet. Throughout the year I have set small goals for myself and whenever I meet a goal, I will buy a charm for that bracelet. It might take me years to fill it up, but once I do I can tell you, it’ll be the most rewarding feeling.”
“You do or you do not. There is no try. Those words were spoken not by Socrates or Aristotle, but rather Yoda (or, really, George Lucas). Ultimately, this quote reminds me that you can prepare yourself all you want to make a change, but you’re not going to know how it will turn out until you just do it.”
“That’s always the hardest part. Whether you’re starting a new diet or writing a book, it’s always the first day, the first page that’s the hardest. But you did it. You committed and you need not try, you just have to do.”
Pocek concludes, “I realized that something needed to change in my work-life / financial situation when my husband and I decided to adopt. We wanted to grow our family but didn’t have the means to do it. That’s when I started working on Fiverr helping people with their resumes. I remember this daily and am so grateful (and proud) of the family we became.”
“Remembering why you started something or opted for a certain change can revitalize your passion in what you’re doing, and save you when you’re feeling down. I work just as hard now as I did when I started working in this field, if not harder, to make sure this little family that we’ve built creates more memories that last a lifetime.”
Instagram has begun testing the ability for users to send Direct messages when using Instagram on the web. Users who have access to this feature will see a paper airplane icon alongside the Explore, notification and profile icons that are positioned near the top-right corner of the Instagram website. This feature will allow users to…
If distraction prevents you from reaching the goals you truly want to achieve, this episode is for you. I spoke with Nir Eyal, international best-selling author of a new book called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. We talked about the simple yet powerful changes you can make to control your mind and use your time more effectively. You’ll also find lots of bonus content on the blog.
If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
If distraction prevents you from reaching the goals you truly want to achieve, this episode is for you. I spoke with Nir Eyal, international best-selling author of a new book called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. We talked about the simple yet powerful changes you can make to control your mind and use your time more effectively. You’ll also find lots of bonus content on the blog.
If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
If distraction prevents you from reaching the goals you truly want to achieve, this episode is for you. I spoke with Nir Eyal, international best-selling author of a new book called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. We talked about the simple yet powerful changes you can make to control your mind and use your time more effectively. You’ll also find lots of bonus content on the blog.
If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.