Steps To Financial Freedom

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Day: January 16, 2020

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You Can Have My Old Business That Makes $381,722 a Month

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?

Step #1: Figure out what you want to sell

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.

Step #2: Start creating your product

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:

  1. People want course material in video format. Don’t
    waste your time with too text-based documents or audio files.
  2. Your videos need to be short and to the point.
    People are strapped for time.
  3. Your course should be completed within 2 or 3
    months at the latest. Ideally within 6 weeks.
  4. Include workbooks, cheat sheets and quizzes
    throughout your course. You can easily create these in Kajabi.

Step #3: Create a presentation

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.

Step #4: Create emails and set up your CRM

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:

  1. Invite sequence – these are a series of emails that invite people to watch your webinar. (here are my invite emails)
  2. Indoctrination – you need to build a connection with people. People are more likely to convert if they know more about you and trust you. (here are my indoctrination emails)
  3. No shows – just because someone signs up to watch your webinar, it doesn’t mean they will attend. For everyone who doesn’t attend, you’ll want to email them and get them to watch the replay. (here are my no show emails)
  4. Encore – not everyone will watch your whole webinar. If they don’t stick to the end they won’t see your offer. You’ll want a few emails that push the replay. (here are my encore emails)
  5. Objection handler – there are a handful of reasons someone may not buy. You’ll want to answer each of those objections through email. (here are my objection handler emails)
  6. Countdown sequence – you’ll want to close off your course. Letting people know that they only have a few days left to buy is a really effective way to generate sales. These emails will roughly make up 1/3 to half of your sales. (here are my countdown emails)
  7. Last chance email – on the last day you’ll want to send a few emails letting people know it is about to close. (here are my last chance emails)
  8. Free trial offer – the majority of people won’t buy from you. Offering the last chance free trial offer is a great way to roughly get 15% more sales. (here are my free trial emails)

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:

  1. PicSnippets – for you invite sequence emails you’ll want to use a customized image that has someone’s name in it. Just like how the image above has “Ben’s” name in it. And it dynamically changes to the person’s name.
  2. Plus This – during the objection handler sequence I typically text everyone who watched the webinar with their “first name?”. Plus This automatically does this and what you’ll find is when you text someone their first name they will usually text back with “who is this?”. That’s when Plus This automatically responds with “Hey this is Neil Patel, I just wanted to thank you for watching my webinar. I wanted to follow up and see if you had any questions or if I can help answer anything for you.”. You’ll find that a lot of people will text back with questions, all you have to do is answer them and you’ll generate more sales.
  3. Plus This – I know I mentioned Plus This above, but you will also need it for emails related to your countdown sequence, last chance emails, and free trial offer. You want to use a countdown timer within those emails. The time should adjust based on when you send each email off and the time zone the individual is in. Plus This does all of it for you automatically.
  4. Collect payments – I also use Keap to collect payments. So, once I email someone, they can click a button and buy through pre-made payment pages that Keap provides you.

Step #5: Drive traffic

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. 😉

Conclusion

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.

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How to Promote a Documentary Storytelling Series on Social Media

Does your marketing include episodic video content? Wondering how to promote your series? In this article, you’ll discover how to release and promote a documentary storytelling series on social media. Why Marketers Should Consider Documentary Storytelling Using storytelling rather than product pushing in marketing content can give you a significant edge. While traditional marketing highlights […]

The post How to Promote a Documentary Storytelling Series on Social Media appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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How to Repurpose Content Into a Podcast, According to HubSpot's Podcast Expert

2019 will be remembered as a tectonic shift in the world of podcasting.

Nowadays, over 51% of the United States have listened to at least one podcast.

Additionally, in 2019, over $650M was spent on podcast advertising, and Spotify, Google, and VC’s are now investing hundreds of millions into podcasting.

All of this money and attention has lots of readers asking how their brand can take advantage of the audio boom by starting their own podcast.

In many ways, it’s a lot easier for folks who subscribe to the philosophy of Inbound Marketing to start a podcast because you’re likely to have lots of existing content. In this post, we want to help marketers leverage their existing content and turn it into a branded podcast.

But first — when does it even make sense to convert your content into a podcast, and when should you hold off?

When does it make sense to convert content into a podcast?

If you’re looking to leverage existing content you ultimately have two main channels to focus on — video, or your blog.

The first thing you need to do is audit your existing content to get a sense for your most popular topics. At this point, don’t worry about whether the content format should be blog posts, videos, ebooks, or social posts. Instead, just focus on what topics and content are resonating the most with your audience.

Once you’ve identified a few core topics that are most relevant to your brand, you’ll have an easier time brainstorming podcast show ideas.

Additionally, this is obvious but needs to be said — a podcast is more than one episode. When thinking about starting a podcast from scratch or using existing content, you need to have enough content to justify multiple episodes. If you’re struggling to think of more than 2-3 episodes, it’s likely the content is too narrow.

A branded podcast can either be a limited run season, or ongoing where episodes are released regularly in perpetuity. Seasonal shows work well when you have a limited amount of content around a certain topic. Ongoing shows, on the other hand, tend to be easier to produce when you have an endless stream of updates, such as news or reviews.

One method isn’t necessarily better than another — you should select seasonal or ongoing based on the goals of your podcast and the type of content you produce.

How to Convert Video Content into a Podcast

Here at HubSpot, we have an enormous library of video content but only a small portion of it works for converting into a podcast. Here’s what excludes our video content from becoming a podcast:

  1. Bad Audio: Hands down the number one biggest issue for converting video content into a podcast. Sometimes videos are recorded with lapel mics that pick up lots of t-shirt scratches, and can sometimes make people sound like they’re recording from a fishbowl.
  2. Referencing Visuals: Often explainer videos, product overviews, and educational lessons reference visuals that appearing in the video. Videos that make use of visual aids are generally not a good fit for podcasts because the people obviously will not see what the presenter is referring to.
  3. Too Short: Podcasts tend to be longer-form content than video or blogs. Many videos that companies produce are relatively short, ~2 minutes. For someone looking to listen to your podcast, this may not be substantial enough in terms of the information covered.

So what videos do work for converting to a podcast? One of the best examples we have is our show, Agency Unfiltered.

The show began as a web-series of interviews that didn’t use any visual aids in the conversations. Listeners were reaching out to the show’s host, Kevin, asking if it could be converted into a podcast so they could listen on their commute or at home. So we took the audio (high-quality) and turned it into a podcast.

Kevin Dynn told me, “One of the biggest pieces of feedback we had for Agency Unfiltered was to release it as a podcast. What we found is that partners wanted the audio content available to be downloaded and listened to on their commutes.”

Dynn added, “For us, it was a piece of cake to do. We already had titles, descriptions, the intro and outro snippets, and the full audio files. And thus far, the process has been easy and the results have been very encouraging.”

Within a few weeks, the podcast layered a whole new group of listeners on top of those who watched the videos. In fact, on one of the recent videos, we saw a 70% uplift in people engaging with the content simply by turning it into a podcast.

It’s important to note — we have not seen podcast downloads cannibalize video views.

Making the video series available as a podcast has simply added value to the audience because it allows people to engage with the content however, and whenever, they want.

Alternatively, if you don’t have a video series, blog content can serve as an excellent jumping-off point for planning and creating a podcast. Let’s explore that option, next.

How to Convert Blog Content Into a Podcast

Here at HubSpot, we highly encourage marketers to think about their content from a pillar-cluster model. This model is incredibly helpful, both for SEO and for organizing your content in a way that’s helpful for readers. The great thing about the pillar cluster model for blogging is it aligns well with the seasonal approach to podcasting.

First, try thinking about your overall topic cluster as a season of the show, with each individual blog post being a distinct episode. Following this path, it makes it much easier to plan a season’s worth of content that all deals with a similar theme or topic without being repetitive.

Like video, only a small portion of blog content will work for turning into a podcast. Here is a quick way to exclude content that’s not a good fit:

  1. Listicles and Roundups: No one wants to hear you read a list of things they can’t click on.
  2. Articles that Rely on Visuals: There are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, if the post is highly visual it’s unlikely to be a good fit for a podcast episode.

Once you decide what topics your show will cover, and which blog posts will serve as a good jumping-off point for episodes, you can finally go through the process of recording.

When recording, it’s important to remember your episodes should never just be a host reading an article. Writing for people listening is much different than writing for people reading. If you don’t update your content to be audio-first it will sound stiff, boring, and inauthentic.

To help you write scripts for a podcast you need to have all of the parts of a successful podcast episode. Check out The Anatomy of a Perfect Podcast Episode for help on how to create a great podcast episode.

How to Combine Text and Video to Create a Podcast

At HubSpot, we are combining the video and blog approach in the upcoming season of the Skill Up podcast. Each season is based around a topic cluster we have identified as valuable based on blog content and keyword search volume. This helps us plan seasons, as well as specific episodes. SEO research also helps us with episode titling and episode descriptions.

In terms of production, we’re using snippets of audio from our videos in order to leverage existing interviews. We will also be using a single narrator each season who will guide listeners through the content. Using a host will also make it easier to add flair to an existing interview without having to re-record the conversations.

Overall, we’re leveraging all the content we have but keeping a tight focus on making it enjoyable for podcast listeners specifically.

Advice for Repurposing Existing Content into a Podcasts

When repurposing content for podcasts, remember to always ask yourself — would I listen to this? Ultimately, if your audio content isn’t good enough for the creator to listen to it, then you shouldn’t be making it. You need to first and foremost think about your listener and make sure you’re providing them with excellent content.

You can use your existing content as a jumping-off point for creating a show. The last question is simple: What’s stopping you from starting now?

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How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales

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…

How people are using Pinterest

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.

How to leverage Pinterest for sales: 5 tips from the Pinterest team

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! 

1. Brand your pins 

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. 

2. Create mobile-first content 

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. 

3. Create a similar look and feel 

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.

4. Time your campaigns 

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. 

5. Set up your shop 

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. 

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You Can Have My Old Business That Makes $381,722 a Month

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?

Step #1: Figure out what you want to sell

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.

Step #2: Start creating your product

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:

  1. People want course material in video format. Don’t
    waste your time with too text-based documents or audio files.
  2. Your videos need to be short and to the point.
    People are strapped for time.
  3. Your course should be completed within 2 or 3
    months at the latest. Ideally within 6 weeks.
  4. Include workbooks, cheat sheets and quizzes
    throughout your course. You can easily create these in Kajabi.

Step #3: Create a presentation

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.

Step #4: Create emails and set up your CRM

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:

  1. Invite sequence – these are a series of emails that invite people to watch your webinar. (here are my invite emails)
  2. Indoctrination – you need to build a connection with people. People are more likely to convert if they know more about you and trust you. (here are my indoctrination emails)
  3. No shows – just because someone signs up to watch your webinar, it doesn’t mean they will attend. For everyone who doesn’t attend, you’ll want to email them and get them to watch the replay. (here are my no show emails)
  4. Encore – not everyone will watch your whole webinar. If they don’t stick to the end they won’t see your offer. You’ll want a few emails that push the replay. (here are my encore emails)
  5. Objection handler – there are a handful of reasons someone may not buy. You’ll want to answer each of those objections through email. (here are my objection handler emails)
  6. Countdown sequence – you’ll want to close off your course. Letting people know that they only have a few days left to buy is a really effective way to generate sales. These emails will roughly make up 1/3 to half of your sales. (here are my countdown emails)
  7. Last chance email – on the last day you’ll want to send a few emails letting people know it is about to close. (here are my last chance emails)
  8. Free trial offer – the majority of people won’t buy from you. Offering the last chance free trial offer is a great way to roughly get 15% more sales. (here are my free trial emails)

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:

  1. PicSnippets – for you invite sequence emails you’ll want to use a customized image that has someone’s name in it. Just like how the image above has “Ben’s” name in it. And it dynamically changes to the person’s name.
  2. Plus This – during the objection handler sequence I typically text everyone who watched the webinar with their “first name?”. Plus This automatically does this and what you’ll find is when you text someone their first name they will usually text back with “who is this?”. That’s when Plus This automatically responds with “Hey this is Neil Patel, I just wanted to thank you for watching my webinar. I wanted to follow up and see if you had any questions or if I can help answer anything for you.”. You’ll find that a lot of people will text back with questions, all you have to do is answer them and you’ll generate more sales.
  3. Plus This – I know I mentioned Plus This above, but you will also need it for emails related to your countdown sequence, last chance emails, and free trial offer. You want to use a countdown timer within those emails. The time should adjust based on when you send each email off and the time zone the individual is in. Plus This does all of it for you automatically.
  4. Collect payments – I also use Keap to collect payments. So, once I email someone, they can click a button and buy through pre-made payment pages that Keap provides you.

Step #5: Drive traffic

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. 😉

Conclusion

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.

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USA Today Ad Meter Partners With YouTube

YouTube will be the official video-sharing platform for the 32nd edition of the USA Today Ad Meter, which provides poll data on how Super Bowl ads are resonating with viewers. Participants in the USA Today Ad Meter will be able to view Super Bowl ads on YouTube and vote for their favorites, and those videos…

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How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales

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…

How people are using Pinterest

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.

How to leverage Pinterest for sales: 5 tips from the Pinterest team

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! 

1. Brand your pins 

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. 

2. Create mobile-first content 

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. 

3. Create a similar look and feel 

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.

4. Time your campaigns 

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. 

5. Set up your shop 

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. 

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AWeber’s Live Video Show Is about to Launch — and It’s Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Seen

At AWeber, our mission is to help small businesses succeed with powerfully-simple marketing tools and the support you need to use them.  

That’s why we regularly host free summits and webinars about marketing. It’s why we write a blog focused on email marketing, and we send our weekly newsletter FWD: Thinking. And it’s also why we offer 24/7 customer solutions.  

Now, I’m proud to introduce our latest free marketing education for small businesses — the FWD: Thinking Show.  The FWD: Thinking Show is a free, monthly live show where you’ll get marketing and business strategy from the smartest marketers in the world.  

Get-rich-quick marketing schemes don’t work. Top-secret formulas that cost thousands don’t guarantee results. Outdated marketing tactics don’t produce revenue anymore.  

Marketing that delivers real business growth takes effort, a bit of risk, and planning. This is the kind of marketing strategy you’ll get from the FWD: Thinking Show.  

And episode 1 of FWD: Thinking launches LIVE next week! Join me at 2:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, January 22 as I interview Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Marketing.

What’s the format of the show?

  The show is like a webinar, podcast, and keynote speech combined! Each episode of the FWD: Thinking Show will follow this agenda:  

1. Quickfire Q&A

Liz Willits, the host of the FWD: Thinking Show, will ask the guest questions about their career, their best marketing and business advice, and more.  

2. Innovative ideas

The guest speaker will share one innovative business or marketing strategy to accelerate your growth.  

3. Audience Q&A

This is your chance to ask the smartest marketers in the world anything and get tailored advice.

Who is the first show guest?  

Lee Odden is a lightly bearded B2B marketing strategist, author, international speaker and CEO of the fine team at TopRank Marketing. His work integrating search, social, content, and influencer marketing for B2B brands has been recognized by numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Forbes.

Who is the host?  

Yours truly. I’m a professional speaker and marketing expert. I help run content strategy at AWeber. And I’ve taught hundreds of thousands of small business owners and entrepreneurs how to successfully grow their businesses online.

Get your ticket to the FWD: Thinking Show!

It’s free! You can get your ticket here, and access the show on Wednesday, June 22 at 2:00 p.m. ET.

For the best experience, I recommend attending the live show. But if you can’t clear your schedule, claim your ticket to get an on-demand video of the live episode. I’ll email
the on-demand video within 24 hours of the live show.

The post AWeber’s Live Video Show Is about to Launch — and It’s Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Seen appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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