Steps To Financial Freedom

How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales

January 19, 2020

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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OneSearch, Verizon Media’s new search engine, sounds awfully familiar

January 19, 2020

The privacy-focused search engine serves contextual ads and doesn’t use cookies for tracking.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales

January 19, 2020

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

Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.

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

1. Brand your pins

2. Create mobile-first content

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.

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?

5. Set up your shop

Every Business profile on Pinterest has the ability for users to create a “shop” tab.

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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Pinterest taps market research firm IRI to measure offline sales lift

January 19, 2020

The deal has taken two years to implement but should be significant for CPG advertisers on the platform.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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#385: Why (and When) Not to Trust Your Gut with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

January 19, 2020

If you’re someone who relies more on your intuition than your reason, this episode is for you. I spoke with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, author of a new book called, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. We talked about one of my favorite topics, mental blindspots and cognitive biases, especially as they relate to creativity in business.

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.

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Amazon is Reportedly Developing a Hand-Scanning Payment Option

January 19, 2020

Amazon is reportedly developing checkout terminals that will allow shoppers to pay by scanning the palms of their hands. That’s according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. The WSJ said Amazon is targeting the terminals, which link credit and debit…

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

January 19, 2020

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:

People want course material in video format. Don’t
waste your time with too text-based documents or audio files.
Your videos need to be short and to the point.
People are strapped for time.
Your course should be completed within 2 or 3
months at the latest. Ideally within 6 weeks.
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:

Neil Patel's Webinar Slides from Neil Patel

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:

Invite sequence – these are a series of emails that invite people to watch your webinar. (here are my invite emails)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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:

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.
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.
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.
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:

Run your URL through Ubersuggest. Click on the “site audit” report as it will show you what to fix in order to maximize your revenue.
Follow these 19 advanced SEO techniques.
If you want to generate sales through Instagram like Grant Cardone, follow this article on generating 1290 followers a week.
And if you want to generate sales through Facebook ads like Sam Ovens, this guide will give you an overview of how Facebook ads work, and here is a beginner’s guide to Facebook ads, and here are 22 ways to make your ads perform better.
To generate info products sales through content marketing as I did, check out this beginner’s guide, here’s how to get started without spending money and here are my favorite 21 content hacks.

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

January 19, 2020

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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Dwell Time is the SEO Metric You Need to Track

January 19, 2020

This morning, I made a quick Google search.

When the results page loaded, I spent time clicking through the first page of websites to find what I was looking for. When I didn’t find my answer, I clicked back to that results page to look at the next one.

This process took me through to the bottom of the page until I refined my search and started the process again.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was actually contributing to a powerful metric — dwell time.

When we talk about metrics, we tend to focus on demographics. We ask questions like, Who’s looking at your site, where are they located, and what are their interests?. These interests help marketers make informed decisions about campaigns tailored to their customers’ interests.

Dwell time is the metric that runs through various search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s the time I spent reading those results pages before I went back to Google to take a look at other results.

Let’s explore more about what dwell time means, and its usefulness, below.

What is dwell time?

Remember that dwell time begins and ends with the SERP.

It’s important to note, dwell time and bounce rate are two different things. Bounce rate is what happens when a user clicks on one page, and then almost immediately leaves the site.

For it to be considered dwell time, on the other hand, the user needs to click on a page from the SERP, stay a while, and then either clicks back to the SERP or otherwise exits the page.

If you use search engines, you rack up dwell time daily, without even thinking about it. I can already recall two separate instances in which I’ve contributed to dwell time today, all before lunch.

Essentially, dwell time metrics can show marketers if their web pages are capturing the attention and needs of browsers. It has the potential to tell you what to include on web pages, and what to exclude.

For instance, let’s say you write a blog article called “Social Media Tips and Tricks”. You notice the piece has a high click-through rate, but low dwell time. Upon further inspection, you see the rest of the articles on the SERPs include comprehensive information regarding social media scheduling, how to create posts for social media, and which social media sites have the highest conversion rates. More than likely, you thought your post was solving for a user’s search intent when it really wasn’t — which is why most readers jump back to the SERP to find an alternative source.

It can also lead to clues about improving UX. For instance, if you have a slow loading time on your web page, you may see that reflected in dwell time metrics, since a user might exit your page if it’s taking too long to load

This metric can lead to important decisions you make for your site, among other metrics.

Next, let’s explore some average benchmarks regarding time spent on sites.

Average time on site benchmarks

According to Google Analytics, “Average Session Duration” is a metric that tells you how long visitors are staying on a website on average. It’s measured by the total duration of all sessions, or visits, in seconds, divided by the total number of sessions.

A session begins when a user goes to a website. After 30 minutes of inactivity, or when the user leaves, the session ends. The inactivity cutoff exists so you can get an accurate report of your metrics without untrue inflation.

You can find this metric already calculated for you in Google Analytics, displayed in minutes and seconds. *Can you give readers an alternative if they don’t have Google Analytics? Is there another time-on-page measurement website?

But what’s a “good” average session?

Try to go for anywhere between 2-4 minutes, the time most marketers agree is a good average duration. It’s also the general benchmark across most metrics of SMBs. It usually takes around this time to explore a website and get a feel for the design.

You can find this metric for your own site by visiting Google Analytics or other metric websites that host the same information. Here is an example of what that’ll look like on Google Analytics:

Most marketers agree that it’s rare to see average session duration times over 10 minutes or less than one minute, so if you’re looking for a goal, between 2-4 minutes is where the average typically lies.

When you’re looking at metrics, it’s a good idea to look at all of them to get a full scope of how your site is performing. If you’re ranking high on the SERP, that means that your SEO is great, but if your website isn’t providing useful information, your session duration might underperform.

To provide a holistic experience for customers, looking into the meaning behind session durations is important. Dwell time contributes to session duration, but remember that the two aren’t cut from the same cloth. Remember that dwell time doesn’t count from anywhere but the SERP, and that sessions end after 30 minutes of inactivity on that SERP.

Uncategorized

Dwell Time is the SEO Metric You Need to Track

January 19, 2020

This morning, I made a quick Google search.

This process took me through to the bottom of the page until I refined my search and started the process again.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was actually contributing to a powerful metric — dwell time.

Let’s explore more about what dwell time means, and its usefulness, below.

What is dwell time?

Remember that dwell time begins and ends with the SERP.

It’s important to note, dwell time and bounce rate are two different things. Bounce rate is what happens when a user clicks on one page, and then almost immediately leaves the site.

For it to be considered dwell time, on the other hand, the user needs to click on a page from the SERP, stay a while, and then either clicks back to the SERP or otherwise exits the page.

If you use search engines, you rack up dwell time daily, without even thinking about it. I can already recall two separate instances in which I’ve contributed to dwell time today, all before lunch.

This metric can lead to important decisions you make for your site, among other metrics.

Next, let’s explore some average benchmarks regarding time spent on sites.

Average time on site benchmarks

But what’s a “good” average session?

You can find this metric for your own site by visiting Google Analytics or other metric websites that host the same information. Here is an example of what that’ll look like on Google Analytics:

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