Marrin Costello:  [1:44] Thank you, Felix. It’s great to be here.

Felix:  [1:46] Great. Tell us a little more about your story, and what you sell?

Marrin:  [1:49] I grew up in the Bay Area in San Francisco. I received a bead kit when I was seven for Christmas. Immediately, became infatuated with all things sparkly, shiny, and ultimately the process of designing and creating beads. Back then, it was plastic, yarn, and supplies of that nature.

Felix:  [3:36] Interesting. You were doing this on the side as a hobby. Did you ever think that it would become a business or did it kind of just come out of nowhere where people wanted to pay you for your jewelry, and then you got all these amazing PR?

Marrin:  [3:51] It came out of nowhere. When I was around 10 years old, my parents helped me enroll in a local arts and crafts fair, where I sold my pieces outside of my elementary school girlfriend’s mom’s store. I didn’t think anything of the process. My parents are entrepreneurs, they recently retired, but they had a restaurant, bar, and hotel for over 40 years.

Felix:  [4:31] Yeah, you have a lot of entrepreneuralism in your blood in your family. Can you recall any specific lessons that you learned from your parents growing up that you do apply to your business today?

Marrin:  [4:41] I was not raised in a nine to five type of setting. If there was work to be done, then it didn’t matter what time of the day it was or what day it was, whether it was a weekend or a weekday. You got the work done. I think that has truly influenced my drive, my passion, and ultimately my work ethic.

Felix:  [5:00] Yeah, definitely, the hustle of the non stop 24 x 7 business. When you decided that this is something that makes sense to pursue as a business, did you have a goal that you set in mind on that very first day where you were committed to turning it into an actual business? What was the original dream that you had?

Marrin:  [5:21] The truth of it is that there never really was a long‑term dream growing up of getting my pieces in department stores, in getting my pieces on the red carpet. It never really donned on me being from Northern California in a small town. Those just seemed not unattainable, but so far removed from my reality that I didn’t even think that was an option.

Felix:  [6:01] Yeah, it is. You said that it kind of just grew organically. Do you remember how you got your first 10 sales? Was it just you handing things out and people asking you? Were they referrals from friends who’re asking to purchase more from you? What did you do to get your first initial sales?

Marrin:  [6:20] My first sale started when I was 10 at the arts and crafts fair. There, I had a physical area, that I had a booth, that was very natural for me to sit there and people would come up to the booth and I would exchange products for payment. In Los Angeles, while I was a student, people would buy things off of me.

Felix:  [7:30] At what point did you think that you would rather pursue working for yourself, rather than getting out of college and then just joining the regular workforce. Did that ever cross your mind that you would work nine to five or were you strictly going to school so that you could learn things to apply to your business?

Marrin:  [7:48] Going to college was honestly the next step in my academic career. I went to a private high school in Northern California so the question was always, “Where are you going to college, not are you going to college?” After being in college and getting a lot of amazing internships, I was referred to an event production company my senior year, where I started doing freelance fashion show production.

Felix:  [9:28] Yeah, that’s some great direction from her. I do want to talk a little bit later about mentorship because you did mention that in a previous interview about your experience there. I want to talk about your experience in PR. You’ve been featured on blogs and magazines like US Weekly and like you were saying before, on the red carpet.

Marrin:  [10:12] When I was interning at the PR firm, it was a PR firm and also a showroom. They did PR for fashion brands, but also other types of brands. In the fashion sector, I learned how to, with the help of one of my mentors, run a showroom.

Felix:  [11:40] Can you explain what is a showroom, and how do you get your product, your clothing or accessories into a showroom?

Marrin:  [11:46] Sure. A showroom is a venue that houses a lot of different brands…normally, a lot of different brands within their physical space. It’s essentially a brick and mortar, but not for people to come and purchase product, but for people to come and borrow product or look at product from different brands if they are.

Felix:  [12:44] I see, so an agency or stylist will get products from the showroom or borrow them, and bring them to photo shoots, or to the red carpet. How do you get your product into that? How do you break into it?

Marrin:  [13:17] I definitely think it’s possible for any brand that has a strong identity. It’s certainly not difficult to find companies, especially with Google AdWords these days.

Felix:  [14:17] I see, so there’s a fee associated with being in a showroom?

Marrin:  [14:21] Yes.

Felix:  [14:22] How much of a budget would you recommend somebody have for a PR before they pursue something, like getting a product into a showroom?

Marrin:  [14:29] PR companies, they arrange in their rights. Depending on what your budget is, they can offer you different services, so that would definitely be a question for the respective showroom or PR agency.

Felix:  [14:42] Is it even worth pursuing if you have a few hundred, or you’re talking about thousands of dollars before it makes sense?

Marrin:  [14:48] I would say probably closer to the thousands, again, that’s just a number that I’m pulling out of thin air.

Felix:  [14:54] Yeah, sure. That makes sense. I was saying before, you got a lot of great mentions and PR on blogs and magazines. Did the showrooms get you those mentions as well, or was there a different technique that you used to get featured on blogs and magazines?

Marrin:  [15:11] I interned at a showroom, but my brand has never specifically been with the showroom, or it isn’t yet, rather. All of my features and press relationship have just been either referral, word of mouth, or from collaborations, or connecting with people through social media.

Felix:  [15:46] Can you explain how the collaborations work, and how they help you get PR?

Marrin:  [15:51] Sure. It’s just a matter of cross‑promoting, so when I do collaborations with other brands, we make sure to create a marketing strategy, and then device the means of promoting on our own, our respective platforms into our respective contacts, and that is kind of how we approach.

Felix:  [16:14] That makes sense. You mentioned before that you…or just now, that you use social media access to, or to meet a network with influencers. When you have an influencer that you have in mind that you want to connect with, what is the best way to get their attention, and to have them listen to your story, and to check out your brand?

Marrin:  [16:36] To this point, it feels like I’ve never aggressively approached any brands or social media influencers. Everything has just happened by word of mouth, or just from connecting on social media. I feel social media encourages us to explore other people, or other brands, or other what else,the other things in the world.

Felix:  [17:23] Sometimes, that’s the best kind of relationship to begin, rather than having all those cold leads and cold calls you have. You created a brand that’s attracting the right kind of attention, so it sounds like your approach is just to have a great, solid brand that’s very clear.

Marrin:  [17:58] Again, I feel like everything has been organic, so it’s not necessarily an approach, but yes, that is what has happened [laughs] .

Felix:  [18:05] Yeah, it sound like [laughs] . I guess if we’d look back on it, it definitely looks like it connects a lot more than probably in the moment. You also have experience with pop‑up shops. Can you explain to the audience that might not be familiar with the pop‑up shops? What are they, and how do you get started with a pop‑up shop?

Marrin:  [18:24] Sure. A pop‑up shop is essentially a temporary brick and mortar, where a brand or a collaboration of brands will erect a retail space for a set amount of time, thus offering face‑to‑face interaction with the brands, and allow people to purchase in person, and see products before they go to the online shops.

Felix:  [19:25] What is the biggest benefit of having a pop‑up shop for, let’s say, an accessory or a clothing brand? I would say face to face interaction ,you can only get something from a two dimensional screen when you are buying jewelery or clothing or shoes, but when you see a product and are able to feel it, put it on, see how it works with your body and see what your taste is.

Felix:  [20:04] Normally, because you have the background of event planning, if you don’t have that background could you just approach a store instead of a pop‑up shop or do you usually just have to work through an agency to help you out ?

Marrin:  [20:15] There are plenty of agencies to help facilitate those relationships. But would encourage anyone with a brand to approach another company obviously in a professional and respectful way. I can’t speak to all the retailers and their capacity to allow for a pop‑up shop, but if the relationship is there and the opportunity is there I think that the brands, I would encourage a brand to do that

Marrin:  [21:00] My last experiences with the pop‑up shop was during the holiday season and it happened very rapidly withing the holiday season. The opportunity and the execution happened shortly there after or within the craziness of the holidays. Now that there is a little bit of time before my spring pop season there is time to do a lot of outreach and I did a lot of field work when I was in San Fransisco last.

Felix:  [21:40] It sounds like what you are saying is that you just can’t just open a pop‑up shop and just wait around for people to show up. You have to really put the marketing effort into driving people to physical location, and even going as far as doing a lot of research at a time to make sure that the pieces you have on display make sense for the kind of foot traffic that would come through.

Marrin:  [22:15] Sure! Packaging to either wrap the product or send people home with them. There are also credit card machines, there are cleaning supplies, there are display purchases, creating a retail space that goes far beyond just bringing your product and setting it up and if you have nothing to set it up on then that poses a problem.

Felix:  [22:57] Yeah, I want to talk about you actual website. One cool thing that I saw that I really don’t see too often, but this seems like it makes a lot of sense is the gift guide section of your website. Can you talk a little bit more about how you set it up ,not how you set it up technically but how did you know to have the gift guide section on your website?

Marrin:  [23:17] Sure. I work very closely with my clients and just based upon their purchases and what they choose to purchase for other people other than themselves, I created this guide of best sellers and broke if down by price.

Felix:  [23:56] Do you find that the gift guide drives a good amount of sales or people just come in and shop around, browse around first? How has the gift guide been for your business?

Marrin:  [24:08] You can find out it has been great. It’s been really great and I definitely think it has helped people gauge what their budget is for gifts because everyone does have budgets for gifts. I mean a lot of people do have a budget for gifting so it is something that is just on the cusp of $50‑$100 bracket they can kind of see with my brand what they would get with the $50 budget and then with the $100 budget

Felix:  [24:35] Yeah that makes sense. You also credit some of your success to the mentors you’ve had. You were talking earlier about how your previous employer really, kind of gave you the nudge to take the jump and and get into working for yourself and start your own business.

Marrin:  [25:04] Well, I think that every relationship is different. For me, I think that my previous bosses really recognized my work ethic and the pride that I took in me, works that I did for them and they respected that. I think that by them being fantastic people and them recognizing the hard work that I put into their company, they were very encouraging of me pursuing my brand.

Felix:  [25:35] What’s the biggest benefit gotten out of a mentor ship ?

Marrin:  [25:39] Advice, priceless advice. My mentors are not just my confidants when it comes to my business but also my personal confidants. They are my friends, I consider them LA family and ma still very close with them.

Felix:  [25:52] That is something that I do here a lot about having mentors that they give a lot of advice or great advice because they are using a position where you were. Basically they have already experienced the kind of trajectory you are currently on. How do you now what to ask your mentors because you have this kind of mentor ship relationship open? I think that a lot of concern mentors have is that they don’t want to bother their mentors unnecessarily too much and they don’t want to waste their time.

Marrin:  [26:35] I think that it’s great to have more than one mentor so that one person is not overwhelmed by all of your questions but I also think that that’s a relationship that you need to feel out on your own. Most people who take the entrepreneurial, most people that I know who have taken the entrepreneurial stuff and have done their business full time have made it a full time venture are quiet savvy and are able to answer simple questions but, when it comes to their respective business asking a little bit of more advanced questions or are not too difficult for them to ask because there may not be other ways of figuring it out.

Felix:  [27:54] Speaking of social media and how you use it, I was looking at your Pinterest. You are very active in there and have a good number of followers and a ton of pins. Can you talk a little bit more about your approach to using Pinterest and how you use it to grow your business?

Marrin:  [28:11] Sure. It’s a fantastic time sucker first of all so I have no problems hours on end on Pinterest. It really helped me, I’m definitely a visual person so it helps me visually categorize either the different things am looking at or the different projects I have going on, or, having conversations with other brands and other people based on what’s going on in your in your head.

Felix:  [28:52] That makes sense. you find that all off‑‑ that you do get traffic from your pinch rest page to the store ?

Marrin:  [28:58] Yes I do. Social media has really been great in terms of exposure for the brand and for clients.

Felix:  [29:06] Do you find that‑‑ is social media the biggest driver of your traffic or there something else like PR or ? What brings the most kind of visitors to your store?

Marrin:  [29:16] I think its two folds. At most I would say over three quarters of my traffic comes directly so that’s either people goggling me or typing in my website because of word of mouth or what have you. But, I also think that social media has been fantastic for my brand along side having faced time with my clients because they do a lot of trunk shows with my retailers and I do have personal relationships with most of my retailers and other brands that I work with. That’s really important for me.

Felix:  [29:49] What about, actually crediting these products? How do you credit all your entire catalog? Are you crediting all by yourself or are you getting them manufactured?

Marrin:  [30:00] It’s three folds, so it’s me. I still make a lot of the pieces and I also design every single piece, I do have production team with me that also make the pieces and then we also outsource pieces that require equipment or other more advanced skills to other production houses. They’re all in Los Angeles

Felix:  [30:24] How did you figure out things like pricing ? Because the products range in pricing, how do you know how much to charge for different items in your store?

Marrin:  [30:34] First and foremost it’s the cost of the materials themselves. Then the intricacy of each piece and from there we build the whole sale price and then the retail price.

Felix:  [30:48] When you’re running the store, do you have a team of people working with your or is it pretty much a CEO one woman show?

Marrin:  [30:57] The store meaning pop‑up store or my online shops?

Felix:  [30:59] The online store?

Marrin:  [31:00] The online store, still the online store is me and I have an amazing team of interns that I offer mentor‑ship and school credit too, I have a director of sales that helps as well, and then‑‑

Felix:  [31:13] I didn’t want to interrupt but, the internship program that you’re talking about, that is something that I’ve heard from a couple of other entrepreneurs. How do you start up something like that? To get local students to help out with running your store?

Marrin:  [31:29] I was asked, this is my 3rd year being asked by UCLA to give a speech for their career night, so, I have, just by telling my story and offering questions or mentioning the internship program I’ve had an amazing response and have worked with some fantastic young women to date.

Felix:  [31:53] So you are saying that interns, you have a director to foot for what?

Marrin:  [31:58] For my wholesale account

Felix:  [32:00] And are you using a lot of tools and applications to help you run your business?

Marrin:  [32:04] Yes, I think that Shopify has been hugely instrumental in changing my business. Changing the face of it and getting everything online and I think that all the tools that Shopify has to offer, have been huge.

Felix:  [32:20] Do you know of any applications off of the top of your head that you use that you have installed onto your store?

Marrin:  [32:26] Yes, I love the application called Kit. It has helped tremendously with my marking. Their product allows me to directly engage with my clients and customers and I love their customer service too.

Felix:  [32:45] Can you explain how you use Kit or what it does?

Marrin:  [32:49] Kit allows its users to see the back‑end of all the social media platforms and other platforms like Shopify or Etsy, for example. It allows you to see who is engaging with your brand and then from there you can create strategic marketing programs and to then reach those people. So it’s cyclical.

Felix:  [33:37] Yeah, it sounds like it helps you a lot with your social media. Do you use any other apps through the Shopify app store?

Marrin:  [33:44] Yes, I love the Shipping Easy and Pixel Printer. I think that the printing apps have been really helpful with streamlining the fulfillment process.

Felix:  [33:56] Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like you have a team with all these applications. It also, frees up a lot of your time to focus on designing the jewelry and actually get the products made. What are the future plans for your store and for your business? What can we expect for 2015?

Marrin:  [34:15] So many things Felix. There’s always so many….I am excited to release my blog, which is going to be called, “The Jewelry Mixologist”. It’s going to help me teach my clients how to style their jewelry. Oftentimes I will get clients that come to me for gifts and whatnot and they will say, for example, that we love your product and this is perfect for so‑and‑so, but we don’t necessarily know how to style them ourselves so we will pass on buying things for ourselves.

Felix:  [35:19] Nice. Thanks so much Marrin. So where can folks follow your story. I know there is the website for the store M‑A‑R‑R‑I‑N‑C‑O‑S‑T‑E‑L‑L‑O.com. Where else can they go to follow along with you?

Marrin:  [35:32] Twitter and Instagram. My handle is my first and last name together, M‑A‑R‑R‑I‑N‑C‑O‑S‑T‑E‑L‑L‑O, along with Pinterest, Tumbler, and Facebook.

Felix:  [35:45] Awesome. I will make sure to link all that stuff up and let the show know so that folks can follow along. Do you have a URL yet for the blog that you are creating?

Marrin:  [35:55] The blog will be attached to the website so everyone can go to marrincostello.com when the blog launches and there will be a click for a link to it there.

Felix:  [36:03] Awesome. Thanks so much Marrin.

Marrin:  [36:04] Thank you Felix.

Felix:  [36:05] Thanks for listening to Marrin’s story and always, a big thank you to our sponsors, Forewards and Recharge. Forewards makes getting customer referrals and word of mouth for your store easy by rewarding your existing customers for helping you find new customers.

The post How MarrinCostello.com Got Celebs To Wear Her Jewelry appeared first on Plug in SEO blog.

Felix:  [0:25] Did you know that consumers are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend? “Forewards” means getting customer referrals and word of mouth for your store easy by rewarding your customers for helping you find new leads.

Felix:  [0:50] Today’s podcast is with an entrepreneur that works two jobs to support his fledgling yarn business.

Nicole:  [1:38] Yup. [laughs] Thanks for having me on, Felix. I’m so stoked to be here.

Felix:  [1:42] I’m excited too. Tell us more about your store and what kind of products you sell on there.

Nicole:  [1:50] Totally. I’m going to start with a little bit of my background. I started the business, like you said, back in 2008. It was after being in the Air Force. I got out, and I had a desk job. It was a company that sold paper for offices. It was a lot like the TV show “The Office.” It was super boring, just without the awesome cast.

Felix:  [4:33] That’s awesome, and I do want to get into the manufacturing and the supply chain of your business, because it sounds like there’s a lot involved, in a little bit, but I want to talk about the very beginning stages as well.

Nicole:  [5:08] Yeah, it [laughs] was the unknown. I have to laugh about it. Luckily, I was in a spot. I’ve always been a saver, and I had a little bit of money in the bank, not a lot. I bootstrapped Darn Good Yarn and the business from my savings account. I didn’t take a loan out. I would tell listeners that. “Make sure you do have those reserves in the bank.” I think that gave me a little bit more confidence to act as my own line of credit.

Felix:  [6:29] What was the initial investment for starting your business? How much did you have to really put in before you started seeing the sales come in?

Nicole:  [6:38] I started the business with about $2,000. It wasn’t that much money.

Felix:  [6:43] What was the original goal or dream? Did you think that this would replace your income from your previous job, or was it something that, you had free time and you were going to throw it out there and see what happens?

Nicole:  [6:56] When I started Darn Good Yarn in 2008, I was working two other jobs to make sure that I had cash flow still coming in. I didn’t have quite the guts. I did this one business, my first business, and that was really full‑time.

Felix:  [8:00] That sounds like a pretty serious hustle and struggle at the very beginning, for a couple of years of work, getting multiple jobs and trying to get your business off the ground.

Nicole:  [8:22] It was intense. My commutes in, I relied on Audible like crazy, so I was listening to e‑books driving into work, and I remember scratching notes on my hand. Not scratching, but with a pen, writing notes on the back of my hand. “Oh, my God, that’s such a good business idea.”

Felix:  [10:05] Those jobs you had sounded like possible career paths that you could have taken. I think that as entrepreneurs we run into this issue where we are pulled in so many different directions, and because we have so much built‑in fire or intensity that are spilling out of us, we really want to go in so many different directions at once.

Nicole:  [10:43] I don’t know if I ever really burned out, and like I said, there was a joy in me running the business. I had to keep myself in check, as far as comparing myself to other business owners.

Felix:  [11:33] I really like that point about not comparing yourself to others, and it’s something I’ve heard before is that when you do look at other people’s successes, you just see the highlight reel of their life and their business, and you just see all the great things, but you don’t see the struggles, you don’t see what happens.

Nicole:  [12:24] I tell them to actually just shut out the noise, it’s as simple as that. I think you have to make realistic goals for yourself.

Nicole:  [13:37] …and it’s the same thing in business. It’s the same sort of thing.

Felix:  [13:39] Yeah, I understand. I see what you’re saying. After all that had work you out in for the many years, and all the sacrifices, it sounds likes you got to put in all the working two jobs and all of that. How successful is the business today, is where you want it to be, and you share as much as you can about the goals that you set out, and what you’ve accomplished?

Nicole:  [14:01] The goals, they are financial of course. For me, it’s keeping happy employees and a happy family, and sometimes, you can’t put those things on a balance sheet. It’s…

Felix:  [14:14] When you first started out the business, were you generating sales right off the bat, or how are you able to validate that this was a product, or this was a niche or a store that made sense, and it was going to be successful?

Nicole:  [14:30] I went to Google AdWords initially to get my story out there, and get the store out there. The yarn itself…the concept of the yarn has been on the market.

Felix:  [15:38] Speaking of the competition at first, I’ve read somewhere that you were initially interested in starting a yarn business, and you looked out for the competition. What did you find when you went out into the marketplace to look at who else is selling yarn?

Nicole:  [laughs] [15:53] A lot of crappy websites. The yarn itself is very important. The yarn I sell…It does go back to the women that are creating the yarn. I didn’t realize that initially. Once, within two cycles of me buying this yarn, I realized that the women who are making the yarn weren’t being employed year‑round, because the yarn wasn’t sustainable in the western market.

Felix:  [16:58] How did you know you could beat the competition? Because a little at times when we, entrepreneurs, we come up with ideas all the time, we find different things that we want to pursue, and then we go out and look at the competition, and then we see that there has been few in the business for many years.

Nicole:  [17:22] It goes back to looking at their website and their branding. When I say branding, it’s not about the logo, and their little cute slogan. It was “What are they doing to engage the customer?” For me, I’ve always tried to change around and say, “How can the customer be part of Darn Good Yarn’s story?” and they were missing the mark on it.

Felix:  [18:42] Can you maybe tell us tactically, how you…You have this story of helping these women in these countries be employed year round, and by purchasing your products, you are essentially voting with your dollars and supporting their lives out there. What did you do with that story to get it out there, was it in a form of videos or what was it that you’re doing?

Nicole:  [19:11] There’s a lot of imagery, we are continually improving imagery, video. I just got back from India like two weeks ago and I brought a videographer with me. We’re going to have a lot of professional produced videos talking about the process of making the yarn, and we’re talking about it with your customers.

Felix:  [20:10] A lot of images as you were saying, when you went out to India, you took videos and pictures, was it coming through in blog posts and all that to talk about the people that are making the product?

Nicole:  [20:25] Yeah, blog posts for sure, my blog doesn’t…honestly my blogs in general don’t get much interaction. We put it up there for good business practice, but for me my customers are on Facebook. We’re posting pictures there.

Felix:  [21:26] When you first launched the story, you had the setup, you had the products listed, what did you do to get the first 50 customers, was it all through ads or were there other avenues that worked well for you?

Nicole:  [21:39] Back in my early days I hustled on Craigslist, believe it or not. I used Google adverts, Facebook ads and it worked really awesome and that helped me get people noticing the brand, that was it. I would say like the third…It was really in the first month that I started to see sales coming and then the positive feedback was so quick because it was such a high quality product.

Felix:  [22:04] Are you able to figure out if you are getting a positive return on your investment with the ads. I think a lot of times, especially if you’re brand new to buying ads you spend a lot of money. Because you’re still experimenting, still learning, you, to suffice, end up in a situation where you don’t get as much in sales as you spent on ads themselves. Were you able to measure that, and did it work out positively for you?

Nicole:  [22:32] Yeah, right from the onset with Google AdWords I had a positive return. Today by my standards, something minimum has to meet a six and a half times ROI ‑‑ to return on investment ‑‑ for me to return on investment, for me to even consider tweaking it. In the beginning Google advert served me extremely well.

Felix:  [23:39] Yeah, I understand what you’re saying about how sometimes we feel like we’re coming out too salesy, and in the beginning and it’s almost like even more…

Nicole:  [24:01] Affiliate program is not…It doesn’t, maybe one percent of sales, it’s not that much. We haven’t focused too highly on expanding that at the present moment. We do have plans for that, moving into this year, but word of mouth help is what’s so critical, and the power of those letters that I send out and the reach out in having great customer service is apparent.

Felix:  [24:39] Yeah, that must be awesome to see.

Nicole:  [24:40] Yeah, it still gets me to this day, it’s like, “Yes, we have all this great technology but let’s not forget the basics of business.” You have to believe in your product, more importantly you have to have your customers believe in your products because you need…In my opinion you need to have 60 percent retention of customers to be successful.

Felix:  [25:15] Yeah once you do have a referral engine like you are talking about. It really does explode your ROI. Every time you get a new customer they are able to refer somebody else then you’ve just doubled the amount of customers that you have through converting one person.

Nicole:  [25:36] Right now it is Facebook, I think I got like 75,000‑76,000 likes on Facebook. We do a lot of contests and a lot of interactive contests there. That’s where a lot of our traffic is coming from this days.

Felix:  [25:51] You are not talking about ads, you’re talking about Facebook likes that are coming to your page?

Nicole:  [25:58] Exactly, and we make it fun. We don’t take ourselves seriously. If anyone actually goes to our Facebook page which is facebookaccount/dgyarn, like Darn Good Yarn of course. We do like color naming contests for the yarn…People come up with most obscure things.

Felix:  [26:55] I noticed you do have a lot of followers and likes on your twitter, Instagram and Facebook. When you have ‑‑ you’re saying 70,000 people ‑‑ that are liking your page and that are seeing your posts. Someone in the audience might be out there and say, “Of course Nicole, is going to be easy to get sales when you have so many followers.”

Nicole:  [27:21] I did the contests. The contest was helpful. I am kind of an open book. If I was having wine time and I was knitting at the same time, I was posting that stuff up. People were relating to it. Facebook, to me like, “Yes, we do sell and we put sales on there.”

Felix:  [27:49] Can you tell us more about this contest idea? Sounds like it’s interesting. Are you just posting an update on your page? Tell us how you go about starting it up and prospering on that?

Nicole:  [28:02] Yeah absolutely, our most popular contest that we run is our color naming contest. I get lots of different colors of the yarn, as you can imagine.

Felix:  [29:37] You are trying to…The purpose of spending time on your Facebook page, but when you are getting some interaction from your fans, Facebook tends to bubble up your posts more often or what’s the kind of effect getting the interaction on your Facebook page?

Nicole:  [30:00] Having high quality content on Facebook is super important, it has to be consistent. If you have a bomb of a post, it’s going to affect probably the next three or four posts, at least in my role it does. It will affect your page reach by 75 percent we have experienced. If you just have like one bomb after another, after another.

Felix:  [30:55] What you’re saying ‑‑ just for the folks out there who might not know how Facebook works ‑‑ you’re saying the reach of your post depending on the number of people that see it fluctuates depending on how many people interact with your posts on your Facebook page?

Nicole:  [31:14] That is exactly right, thank you. People should realize that even if you have 1,000 likes, only 16 percent of your followers will see that at any one time, which is kind of alarming. That’s why maybe we’ll lead in some spy, where I rely on my email list and email acquisitions to stay in contact with my customers.

Felix:  [31:34] Yeah, you guys are jumping to next, I think that email has always been…It went away for a bit, but now it’s coming back in full force because of these issues that people are running into by having their customers on a platform that they don’t control.

Nicole:  [32:31] Sure. We do a couple of things. I’m sharing a lot of secrets with you. In general over all, Darn Good Yarn, we try to not focus more than 20 percent of our marketing efforts to any one place. I say that, because I got my hand slapped with Facebook.

Felix:  [33:40] Could you explain that? You’re saying, how does it work with Facebook?

Nicole:  [33:44] Sure. What you do is you take your email list. You upload it into their software. What they do is they match the email addresses to Facebook profiles. They go, Betty Sue, and this is Betty Sue’s email address, then matches them together. When Betty Sue is looking at her news feed, she will see advertisements that I’m paying for in front of her in the form of sponsored ads.

Felix:  [35:26] 18,000 is a ton. What do you email them and how often do you send emails out?

Nicole:  [35:32] I send them little love letters that’s about…

Nicole:  [35:38] Every other week, we do an email that’s focused around branding, that’s focused around telling people more about the story of Darn Good Yarn, exactly what we were talking about before. “Hey, this is my last trip to India. This is a recent blog post.” It’s not super sorry at all, I’m telling the story.

Felix:  [36:17] Can you share some, maybe, tips on things like the subject lines? I think that’s something that if you’re just starting out, it’s hard to master because you are not frequently enough that you are able to test. For someone that’s done for so long and then with so many emails out, what goes into your thought process when you’re coming up with email subject lines?

Nicole:  [36:43] Time sensitivity is very important in email. Subject line, if I am pushing a sale, I’ll say, “Hey, 24 hours left.” What I like to do is, if people are looking for ideas, I sign up for a lot of other people’s newsletters, from big boxes like Old Navy. Believe it or not, I think they do a great job with their subject lines. I say, “What are they doing there? Why did I maybe open that? Why did it catch my eye?”

Felix:  [37:25] I like that. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If someone else is doing it successfully and a big box chains, like you’re saying, like in Old Navy, they have tons of money and tons of experience. You might as well take advantage of that and merry that in your own business.

Nicole:  [37:52] Like I said, I had that first business. I’ve always been a crafty sort of kid. I wanted to learn how to knit. That’s when I started joining the yarn. The yarn itself, I didn’t realize how important the supply chain was behind it until those first couple of cycles of inbound shipments.

Felix:  [40:25] It definitely sounds like the best business to be in, because it was something you truly believe in. It gives you the extra energy that I think is probably one of the key elements of strategists having the grit to stick in the game and staying in there during the times where it gets tough.

Nicole:  [41:08] It’s very complex math. I usually double it or quadruple it depending on if we’re doing wholesale or retail. It’s not that complex. I wish there was more science, but that’s what it is. I only realize that through. I want to talk about this, because I think it’s important.

Felix:  [42:33] That’s important about having that almost professional and formal businesses, employee or help. How did you find a bookkeeper? For someone that’s starting out, how much time…? You probably don’t need somebody full‑time when you’re first starting out. How much time would you expect to need from a bookkeeper when you’re first starting out?

Nicole:  [42:57] If you get someone from the beginning, you might need them for maybe three or four hours a month. That’s at the most. That’s if you’re going to them for consulting as well. Anthony and I have a relationship where I’m paying him by the hour, but we’re also talking about business development and strategy.

Felix:  [44:05] That sounds like a lot of work. Speaking of having employees, what else is on your team? What roles did you hire for initially?

Nicole:  [44:14] Initially, I thought I just needed an assistant. I guess I did, but I hired Maggie, who’s now my vice president of Darn Good Yarn. She was a customer of mine, believe it or not. I posted on my personal Facebook wall, “I think I need an assistant, maybe eight hours a week.” Within two months, she was working 50 hours a week for me. [laughs] I think I was a little bit overloaded. You know what I mean?

Felix:  [45:33] Are they all working remotely or do you guys have an office that you meet at?

Nicole:  [45:39] Maggie and Jessica, they’re remote. Amanda comes in to work with me. We moved into this place in June, in Schenectady. I don’t want to make it sound like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve had this big ass building for a long time.” That’s not the case. I ran Darn Good Yarn hustled out of my house in Maine for three years.

Felix:  [46:10] I don’t see why you couldn’t do that. I think that’s one of the great things about starting a business these days, you could find the best talents that works for your business, works for your budget, and they don’t have to be in your town at all.

Nicole:  [46:28] Totally. Number one app, RetentionGrid. It is the bomb. I’d say, in the past 12 months, it’s generated over $100,000 in revenue for us [indecipherable 46:41] . It is the bomb for an app. The team over there, they are amazing. They’ve created some new emailing technologies that we’re currently using. They brand a lot more beautifully than what we’ve previously been using. RetentionGrid is the bomb.

Felix:  [48:41] Other than these awesome applications that you’re using, can you pinpoint a thing that you’ve maybe changed about your site? Either the design or adding something or removing something that has made a big impact on your traffic or the sales that you’re generating?

Nicole:  [48:58] We’ve had a better conversion by grouping our products better.

Felix:  [49:42] That makes sense. When I close out on something that I found when I was Googling around about you and your business, was that you won the FedEx small business grant contest. Can you tell us more about that? What was it about? What was the prize and your experience with them entering that contest?

Nicole:  [50:00] Yeah, totally. Thanks for bringing that up. Gosh, it was two years ago at this point. I’m like an old lady now. FedEx launched this small business grant contest. There were about 40,000 businesses nationwide that entered into it. I’m like, “Hell, I think I can actually win this thing, because it was asking questions about supply chain and how you integrate your small business into a global supply chain,” which is what I was doing but I was doing it from my house in rural Maine at the time.

Nicole:  [52:18] When you’re entering in and you’re filling out your information, keep it centric to who your audience is. It’s people at FedEx, they still are trying to have a high production value after the fact when you win.

Felix:  [53:17] Yeah, I think what I’m hearing from what you’re saying is almost like make sure that you have a story that FedEx would want to tell. I saw the video that they put out for you, and it looks awesome. It really makes FedEx look amazing too. I’m sure that goes into FedEx’s mind when they pick winners. They want to pick somebody that has a great story that they can use for their purpose as well.

Nicole:  [53:59] Totally. Facebook is always awesome. Come visit me there like I said before, Facebook.com/dgyarn, but the website is where it’s at. We’re going to be posting a ton of video from my India trip.

Felix:  [54:46] Awesome, thanks so much Nicole.

Nicole:  [54:48] Yeah, thank you.

Felix:  [54:49] If you want to support Nicole’s cause by purchasing from darngoodyarn.com, head over to shopifymasters.org/27 to get a Shopify Masters exclusive discount code.

Felix:  [54:59] It’s a limited time discount so don’t wait. Thanks for listening. Make sure to go to shopifymasters.org to check out the show notes with all the information and links we mentioned on the podcast. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please head on over to iTunes and leave us a five star review. It helps a ton in growing our community.

The post How Darn Good Yarn Grew to 73,758 Facebook Likes With $5 Contests appeared first on Plug in SEO blog.

Good managers pay attention to the numbers because they don’t lie, or do they?

The beauty of online marketing is that everything can be tracked and measured.  Did the last email blast outperform the previous one or how well is your newest landing page converting visitors to leads/sales?

The answers to each of these questions and numerous others lie in the reading and interpretation of your analytics.  One of the problems facing managers looking into the data is what to look at.  With reams of data being generated every day, staring at the sheer volume of information and trying to make sense of it can be overwhelming.

Adding to that feeling is the fact that some of the commonly discussed numbers are somewhat irrelevant, even though they appear sexy at first glance.  Numbers like visits, page views and time on site are important, but do they really tell the story that needs to be told about your site.

Choosing the Right Analytics to Watch

Before you begin diving into your analytics you need to define the purpose of your site.  Defining the purpose of your site allows you to determine which numbers you should pay attention to and what they mean to you.

Two questions to ask yourself when evaluating your website are: How does our website help our business grow? What do we want individuals to do when they are on our website?

After answering those two questions, you will be able to set clearly defined goals—landing page conversions, shopping cart abandonment rates, new vs. returning visitors, etc.—that are meaningful guide your analytic analysis.

Key Metrics to Focus On

1.  Unique Visitors.  Site visits is one of those sexy numbers that everyone likes to quote because it can make them look good.  While site visitors is important, what does it really mean?  For example, you could get one person—person A— to visit your site every day for a month and that would give you thirty views.  Yea, you have thirty views but how useful are they?

A better metric to measure is unique visitors. Unique visitors are those individuals visiting your site for the first time.  Unique visitors are important because they help gauge the impact of your marketing efforts.

Now, if Person A visits your website twenty times, person B visits nine times and person C visits once you will still have thirty total visits, but now you have three unique visitors.  Those three individuals are important because they represent the reach of your marketing efforts.

2.  Bounce Rate.   Bounce rate is a metric that measures how many visitors leave your site after visiting only one page.  This is an important number because it tells you if you are delivering on the promises used to get visitors to your site.

For example your search result might promise visitors information on why Zebra’s have stripes, yet when they click the link and arrive at your site they don’t immediately see the promised information and they leave.

The marketing team at Rocket Fuel studied a years worth of bounce rates on 60 random websites.  They found bounce rates ranging from 26 – 70% with an average rate being 49%.  They concluded that bounce rates below 40% were excellent and rates between 41 and 55 % were average.  Anything above 55% represents a problem and that the reasons causing it—poor design, bad SEO, etc.—should be determined.

3.  Conversion Rate.  This is the one metric that really matters because it measures the percentage of people who reach a desired goal on your site.  Everything you do on your website should be designed to move visitors through the sales funnel toward your desired objective.  If your website isn’t converting visitors into customers you need to know why.

Marketing Sherpa—an Internet marketing research company—evaluated 2,912 survey responses to find Ecommerce conversion rates ranging from less than 1% all the way to a ridiculous 100%, with the majority of the rates being less than 5%.

Conversion rates will vary depending on a variety of factors, so it is important to watch for any sudden changes or trends that appear in your conversion rate.  Any sudden shift in the rate needs immediate attention because it could point to potential problems on your site.

Rinse and Repeat

The beauty of the Internet is the ability to measure everything and choosing the right metrics will aid in your quest for success.  Setting goals for and reviewing the metrics discussed will provide great insight into your business and your marketing efforts.  Taking the time to familiarize yourself with these three metrics will bring focus to your efforts and help you ask the right questions.

The post 3 Website Analytics You Shouldn’t Ignore appeared first on Plug in SEO blog.

Mark Costigliola:  [1:48] Thanks a lot, Felix, for having me on.

Felix:  [1:50] Give us a little more information about your store. What is it that you guys sell?

Mark:  [1:54] Earthled.com is the leading online retailer of LED lighting products. We sell everything from screw‑in bulbs that anyone can put in their house, all the way up to office and industrial fixtures that are used in commercial applications.

Felix:  [2:21] Awesome. You guys have been in the business for a while now, eight years at this point. What were you doing before being in e‑commerce, and what made you decide to take that route and start selling online?

Mark:  [2:36] My background is in IT. I used to work for a medical device company. They had a really strong e‑commerce component to their operation as well. I was heavily involved in that, and experienced some rapid growth with that company over the course of the five years I spent there.

Felix:  [3:29] That’s interesting, because it is a pretty new consumer technology that’s really been only affordable in recent years. You’re saying that you spent some time working at a different company that was selling LEDs, but maybe not for consumers that want to light their households.

Mark:  [4:09] The best thing was I really didn’t know. [laughs] In a lot of cases when you’re entering something new like this, the less you know, maybe the better. I didn’t have a background in lighting or anything of that sort, any of the sciences behind household lighting or lighting.

Felix:  [4:54] Usually for any new technology, and if you are one of the frontrunners of that technology, I think that a lot of the responsibility of education comes onto your shoulders, and you have to educate the consumer on this new technology.

Mark:  [5:21] Yeah. A lot of that came down to doing it myself. I had to spend about six months learning the technology, and I did spend the first part of that year in 2007 really learning about it.What I saw definitely was that everyone else who was selling, and there was really ‑‑ the amount of companies that were selling this product was you could count on your hand, at least online.

Felix:  [6:49] That’s interesting because a lot of people don’t necessarily buy a lightbulb for the lightbulb, they buy it for the lighting, and it’s weird that you wouldn’t show the benefit of the products.

Mark:  [7:51] For me personally, the biggest driver was I wanted to make a change. I didn’t want to work for someone anymore. I think that I’ve always wanted to have my own company. I just believed in what I wanted to do, and so that made the time spent learning about the industry.

Felix:  [8:34] I think that’s a goal that a lot of entrepreneurs have, is that they want to be their own boss. Was this your first entrepreneurial pursuit, or did you have experience in starting projects in the past, or starting companies in the past?

Mark:  [8:49] I had done a lot of selling of products on eBay. I had also dabbled with CafePress. Some of your listeners are probably familiar with that, making t‑shirts and things like that.

Felix:  [9:12] I see. So you wanted to not just have a job in selling whatever you were selling on eBay, you wanted to actually build an actual company out of products that you were selling.

Mark:  [9:22] Yeah, that was the ultimate goal. It was never about the money. I never really thought about that part of it. It was just basically I wanted to build a larger organization. That was the main goal.

Felix:  [9:33] That makes sense ‑‑ the progression of your e‑commerce career or journey is that you start off with selling on someone else’s marketplace, like on eBay. Starting with something small, low overhead like CafePress and making t‑shirts aren’t probably nearly as much overhead as the business that you’re in today.

Mark:  [10:18] I think the interesting thing about eBay, and even CafePress, is that you really learn a lot about taking care of customers, on a smaller scale of course.

Felix:  [11:32] I want to talk about that a little more. Once you get that sale, and you’ve shipped out the product, the packaging is fine, and it gets to the customer just fine within the estimated shipping time that you quote, and that process is fine, what do you do after that that really contributes to the kind of level of customer service that really makes a customer delighted and want to repeat purchase from you in the future?

Mark:  [12:00] What we’ve been doing, we’ve been working really hard towards ‑‑ and I don’t think anyone’s ever perfect at it, is we’ve been trying to build an experience where someone can get the order as quickly as possible ‑‑ that’s the first step, be communicated with the entire time in that process, and then we do surveys.

Felix:  [13:12] These surveys that you send out to every customer, you’re saying that you ask questions about how easy was the checkout process. What other kind of key questions do you recommend other e‑commence store owners ask if they are also creating surveys for their customers?

Mark:  [13:28] In some of the follow‑up emails we use through Retention, we actually ask, “Is there any product you’d like to see on our site,” just a general overall view of, “Is there anything we could be doing better?”

Felix:  [13:55] And these are all just through the surveys?

Mark:  [13:57] Surveys, phone calls ‑‑ we are always trying to improve the process. I think one thing for any person, even if they spent a lot of time on it ‑‑ the first version was that I spent, like I said, two months of my life on that, but there was a lot of things that needed to change over time, and so you can’t be stubborn about it.

Felix:  [14:34] That makes sense. I think that when we are starting off as entrepreneurs, we have this creative vision that we want to push forward and get it out there and really stick by it, but really, if you’re running a business, you should really think about, “What does the customer want? How you can improve it from the customer’s perspective?”

Mark:  [15:17] Yeah, that’s our parent company.

Felix:  [15:18] And [inaudible 15:19] LED and a bunch of other companies. How many companies are you involved with, or do you have running, and how do you find the time to manage all these kind of entities?

Mark:  [15:29] Advanced Lumonics is our holding company. It holds everything, so EarthLED is the prime layer for LED, the LED online store, and the LED division. We actually have an interesting product called ORBneXt that we launched on Kickstarter, and that’s a product that we built from the ground‑up.

Felix:  [16:14] So you do have the business being run by your entire family, I think that I read that the original conception of the company was run by you, your father and your mother. Now what is it like starting a business with family?

Mark:  [16:27] It think it can be a lot of different things. It depends how you want to do it. Obviously there’s a lot of stress involved in the beginning of starting anything, and doing that with family can raise that level as well.

Felix:  [17:36] I read also in one of your bios that you’re really kind of passionate and focused on the Internet of Things. I think that that’s very similar to, or at least the Kickstarter campaign that you guys launched ‑‑ ORBneXt now seems like it’s really now related to your passion for the Internet of Things.

Mark:  [18:01] Internet of Things really categorizes anything that’s a device that is basically connected to the Internet. In the future we envision, and a lot of people see, the future as being basically everything will have intelligence built in to it, whether it be light switches, your thermostat, your air conditioning, anything will have intelligence so that it can be controlled, monitored, and basically its operation perfected, in terms of its efficiency.

Felix:  [19:21] That makes sense. Why did you guys decide to kind of go with Kickstarter to launch this campaign? You have businesses that are running. I’m sure you could have funded this yourself out of the businesses, but why go to Kickstarter?

Mark:  [19:35] I think we generally wanted to see what the interest was, firstly. I think Kickstarter’s a great platform to do that. We actually, unlike, I think, a lot of things you see on Kickstarter these days, which have a lot of funding behind them before they even go on Kickstarter, we really didn’t have any extra funding to do it.

Felix:  [20:06] You guys started this Kickstarter in, I believe, early 2014, with the goal of raising $12,000. You kind of blew past that, almost double the original goal and raised close to $23,000.

Mark:  [20:35] Again, unlike a lot of other Kickstarters, we knew we could do it if we had the funding, so once we had that funding, the first step was really easy. We put it into production, basically what we had done before Kickstarter was built a proof of concept, functioning prototype.

Felix:  [21:31] With this kind of ORBneXt project and your goal of possibly creating an e‑commerce store around the Internet of Things kind of theme, and with EarthLED and all that, do you ever get worried that you might be spreading yourself too thin? Do you ever get maybe stressed out about having all of these different projects going on at one time, or is that how you like to fill your time?

Mark:  [21:52] It’s definitely, definitely a lot at once, but I have a really good team behind me. If it was just me, yes, it’d probably be a huge problem, but I have a good team. We try to build smart processes from start to finish for everything, so I think that, although it is a lot, we’re able to do a lot with a small team.

Felix:  [22:15] When you first started this out in 2007, the EarthLED business, did you know pretty quickly that it could become a full‑time business and you wouldn’t have to work for somebody anymore, you could work for yourself? Or how much time after initially starting before you realized, or before you could make it a full‑time job basically?

Mark:  [22:37] The first year, I think we opened the store August of 2007. We really didn’t start getting orders until late August. The first year was pretty modest sales, I think somewhere under $30,000.

Felix:  [23:54] I think that’s the most difficult part for entrepreneurs is that you do kind of have to, I don’t want to say delude yourself, but you do kind of have to be more optimistic than maybe what’s realistic at first, just because you need to survive those, like you were saying, six months or maybe even a year where you’re not necessarily where you want to be.

Mark:  [24:36] I think for us ‑‑ it was interesting. We did a major pivot in 2011 time frames.

Felix:  [26:27] Right, that makes sense. And do you remember how much investment you had to put into the business back in 2007 before you were ready to start and selling even your first product?

Mark:  [26:36] Yeah, basically, myself and my parents, we both put in about $14,000 each to start the company, which for me, it was a lot of money. It was something where the prospect of taking all of your savings and going into something where you’re not going to have a job. It’s a lot, but I think what I did, I know that I did differently than maybe some other people who maybe fail at, is I gave 100 percent.

Felix:  [27:48] And was that $28,000 total that you guys put in?

Mark:  [27:51] Yes…

Felix:  [27:52] Was that all going towards the actual manufacturing of the products ,or how did you spend that money?

Mark:  [27:58] Since I do have an IT background I was able to do all the site design myself, all the photography and everything myself, so that was all basically free. Yes, that basically went into the first round of products and setting up simple things like shipping, supplies, and that sort, and buying, basically, inventory.

Felix:  [28:15] You said that within your first year you did $30,000 in sales, which is obviously not nearly as good as you guys are doing today, but for somebody that is just starting out, doing $30,000 in sales in the first year is a pretty good milestone to hit.

Mark:  [28:43] Well, I do have a background in SEO as well, so I think we were really well positioned so that when people would search for LEDs, people would find us organically, but then I did do a lot of paid advertising, a few Google AdWords, which was pretty early on in its evolution back then.

Felix:  [29:40] Yeah, in 2007 or early on, eight years ago, it was definitely a different time for online marketing in terms of, SEO was a lot easier to dominate than it is today, and since you guys have been doing this for eight years, you were telling me before the call that you were one of the first Shopify customers?

Mark:  [29:59] Yeah, we were in the first 100. We’re the store number 87.

Felix:  [30:02] That’s amazing. How have you seen see the e‑commerce market evolve over the years? What are some of the most dramatic changes that you’ve seen that have had the biggest impact on your business that you guys have to adjust to?

Mark:  [30:17] I think that definitely at that time, companies like Home Depot or Wal‑Mart had basically zero online presence. Their online presence was minimal at best. I remember when I was in college, we did a case study on Home Depot, and our results of our case study where that Home Depot should open an online store because at that time they didn’t even have one.

Felix:  [31:16] Yes, that makes sense. Are you doing things like selling on Amazon as well, or any other marketplaces other than eBay and your own Shopify site?

Mark:  [31:25] Yes, we do some eBay and some Amazon, but not as much as we used to. We like and we think we want to drive as much traffic as possible to our store. We definitely do advertise on Amazon. I think that’s a good platform. I think that works really well.

Felix:  [31:52] I see. I’ve heard of this before. It’s basically you buy ads on Amazon, and if a customer on Amazon searches for a product that they don’t have in their catalog, immediately they would show an ad from advertisers like yourself?

Mark:  [32:08] Yep, that’s right. It actually makes a product listing, and that listing actually goes into the search engines as well. Amazon’s link powers is unparalleled. I think those work really well, especially around some products that they don’t carry, but you’ve got to be very careful with them.

Felix:  [32:39] That make sense.

Mark:  [33:00] The biggest issue I think we faced was the fulfillment side, because we carry so many different SKUs. It’s a difficult thing to get right. The first five years we tried to that ourselves, we would fulfill everything on our side by hand. [laughs] That was quite a daunting task, and running a warehouse is a very challenging endeavor for anyone, especially when you carry so many SKUs.

Felix:  [33:47] If you could go back, would you outsource fulfillment sooner than you ended up doing?

Mark:  [33:55] Yeah, I think I definitely would have done that. At the same time we needed to have the team in place here, just the people. I was very fortunate to have hired people that understand fulfillment and logistics.

Felix:  [34:29] So, you’re thinking that if someone wants to consider outsourcing, you should still have somebody dedicated or a least a big part of their job is to manage the outsource‑fulfillments company that you guys are working with?

Mark:  [34:42] Yeah, most definitely, especially if you have a lot of SKUs. If its one or two skews, I think that’s pretty manageable, but when you have four hundred plus like we do, it becomes very difficult.

Felix:  [34:52] How many did you start off with?

Mark:  [34:54] I think the initial batch, maybe was under 20.

Felix:  [34:57] Do you find that was difficult to start off with 20? I know that a lot of stores today, especially in the Kickstarter world, is just one product that we sell, and then just to have a store up after Kickstarter campaign, and just sell that one product, maybe different variations of it. It’s really just one kind of solution.

Mark:  [35:27] It’s just the nature of our business where we got to have so many different types. Obviously, if you have a choice and you’re just going to pick something, it makes a lot of sense to pick something where you can have maybe less than five SKUs. That would be excellent.

Felix:  [35:52] Now the wholesale business, was that something you guys started right off the bat?When did you introduce that into your business?

Mark:  [36:00] Ever since the beginning, we have catered towards high‑volume sales, stuff that’s done off line in our case. We’ll get a contractor or a construction company, or a large company comes to us, and they want to do a large volume of product, either for their client or to retrofit their entire building.

Felix:  [36:34] Do you actively pursue that kind of business, or are they just finding your website and then reaching out saying they want to purchase a large order from you?

Mark:  [36:43] We don’t do anything outbound, but what we do have on every single page is a button where someone can click if they want a volume quote. It’s our primary avenue to get that business, and then we take phone calls everyday, so everything is all pure inbound.

Felix:  [37:05] I see, so it’s really something as simple as just having a link or button that says, “For the Wholesale Business” is enough to actually get customers for that line.

Mark:  [37:14] Yeah, I think for us that works. I think anyone who has an online store should definitely take a look at that possibility, where designing something as simple as an email form that pops up and they’ll ask someone to quote something of volume gives you a way to negotiate that business offline.

Felix:  [37:30] I think that when we entrepreneurs are starting up a store, we kind of think that only consumer is an individual that’s buying the products, but you also have different size of customers like large businesses that want to buy from you wholesale, so it makes sense to have a way for them to easily purchase that from you as well.

Mark:  [37:58] With EarthLED in Colorado, we have six people including myself, my father, my brother, and my mother. My father and my mother work out of Florida. My brother works out of Washington, and we have a couple of contractors that work with us on a lot of the hardware projects. Basically, it’s a team of nine people day in and day out.

Felix:  [38:24] Other than your family, how did you know who to hire? How did you know what kind of job to hire for first, once you made first hire?

Mark:  [38:32] It was a struggle, I mean when I moved out here is when we really did our first batch of hiring, and we ran into some struggles with that.

Felix:  [39:53] What positions did you hire for initially?

Mark:  [39:56] Initially the biggest hiring portion was to staff the warehouse. We had to have four people in the warehouse, and then we needed inside sales, and we also, since we had an office environment, we had to have a receptionist. That was the initial batch of hiring when I moved out here.

Felix:  [40:14] You mentioned that in terms with the apps that you guys use, you said YOTPO, Retention Grid, and also Shopper Approved. Are there any kind of apps or tools that you use internally even to help you run the business?

Mark:  [40:27] Yes, in addition to that, we’ve developed a pretty proprietary system to both do fulfillment and to develop our ordering strategy and our inventory management. That’s been developed in‑house by our team here.

Felix:  [41:06] So you said that you were going through a site redesign right now. Can you recall something that you’ve made a change to on the store itself, on the site itself, that has had a big impact on traffic or sales?

Mark:  [41:18] Yes, we’ve been rolling out small changes, but the base what we do now ‑‑ the Volume Quote button I mentioned before was a huge addition. Now we’ve also built in some customized logic, so that if something is out of stock we can have someone be notified when it comes back in stock, and that’s through an app we use called “Back in Stock”.

Felix:  [42:16] Were you always using this kind of automated review system through YOTPO, or did you have a point in time where you didn’t use that and was just kind of waiting for customers to write reviews?

Mark:  [42:25] We really didn’t have a review function until 2011.

Felix:  [42:30] You saw a tremendous lift in the conversion rate or something on your site once you introduced that?

Mark:  [42:35] Yes, it’s definitely helped, but it’s also, I think it helps legitimize the site more if you have reviews. A company like YOTPO is the good one because it’s all third‑party verified. It’s not something where it’s an automated system. They really help control spam, so it isn’t just bombarded with the spam bots all day long.

Felix:  [43:10] The Google product listings, they also take in consideration the reviews that are on the products?

Mark:  [43:17] Yeah, and the overall site itself. They pull that data from Shoppers Approved. The more ratings we have there, obviously the better it looks in Google shopping.

Felix:  [43:28] Do you decide to discontinue some products based on reviews as well? What’s the process behind how you stock the store based on customer feedback?

Mark:  [43:39] There has been cases where we very quick to add products, and some of our vendors are very quick as well to develop new products, so we always want to be the first to offer the product online, if it’s possible.

Felix:  [44:27] That makes sense.

Mark:  [44:45] That, just one day I thought that might be an interesting addition. I know when I go to a site sometimes when I’m just shopping, I want to say, “Hey, what’s maybe the best selling product on a site?” Shopify makes it easy to do things like that so you can create something ‑‑ it’s pretty automated to track that data and display it to them. It was kind of no brainier for me to do something like that where people could see, “Hey, what’s everyone is buying?” basically.

Felix:  [45:17] Also the bulb finder ‑‑ do you find that a lot of your visitors use that feature?

Mark:  [45:27] Yes, we get a lot of people that use that. It’s a great way with this type of product. It can be a technical product. It makes it easy for someone, as long as they can use a camera, to get us a picture right from there to see what they might need and what fits for that application, because sometimes it’s difficult to describe something over the phone or by email, but this leave us a good way of doing it.

Felix:  [46:08] This is just for the audience that’s listening, so it’s basically a form that a visitor fills out that also asks them to upload a picture. What’s the picture of, their current bulb that they have that they want to replace?

Mark:  [46:22] Yes, we just ask to take a picture of what you’re wanting to replace and show us as much as possible, and then from there we can try to, if we do offer something, we’ll send you a link to what would be the best replacement for that particular product.

Felix:  [46:38] I really like that, I think because one of the activities that really make an online store standout is being able to emulate the actual experience of going to an actual store. If you go into a store like a Home Depot and you have a light bulb with you, you want somebody to help you out by showing them the light bulb that you have or that you want to replace.

Mark:  [47:35] You can purchase the ORBneXt today at orbnext.com. That’s where you can buy them now, and our parent company is advancedlumonics.com.

Mark:  [47:50] You can check out all of our new products there.

Felix:  [47:52] Awesome. Thanks so much, Mark.

Mark:  [47:54] Thanks a lot, Felix. Appreciate it.

The post The 8 Year Ecommerce Story From Shopify Store #87 appeared first on Plug in SEO blog.

Bryan Gardner:  [1:49] Hey. Thanks for having me Felix.

Felix:  [1:51] Can you tell us a little bit more about your store, and what you sell on the store?

Bryan:  [1:56] Yeah. On FlyPedals.com which is my second e‑commerce store, we actually sell one product which is the original fly pedals. We’re developing more products right now that we’re going to launch this next summer, and we’re really excited about that. But so far we only sell one product which we like, but at the same time there’s a lot more money to be made.

Felix:  [2:20] You’re saying this is your second e‑commerce store. What was your first attempt at e‑commerce?

Bryan:  [2:25] About five years ago I was working as a public accountant, and I’d always really liked the idea of being an entrepreneur. I really loved the idea of being an entrepreneur, but obvious it’s difficult with limited mentors in my community.

Felix:  [4:35] It seems that you hit out the park even with your first [inaudible 4:42] , especially getting a partner like that. What were you doing before e‑commerce, and how did you know what will sell ‑‑ what kind of store sell, what kind of product will sell?

Bryan:  [4:53] The short answer to that is when I first started, five years ago, I had no idea. I mean, everything I know now is directly from trial and error and failing. I really just don’t think to study this and do it right the first time, right off the bat. I think, you really just have to go for it, is my biggest suggestion to those who really want to start a store that haven’t, and maybe they’re afraid to. The best way to do that is to start with this limited amount of capital invested.

Felix:  [5:57] Yeah, that makes sense. Before you were able to able to launch the first story, and get that success with Kickstarter, what was the original goal or dream? Was it just to get the product out there, or did you have some kind of financial goals in mind before you guys started?

Bryan:  [6:15] I feel like the longer I work as an entrepreneur, I realize that you should really underestimate the amount that you’re going to sell. When I first started Lazer Shirts, my idea was, “Oh my God, I’m going to sell a million of these things! Right? I’m going to make $20 million in five years, or whatever it is,” and you make these unrealistic goals, because you think it’s possible because you have this rush of confidence after you sell your first 100 or 1,000 or whatever, units.

Felix:  [7:10] Yeah, that makes sense because most of the time people say that you should set large goals and aim really, really big. But then they don’t follow up with that advice, because not just that but then you have to set goals that are going to get you one step closer by next month to that big goal, rather than just think about the big picture all the time.

Bryan:  [8:05] Absolutely. I think it’s a niche product in terms of not everyone’s going to understand it, because it’s really a product for people who have clip less bike pedals, which is really big if you’re into mountain biking or road biking, but the general population of bicyclists might not have them.

Felix:  [9:31] That definitely sounds like a problem. How did you know that that was a problem that people were going to pay you money to solve?

Bryan:  [9:38] We didn’t. That’s the excitement of creating these start‑ups. If you’re creating your own product, it’s kind of like, “Oh, I’ve got this crazy idea and I’d love to build this. I don’t know if anyone’s going to want this.” Obviously, you do your best to ask around, but most of the people you ask are going to have a relationship with you.

Felix:  [10:56] I do want to talk about Kickstarter in a bit, but just to close this out, it sounds like the problem you were solving ‑‑ was there a competition out there that was selling similar products, or solving it in a different way, and was that ever concerning to you guys?

Bryan:  [11:12] Yeah, there absolutely are other products out there, and that’s kind of how we created our product. We’re not claiming to be the ones that invented this thing, we’re not inventing the actual clip less adapter. We’re inventing a universal adapter. In other words, our product works with every clip less pedal, and the competitor’s only works with certain pedals.

Felix:  [11:56] Earlier you were talking about how when you were first introducing this maybe friends and family weren’t giving you the raw unfiltered feedback that a paying customer would give you. Did you ever encounter those?

Bryan:  [12:28] Absolutely. I wouldn’t say that it was a huge struggle, but there definitely were people ‑ mostly people that maybe weren’t close friends of mine, that maybe I have a community online that I talk to to throw ideas out at. It was like, “Well this might not be a good idea for these reasons.”

Felix:  [13:18] What did you do to get your first 10 sales after Kickstarter was finalized? When you set up your own Shopify store, how did you drive traffic to it, and turn those first 10 customers into actual purchasers?

Bryan:  [13:32] That’s why I love Kickstarter so much. We didn’t really have to do anything. The first three months after Kickstarter had ended we were still just riding that wave of blog posts that we had reached out to from Kickstarter.

Felix:  [15:12] Let’s actually look at the Kickstarter. You set a goal of $12,000. Really surpassed it by raising almost $50,000. This was in 2014. Why did you decide to turn Kickstarter rather than borrow money from friends and family to start the business?

Bryan:  [15:31] I think it’s a no‑brainer. I could probably go on and on about why I think Kickstarter is a much better platform. For one, you definitely don’t have to give up any equity. You’re not taking debt out at a percentage interest rate. Not only that, but you’re getting exposure because bloggers and social media influencers and all those types of ways that you’re going to be featured on the web, they want to post a Kickstarter campaign.

Felix:  [16:41] It definitely sounds like having the Kickstarter story is more of a story, and it adds things like it’s a current event that’s happening, because it’s going on right now. There’s urgency because the time is limited, if you wanted to participate in it. Did you rely heavily on the Kickstarter story when you were going out to pitch at blogs and other publications?

Bryan:  [17:08] Absolutely. We still do. I think that a lot of having a new product is you have to validate the product. Because the first thing that people will see, if you don’t have a Kickstarter ‑‑ the first thing they’ll ask is, “Well what are your sales?” Or, “Who’s buying this thing?” If they don’t ask you, that’s what they’re thinking.

Felix:  [18:09] Can you walk us through how you write this kind of pitch, maybe in email format to somebody, if you have a Kickstarter that’s going on at the moment? How do you make it compelling enough to the blogger or the publication, that it’s a story worth covering?

Bryan:  [18:24] I’d be lying if I said that I was an expert at that, because I’m still working on the best ways to do that, and the reason is is that every blogger is a little bit different. I think a lot of people will tell you that reaching out to bloggers has a low conversion rate.

Felix:  [19:30] That’s interesting there, those levers of organic and it wasn’t just you guys pushing it out there. But you’re basically saying that your content marketing is to build content that really tries people to share and tries to check out your store and eventually if they purchase. How do you know what to actually create? What kind of content to create?

Bryan:  [19:54] I think in my experience, the best content is a really great video and I always recommend going above and beyond if you’re going to do a Kickstarter campaign or if you’re going to do a big launch. Make a really professional video with really talented videographers.

Felix:  [21:16] I see a huge video on the boarder fold when you get FlyPedals.com and definitely stands out. It looks like something that I want to click and watch before I even scroll anywhere else.

Bryan:  [21:49] It really is like choosing a partner, a business partner because we reached out to a lot of different videographers in the area until we found the right one. The people we used are like media group in Denver. Their videographer had special and outdoor sports.

Felix:  [22:45] Interesting there. I never really thought about taking that approach where you cannot pay upfront but maybe, if this takes off, they can make more money that way as a videographer. If someone is starting out and they needed to pay for a videographer and they were weighing the difference between whether they should invest a lot in paid advertisements or paying someone to work on their CO.

Bryan:  [23:16] Our video ended being about $10,500.

Felix:  [23:20] That means that’s a big chunk of the Kickstarter campaign. Because it’s that amount, how much do you usually bring to the table like you usually do preparation to say, “I want this done. I want that done.” Or did it really work with you to figure out how this all should be done, how the video should play out, the story behind it and everything?

Bryan:  [23:41] I will like to say that I had a big part in the video script and all that stuff, but the reality is that I had an idea and Mickey the videographer really chopped it up and made it into something that was phenomenal rather than just ordinary. He turned it into a more humorous…he made it a funny video, something that was a little bit more, what I like to call “shareable.”

Felix:  [24:38] To find a good videographer is what you’re saying is that you want somebody that has done something similar in the past or has worked in the put‑shot videos in the similar industry or same industry.

Bryan:  [25:01] I don’t think it was that. I think it was pretty natural, we knew about it. They were the third or fourth people we had talked to and second person we had met with in person and it was very natural.

Felix:  [25:48] That makes sense. For your Kickstarter campaign, you guys raised or set a goal, $12,000. How did you figure out how much to set as a goal? Were you surprised by how much you were able to raise above that goal?

Bryan:  [26:06] I can talk about the pricing a little bit more later for Kickstarter. That’s a whole separate thing. The $12,000 that we did ask for was our goal amount, was for the tooling for the die cast mold from the manufacture. That’s how we set that number.

Felix:  [27:15] You had the site up at the same time that you were running the Kickstarter campaign?

Bryan:  [27:18] Yeah. I highly recommend anyone that does a Kickstarter campaign to have a presales website. You don’t want to be selling the product obviously if it’s not already inventoried yet. But had the website up on Shopify, preselling them on the Shopify store.

Felix:  [27:43] How did you know to come up with the different packages that you are offering on the Kickstarter campaign?

Bryan:  [27:49] Ours was pretty simple. [inaudible 27:54] the hindsight there. We would have done a little differently on a higher price point just because I think that as someone doing a Kickstarter campaign, you feel like you should be discounting it because that’s the value of someone that might go to the Kickstarter and buy from you.

Felix:  [28:35] You talk about that app in a bit. Or do you want to talk about this excessive [inaudible 28:44] though. The campaign launched in middle of 2014, you guys were almost wrapped up at the same time. Since then, is now a full time job for you to run this business? How much have you done in revenue since then?

Bryan:  [28:54] Yes. The first six months that we launched, about 100,000 just through our website that’s in addition to the wholesales orders that we did and then working with the shipping. We realize that we really wanted to focus on the retail side rather than the distribution because obviously, there’s much higher profit margin here.

Felix:  [29:45] That’s amazing, 100,000 since then. You said Amazon accounts for 3,000 at the moment. How much work goes into running an Amazon camp, or running an Amazon listing? Is it all organic traffic or you got to put a lot of work into pushing people to purchase with Amazon?

Bryan:  [30:00] Right now, we do literarily zero hours a week and it’s bringing $3,000 a month. There’s probably a strategy and it’s one of those things where we just started selling on Amazon three months ago and I haven’t really dove in that much. I’m sure there’s way you can be sponsored, post and things like that.

Felix:  [30:34] That’s awesome. You’ve had success with this store. I want to talk about the app that you’ve created since having success with the store. Can you tell us the more about the coopt app that you have?

Bryan:  [30:49] Absolutely. Most of the success of Fly Pedals was because we had that great video. A lot products do have, if there’re hero image which is a product that they have a price of media that they have, that has a much higher conversion rate than other photos or videos that they might have.

Felix:  [32:30] That’s amazing. How did you know to create an app like this? Was it coming out of a need that you had?

Bryan:  [32:37] Yeah. I had tried the affiliate programs, like offering a customer at checkout, hey, if you share this affiliate link and someone buys, we’ll give you 5 dollars or 10 dollars or whatever it is percentage of the sales.

Felix:  [34:31] Are there any other apps or tools that you use to run your business?

Bryan:  [34:34] Nothing that really…we’ve used shipping apps, like Shippo and the standard ones. For marketing, we really don’t. We use the Google shopping app, but I think we’re having issues with it right now for some reason.

Felix:  [35:04] Those definitely help you run a business without having a team. Do you have employees that you’ve hired since launching the store or the app?

Bryan:  [35:15] I don’t have employees. I have a team of five that I hired on a contract basis for the app.

Felix:  [35:22] In terms of the actual store or maybe in the Kickstarter page or campaign, are there any changes to your store that you’ve had or changes to implementation that you’ve put into the Kickstarter campaign that you think have had the biggest impact to your traffic or sales?

Bryan:  [35:39] Any changes to the Kickstarter campaign? We didn’t really change a whole lot. The store has gone through a little bit of a facelift but nothing too transformational. You mentioned right away you see the video.

Felix:  [36:57] One thing I notice on your site is that there’s animated gifs all throughout it. I think that’s really cool, too. It goes along with your plan to really focus on having rich content rather than just text. I really like that implementation.

Bryan:  [37:27] I think it’s a product. It’s a product‑specific strategy because if you’re selling dog treats, for example, you don’t need a gif, right? There’s no reason to show. People know what dog treats are for. There’s a learning curve.

Felix:  [38:01] You were saying before that videos on Facebook are some of the biggest drivers of traffic to your store. Can you talk a little bit about how to get started with something like that or maybe some tips on how to do it well and get conversions from the video to actually people coming to your site?

Bryan:  [38:18] Absolutely. I’m actually in the process of writing a blog post for the Shopify blog to talk more about how to maximize conversion through embedded links on Facebook. The best way to do that is to change the meta‑tags on your website HTML to make sure that when your website, www.whatever.com, is posted on Facebook it’ll pull up an embedded link.

Felix:  [39:46] Awesome. Thanks so much, Bryan. Getcoopt.com. That’s the app. That’s GetCoopt.com. Flypedals.com. F‑L‑Y‑P‑E‑D‑A‑L‑S.com. Are there any other places that anybody could check out if they want to follow your store, follow your journey, or just learn more about the products that you’re selling?

Bryan:  [40:05] You can follow us on our Fly pedals Facebook page. I just started Twitter for Coopt. @CooptApp is my new Twitter account, but I just started a few days ago. [laughs] I don’t have too many followers yet.

Felix:  [40:20] Awesome. If someone out there is trying to produce their own products and manufacture them like the kind of path that you took, was there anything that you ran into? Any difficulties that you ran into that you didn’t expect initially when you first got started?

Bryan:  [40:37] I think that if you are going to manufacture a product or design a product, there’s a lot of different stages from obviously designing it if it’s a physical product to putting it into whether there be a [inaudible 40:54] model, choosing the right type of materials that you choose. There’s a lot of different expertise that goes along with that.

Felix:  [41:40] Awesome. Thanks so much, Bryan.

Bryan:  [41:41] Thanks, Felix.

Felix:  [41:42] Thanks again to our sponsors, Soundest and Vantage. If you’re looking to step up your email marketing or really understand how your visitors are using your site, go to ShopifyMasters.org/soundest or VantageAnalytics.com.

The post How FlyPedals.com Made $130K in 6 Months Working Part Time appeared first on Plug in SEO blog.

With the importance of email in mind, it’s important for businesses to have a strong list of relevant leads that can be nurtured into future customers. However if your business doesn’t already have a strong email list, it can be difficult to grow one from scratch. Especially because email lists decay at about 22.5% per year, meaning the contacts you gained 5 years ago from a large trade-show are most likely no longer valid.

Wondering where to begin? Here’s our top seven tips on how to grow a healthy email list:

1) Be clear with expectations – No one likes being “tricked” into giving their email away, and then receiving spam afterwards. On your website forms, make it explicitly clear that the user is opting-in to your marketing emails. Or, even better, allow them to choose what sort of emails they will receive from your business.

2) Provide Opportunities – Anytime you’re giving away content, ebooks, doing webinars, etc – make sure you’re capturing lead information so you can grow your email list with relevant contacts who are already interested in what your business can offer.

3) Use the Channels you have – If you have a presence on social media, a strong blog, or do a monthly webinar – make sure you also are linking to Lead Generation offers with CTAs, links, or even subscription forms. It’s free real estate you should be using!

4) Run an opt-in campaign – Remember that rusty old email list we were talking about before? Running an “Opt-In” campaign is a great way to re-engage with this audience simply by saying:  “We have you in our database but haven’t communicated in a while, would you like to opt-in to our email communication?” This is a great, straightforward way to build a stronger list.

5) Add Value in your communication – Sending email for the sake of it is how email got a bad reputation in the first place. Promote something useful, educational, industry-specific, or free in your emails to prospects. The idea is to nurture them into using your business because you have shown your business is reputable, knows it’s stuff, and is relevant to their interests.

6) Simple and Straightforward – Receiving an email should not be a puzzle or some sort of cryptic message that needs to be decoded. If you’re reaching out to a contact, make sure it’s very clear why and what they should do with that information. One of the best tips here is to add some sort of CTA (Call to Action) that instructs the reader where to go from here.

7) Allow your recipients to unsubscribe – I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but let’s face it: if your leads aren’t interested right now, what is the point in continuing to harass them with the emails they don’t want? Besides, spam complaints (created when a contact marks your email as spam) are one of the worst things you can do to your email sender score, which means that spam filters in the future are more likely to filter your emails out before your contact even sees them.

The post Build your email list using these 7 simple techniques appeared first on Plug in SEO blog.

But the question is – how can you keep up? Are businesses meant to have accounts on every single social media platform? What are you supposed to be posting about?

The answer differs from business to business. The good news is that the most qualified people to make these decisions are the people who know the business best: your team.

Your consumers, prospects, and competitors are all comprised of various traits that make them unique in the sales world. What you need is a way to group these traits in a way that will allow you to focus on the strategy for each “type” of buyer. One of the main strategies for this is to develop buyer personas. Buyer Personas are a separate discussion we’ll be covering soon, but let’s assume you have one distinct persona that your business wants to target for future sales.

Let’s focus in on the main point of this issue: where is your business supposed to be posting on social media and what about?

In general, there are assumptions we can make about the various major social networks and their audiences. There are many social networks, but for the time being let’s focus on these major players: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.

With the buyer persona your business uses in mind, let’s look at some of the “personalities” of these social media networks:

Twitter: With a short shelf-life, Moz research shows that the lifespan of a tweet is around 18 minutes. This means anything posted on Twitter will only gain traction if it is very specifically relevant or interesting to your prospects – or that is shareable enough to get re-tweeted.

Because tweets decay so rapidly, Twitter should be used for prospects who interact actively and regularly. If your business is looking for prospects who are not as technically or social media savvy, this is not the optimal network. However, Twitter is a great customer care hotline and should be monitored for customer issues – and met with a quick response.

Facebook: Typically for personal usage. Although posts have a shelf-life of around 5 hours for most engagement, businesses are at a severe disadvantage because users don’t opt-in to see clutter from businesses in their Timelines – unless it is relevant to their personal lives.

Facebook is the most popular social media network by far, but is used by such a large grouping of the population (ages 17 and under through 65 and older) that building a large presence and following can be hard to target.

LinkedIn: Business and professional networking reign here. This is not the place to post your big sales, recent markdowns, or special offers. This is the place for businesses and consumers to connect about the industry that unites them.

LinkedIn is where businesses can and should promote educational articles, reports, and ebooks or post industry questions and thought-provoking observations. Your business should speak as a thought leader in the industry, and your business will benefit.

Pinterest: Beneficial for highly-visual businesses, but with the requirement that participants are active users in the community. Because Pinterest is inherently driven by self-interest (users build collections of things they find interesting), it can be difficult to get in front of the user.

Pinterest is dominated by an 80% female audience with only 23% of their users interacting daily. However, if your business fits within this target demographic and actively creates visual content relevant to your prospects, this is a good place to focus.

YouTube: Video content is easily shareable and can explode if done well. Great examples of this are the YouTube channels of Dollar Shave Club and Old Spice – their “ads” are viral, shareable, and contagious because they are making content and not simply trying to yell above everyone else.

However, YouTube is only viable for very few. The art of going viral can be hard to accomplish, and even against those odds – success is sometimes defined by extremely creative marketers who just got lucky. If you can get on YouTube and be relevant, shareable, and make some noise like these examples, then using this platform may be a good option. But for many, YouTube is a great way to host video content that is shared on other platforms – which is where the benefit for most businesses occurs.

Instagram: Visually-driven postings with emphasis on the younger audience. A benefit of Instagram is that when used in conjunction with Twitter and Facebook, sharing images with your already-established audience becomes much simpler.

Over 90% of Instagram users are under the age of 35. This makes Instagram a good choice for businesses in the visually-inspired industries – but more often than not, doesn’t fit into the demographic requirements of your target audience.

In summary – there are many social media networks out there, each with their own unique attributes, benefits, and downfalls. Finding the right social media platform for your marketing strategy requires insight into the mind and habits of your target customer-base. But the most important key is to always be where your target buyer personas are and how they’re interacting.

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