Revox Podcast

A customer on average needs to see your content 7 times before they feel comfortable enough to purchase something from you.By looking at cheaper ad platforms, you can bring your total CPA down. It doesn’t make sense to advertise on Amazon for “Brand Awareness” unless it’s cheaper than advertising on other platforms.There are ways to advertise that are way more affordable than Amazon (or Facebook or Google for that matter).Don’t get too caught up in the metrics and attributions. This is top- to mid-level advertising, so you probably won’t be able to track direct sales. Instead, look at CPC and CPM costs to know if you’re doing well.All of my clients who have focused on this kind of advertising have seen a lift in sales across all sales channels.

April 5th isn’t a hard date on when other categories can ship in products. Coronavirus is unpredictable, so nailing down times for anything is going to be finicky.No new coupons or deals until April 5th (hopefully). Probably to slow things down as Amazon tries to cope with the possibility of a lot of their employees getting sick.Have an extra condition on all of your listings in case you run out of FBA inventory. This will allow you to keep your listing open (and ranking) by selling FBM inventory. Make no mistake. This will not slow Amazon down. Amazon, like a lot of business, will not only rebound, but will do better than ever after this. Amazon is still doing rather well, all things considered, and when everyone goes back to work, they won’t go back to shopping in brick and mortars. Amazon and online shopping in general will continue to grow. That being said. You can use this downtime to your advantage. If you have room, I would recommend spending even more in ads than you ever had before. Most companies are pulling back on everything. If you can go all in, when the economy rebounds, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. While we’re on the subject of gaming the system. Amazon’s attention is on pretty important things right now. And while I’m not one to advocate breaking rules…you may be able to break some here. Things in your titles, descriptions, photos, that would help give you a leg up might be worth a shot. Usually you’re not allowed to put competitor names in your descriptions. But if you can use it as a keyword…it might just help you. Adding graphics to your main photo might improve your conversion rate. Again, Amazon might catch you—but if they don’t…well…

Amazon is a marketplace with a lot of awesome opportunity. Some of the reasons you can be so successful on the platform have to do with a lot of user-testing Amazon has done. They’ve nailed what makes a page convert. No websites on the planet—no marketplaces—convert as well as Amazon does. Their customer experience is awesome. Not just how everything looks, but the buying and even returning process are awesome. And customer support is great for customers. This sets you up for running a really awesome business that’s almost done for you.The downside is that there are tons of other people on the platform with you. In the week you launch your product, there are thousands of other products also being launched. This means just on the basis of competition alone, you have a lot to deal with on day one! Coupons, promotions, giveaways, and external traffic are often the most stable route for launching a product on Amazon. It’s true you can run a successful Amazon project without much funding. But to do it really successfully, Amazon follows the model of the J-Curve, meaning you put a lot in before you start getting a lot out.

I just received an email from an email automation company about changing what they do. Instead of sending out emails for you, they now automate Amazon’s new “request a review” button.Amazon’s been trying for quite some time to edge out communication between sellers and buyers and they recently got rid of a lot of sellers’ ability to send emails to customers. Now, when you want a review, you need to go into orders and click a button for each order you want to request a review from.These email services are morphing into button pressing automation. Amazon will continue to restrict buyer/seller contact, and will probably eventually edge out that ability as well.

Coronavirus has officially hit Amazon. Two employees in Italy and one in Seattle. There was a joke online that said now that Amazon has contracted COVID-19, the rest of us can expect it for free within two days—at least those of us with a prime membership. Amazon’s building Mini Fulfillment Centers. In an article by Supply Chain Dive, Amazon’s reported to be building smaller ship houses to get customers product in one day or less. The delivery windows are somewhere in the ball park 5-10 hours. This is now available fore up to 300 million products. There are pros and cons to this for sellers (higher sales, higher expenses). Amazon is decreasing Multi-Channel Fulfillment fees to push people to use them as a fulfillment option. It’s a little more flexible than selling on Amazon directly (for example, you can have customers ship returns back to you instead of them), and Amazon’s always trying to do more to get into other markets. Looks like they’re taking on Shipstation now. A list of the new fees can be found here.

Get consistent, SIMPLE reporting on key metrics. The key word here is SIMPLE. Agents have limited time for each account and you don’t want them spending all of their time compiling data. You want them doing things to help your account. Give them objectives, not tasks. If you hired a good agency, you’re not working with less skilled people for a smaller price tag, you’re working with highly skilled people for less time. In other words, it’s most effective if you give them problems you can’t solve, then let them figure it out. It’s expensive and inefficient to try and just delegate data entry and carry-out tasks. Ask lots of questions. The goal of the agency is not to grow your account—it’s to grow your account with the least amount of effort. For this reason, a lot of agencies will work really hard in the first few months, at which point they can automate many of their tasks. But to automate and to innovate are not the same. They’re polar opposites, actually. Don’t expect them to do everything. Have a very clear scope, and temper that scope with reality. Most people hire an agency because it’s cheaper than hiring a full-time employee. If that’s the case, don’t expect them to do logistics, customer support, ads management, copywriting, and creative work. At least, don’t expect them to do it well. Even a well equip team will struggle to do all those aspects well.

You can probably guess that the answer is no. If you’ve ever searched for “Yoga Matt,” you’ll know that there’s plenty of space for product duplicates. The question is, are there advantages  to having a unique product? And that leads to another question: are you building a brand or selling products? If all you’re doing is selling products, I would say you SHOULDN’T have a unique product. If you are building a brand however, you SHOULD have at least a couple of products that are unique to you—or at least differentiate your brand. Both approaches can be successful. Just know that the main difference is that you have greater sales volumes potential if you sell a trending product, but it’s hard to rank; and conversely, it’s easy to rank for a niche product, but it might not have a developed customer base yet.

This week's headlines can be found at: https://www.sellerlabs.com/blog/icymi-amazon-seller-news-feb14/

Brand Registry is a program that Amazon offers that gives certain privileges and programs to trademark owners.Benefits of Brand Registry are greater control over your listings, A+ content, listing videos, product display ads, and beta programs.Brand Registry is simple enough to sign up for. All you need is a trademark, a seller account, and a brand of products.You for sure want Brand Registry if you plan on keeping control over your Amazon listings. Listing hijackers are everywhere and you want to be able to get rid of them easily. Brand Registry helps you do that.The benefits of Brand Registry also help your listing convert better.Link to the application: https://brandservices.amazon.com/

The short answer is YES! Absolutely put a video on your Amazon listing. But a couple of things to consider:It doesn't need to be fancy or professional. Sometimes simple iPhone videos perform best anyway. So don't overthink it, and don't overspend!People WILL watch your video, so give them something useful. Tell them how to use the product and the benefits they'll get from using it.Keep it short. Amazon's always changing the length of the video you can upload, but try and keep it under two minutes. Really good videos probably don't need to be more than 30 seconds.Don't link to ANYTHING outside of Amazon. It won't post because Amazon doesn't like poachers.

Ads are getting more competitive, which means more expensive. It’s important to make sure that you have a good advertising strategy to keep your advertising campaigns profitable and low cost. Use mid-tail keywords. At first, these don’t look super appealing because there’s not an apparent winner as far as sales volume goes. But if you can find several mid-tail keywords, it’s just as good as finding short-tails, and it’ll be cheaper.Target products, not keywords. Because it’s a specific product, and not a search term for several products, you can get clicks for a fraction of the cost.Bid higher on low-ACoS keywords. It sounds counter intuitive, but it’s way more profitable to bring a keyword with a 10% ACoS to a 20% ACoS than it is to bring a 40% ACoS to a 30% ACoS.Organize your campaigns well. So much money is lost in translation because data is hard to access due to poor organization. Link to Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s8QncDFx0s

LINKS: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/how-amazon-s-liability-for-third-party-30990/ https://www.sfweekly.com/sponsored/amazon-accountability-needed/

Amazon is instituting the ability to leave ratings without reviews. This probably dilutes the efficacy that written reviews have in the algorithm. This is good, in my opinion because it gives smaller businesses a chance to compete with bigger brandsTax forms are out for the year. If you made more than $20k in revenue, Amazon will send you a 1099-K form. These are now available for tax purposes.

-FedEx returns after a one-month exile from Amazon. Now third-party sellers can again choose the carrier to ship their packages. My opinion on this is that it’s temporary. Amazon is only interested in monopolies, and sooner or later FBA will be the only fulfillment channel on Amazon. Every month they get more efficient, and with a bigger network of fulfillment centers. No one will process orders better than they will. Let’s face it, Seller-Fulfilled-Prime wasn’t really that great anyway (super expensive), and Amazon wants to do away with it. -I personally don’t think counterfeits are as big of a deal as people are making them out to be, and I think people should really stop complaining about it. The only way Amazon’s going to be able to get rid of sellers is by making it harder to prove a product is real. Honestly this makes life a nightmare for sellers, so I would rather play the long game and wait for bad seller to show their colors and get suppressed by Amazon than truncate my ability to launch and iterate on products. -Sellics updated their article on Amazon’s A9 (why it’s title May 2019? I have no idea). Basically, Amazon now says that the 250 characters in backend keywords does not include spaces or punctuation. In other words, the 250 characters (formerly 249 bytes) now only entails actual letters. Sellics advises that you still keep your most important keywords at the front of your 250 character list. My take is that if you believe the algorithm works at all, you probably don’t even need the 250 characters 

Before we get into the news I’d like to announce that I’m going to focus the Revox podcast going forward on Amazon specifically. Amazon is the area i have the most expertise and it’s where I feel like I can provide the most value. Although there are plenty of other marketing things I do and understand, Amazon is a place where I know I can consistently perform well, and that’s where I want to help out the most.There actually wasn’t much by way of news for Amazon this week. Like other businesses, I imagine Amazon spends most of Q1 planning goals for the year and how they will execute them. Speaking of planning, the new fee structures are about the hit next month, so make sure you have your prices and logistics set for that. Most people will see a small increase in fees overall, but many products will actually see a decrease in fees.Let’s get into the meat of today’s podcast. Amazon has recently started to really crack down on buyer-seller messaging. This has been a hot topic for quite some time, but now Amazon is really bringing down the hammer. The buyer-seller messages policies have pretty much always been in a state of flux. Usually, the policies have become stricter over the years. Recently Amazon has started cracking down on sellers and revoking their privileges entirely for no apparent reason. They’ll send out an email saying that the seller violated a policy, but one say which one directly. I think this all headed towards removing any sort of request from the platform at all. You’re already no longer allowed to send external links, promotional content, discounts on future products, or anything like that. Very VERY soon, the only think you’ll be able to contact your customer about is whether or not they got their package, which, if you’re doing FBA, isn’t even your job.

There is a lot of really awesome information on the internet. Some of it’s free, some of it’s paid. But there’s a lot.How can you tell whether an internet marketing guru is legit or fake?They talk about others’ success with their course or product instead of their own (they don’t eat their own dog food).They act like they have a secret. They don’t most.They try and sell a dream instead of information and facts. In other words, they say “imagine what this product could do for you,” instead of “this product solves x problem.” Be wary of the fake gurus. There are some real guys out there, like Chris Conrady.

80% of people will see and read your title, only 20% will click through and read your copy. This is kind of a bogus statistic, but it highlights a principle that is very important. And that is that your title has a huge amount of weight in your sales copy. If your title is really good, that click-through-rate will go up, and so will how much people watch, read, or listen to your content.But here’s the question: do you optimize your title for SEO or conversion? In other words, should your title be focused more on keywords or click-thru?In many ways, it depends on your platform, but I would err on the side of conversion. Most search engines are smart enough that they know how to find your product, even if your info isn’t super optimized for search. In the example of Youtube , rely very much on conversion. On Amazon, though, maybe more on search.

Instagram released a bunch of new features for business owners (super useful for small business owners too).   Alex Toobey wrote an article with all of them in there. You can check that out here: https://alextooby.com/new-instagram-update/

How good a theme is comes down to mainly two things: functionality and speed. Some themes have one or the other, others have both, but most have neither.Odds are, if you know what you want your theme to look like, you won’t be able to get it with a free theme. Even most premium or paid themes don’t offer a bunch versatility, which means you’re going to end up with some frustrations. Not only can it be hard to make the theme look the way you want, but it can also be super difficult to get it to work with certain plugins. So functionality is huge. You want a theme that’s super versatile.The next is speed. A lot of themes are just loaded up with a bunch of garbage that no one wants to use. If there is a feature that it has that you don’t want, odds are that theme is going to slow down your website. Some themes that allow you to customize things use what’s called short-code, which basically means instead of changing the actual functionality of the theme, it has a code that performs an overwrite. This will slow down your website a HUGE amount. Avoid shortcake if at all possible.So which theme is right for you? Now the question is what do you want to use it for? If all you care about is getting your content out there and you’re just blogging, there are two options I recommend. 1. Clean Bloggist. This is free and you can search it in the Wordpress Platform. It’s super simple, wicked fast, and it is the best theme I know if all you want to do is create content. 2. My second recommendation is Acabado. This is basically a glorified version of clean bloggist. It’s geared towards making a blog monetizable. This theme is premium and is $50/year or $99/century (weird, I know).If you need something that is more customizable, I would recommend getting a bare bones theme (premium) and adding a visual builder plugin. I use GeneratePress premium for my theme and BeaverBuilder Standard as my plugin. Both of these are annual renewal premium products. But they’re worth it. They make things fast and easy to edit.So there’s a lot out there. But make it easy on yourself and don’t spend hours and hours looking for the perfect theme only to realize it’s not all it’s cut out to be. I spent hundreds of dollars on themes and plugins before realizing I can do just about anything I want if I get GeneratePress and BeaverBuilder. You probably won’t ever need another theme again.

Keyword tools provide data on keywords for specific search engines. But none of the data is correct, and you can tell because each keyword tool will give you different data for any given keyword. Instead, keyword tools guess on keyword data. In order to get accurate data, a tool would need to access the search engine’s database (not just API) on a CONSTANT basis and pull every keyword ever all the time. No tool does that. In other words, the only companies that know keyword data exactly are the search engines themselves. And that’s valuable data that they wouldn’t just give up to any keyword company. Think about it, if you were Google, would you rather give out your keyword data for $10 a month, or free to developers so they can charge $70? It just doesn’t make sense that search engines are giving keyword data away. But let’s assume keyword data on these tools is correct. Or at least somewhat accurate. Are they worth using in the first place? I would argue not really. Search engines are sophisticated enough now that they can decode intent. Basically, when you search beard trimmer, and a company is advertising a beard clipper, your search engine knows they’re the same thing. So it’s not about getting the exact keyword correct.Instead, bloggers should search focus on TOPICs instead of keywords, and CPG companies should focus on conversion. And as long as your content is thorough enough and helpful enough, you will rank.

Biggest sales number for the Christmas season. You can only expect this trend to continue. More and more people are shopping online. We’re not even close to peaking numbers. So even if your company is a brick and mortar, it’s important to have an online strategy. Chipotle is upgrading their strategy to include mobile ordering. Dominoes, Little Caesar’s, and other food places are doing or have done the same. The world continues to go mobile, which means that if you can reach your customers on their phones, you’re at an advantage. There’s even a drink shop that doesn’t have cashiers, you just take your drink and text them what you took, and then they charge your card accordingly. Even though there isn’t tons of news, every company is gearing up for 2020. Reflecting on the year and setting goals is vital to creating a successful marketing strategy.

Links:Clickbank: https://www.clickbank.com/JVZoo: https://www.jvzoo.com/register/707499ShareASale: http://www.shareasale.com/CJ Affiliate: https://www.cj.com/ Affiliate marketing is getting paid to refer people to products and pages online. The way it works is every affiliate is given a unique ID that is attached to every link you use. When people use your affiliate link and purchase a product, you get a commission on a sale.Is affiliate marketing legit? It is totally legit. There are thousands of people who make millions of dollars through affiliate income every year. Some products that have affiliate offers pay bigger commissions than others, so depending on how you position yourself, you can make a lot of money without a lot of sales.There are hubs where people post affiliate offers. The biggest one is ClickBank, but there are others like Share A Sale, CJ Affiliate, JV Zoo. You can literally go to these affiliate networks and pick an offer you want, sign up, get your link, and start promoting.The way affiliate marketing works, usually, is you pick a niche, create content surrounding that niche, create and offer, and drive traffic to your pages with affiliate links. If you want to get involved with affiliate marketing, the best thing to do is first pick an audience you want to serve, and then start generating content. Affiliate marketing is also a good way to supplement an already existing channel or stream of income.

Merry Christmas! I hope you do something good for someone else today. I hope to you spend some time with those you love, doing things you love, and showing love in the things you do. Marketing is about telling stories to an audience that are compelling enough to cause them to make a decision. If your marketing isn’t compelling people to make decision, it’s not effective marketing.In Marketing, we tell all kinds of stories. Stories about the product, stories about our audience. Stories about how our company came to be, and stories about the projects we’re working on.Furthermore, marketing allows our audience to tell stories themselves. Stories about what their life will be like with our product. Stories about their own background. Stories about what they want in life. Our marketing material is supposed to provide our audience with that ability.Branding is a subset of these stories. Specifically, branding is the story we tell others about ourselves, and it’s the story we want our audience to tell about us.Branding is not about your origin story or how you came to be, it’s about the story you tell with your imagery and the experience your customer has. Basically, branding takes place in two facets, what someone sees before they become a customer, and what someone feels after they become a customer.Amazon has a brand that has expansive imagery. When you visit the website, you see every product. They have more categories than most stores have square feet. That’s what you see.Amazon’s backend branding is the feeling a customer gets knowing they will get free 2-day shipping, free returns, customer care 24/7, and a ridiculously easy checkout process to kick it all off.It’s all part of their marketing, but the positioning Amazon has done to portray themselves as the everything store is their branding.

Amazon updates referral fees:Shoes, Handbags and Sunglasses have a referral fee reduction from 18% to15%Outdoor Furniture will be combined with the Furniture category and will see a referral fee reduction from 15% to 10%Personal Care Appliance products under $10 will see a referral fee reduction from 15% to 8%Activewear will be consolidated into the Clothing and Accessories categories and have a referral fee of 17%Ring accessories will be consolidated into the Amazon Device Accessories, which has a referral fee of 45% Amazon makes some changes to their fulfillment fees, which will result in an increase in fees of about 3%. Amazon updates its storage fees and increases the monthly fee by $0.06 per cubic foot, which isn’t that big of a deal unless you have a lot of really big items. These increases are pretty normal, but it’s another way Amazon can squeeze money out of their sellers. Some positive changes for the Small and Light program, which makes it cheaper than ever to enroll. Including eliminating long term storage fees for the first year. Amazon automatically enrolls subscribe and save eligible products and they fund the first level of savings of 5%. See here. Amazon continues to push people to enroll in FBA by offering free monthly storage, free removals, and free returns processing, plus $100 off on partnered carrier shipping for New to FBA ASINs. Links: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gc/fee-changes?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_1https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/GABBX6GZPA8MSZGW?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_2_GABBX6GZPA8MSZGWhttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/GZ5Q2VW5WF4JWRGC?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_3_GZ5Q2VW5WF4JWRGChttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/G3Z4AX6UNV5EN2VR?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_4_G3Z4AX6UNV5EN2VRhttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/GWHQRT98SAZC29VQ?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_5_GWHQRT98SAZC29VQhttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/headlines.html?id=864693466921348349

Episode #47 What is Wordpress and how does it work? Wordpress is a CMS. CMS stands for content management system. What it does is tell the files that your website is made out of what to do. Instead of coding everything from scratch, inside your CMS you press a button and the coding is done for you. Wordpress works with themes, which are precoded ways of structuring pages, blog posts, sidebars, headers, and footers. Wordpress is open source, which means anyone can develop integrations for the platform. These are called plugins. So if your theme doesn’t carry a function you want (like what typography your theme website uses), there are plugins that overwrite the code to allow those functions. The company that created Wordpress is also a hosting company, which means you can pay them to store your website files. Their hosting service is just fine—not the best for things like uptime or features, but their pricing structure is simple and straightforward, which can be really annoying with other companies. There are also features that Wordpress hosting has that a lot of other companies don’t have, like built in advertising options and payment processors. But as with most companies that claim to offer everything, it’s not as good as specialized companies. If you’re interested in just downloading the CMS, you can go to wordpress.org, if you’re interested in their hosting services, you can go to wordpress.com However, it’s overly complicated and unnecessary to download the Wordpress CMS. If you host with any major hosting company, they will have a one click install feature for Wordpress. There are a bunch of benefits to using Wordpress as your CMS. Because it’s open source, there are loads of themes and plugins. This means that if you want a feature, or you want your website to look a certain way, there’s a way to make it happen. Additionally, you can usually get most of your features for free. There are a lot of free themes, and there are a lot of free plugins. Many of them are good, but a lot of them are also bad, so always check to see if you’re getting a good plugin or theme. There’s really only two downsides to creating a Wordpress website: the first is that it’s hard to make it look fancy and modern. Sometimes, if you’re on a website that looks old, plain, or awkward, it’s probably built on Wordpress. Other CMS platforms modernize their look automatically. So although you’re limited in what you can do, what you can do looks good. The other downside is that Wordpress is designed for everything, not for any one thing. So if you’re looking for an easy to make eCommerce website, Shopify has an easier platform with a lot of intuitive plugins already built it (all apps). Essentially, if you have something really specific in mind in terms of functionality, but not design, there are other platforms that can make your website function better.

Link: clickfunnels.com Episode #46 Is Clickfunnels Too Good to Be True? What is Clickfunnels? Clikcfunnels is a sales funnel builder. It takes the idea of website and turns it on its head. The whole goal is to get your traffic to do one thing. So you don’t have a site navigation, no “about me” or anything like that. You create multiple pages and websites under the same account, all for different purposes. Instead of having on catch-all website, you have one website for every marketing campaign you have. The downside to Clickfunnels is its price and learning curve. Even though there are a lot of features, you still need to pay for integrations. The learning curve is with design. The platform is simple enough to get down, but you hope to create awesome looking landing pages…and then they look pretty normal or worse—1995ish. Clickfunnels does eat their own dogfood, which gives you an idea of what kind of businesses do best with Clickfunnels. Clickfunnels is legit, and it does help a lot of businesses make money. But it’s using a different model. And there are usually specific niches that do well on the click funnels platform. That’s okay, it’s just kind of limiting. There are many alternatives to Clickfunnels—I personally use Wordpress. I can make loads of landing pages with the GeneratePress Theme and BeaverBuilder plugin. LeadPages is another competitor—but a bigger one is Builderall. There are plenty others out there, so you’re not stuck with just one option. Clickfunnels has a lot of features—more than pretty much any other. But most businesses don’t use most of the features. So you’re mainly paying for someone else’s business plan.

In the News: Amazon, Facebook, and PandoraAmazon changes their review system to include ratings without a written review. Now customers can just give your product a star rating without writing anything about it. This leads to a jump in reviews. SO good for small business owners who struggle to get review traction. This low barrier of entry means that you can get more reviews faster as a startup business, or with a new product line. The question we need to ask now is how are these reviews weighted in the algorithm. Link to article: https://tamebay.com/2019/12/new-amazon-rating-system-causes-rise-in-reviews.html  Facebook Starts Using Info from Oculus to Serve Targeted Ads There’s a lot of controversy around using data to serve ads. I think it’s important it happens. It keeps adult ads away from kids and other ads we don’t want away from the rest of us. It helps in the long run. We should expect to see Facebook and Google and all of the other companies use as much data s they can to serve as detailed ads as we can. Link to article:  https://www.pcmag.com/news/372499/facebook-your-oculus-vr-data-will-be-used-for-ad-targeting Pandora Launches Interactive Voice Ads Now brands can interact with their customers through their audio ad on Pandora. You can ask your customer a question and, depending on how they answer, serve them custom content. This could be HUGE for advertising. The barrier of entry is super high on this one, but that probably means two things: fewer people are going to end up doing it, and it can be really cheap. Right now it’s in beta, and only certain partners are allowed to test these ads, but eventually, they should be rolled out to self-serve platforms. Platforms across the board, even. Link to article: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/12/pandora-launches-interactive-voice-ads/

LINKS:BrickWork India: https://www.brickworkindia.com/Get Friday: https://www.getfriday.com/Income School Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCytOqtKYpACcWMD14UjhSeQ Episode #44 Are SEO Companies Worth The Money?The simple answer to this question is do they bring in more money than they cost? If an SEO agency isn’t showing you the returns you need, then the cost isn’t really justifiable. But the answer really goes deeper than that. Really you need to answer three questions: 1. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you need leads, sales, or just page views? 2. Do you need SEO for that objective (probably not for the first two)? 3. Is it more cost effective for me to do it myself, or do I need to outsource it? The reason you probably don’t need SEO for ecommerce or lead generation is because SEO takes a TON of time before it shows results. If you’re testing a product or a landing page, you need results fast so you can iterate on changes you need to make. Advertising is probably the better route for these two because you put money in and you get results back out. It’s fast, it’s measurable, and it allows you to make changes quickly.Let’s assume that you do need SEO, though. Should you outsource it? Well, odds are, unless you’re a pretty decently sized company, probably not. Most agencies aren’t designed to help the little guy because small businesses don’t have tons of money. So if you bringing in less than a half a million dollars a year, you probably will only be able to afford an agency’s lowest package—which doesn’t give you much, but it does cost you. Instead I would hire a VA (you can get some pretty good ones for not very much money) and have them do it, or take it in house. The returns you’ll see will be much better that way.If you can’t afford any of those options (agency, in-house, or VA), there are ways to learn it and do it yourself. There are a lot of differing opinions on how SEO works and what best practices are, but I recommend Income School. They have a YouTube channel that is all dedicated to doing SEO yourself. It’s great. Their target audience are people who are looking to replace their income by blogging full-time, so it is a little slanted, but I haven’t seen very much info out there that’s quite as high quality.     

LINKSCanva: https://www.canva.com/Fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/ Episode #43 How much time and money should you spend on branding? Branding is important. On the internet, sometimes a first impression is the last impression you get to make. So if it’s bad, you can kill your possible conversions.Having a good identity is risk mitigation. Bad branding leads to mistrust, good branding leads to trust. That being said, branding is a cross between having a remarkable design and having something that isn’t distracting. You want people to be focused on your product, not your logo.When it comes to identity design, less is more. If you can get something that looks good but is really, really simple, you’re on the right track. So how much time and money should you spend on it? That depends on how big your business is. If you’re small the answer to both questions is not much.If your company isn’t making money yet, don’t spend money. So if you can, either DIY the logo or outsource it to Fiverr. If you’re comfortable and familiar with the basic elements of design, I recommend a four-step process to create your logo:Get a Canva accountPick a simple shape to put your logo inPick a nice Google Font pairingPut the name of your company in your headline font inside the shape Your Logo really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that when you’re starting out. In fact, if it is, you’re probably headed in the wrong direction.If you don’t feel comfortable making a logo yourself. Outsource your logo creation to Fiverr.Most of what goes on on Fiverr isn’t great, but it’s good enough to get started.  You can get a decent start for $5.Search “minimal logo”Filter price from low to highPick a designer you like for $5 that does minimal, flat logos.Again, with this, less is more. If you’re thinking “wow, that’s really cool for $5” you’re thinking about it the wrong way. Look for something really simple.The process of using Fiverr can take a few days, but most designers of logos only take 24 hours.Last note: make sure you get your logo in a PNG file and a vector file. That might cost extra, but it is totally worth it and REALLY important to do.In either case, you shouldn’t spend more than a couple of hours on the project and it shouldn’t cost you more than $25. If your company has already made money and you’re looking to rebrand or get a really nice logo, you should really pay a professional that knows what they’re doing.A professional designer should have their own website where they showcase their work. Many of them will have a “logo folio” where previous logos are displayed.Ask them what you get in an identity package. It should include a logo, a wordmark (as applicable), a color selection, a font selection, and a style guide.Prices for these kinds of packages can range from around $500 to thousands. Don’t be surprised if a good designer asks for $5k. Big corporations pay hundreds of thousands of dollars oftentimes. But getting it right gets more important the bigger you get. Any way you cut it, when you’re first starting out, you shouldn’t spend much and it shouldn’t take long.The longer you take getting set up with your branding, the more you push shipping your products back, and the more likely you are to fail.Branding can be a really awesome asset, but if you spend too much time on it, it becomes a huge liability.

Lots happened in the news this week. Not much impact on small business owners, but there are some tips in here you won't want to miss.

If you joined me for my last episode, you'll know that we covered how Pinterests ranks pins from a social media perspective. But how does this hybrid platform use SEO to figure out where to put your pins? We cover all of that in this episode--you're not going to want to miss it!

Let's say you don't have money to run ads on Pinterest. Or you have a good amount of content and would prefer to rank organically. Let's talk about how to do that.

Amazon has made Alexa possible for processors as small as 1MB, which means Alexa it could be put into anything (even your toothbrush) Facebook launches a new app called Viewpoints dedicated to collecting first-party data for marketing research purposes.

There are three main metrics when it comes to advertising online: impressions, clicks, and conversions. This episode focuses all on Impressions and how you should approach looking at them. Are they useful? What should you be focusing on?

Do local businesses need SEO to get customers? As a local, small business, it's important to get people in your door, or you won't survive. The question is how do you do it? Is SEO a good idea for local businesses to focus on?

Black Friday is practically here, and if you haven't dialed in what you're going to, it's time to get that taken care of.

Humans communicate in stories. It's the most effective way to teach, sell, and connect. But what do you do if you don't feel like your products don't have much of a story to tell? From protein powder to phone cases, there's a compelling story that will sell.

Sometimes you can feel stuck with your products. You feel like you're making as much money as you can with what you have. So the key is to switch up what you have.

Kind of an interesting week in the news, but one that I think marks progress. If you're in eCommerce, Amazon has changed the game a little bit. Also, social media is taking over the world.

Remarketing is an interesting thing. It's kind of cool that you can target just people that have visited your website, but what's the point of a remarketing campaign? They serve a very specific and important function (especially for bigger ticket items).

Facebook and Google are great places to advertise. And they should probably be a place you advertise often. But are there other places that are better (cheaper, easier to be a part of, less competition, etc.) for your marketing dollars? Should you focus on becoming a big fish in a little pond?

This was a FUN week of news. One you're not going to want to miss if you have any interest in major marketing platforms. Take a listen!

In today's episode, we discuss stickiness in messaging. Is how you present your brand, your product, or your service sticky enough to convert? How memorable your message is directly affects how effective it will be.

News was a little sparse this week, and not overly useful or exciting. But I did manage to dig up a couple of interesting stories that are worthwhile. My favorite one is Facebook's new logo (rolled out today). I think it's good for transparency and showing that companies are always growing, even if you're huge.

First of all, I think people try and be viral way too much of the time. Being good doesn't mean being instant. But, if you want to be viral, there are some things about your environment that you're going to want to make sure you take care of to give you the best shot at being viral.

Knowing your numbers is SO important to the profitability of your business. In this episode, we talk about your cost-per-acquisition, which directly correlates to whether or not you're profitable.

Tons has happened in the news this past week and it's important you know about what areas could impact your price and profitability. We go over this important information when in comes to Walmart, eBay, and Amazon. Also, could Facebook be draining the news outlets of their ad revenue?

Posting things online can be intimidating. Where do you find the time to make content? Or edit or publish it? In this episode, we answer these questions.

It's important to post good content for your audience. Your goal should always be to serve your customer. But how do you know if the content you post is good? We cover that and more in this episode!

In today's episode, we talk about how Facebook chatbots can really build your subscriber base. We also talk about tricky things Amazon and Facebook are doing with their ads and how you can reverse things that aren't working for you.