GSD: Life Maxed Out

Step out of your Comfort Zone: Embracing new, potentially uncomfortable situations can lead to significant personal and professional growth.

Continuous Learning: Engaging in new learning experiences and tackling different problems can reinvigorate passion and prevent boredom in one's career.

Innovation in Marketing: Utilizing modern marketing technologies can dramatically improve lead generation and shorten sales cycles, especially in industries like franchising.

Networking: Building connections and gaining insights from others in the industry is crucial for growth and success.

Focus on Excellence: A key strategy for achieving success is to concentrate on doing fewer things but doing them exceptionally well.

"If you let yourself be bored by what you do every day, then you're doing it wrong because you're not challenging yourself."

"The fastest way to reinvigorate the love of what you do is to do something new or something different or work on a different problem."

"At the end of the day, it's more about doing fewer things better. And ultimately, that is what brings you success."

"We’re moving in the franchise space as hard as we are because we drive more franchise development leads than anybody else."

"For me, it was a last-minute thing, but at the end of the day, the reason to attend is for the connection, insight, and learning something different than what you did yesterday."

Listen to the full episode to understand how stepping out of your comfort zone can drive tremendous growth and success. Stay tuned for more enlightening content on the GSD podcast!

Today, we’re going to talk about why email marketing is important. We just created a very nice-looking video that’s going to kick off the series of why. Basically, this four-part series that we’re putting together is going to be how to always stay top of mind to your customers, your prospects, the people who are doing business with you.

There are three reasons why email marketing is important for your business. If you are not sending an email or sending too little email, it’s a problem. Most of that is because people, first of all, they’re super, super busy. We all know that. I mean, everybody is living in a very immediate gratification kind of world. Something becomes top of mind, and then it pushes off their plate relatively quickly. That isn’t awesome as marketers, of course.

One of the best reasons to use email marketing is it is a no-cost sales generator. Now, here’s what I mean. Once you have somebody on your list, you can market to them again, and again, and again, until they unsubscribe or until they just stop opening your email. Sending that email sometimes costs a fraction of a penny. For all intents and purposes, you’re not spending money to acquire that customer anymore. You putting leads on an email list is one of the best ways of future-proofing your business. Recession proofing your business because you always have a way to reach out to them and promote your next thing, promote your product, promote your giveaway, promote your discount, whatever.

Whatever it is, you have a way that you can just log in, write an email, hit send, and it goes to 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 people on the other side of an email inbox. Now, a lot of people say, “Well, email is dead,” and nothing could be further from the truth. You still check your email every day. I still check email every day. Everybody still checks email every day. The thing is, you have to be relevant. You have to not be forgotten, and that’s one of the other reasons.

When you send stuff out in an email that isn’t always sales. It isn’t always a promo. Also, it isn’t always something where they have to read an email, click a link, and then put in their credit card.

When you invest in them, through what is known as content marketing, then you’re always reactivating them. You are always adding value to their life and you’re becoming relevant. You’re teaching an education. You’re increasing the know, like and trust factor of you, of your business, because you’re giving them valuable information, valuable guidance, valuable content, whatever it is you want, whatever it is you give them through email. But they’re used to opening emails from you, click the link. When it is time to actually go to a promo, or when it is time to actually buy something. So you’re able to nurture. You’re able to bond with them through content. You’re able to sell something and generate revenue without investing more money.

That’s really the big thing. A lot of our clients, we do a lot of paid traffic, and with paid traffic when you turn off an ad budget, the traffic also goes away. I mean, unfortunately, that’s the reality. When you pause ad spend, or whatever, an ad account gets shut down, and that account gets hacked, any one of several really, really shitty things happen, the traffic also goes away.

Email is something you always have in your back pocket that you can just send an email out to and pivot your business. Send an email out to and generate revenue. One more thing, send an email out to and even survey for a new product, or survey for something new, or whatever, a new product variation, or whatever. It’s the benefit of email. That’s why we email every day, every other day, whatever. One little caveat, if you’re emailing too frequently, you should increase the number of emails that you send. A lot of people, especially traditional businesses, but even digital businesses, a lot of people have an email list of five, 10,000 people. Usually, a good portion of them are buyers, and they’re like, “Well, I email them once a week. I email them once a month. I email them twice a month,” whatever.

You have to email them more often than that, quite a bit more often. We try to send three emails a week to almost every list. Every list, like our client list, and sometimes it’s one a week, and it depends. It just depends on what kind of content we’re mailing out, but we try to be in front of them, at least, three times. Sometimes it’s three blog posts, and then the next week is a promo, a four or five email series promotion. Sometimes it is full… It might be two emails setting up a promo, so it might be an email on a Monday and Tuesday, and then we send out a promo email on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday promoting a product.

There are lots of different cadences that you can use, but you want to be mailing, at least, three times a week to your universe of active subscribers. We should probably do a video on this management. I think I did at one time, but it’s super important to only mail to the people who are actually engaging with you. It makes your email cost cheaper, and it also helps increase the open rates and all of that other stuff.

That is why email marketing is important. You want to generate revenue, without spending any money. An email will do that. You want to test out new products, new services, and keep your list updated on where you’re at in your business. An email will do that. And then, also, being top of mind for your list, or being top of mind in your customers, in your prospects’ mind. An email will do that.

If you have any questions, at all, if you’d like to schedule a call with us, where we would actually go through and figure out how, maybe, email would work in your business, or how to increase the level of email, or the effectiveness of email, or, basically, anything else that has to do with digital marketing, go to consultingsession.com. Fill out the little form, and jump on a call with us.

The post How Email Marketing Increases Your Traffic appeared first on Done For You.

This week we’ve been talking about e-commerce shit. I got a question from one of our clients yesterday about eCommerce referral programs.

Think of it this way, you have an affiliate program, there’s a JV program, as a referral program. Like all of those things incentivize people to send you customers. As an e-commerce store, what this means is like, let’s say you’re a clothing shop. You have this t-shirt that everybody’s just dying for. They’re selling off the racks. You’llll send that thing to an influencer and you have them wear it and you give them an affiliate code, so that every time somebody clicks that link in Instagram, somebody clicks the link in Facebook or TikTok or whatever, every time somebody clicks the link, then they get paid and you set the percentage.

The percentage might be 2% or 5% or 10% or, you know, whatever, 50%. But you set the percentage and software tracks the whole thing. You don’t need to worry about tracking anything. Basically, you know, they drop a link, somebody, one of their thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers, click the link, come to your store, buy something, you get 95%, the influencer gets 5% or whatever. That’s the idea behind referral programs.

Now it used to be the eCommerce referral programs they sucked to set up and it was hard. It was just difficult. I mean, most affiliate programs, the good ones anyway, were kind of baked into CRMs like Infusionsoft or Ontraport or, you know, way back in the day. But now most solid e-comm providers, have referral program kind of add-ins.

Referral commissions are 100% dependent on you.

The one we’re going to talk about today is Shopify. Shopify has some referral add-ons and if you don’t have Shopify, there are some other ones I’m going to talk about today. Before I talk about the software, one thing to know is referral commissions are, they’re a hundred percent dependent on you, but it’s kind of a two-way street.

You want to pay, you want to make it attractive for somebody to promote your stuff. So 5% might not do it. 10% might not do it. You know, somebody might need 15% or 20% to promote your products for you. The antithesis of that is true. In relatively unsophisticated markets, you know, 2% or 5% might be all they need. Like some of our clients in the info product space, well, so in one particular client, in an info product space, she does super, super, super well selling very, very niche video products.

She’s an influencer and she pays a 5% affiliate commission. And she has lots of affiliates who are, you know, signing up and promoting for that 5% affiliate commission, because it’s better than anything else in that particular niche.

Now, on the other hand, digital products have no cost of goods sold. Most affiliates who sign up to sell digital products as an affiliate want 50% commission or 40% or 75% commission or whatever, because they know there’s no cost of goods sold. The only real cost is marketing for a digital product. You know, because there’s very little fulfillment, usually. There’s no, you know, manpower, there’s no delivery or shipping or storing or warehousing or whatever, you know? So e-comm products, on the other hand, there are always COGs. You always have the cost of goods sold. Somebody always pays to ship. I mean, shipping is never free, you know, somebody pays it.

Then you have people and labor and handling and all of that other stuff. For e-comm style, e-comm products have just greater cost to them, which means that you’re probably going to have to sell. You’re going to have to reduce that referral percentage down to 5%, 10% 15, something like that. The numbers have to work for you. They also have to incentivize your audience. It’s just something to think about.

Now, some of the software that you can use. Inside Shopify, they have add-ons. You can go in and add on additional software, additional functionality that will make Shopify run better, hopefully. It adds functionality. Although, it might not necessarily run better. It might slow it down.

It’s one of those things that you really need to work through, you know, test it out, install it, sign up for the free trial if it’s a paid thing. But some of the better affiliate referral programs for Shopify, there is the one that came up, the one that we use most often.

1. Referral Candy

It’s end-to-end software. You set the percentage of how much you want to pay. Referral Candy keeps track of it, and then you pay it out through PayPal at the end of the month. Now, normally affiliate payments, how it usually works is you have like a 30-day grace period. After 30 days, whatever the next payout date is past 30 days, it might be 45 days, that’s when the checks go in the mail or that’s when PayPal actually sends that thing out. It just kind of starts month after month after month.

2. Smile

3. Bamboo

Another one that we like is Smile, and a third is Bamboo. So the one that we use most often here is Referral Candy, though. Once you get this referral code set up, you want to then hit your network of bloggers, influencers, friends on social media. Buyers is another one. If you have a list of, you know, 5 or 600 people who have purchased your product, send them an email and say, how would you like to make 10, 5%, or 10% by just sharing this link with your friends? You know, so very, very easy to add that on. Amazon is, I’m pretty sure the largest affiliate network in the world and they literally built their business around selling affiliate products through an affiliate program. So it’s just something to be mindful of.

Now, if you don’t have, if you’re not using Shopify, let’s say you’re using Big Commerce or one of the other ones, there are a couple of other ways you can do it.

1. iDevAffiliate

2. Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro and then iDevAffiliate are two affiliates, they’re standalone affiliate softwares. Basically, you install the software on your own server, usually. They have hosted apps too, but you set it up so that you set it up on your website so that there’s basically a pixel that fires. The pixel fires on the thank you page. Then that tracks back to the affiliate and then this software maps out, you know, keeps track of who sent that sale, how much they’re owed, when their payouts are, and all that other stuff.

This is if you’re not using Shopify or if the software platform you’re in doesn’t have kind of that baked-in functionality. iDevAffiliate is awesome and Post Affiliate Pro is awesome. I’ve used iDevAffiliate more and it’s a great standalone software.

There’s one that used to be HasOffers. This is if you wanted to set up your own CPA network. If you have two or three or four, maybe clients or some friends who are operating e-comm stores, then you can set multiple people up in this. Tune is what it’s called now. It used to be HasOffers. And HasOffers or Tune keeps track of multiple vendors and multiple publishers.

You can have multiple affiliates publishing multiple or affiliating, multiple stores. It’s one of those, like, I mean, you then become an affiliate network, you know, so it’s very cool software. There’s a lot of opportunity in it. You just have to kind of know what you’re getting into. Managing a network is a much bigger job than just managing an affiliate program.

If there is anything that we can do for you, just go to consultingsession.com, whether it’s you want to talk about an affiliate program to set up for your e-comm store or setting up an e-comm store, or you just want some help and some advice on how to get started or have a scale. Either way, let us know, and we will talk to you soon.

The post How To Set-up Ecommerce Referral Program appeared first on Done For You.

Today, what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about sourcing products. We talked a little bit about this yesterday, but I want to actually walk through what finding products on something like Alibaba actually looks like.

First of all, you never want to just have one product, especially like Done For You E-commerce stores stuff.  You never want to just have one SKU, just have one thing and put all your eggs in that basket and drop a bunch of money to that one thing. You want to have multiple things. What we have all of our new startup e-com store folks do is have 10. If we’re looking at e-com stores, we want to make sure is that we have at least 10 products. From there, for those 10 products, we’re going to get two that actually work.

This is the 80-20 rule, so 20% of your products are going to produce 80% of your revenue. At the end of the day, that’s the number you’re going to look for. What happens is, if you have 10 products, then two of them are actually going to work. Two of them are actually going to be producing quantifiable revenue in your business. Now, these two products you want to reorder. You’re going to buy stock of those two products and continue working them in your e-com store, continue running traffic to them.

Then what you do is, the eight that don’t work, you just want to kill. Just throw those guys out. A quick and dirty way of doing this is going to like Alibaba, which is one of the best.

Alibaba is one of the most popular places to look for and search for manufactured goods, is Alibaba. What you want to do is you want to go to Alibaba, and you just want to start looking in your niche.

We’re going to go over here to Alibaba and what we’re going to do is, let’s say that we are going to start selling fitness gear. So we’re going to just start with a very general search, fitness equipment. Now, I can guarantee that there’s going to be just an absolute ton of stuff that pops up, and some of it is going to be great in terms of selling online, in terms of shipping. Now, I mean, just kind of looking down through these listings, we have a gym strength training pin load selection machine. The minimum order is one cent and it’s between $200 and $1,000 per set. Shipping this thing is going to be an absolute monster. The shipping’s going to be crazy on it, freight, like the whole deal. So importing that thing is going to be a pain.

Now, on the reverse side of that, we have this fitness equipment here, this resistance bands set. One of the reasons why you go to Amazon and you just type in resistance bands and you see a million people selling resistance bands is because, first of all, there is $3 to $4 per set for a minimum order, and far cheaper when you buy a 100 or a 1,000 of these things. They’re super light to ship, so there’s next to zero packagings, super cheap to ship. From a premium pricing standpoint, I mean, you can get quite a bit of money in exchange, rather the cost of goods is so small compared to what you can get for it.

Again, you have some big fans, you have these adjustable dumbbell sets. There are lots and lots of things in the fitness space that you can sell. Here’s another example of a good, low price, cheaply shipped item, one of these yoga balls, or one of these things. So nice offers to get started with, you don’t need to go start selling this hammer strength bench press to kind of get started.

What you do is that starts your search, then you want to just keep refining it. Let’s say we wanted to sell a fitness equipment sled. This is a Prowler training or fitness sled, and there are a couple of different versions. We have this one that you can put a dumbbell or a plate in the middle of. We have this guy, which you can put a plate in the middle of, it’s just kind of shaped a little bit differently. These sleds, I mean, they’re not too bad. I mean, $30 to $80, a 20 set minimum, you put that thing on Amazon and you put it on your website and then you can start selling it.

1. Contact the supplier and request samples

Now, here’s the trick. If you want to start importing from Amazon, you want to contact the supplier or you want to chat now. Chat now typically, we’ll chat pretty quick, but so you contact the supplier and you ask them for samples. You say, “I would like to start selling this sled. I would like a couple of samples shipped over, and so I can just check quality and manufacturing, and all that other stuff.” And they are going to say yes, usually. They say yes, they’re going to charge you in abnormally huge amounts of shipping money, so two sleds might be a hundred bucks, might be 150 bucks.

They’re going to send you those goods over and it’s going to come to DHL, or whatever.

2. Assemble the item, take photos and sell online

And what you do then is you put it together, you take some pictures. And then you turn around and start selling it. You start selling your samples. And if you can get two, or three, or five samples, and those samples sell-through, then you have a winner. Then you have this right here, you have the two that work and you’re going to increase the ad spend on those two items.

Now, if you don’t sell your samples, then they go on this dead list. They’re no longer able to be sold. That’s a way to rapidly kind of prototype new stuff. Now, think about this fitness sled for a minute. In Erie, Pennsylvania here, we have some manufacturing clients. One of those manufacturing clients does a lot of metalwork. So it doesn’t make sense. Let’s say I wanted to start selling this sled, it doesn’t make sense for me to get drawings, go to ISM and have them start building this item when I can sell it and test it so simply and easily this way.

I wanted to start selling the sled or anything metal, what I would do is I would go find a way to get my hands on like five of them, throw them up on a website, and then we can see how fast we actually sell through that stuff.

If we sell through it fast, awesome. If we don’t, then we either need to make modifications to it, or it’s not going to work right now. We’re not going to work to the audience or not going to work for any number of reasons. At the end of the day, it’s much, much quicker, and cheaper, and easier to import something tested. And even if you’re going to manufacture in the States, then you can figure out how to manufacture in the States. So, that is how we would source. That’s how we have people source products. That’s how we source products on our e-comm stuff.

You would like any help at all, just go to consultingsession.com, fill out the little form. It will send you down one of two tracks, either Done-for-you, where we would actually go and build a Shopify store and run the ads and all that other stuff, or Done-with-you, where we can help on a strategy mentorship piece.

The post How To Find Products For eCommerce Store appeared first on Done For You.

Today we’re going to talk about the eCommerce store. A lot of people don’t know this, but when I was 18 or 19, so this was actually before Pepsi, I started an eBay business. It was an interesting business because eBay was kind of just getting started, not getting started, it had been around for a couple of years. It was where power sellers really started moving a lot of products.

I was really into cars at the time, car stereos, actually. I was paging through a magazine of Truckin’, it was a Truckin’ Magazine. In this magazine, there was an ad. There was a six-page ad of all the car parts that you could put on your truck. On the very bottom, it said, “Wholesale accounts can apply here.” I was like, “Well, shit. Wholesale accounts. Does that mean that I can actually buy product wholesale and then it to somebody like they are now a supplier for me?”

I applied to be a wholesaler. Then, I started taking their product shots, putting them on eBay, and then just marking up the bumper, or marking up the hood scoop, or marking up the whatever for the truck that we were trying to sell for. That worked really well, I mean, I was at Mercer Northeast at the time. Actually, so I was in the Northeast here. I was selling quite a few bumpers. By quite a few I mean 10 or 12 a month.

Basically, I would take the money from eBay, and then I would give it to the wholesaler. The wholesaler would then drop ship it. This was 22 years again, 20 ish years ago. It was a really long time. At the time, I think I was working for Pepsi. I haven’t thought about this in a long time. I don’t know, that’s probably where my love of the internet came from, that and blogging and all that other stuff.

Anyway, so what happened was, is right around that time, shipping got really expensive. So FedEx, UPS, all that got super expensive. You just couldn’t do anything with it, it jacked the shipping rates up. The wholesaler was charging me shipping rates, and then my shipping rates got crazy because it’s oversized bumpers and stuff, so it was $40, $60, $80 to ship it, and that was all my profit. That was the profit margin on a wholesale good.

I wasn’t good at it, so I ended up just kind of pausing that thing and whatever. That was the first e-comm physical product business that I ever worked in, which is cool. There were a lot of learned lessons. We were doing about, I think the very last month that I was doing it, I did $16,000 in revenue or something. Most of that goes right back out the door because it’s wholesale. It was an interesting learning experience, let’s put it that way.

Now fast forward to today, and we work with a lot of e-comm stores that are selling a lot of different products. So most of the e-comm stores are set up in Shopify. Some of them are using other platforms like WordPress and WooCommerce, but most of them are Shopify.

I wanted to talk about a few things. First of all, I want to talk about sourcing products.

I want to talk about specializing in something and then also running traffic and scaling stores.

It could end up being a whole course all unto itself, but I want to give a couple of nuggets in each scenario.

First of all, sourcing products. There’s a couple of ways, there are two ways you can source a product. You can either find stuff that you’re going to sell yourself. It might be something you design in CAD, or there’s all kinds of really, really cool 3D CAD drawing kind of apps for iPads and stuff. They make it super, super easy to do it. If you have an idea for a product, you can design it up and send it to a manufacturer. The manufacturer then can do a prototype and then send you a supply, and then you can sell it on your Shopify store or whatever.

That ends up being kind of a risky proposition because you don’t know what’s going to sell. In every business, there’s an 80/20 rule, and you’re going to hear me talk about this a lot. But in every business, 80/20 rule. So 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your products or even fewer. It might be 95% of your revenue comes from 5% of your products. It really just depends. So e-comm is the same way. The problem with designing a product from scratch and then sending it to a company to fulfill that product, you don’t know if it’s going to sell.

The best thing to do is to sell a prototype.

One of the easiest and quickest ways of doing it without a lot of labor and a lot of mind share from you is just sourcing it. Let’s say you wanted to sell some workout equipment. Let’s say a jump rope. Well, you have this really good idea for a ball-bearing jump rope that spins really fast, and CrossFit athletes can use it for double under. Well, you don’t know if your jump rope is going to sell. The next best thing is to go to Alibaba, look for jump ropes, and find some jump ropes that look like they’re worth you testing out and trying to sell, so testing your product first.

Then, request samples. It might be two samples, three samples, five samples, whatever. They send them to you, DHL usually, overseas. You import them into this country, so the shipping is fucking crazy, so it’s going to be 50 bucks to ship five jump ropes, and it’s going to take three weeks to get here. But at the same time, you’re able to test that quickly. You take those five jump ropes, you put them on your Shopify store. If they sell through, you reorder, or you go and source the jump rope you wanted to create. You now have a working prototype.

If you go through all the expense of trying something without testing it, and then you have 1000 jump ropes sitting in your garage that isn’t going to sell, then that doesn’t work. Sourcing e-comm products is the best way to do it.

However, there’s an even better one, and it’s drop-shipping products. You can do the same kind of testing by using a drop shipping plug-in or app like Zendrop. It lets you tap into thousands of products that are out there, able to be drop shipped. You just add them to your store, you set a price. Then when somebody buys it, you collect the money, and then it goes to Zendrop. Zendrop suppliers fulfill that product. It is the quickest and best way of testing something, well, fast really. Fast, zero risks, you just throw it up in your store. You test it. You run some traffic and that’s it.

1. 80/20 Rules

Now the thing about e-comm stores is eight of 10 of your products are going to fail. It’s the, like I said, 80/20 rules. 80% of your revenue’s going to come from 20% of your products, or two out of 10. Two of the products you test are going to be flying away winners. The other eight are going to suck. You throw those eight products away. You scale the two, and then you go test 10 more. That’s how you create an e-comm store that works, either through importing, through creating your own stuff, or through drop shipping. That’s how you would source your products.

2. Most E-comm stores don’t specialize 

We’ve worked with a lot of e-comm stores that just don’t specialize in anything. Think of retailers. Retailers oftentimes buy in season. It depends on the retailer, but I mean, you think of the bargain bin kind of pallet drop retailer. The retailer, you go to one of these supply liquidation events or so. You buy a pallet of stuff, then you sell that pallet of stuff on your e-comm store, or Amazon, or whatever.

Now you have a very limited supply, which means when you have a limited supply, you can’t ramp up the ad spent and ramp down the ad spend. So you have, let’s say, three pressure cookers. You can’t continue to sell pressure cookers because you only have three of them, so once you’re out of supply and you have no means of getting more, then that ad is toast. It doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of money in something that you’re not going to be able to run like a brand over and over and over again.

1. Figure out things that are selling the best

You want to specialize in those things. It might be a private line, it might be a handpicked line, it might be whatever. Maybe it’s eight or 10 things that you know your customers love buying from you. Those are the things that you want to stock and buy a lot of inventory of, keep in stock, and run ads year-round, or summer, or fall, spring, or whatever. You want to run them for a long time, so those are your core priority products. And those things are always in stock and you’re always moving those things.

Then everything else that is seasonal, or that comes in, that maybe you can buy a bulk order for the fall or whatever, all that stuff becomes secondary items that you might sell with a targeted ad, or you might sell with email. Your primary core offers, your core e-comm products, those are what you’re driving traffic to the most, year-round, cold traffic, warm traffic, whatever. And that’s where you make the bulk of your money. That’s your 80% profit or 80% revenue. And then everything else is secondary, and you’re driving traffic there through email.

2. Create Campaign that will hit core offers

Running traffic, that kind of gets into running traffic. When you can keep a campaign on for a while, so if you can keep it on for four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, every campaign has an end of the life cycle. We’re always trying to actively prevent that end of the life cycle. We’re always trying to switch up ads and use dynamic creative and stuff so that we’re not burning out the same creative. But at the same time, every offer has a life cycle. Every ad has a life cycle.

What we always try to do is hit those core offers, and we try to always be attracting cold audiences into our ecosystem, into our brand. So how that works is you have one bucket and it’s all cold ads. And then when they watch 10 seconds of a video, they go to a website, they like a page, whatever, then they get re-targeted as a second ad set. So we have cold traffic, warm traffic. What happens is, well, it’s July now, but in November, December when traffic starts getting more expensive, then what we can do is we can just shut off. We can just throw away the cold traffic, and we’re only targeting the warm traffic, which lets us just more intelligently spend ad budget.

The last bit that I wanted to cover today is scaling stores. Basically, scaling stores is mostly about identifying your core products and running traffic to those things, and using every means necessary to promote those. Then understanding that you have your core products, the ones that are generating all the revenue. You have your secondary products, the ones that are generating a little bit of revenue, and understanding how they mix. Also, when you have your core products, you can arrange upsells, bundle offers, any of that kind of stuff.

That’s like just more advice on how to scale your own stuff, there are two ways. Go to doneforyou.com, and that is going to lead you into our services portal. We’re just starting something new called Done With You. Done With You is where we don’t necessarily push the buttons for you, but we help on a mentorship advisement coaching level. We are always with you, but we’re helping you navigate the waters, go through, and just basically saving you months and years worth of time off of scaling your own stores in this case, or scaling your online business.

At the end of the day, we have literally seen it all. There are a lot of situations where Done For You doesn’t work, but Done With You does. So that’s pretty much how we’re going to roll out. We’re building consultingsession.com to really be the place where you can kind of self-select whichever side you want. But being restarting these GSD Dailies has kind of been a shotgun thing. That’s in the works.

If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start. Or comment below and we’ll get right back to you.

The post eCommerce Startup & Scale Strategies appeared first on Done For You.

Welcome to episode number 166 of GSD Daily.

It has been a while since I have done these, nine months-ish. Just to kind of recap you a little bit, pretty well. When COVID hit back last March, I made it a mission to record a live stream every day, Monday through Friday. The intention of it was to just basically teach some of the internet marketing stuff, because at the end of the day, I mean, businesses were shutting down. Everything was really random. I wanted to help give as many friends and clients and just people crossing our path, I wanted to give them as much strategy and as many tactics as possible to get them moving in the right direction.

It continued on for 165 episodes. All the way from March, up to around Thanksgiving. Every Monday through Friday, I posted sometimes a 20-minute video, sometimes a five or 10-minute video, or whatever. I’ll tell you what, not only was able to help a lot of people, some of them weathered the storm from a business standpoint, some of them sell more from a digital product standpoint or an e-com standpoint, or whatever. At the end of the day, we were able to make a difference.  Even if that difference was just one person or two people a day, literally that was the whole goal, to get somebody moving in the right direction in the turmoil that was the shutdown.

Now fast forward to Thanksgiving. Business is rock and roll. I mean, working with lots of clients. Holidays are coming up and I had talked about 165 things. Every topic was different. Every day, every live stream was different. For some of them, I’d review blog posts. Some, I would talk through strategies or talk through just a question the client asked me and then answer that. There were lots and lots and lots of different types of material out there that you can use in getting back.

What we did was we took those videos and I sent them to rev.com to transcribe. Then I dropped the transcript in a blog post. So do a live stream, send it to rev.com. They would transcribe it. Then we would just put it all on a blog post on the doneforyou.com website. It was not only great content from a social media standpoint but we started getting ranked for hundreds of other keyword phrases that were in that content.

Video is such a quick way of creating ranking content when you transcribe it and post it on a blog. It has since become a strategy that we use for a lot of our clients. We have a lot of our clients use to grow, especially when they don’t have a lot of data starting at when they don’t have an email list in getting back. They might have a social audience and maybe a small social audience. This idea of creating daily live streams, turning that content into blog post content, and then posting it online, I mean, it’s such a great startup growth plan. Now we went from ranking for about 1800 keyword phrases on doneforyou.com to ranking for over 9,000 keyword phrases on doneforyou.com. Even if we weren’t paying for traffic, it’s traffic we couldn’t turn off.

Now a lot has changed since we stopped doing those live streams. Today is where we want to kind of getting back into the saddle if you will.

Priority 1: I’m going to start doing these daily live streams so I could do and teach at the same time.

Priority 2: I am now sitting in a huge-ass building. We purchased just shy of a 20,000 square foot building that we are going to be turning into the epicenter of basically everything we do. Video studio podcasts, the whole deal, which is super exciting. This is my office and I adhered to a couple of the offices in the building, and this is where we’re setting up shop now. We got just a lot of construction, a lot of things going on.

It’s a really, really old building. I’m going to walk through and record some of these live streams in different locations. I’ll probably do a whole walkthrough of the interior of the building so you can see what we have going on. The whole project is, we’re kind of keeping it a secret. We’re not necessarily telling everybody exactly what’s going in here. At the end of the day, this building is meant to be a source of growth. We want to revitalize the community. We want to grow a lot of things in and around this town and also bring a lot of money, a lot of exposure, and help start a lot of companies out of here. That is the goal for this building.

You’re also going to see some new things we got coming down the line. We have Done For You obviously. Done For You has grown 800%-ish. Since March, give or take a couple of percents. We’re working with a lot more clients. We have a lot more team members. We’re just doing a lot more at Done For You, which is fantastic. It also has let us open a couple of different verticals. We’re doing more with franchises, lead gen and we’re also doing more with just some strategic kind of JVs. We work to open up a vertical there. We’re going to talk some about that. We’re starting a GSD clothing line. So, Get Shit Done clothing line. That is coming here rather soon and you’re going to see some of that in these live streams.

We’re also going to do Done With You. In donewithyou.com, it is going to be a coaching, mentorship, educational portal, where we will help you grow your business. Not necessarily it’s not done for you, it’s done with you. We provide the strategy, the mentorship, the accountability, the insights, the relationships, the people, all of that stuff, all the softer things to help grow. There’s going to be some dedicated time for that as well.

I think that’s really about it for all of the latest, getting back, and greatest stuff. All in all, we want this space to be somewhere you come, you enjoy, you learn from, and then go from there.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to drop a question in the chatbox below, or tomorrow, we will be here. We should be here at nine o’clock. I mean, unfortunately, my day isn’t much, like it used to be where literally every day at 10 o’clock, I was for the most part open. Now, not so much. There are meetings and stuff popping up all over the place because I’m not the one who controls my calendar a whole lot. I’m going to try to be as close to nine o’clock as possible.

We’re going to be doing some free coaching sessions. I just got a lot planned. We’ll do some interviews and then we’re going to start bringing some of our team members on so that they can start to share some of their brilliance with you. We’ll go rock and rolling! I will see you tomorrow.

The post Getting Back On appeared first on Done For You.

…investment will bring you traffic forever.

Today, I want to talk about how to write great blog posts in 30 minutes or less. Blog content takes a tremendous amount of time to create. It’s advised that they’re over 1500 words. So 1500 to 2,500 words is ideal for a blog post now. That length basically allows the blog post to stand out from everything else that’s out there. And Google has all kinds of keyword phrases that it can rank inside of that blog post. For instance, we have some 2500 word, 3000, 4000-word blog posts on our Done For You website, and those blog posts are actually ranking for 150 or 200 keyword phrases, just absolute nonsense. So many different keyword phrases and ranked on the first, second, third page of Google, even for all of those keyword phrases.

The longer posts, sure it’s going to take six hours to write, or it’s going to cost $200 or $300 to actually pay somebody to write it because it’s longer than a college essay, but the investment will bring you traffic forever and that is the benefit of quality writing. Now I don’t have six hours to write a blog post. You don’t have six hours to write a blog post. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to create that same type of blog post in 30 minutes or less. And I’m going to show you how in this video.

The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to search for keyword phrases. We go to Google Keyword Planner and we just type in whatever it is we want to talk about. In this particular instance, I knew I wanted to write or record a video about writing faster. The keyword phrase that we’re going to be targeting is how to write a blog post fast. In fact, it gets somewhere between a hundred and a thousand searches every single month. And it has lots of LSI keyword phrases that we can rank within that blog posting itself as well. So it will give us the most bang for the buck and we get to provide some good content. Now that keyword phrase is going to be used in the subject or the headline of our blog post.

That’s going to be the title of the blog post, how to write great blog posts fast and then usually colon in 30 minutes or less or something like that. So we want to use the keyword phrase in the title of the article. We want to use it in the first paragraph of the blog post itself, right underneath where the video is going to go. And then we also want to use it in the sub-headlines and we want to sprinkle it throughout the body copy itself. And then we want to use other related keyword phrases. So write great blog posts, writing an article, different keyword phrases that are similar to the one we’re trying to rank for.

Then what we want to do is we want to record a video that is somewhere between eight and 10 minutes long. So eight and 10 minutes long is going to give us about 1200, 1500 words. We could go a little longer and get up to 2000 words, but we want to create a video like this, where we’re talking through what it is we’re talking about. Now I have a list of topics that I want to hit. I didn’t really put a whole lot of thought into what was going to be in the video before, other than just a list, the steps that I wanted to cover, but by and large, when you’re doing this, you’re going to be talking or writing about something that you know.

And then once the video is done, we will send it off to a company called the Rev, rev.com, and we will have them transcribe it. We always go with the human transcriptionist and then we go through and edit it and then add some links, add some images, all of that stuff after the fact, sub-headlines.

It’s the best way. If the video is 10 minutes long, you send it away, you get the transcript back. It’ll take another 20 minutes to go through and edit the transcript. And now you have a 1500 word blog post with a video and with a podcast even, that becomes your finished thing. Now you’ve written and you’re life and you’re published and Google picks up organic content. You get ranked in the search engines, you get traffic for the rest of your life.

And if you like this post, make sure to share it, like it, subscribe to the YouTube channel, friend me on LinkedIn, if that’s where you are, or add me as a connection and I will talk to you soon.

The post Writing The Best Blog Post Quickly appeared first on Done For You.

... Standpoint. You want to use it to promote your things, things you don't just get a commission on, and things that further your business.

Today, we will discuss making money on your website without advertising and creating a profitable website. And that's weird because many blogs use advertising to generate revenue. I know when I first started, I did. I was using AdSense like crazy. And Text Link Ads was another one. And then there were some weird little networks. But Text Link Ads and AdSense were my two bread and butter platforms before I started selling our products and affiliate marketing.

Not only that, but we're also going to talk about how to find profitable websites for sale!  More on that in a minute, though...

Reviewing products is the first way to make a website profitable without ads. I did a lot of this back in my SEO days. We would do product reviews, and rather than get paid for the product reviews, we would get paid as an affiliate.

I would review three or four digital products daily or have writers check these products. Then we got paid whenever somebody read the review and then clicked through and bought the products; we would get paid commission. It worked out well for me. Some of the largest affiliate revenue sites were generating... We were using this model, marketing hacks, net hacks, and some old ones. But we had websites making $20,000 a month just reviewing products for the most part.

The difference is, rather than take a hundred dollars to review the product, we would embed our affiliate link in there, and then somebody would click it and ultimately go through and buy. One of the most significant affiliate opportunities we played with was that Amazon had a wireless carrier. It was like wireless.amazon.com. And they paid a $60 bounty for a while for every new person that you sent signing up for a cell phone. And we were sending four, five, six people a day. This is where I first got my feet wet on product reviews, affiliate marketing, etc. And it was all free traffic. So, that worked out well.

The second way to make a website profitable without ads is through services. If you have a business that offers services, it can be freelance writing, video editing, or anything else you can do with a computer. If you can do that service, you can offer it on your website. We encourage our clients to make services to bill for more expensive services. We're looking for a thousand dollars a month that gives you five hours worth of time, that gives our clients, customers five hours a month for a thousand dollars, whatever.

So whenever we're coaching or helping people in that direction, something that is a higher ticket. Because it's just as hard to sell somebody at a thousand dollars a month as it is to sell somebody at a hundred dollars one time. What would you rather have? Would you rather have to sell 30 people your service every month to pay your mortgage? Or would you rather sell three people every couple of months because it's a monthly recurring?

Just think about services in that light. Do something that links up to your business or what you do and links that up with the person, with a buyer, because your blog and website should be where that transaction happens. Your potential, your prospect should come to your website, read a blog post, and then say, "Oh shit, he's got this service. Well, I'll just fill out the contact form or call him on the phone or watch his webinar or download his lead magnet," and you're off and running. Now, you'll need to make sure that the service you're doing is worthwhile.

The next thing to make a website profitable is writing eBooks or providing other resources. I already touched on this, but you can create a course if you know something. You can register an ebook. You can write a report. Typically, it works when you offer a product for sale on your website, like a report or six to eight-page information you will give away for free in exchange for somebody's email address. That's typical. If it is a 30, 40, 60, or 100-page ebook, you will charge between $27 and $37 if you sell it on your website.

If you're selling it as a Kindle book, you're going to charge nine bucks or ten bucks or four bucks or whatever because the Amazon marketplace drives everything down. Also, you're splitting some of the money with Amazon, which is one of the reasons why whenever our clients want to sell eBooks, we always try to make sure they're selling it on their website, too.

Your video course, if you have a video course, and that can be just literally made up of videos like this to make a website profitable, you can put those all in a video course or a screencast where you're recording with ScreenFlow, or you're recording with Camtasia. Those videos can be put together in a video product and sold for anywhere between $97, and we have clients selling their video courses for $2,500 each. Selling these products on your website is a great way to monetize the space. I need to find out the last client or website we built for which we ran ads because all our clients have their stuff to sell.

We have our stuff to sell. So your screen real estate, your website, the banner, the sidebars, the headers, the footers, everywhere in that website is so damned important from a real estate standpoint, you want to use it to promote your things, things that you don't just get a commission on and things that they further your business. So, if you did all the hard work of getting a prospect there, you also want to sell them something. That's the idea.

On the flip side, give affiliate marketing a try. Try affiliate marketing if you don't want to create your products, videos, audio, and other stuff. You can sell all kinds of affiliate products you can get paid a commission on. You don't have to sign up for some weird MLM downline or anything. You can visit a site like ClickBank or Commission Junction cj.com and find a product or multiple products with banner ads.

So, if somebody buys, then you get a commission. For a digital product, you might get a 50% commission or 75% commission; for a physical or more traditional product, you might make a 10% commission.

Amazon has an affiliate program. Amazon also, when somebody clicks your link, you get paid on everything they buy for the next 24 hours, which is also super cool. So, affiliate marketing might work well for your pages to make a website profitable. If you want to avoid selling your products, if you're going to put the time in to write your eBooks to create video courses or coaching programs, or whatever, affiliate marketing might work well. And if you liked this video, make sure to like it, subscribe, and comment wherever you are. If you're on the website, that's awesome.

After exploring ways to make a website profitable, a logical next step is to consider purchasing already good websites. This can be an efficient strategy for digital marketers and entrepreneurs looking to expand their online presence without starting from scratch. Here’s how to find profitable websites for sale:

Before you dive into the search, could you define your niche and goals? Are you looking for an e-commerce site, a content-driven blog, or an affiliate marketing platform? I think it's important to understand your target market and the type of website that will cater to your strengths and business model.

Websites like Flippa, Empire Flippers, and FE International specialize in selling online businesses and websites. These platforms provide a wealth of information, including revenue, traffic details, and the business model of the listed websites. It’s essential to do due diligence on these platforms to ensure the authenticity and profitability of the websites.

Please be sure to look for websites with consistent and diverse revenue streams. A site that relies solely on one income source, like ads or a single affiliate program, might be riskier than one with multiple income channels. Consistent revenue over a period indicates stability and potential for growth.

Examine the website’s traffic sources and SEO metrics. Use tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to understand where the traffic comes from and how well the site ranks for its key terms. A website with a solid organic traffic base is typically more sustainable.

Research the history of the website. Look at how long it has been operational, its growth trajectory, and any significant fluctuations in traffic or revenue. This can give insights into the site's stability and potential future performance.

Consider the amount of work needed to maintain or grow the website. Some sites might require ongoing content creation, SEO, or technical upkeep. Ensure that this aligns with your skills and the time you’re willing to invest.

Networking with other digital marketers and entrepreneurs can lead to private sales not listed on public marketplaces. Engaging in online community forums and attending industry conferences can open opportunities for finding hidden gems.

Consulting with a professional broker or a digital marketing expert can be beneficial if you're new to buying websites. They can help you navigate the complexities of evaluating and purchasing a profitable website.

Once you find a suitable website, negotiate the terms of the sale. Consider hiring a legal professional to ensure that all aspects of the transaction are covered, including the transfer of assets and intellectual property.

By following these steps, you can identify and purchase a profitable website that aligns with your digital marketing goals, potentially accelerating your path to online success.

The post 5 Tried ‘N True Ways To Make Your Website More Profitable appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we’re going to talk about ad funnels or Facebook ad funnels to be a little bit more specific. Now, an advertising funnel is interesting because what an advertising funnel does, is it understands that your traffic is cold. I mean, they’re cold when they first see an ad. They’re cold when they first experience your brand, and the ad funnel, the advertising funnel, warms them up. There is always a set of ads that is cold traffic. Your cold traffic audience is they don’t know who you are. They’ve never heard of you. In the Facebook world, they aren’t necessarily even searching for the solution that you provide. They’re not going to Google and typing in a keyword phrase, if you know what I mean, because Facebook traffic is all interruption-based. In the Google world, they are going to Google and searching for the keyword phrase that you are advertising for or that is related to your business.

This cold traffic person doesn’t know who you are. They’ve never heard of your business because if they had heard of you, then they’d be a little bit warmer. Do you know what I mean? The way the advertising funnel works, they see an ad as a cold traffic prospect, a cold prospect, and then they take some sort of action. That action might be watching a video that is 50% or more, 25% or more. It might be clicking on the ad and going to your website, might be opting in for a report for a lead magnet, or might be just full-out buying something. But that cold prospect is, in their action, warming up to you, warming up to your brand. So, that is what the advertising funnel is all about because when we warm them up, then we can do additional things with them.

So after they do something, they are no longer a cold prospect. They move past that cold traffic ad, and now they are seeing a retargeted ad because they did something, watched a video, or clicked a link. This traffic landed on a page and opted in and bought something. So, they are no longer cold. They are warm, and because they are warm, they are seeing a different type of ad from you. On Facebook, Facebook Ad Funnels might be a welcome back ad, or it might be, “Hey, you left this in your shopping cart,” like a shopping cart abandonment ad. It might be telling them about a product that they might be interested in that they didn’t already purchase. So, there are lots of ways that you can carry out the retargeting piece.

One of the things that we really like to do is once they move from cold traffic to warm, to a retargeted ad, then we also acknowledge that they were probably getting warmer or colder within our sphere of influence. So, we might have a retargeted ad that shows a lead magnet for days one through four. So, if they land on our website, then for this four-day period, they see a video view ad talking about a lead magnet. Then, if they don’t do anything, days five through eight, we give them something else. Maybe it’s a checklist, or maybe we’re promoting a different product or promoting a different newsletter or whatever. Then day nine through 13, we do something a little different, with the understanding that they’re getting colder. The longer they go without doing something, they are getting colder.

We need to be fast because a buyer’s only really hot, usually for a very short amount of time, for a very, very small window. It might be a week, might be for three days, and might be three weeks, but they usually buy and consume a bunch of stuff in the same period of time, and then they move on oftentimes. Think about your own experience. Let’s say you’re looking for a piece of software like a video hosting platform, let’s say. Chances are you recognize the need that you need a video hosting platform, like Wistia or Vimeo or whatever. So you do a little bit of research. You find all the people in the market. And that might not have even been triggered by you internally but by an ad. Maybe you saw a Wistia ad, and then you’re like, “Wait, this makes sense. I need to keep my videos private, so who else has this technology?” Then you do a little bit of research, and then you buy, and you do a free trial and everything. But you’ve come to your decision in the first week or two, typically.

You’ve settled on one and canceled everybody else. Now you are done. You’ve moved on. You’re past that. You might still open some emails and do something, but you’re done signing up for free trials until you’re dissatisfied with Wistia, and then you’re moving on to something else. That’s typically how buyers react. That’s how your buyers react. So understanding that they’re cold, and when they’re warm, and then they’re leaving you. You gotta keep them warm as they go is paramount to this advertising funnel. Recognizing that you need to have different types of ads for how warm somebody is really, I mean, it’s important.

Now Facebook is a little bit different when you’re doing these advertising Facebook Ad Funnels because A, you can do a lot with video. Video, you get cheap clicks and you can add video views. You can do video views campaigns and then target people based on how much of a video somebody watches, which is super important for this momentum and moving somebody through this advertising funnel. But it all comes back to the Facebook pixel. You add the Facebook pixel to your website, and then that pixel tracks what pages they visit, where they go on your website, what the conversion events are, which ads are sending you leads or sending you sales, or ultimately sending conversions.

The pixel is really, really important in this entire makeup, and that’s how we actually set up the day one through four campaigns, the day five through eight campaign. We actually go in and say, “Okay, if somebody is brand new to this audience because of the pixel, show them this ad. If they’re between five and eight days, then show them this ad.” If they’re between nine and 13 days, show them this ad.” It’s all based on the pixel. It’s all based on the lookalike audience.

But then what we do is we create the lookalike audiences of our most successful segment of folks. So, at first, if we have no data whatsoever, then we’re creating a lookalike audience based on the people who watched 50% or more of a video or 75% or more of a video. We were always creating a new lookalike audience based on our best set of data. Then we’re moving all of the ads, so we’re always optimizing the audiences and letting Facebook know exactly who we want to get in front of.

Now, the ad funnel itself, as it’s moving prospects through, needs to tie in with your sales funnel. The sales funnel, your landing pages, your automated webinars, your VSLs, all of that stuff really comes out to party in these Facebook Ad Funnels. We like videos a lot. We do a lot of video views campaigns.

If you liked this video, make sure to share it, like it, comment. That way, you know whenever we put out something new.

The post Scaling Facebook Ad Funnels appeared first on Done For You.

Drip marketing automation is the same thing as an autoresponder, it has just been renamed and is the current terminology used in the marketing industry today. This is going to date me a little bit, when I first got into internet marketing 14 years ago, I remember listening to a tape. A tape? Yeah, maybe a CD, an audio program, a tape from this guy named Eben Pagan, and Frank Kern, and they were talking about the miracle of email marketing and building your email list and this thing called an “autoresponder.” This autoresponder, basically, somebody will go to a landing page, they’d fill in an opt-in form for a lead magnet or a freebie of some kind, a bribe, and this autoresponder would send them email after email after email. Day one, it would send an email, day two, it would send an email, until day three.

The autoresponder and the big company back then was a company called AWeber. They’re actually great software and is also here in Pennsylvania. Aweber created an autoresponder who acts as an assistant, or you, or whoever wouldn’t have to actually email your list every single day based on when somebody signed up. The email goes out and everybody’s happy. This is the beauty and the magic of technology.

Today, the autoresponder has been renamed a “drip email sequence” or “drip marketing”. Email one goes out and then email two drips out the next day, email three drips out the next day, email four drips out the next day. Your membership content is dripped out week after week after week, so this drip is now basically what the terminology is calling “automation” or “autoresponders.”

Now, when we get to drip marketing automation, really, the automation just adds another layer on top of it, so the automation piece adds a trigger. The drip marketing sequence that is set to go out emails one, two, three, four. The automation piece adds in a trigger and the trigger might be a tag that is added to a contact record. This person visited a landing page, this form was filled out, this webinar was attended, this survey result was submitted. There are lots of triggers that will fire that drip marketing automation, and that’s where the magic all comes together – it’s the trigger.

We build sales funnels for our clients, go in and we will set up a bunch of drip marketing. We already know how people are going to be moving through the sales funnel, so the most common examples are we will set up a lead magnet fulfillment sequence. When somebody downloads a lead magnet, they go into this fulfillment sequence.

The fulfillment sequence drips out, day one, drips out the link, the download link that they can get the report. On day two, maybe it drips out the social media profiles for our client. On day three, we’re trying to bond them which is called an “indoctrination sequence“. Day two might be social media profiles, day three, “Hey, this is what we do today,” day four might be the about page, day five is “This is why we do what we do,” so it’s basically telling the story of our client.

Webinar Promo Campaign is one of the drip marketing automation campaign that we put together for our clients. It’s a four-email sequence that promotes a webinar or a webinar replay sequence. A six-email sequence that we use to promote the webinar replay or a strategy session promo sequence. The emails were loaded up inside our client’s CRM. We’re going to be driving paid traffic to a sales funnel.

Now, we have to figure out what triggers: What is the automation piece of drip marketing automation, what triggers are going to fire, what forms are going to be figured out, what pages are going to be visited, and what webinars are going to be attended?

If that person signs up for the webinar and doesn’t attend, what happens? All of those triggers put people in different drip marketing campaigns which layers all of that complexity on top of itself.

The post The Essence Of Drip Marketing appeared first on Done For You.