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You might know by now that my favorite way of marketing any business is with getting your work featured in front of other people’s audiences.

Traditionally, this is where you get your products featured in magazines, on big websites, and more recently you can do the same process in conjunction of social media.

Instead of trying to pitch your products and try to land them in magazines, on websites or on someone’s blog, how about you pitch yourself to someone who has a large following on social media?

This is something I almost always recommend to for my students or my clients to do, but the number one question that usually comes up when they start the process is “How do you know it’s a big enough influencer?”

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a magic number and tell you how many followers someone has to have. It’s a relative number.

If let’s say you have an audience of a thousand people for your business, you generally don’t want to work with someone that has the same or smaller following than you.

If you find someone that has two thousand followers then you probably want to give that a chance and try working with them. Does that mean you will get a lot out of working with them? That’s a totally different question.

If you have a thousand followers and someone has two thousand followers, you benefit from gaining exposure to an audience that is twice the size of your current audience.

The thing is, two thousand followers is not large enough to convert into any meaningful sales.

The standard e-commerce conversion rate is about 1%. That means if you want to make one sale every day, you need to have 100 people visiting your website every day.

Two thousand people who you get exposure to will not convert into 100 people visiting your site.

The other number you have to pay attention to is engagement.

How engaged is this influencer’s following? If the influencer doesn’t have a highly engaging following, that means that very few of their actual followers are seeing their posts.

If you pitch yourself to someone who has 100 thousand followers it might sound very cool (especially when they say yes) but your future could fall flat if they have a very low engagement rate.

If out of 100 thousand followers they only get 100 likes and comments on every post, you are ultimately not getting your products seen by enough people.

Getting your products featured, whether it’s by an influencer or a magazine is a fairly easy process when you know how to do it. It’s a very nuanced process that most people don’t get right. I’m want to cover a few of the top reasons I see people failing with influencer marketing.

You need to have a very clear understanding of who your ideal customers are and you need to get really specific. If you’re pitching to someone who talks about all sorts of things and whose style appears to be very generic, you’re not going to get a lot of traction from them.

People often work with influencers who have a lot of followers but very little engagement. As I mentioned before, engagement is a much better metric to gauge how many eyeballs will see your feature.

If you sell jewelry for example and there is a lot of fine detail in your work, you don’t want the influencer to be wearing the jewelry and taking a photo because all of that detail will be lost. It would probably be a pretty wide shot and it wouldn’t be close enough for someone to admire and appreciate what makes it so special.

This happens a lot with my Tiny Hands products, but if I send my product to an influencer and they wear the jewelry it doesn’t translate as well as if they just took a close up shot of their necklaces, rings or bracelets. If it just sits in the packaging or their desk and they’re taking a macro shot, that tends to do much better for me.

The influencer and you need to work pretty closely on how to make the feature be the best that it can be.

If you’re writing your email pitch in a way that says “Hey, I’m this jewelry artist and I do this kind of work and I think your audience will love my products. I think this would be really great for my business.” If you come from a very “me me me” approach it’s not going to work out and it’s very off putting. This might sound like common sense, but a lot of people make this mistake. Writing an email pitch can be very strategic, so you really need to pay attention to how you’re writing them.

Once you’re found an email template or have written it in a way gets results, you can basically copy and paste it and reuse it. Obviously, don’t copy and paste it word for word, you want to make some changes to address that specific influencer.

When it comes to influencer marketing, unfortunately not all features will bring you sales.

What I want you to take away from this is don’t get too attached to one particular person that you’re pitching to.

I’ve certainly fallen into the trap of finding and influencer and thinking “Oh my goodness, she’s just perfect! She totally matches my brand and her audience will just eat up my jewelry! (No pun intended)”

And then not hearing from her even after following up or if she say no, it can hurt. That’s just part of the process, but most importantly don’t give up.

Now that you know that not all features will bring you sales, and this is true not just for influencer marketing but also when you get featured in a magazine. I have been featured in national glossy magazines that is sold in all Target stores and I’ve gotten zero sales before.

Once you’re managed your expectations and you know that not all features will bring you sales, that will at least help you with your emotions so you don’t feel too hurt or disappointed if the feature doesn’t pan out or bring you any sales.

Don’t think it doesn’t work, because I’ve been featured in places that got me tens of thousands of sales in a matter of a few weeks. It’s definitely possible, it’s what grew Tiny Hands, and I stand by this form of marketing and I highly encourage that you start doing it for your business as well.

If you want to learn more how to pitch your products to anyone, I recommend you go to In The Limelight.

If you sign up for the wait list you get enrolled in a free e-course that teaches you how to pitch your products.

Thanks for hanging out with me today! If you have any thoughts, ideas or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons above and below this post.

And if you love what you’re hearing, go ahead and subscribe to the Business Buzz Podcast on iTunes.

While you’re there, could you leave an honest review? It’ll take two minutes, tops. Ratings and reviews are extremely important – help me refine the content of the podcast and they also help it reach more makers and creatives like you!

If you have a question or guest suggestion for the podcast (it could be you or someone else!), head on over to BusinessBuzzPodcast.com. There’s a box for you to ask your question.

Talk to you again soon!

The post #3: Working With Instagram Influencers appeared first on Creative Hive.

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Read Transcript

I know Instagram is a pretty big topic and a lot of you guys use it. A lot of creative artist maker-type folks use Instagram because it’s such a visual platform and it just kind of just makes sense for us. It’s easy to use and it’s easy for us to understand.

More specifically, I want to address the question I get pretty frequently and I actually just got this in an email a few hours ago from Tim Tindall.

So the question is “How do I translate Instagram followers into sales?”

If you’re asking this question, where you’re probably at right now is you’re seeing some small Instagram growth with you followers. You’re gaining a few followers here and there and you’re optimistic, but now you’re thinking how to translate the momentum you’re getting on Instagram into sales on your Etsy shop or stand-alone website.

First, some background information.

I believe this is important stuff for you to understand so you can have managed expectations on this entire process of what it means to translate Instagram followers into sales.

When it comes to Instagram or social media in general, but Instagram in particular, there are two very important numbers that you should know. The first is followers – how many followers you have and the second is the engagement.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a metric that counts how much engagement you’re getting, but the way I normally calculate it is I would take an average of my 10 most recent posts and see how many people left likes and how many people left comments.

You can have a million followers, but if your engagement is 0% it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. Engagement is a very important metric because that is the true number or metric that helps you know how many eyeballs are actually seeing your post.

Even if you have a small following but your engagement is really high that’s great! You don’t need a huge following in order to make consistent sales on Instagram.

But here’s the thing. You can’t have a lot of engagement without a lot of followers. You can never have more engagement than you have followers. You can if people who are not following you are engaging, but I don’t really count those people because if they’re not following you they’re not people you can reach again and continue to communicate with them.

If you want to increase your engagement, you need to increase your followers.

Instagram or really any other social media out there is a numbers game.

Let me share a really clear example.

Let’s say, for example, you have a thousand followers on Instagram. What’s the percentage of people that click the link in your bio? If you know anything about Instagram you know that you only have that one link in your bio for people to click on.

Let’s make the assumption that you have a 1% click through rate. Out of one thousand followers you have 10 people click your link per day.

When it comes to e-commerce standards and bench marks, I always say that you want at least 100 visitors on your website per day in order to make one sale.

That is on assumption that you have a 1% conversion rate. If you have 100 people visit your website on a 1% conversion rate, you will make one sale out of those 100 people visiting your site.

How do you get from 10 visits per day to 100 visits per day to your website?

That just means you need to increase your numbers by 10 times. You can do this in a variety of ways. You could:

You can do this by writing more calls to action and make sure they’re being seen. In your description for every post you want to include “Click the link in my bio for more information.” Very few people actually say it, but if you want someone to do something you have to say it straight to their face and be direct about it.

The problem with just writing more calls to actions is that if you write them for every single post on Instagram you run the risk of looking very spammy.

That’s not necessarily the best answer here.

Instead of having a thousand followers, what if you could grow your following to ten thousand followers?

If you increased your click through rate to 2%, then you would for sure get one to two hundred visits per day to your website.

I personally think it’s easier to grow your followers because I have systems to do that and I know how to do it well. I’ve done it for both Creative Hive and Tiny Hands Instagram accounts and they now both have over 33 thousand followers. You just need to give it time.

Social media at its core is really slow and steady form of marketing for your business. It’s not really the sort of thing you do where if you have 500 followers you expect sales from that. So few people are clicking to your website in the first place, so you really need to increase how many followers you have.

In all honesty, with my Tiny Hands jewelry business, I’ve been running it since 2006. I didn’t hit my first tipping point for Tiny Hands with social media. In fact, the few things I was doing in the very early days was participating in a few forums and online message boards.

I don’t know if that is still a thing, but an equivalent to today are Facebook groups. I hung out with a lot of people in different message boards and it was kind of like Reddit and how it has different subreddits.

The beauty of message boards is that you get to put a signature at the bottom of your message. If I said something really cool they checked out my signature which included a link to my website, so I made some sales here and there.

What my tipping point was and how I started getting a lot of traffic and sales was when I got featured by a few very niche blogs that attracted my ideal customers. That sent traffic to my website, and not just any traffic it was people that were my ideal customers.

If social media is a slow and steady way to market your business and you can’t expect instant sales, why do people do it?

If you’re looking for bursts of growth with your business in terms of traffic which leads into sales, then I highly recommend that you do PR instead. PR or publicity is the way you would get your products featured on someone else’s blog who already has a huge following or on someone’s social media.

You could also use PR in conjunction with social media.

That means getting your product featured on someone else’s social media. A lot of people out there have millions of Instagram followers and if you could get your product on their social media feed you get to be seen by so many people.

If you are in a position where you’re looking for your social media followers to translate into sales, I highly recommend that you join thousands of other makes in the free 30-day sale a day challenge. It’s a free email course, you get one step every day for the next 30 days and you can join it at https://www.creativehiveco.com/challenge/

Thanks for hanging out with me today! If you have any thoughts, ideas or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons above and below this post.

And if you love what you’re hearing, go ahead and subscribe to the Business Buzz Podcast on iTunes.

While you’re there, could you leave an honest review? It’ll take two minutes, tops. Ratings and reviews are extremely important – help me refine the content of the podcast and they also help it reach more makers and creatives like you!

If you have a question or guest suggestion for the podcast (it could be you or someone else!), head on over to BusinessBuzzPodcast.com. There’s a box for you to ask your question.

Talk to you again soon!

The post #2: How To Translate Instagram Followers Into Sales appeared first on Creative Hive.

Six months ago, my assistant, Brittany Dunlap sent me this text:

“I’m on my way back to Ohio for a few days and thought of a podcast idea for you!”

It’s taken this project a lot of time to put together, but I’m excited to finally launch The Business Buzz Podcast today.

I share more about what you can expect in the first episode, but for now, let’s celebrate!

I’d like for you to join me in a giveaway.

I asked about prize ideas in the Creative Hive VIP Facebook group and almost everyone wanted a 1:1 session with me or membership to A Sale A Day Business System!

We’re going to do that, but I’ll also throw in some of my favorite books from 2016!

Here’s how to subscribe on your computer:

Click this link to head over to iTunes.

Here’s how to subscribe on your iPhone/iPad/iPod:

Grab your phone or device and go to the iTunes store and search “The Business Buzz Podcast”.

Here’s how to subscribe on your Android or other podcast app:

Search for “The Business Buzz Podcast” or enter in this URL if it asks for the podcast feed: https://www.creativehiveco.com/podcast

On February 13, I’ll be selecting five random winners from the comments below (and I’ll check to make sure you submitted a review!)

That’s it! Good luck!

Here’s the first episode:

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I wanted to share with you a kind of funny, kind of ironic, but kind of interesting story.

When I started my business Creative Hive Co, I told myself two things.

One, that I will never write a book and two, that I will never start a podcast.

But here I am today, hosting my own podcast.

It was mostly because, at the time, I had friends who have written books and who are published authors and writers and who do run podcasts and I got some insight as to how tedious and how time consuming writing a book or running a podcast can be.

Then you get to see the return on investment of either of these types of projects and it’s usually not very good.

My podcast got started because my assistant Brittany was on a road trip one day.

As you know with all road trips, especially if you’re not driving you start to think about things kind of like when you’re in the shower and some really good ideas come to you.

She sent me a text message with a really good idea and I was sold.

I thought it was a really good idea and over time I got convinced that a podcast was something I really wanted to do.

The reason I am doing it, the reason I started the Business Buzz Podcast, is not because of the money and I don’t ever intend to have sponsors, but I just want another way other than workshops, online webinars, and through my blog, to teach you and share with you what I know and you get to know how my brain works as well.

What is my podcast all about?

Throughout this entire show, I want to be sharing with you everything I know, marketing tips and strategies on how to build a stand out, online brand with your handmade business.

Now, I want to define what a brand means in my mind, but I think that the best way to define it is to contrast it with an Etsy shop.

We all know what Etsy is and what the landscape of an Etsy shop is like.

My missions for you is to build a brand that is long lasting and that can grow and live with you over 5 years, 10 years, 15 years or however long you want to be running your business. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a lot against Etsy.

I have my own Etsy shop, I love it, and I get sales from it, but running an Etsy shop by itself and not having your own website is in my opinion not a recipe for long term business building.

Etsy can change their layout overnight, they can take your shop down without any notice, they can change the layout of how Etsy looks and where you were once making tons of sales every day you might start seeing your traffic drop and all of that is outside your control.

My goal for you is to help you build a brand where you are like the house name brand that every family out there knows about, where you have insane brand awareness, and people are googling your name because everyone and their friends are telling everyone about your shop.

Having said that, here’s a little bit more about me just so you can get a glimpse of who I am as a person and a little bit into my life as well.

For those of you who don’t know, I am a total foodie.

I love cooking, I love baking, and most of all I love eating.

I love trying out new foods, trying out new restaurants, and I can bet you that I have probably eaten the craziest and weirdest things that you would either never want to touch with a ten-foot pole or that you have never heard of before.

I’m very adventurous with what kind of stuff.

I also love playing video games and board games.

I’m a total nerd and I’m really goofy.

I love making jokes, I’m a very positive and bubbly person, and I’m all about the positive stuff.

I hate watching TV shows that are super dramatic and make me want to cry and feel all tense inside – that’s really not what I’m all about.

One thing also that you may or may not know about me, is that I did not grow up in America.

In case I mispronounce a name, a thing, or if completely mess up saying an English or American proverb, idiom or slang, let’s just laugh about it and you can send me an email telling me how it should be said.

I would kind of identify as an entrepreneur.

I’m always coming up with product ideas and I actually run multiple businesses.

The most notable is Tiny Hands.

I started it in 2006 and this is where I design super cute scented food jewelry.

Think little cupcakes, waffles, doughnuts and I make necklaces, earrings, bracelets and best of all, they smell like what they look like.

Waffles smell like maple syrup, strawberry cupcakes smell like strawberries and so on.

I have done virtually every form of marketing that is out there revolving around running a handmade business.

I have tried so many different things, I’ve made mistakes, I’ve gone through failed projects, and I have seen a lot of success and I know what works and what doesn’t work and that is what my podcast is about.

It’s about me sharing my experiences and what I’ve found to be the best things that work to get you more traffic and more sales to your online brand.

Some of the really cool things that I’ve been able to accomplish with Tiny Hands:

You can go check this out yourself, but as of now I’ve got 30 thousand Facebook fans, about 32 thousand Instagram followers, I’m approaching 20 thousand Pinterest fans, and about 7 thousand email list subscribers.

I’ve also had a ton of experience working with brick and mortar stores, done a lot of wholesale, I’ve done trade shows, worked with sales representatives, and I do a lot of PR and publicity as well.

I have hired agencies and I’ve done it on my own, I’ve got Tiny Hands into some really huge TV shows like Parks & Recreation, and some other really small regional segments.

Some of the magazines Tiny Hands has been in: In Touch Magazine, Rachael Ray Every Day, Girls Life Magazine, and just a ton of other large online websites. I also have a small team of helpers. I have two production assistants and one of them also helps me do packing and shipping and I also have a virtual assistant that helps me manage all of the online stuff. I started Creative Hive Co in the fall of 2014 and this is where I help other makers, artists, and designers make a consistent income with their business online so they can spend more time with their family and do more of what they love.

The reason I started Creative Hive Co was, as I was learning the different ways that I could grow Tiny Hands, I took so many e-courses, I consulted with coaches and gurus, I read books, I attended so many webinars, and I was a part of so many forums and online communities just learning everything I could to grow my jewelry business.

Along the way, through my journey of exploring and learning, I came to realize that a lot of the marketing education that was available out there does not specifically address people who run handmade businesses.

Yes, a lot of the marketing concepts are the same, but people who run a handmade business have very specific and particular nuances that make it either more challenging or just different how you market your business.

There are topics and things that come up with a handmade business owner, that don’t come up for someone else’s product or someone selling an information product.

I recommend you listen to my podcast if you are a maker, artist or designer.

You might create something with your bare hands, you might sell a physical product like soap, jewelry, or children’s clothes or even if you’re an artist and you paint or illustrate online and you print your product on mugs or phone cases.

My podcast is for you if you want to build a long-term brand on your website and you want to get more traffic and more sales, so you can make a full-time income running your business.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean that if you have an Etsy shop the tips and strategies I have to share will not be relevant to you.

They absolutely still will be, but just so you know this will be my focus for the Business Buzz Podcast.

I want to give you an idea of what you can expect in future episodes.

We will be talking about things like raising prices, the differences between social media and PR, what are the three most important things you need for social media, how to run a subscription product for your business, how to track your numbers and why that’s important, blogging for your handmade shop, and outsourcing.

If all of that sounds interesting to you, what I would love for you to do right now is to head on over to BusinessBuzzPodcast.com and subscribe and please leave a review as well.

Thanks for hanging out with me today! If you have any thoughts, ideas or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons above and below this post.

And if you love what you’re hearing, go ahead and subscribe to the Business Buzz Podcast on iTunes.

While you’re there, could you leave an honest review? It’ll take two minutes, tops. Ratings and reviews are extremely important – help me refine the content of the podcast and they also help it reach more makers and creatives like you!

If you have a question or guest suggestion for the podcast (it could be you or someone else!), head on over to BusinessBuzzPodcast.com. There’s a box for you to ask your question.

Talk to you again soon!

The post #1: Welcome To The Business Buzz Podcast! appeared first on Creative Hive.