The Livelihood Podcast

What’s the perfect name for a business?

*Disclaimer* If you haven’t got a product yet, call it anything remotely sensible and don’t listen to this episode. It's a waste of your time - focus on your product first. 

Have a clear indication of the message you are trying to portray and what your brand needs to communicate. 

How are your main competitors naming their brands, and how will you fit into the market.

4 types of name - descriptive, suggestive, abstract and legacy.

Descriptive: names that describe what the company does like Snapchat, PayPal, DirecTV, Playstation and Toys R Us.

Suggestive: they set an evocative mood for the brand like Apple, Sky, O2, Red Bull and Uber.

Abstract: these are made up words that have a strong memorable sound and have the potential to gain new meaning like Google, Skype, Kodak, Yahoo and Rolex.

Legacy: these include founder’s names, nicknames and organisation acronyms that may already be in use, even if not officially, like Ferrari, Chanel, Adidas, IBM and H&M. Six Apart.

It could relate the history of the field that your in, like Karl Drais - inventor of the bicycle. Or Tesla

1. Short
2. Memorable
3. Unique
4. Descriptive
5. Available (companies house / trademark search) There’s a difference
6. Uses Alliteration
7. What domain name can you get

If you want to come across as a premium brand try to avoid the comical sounding names, you’ll want something more sophisticated. Try to imagine your target audience and figure out if they would appreciate it. 

Write a brief and try and hit it, but if you can’t just call it whatever and crack on you can always change it later.

What’s a good example of a company name?

Redcross

Volkswagen - Peoples Car

Loaf - soft sounding, rounded, describes bread which is warm and soft, also means lazing about. 

What’s a bad example of a company name?

Something difficult to pronounce or spell. Something so long that you can’t abbreviate it and it till makes sense. 

Abbreviations in general are very easy to forget. 

Testing if the name looks good - Write your shortlist of names in helvetica font without any branding to see if they look good just as a word.

Chris runs the Mandiri Beach Club Surf Camp with his two business partners. It's based on a remote beach on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Chris talks us through how they not only didn't have a business plan, but ended up falling foul to a notorious con artist in the area. The first few years Chris had to sleep with a machete under his pillow in order to protect themselves from attack. The guys eventually worked together to get the con artist deported, but even then things weren't easy. Chris talks us through his approach to building your ideal lifestyle, that way it's easy to take the positives when thing's aren't going so well. Super inspiring stuff from Chris! 

Questions we go over:

1. How has the rise of social media, especially instagram helped your business?
2. What advertising channels do you use to promote your business?
3. You have a really strong brand, how important is your brand image to your customers throughout their stay?
4. How many people do you have working for you? How difficult is it to manage staff?
5. How has it been running a travel business during corona virus?
6. What are your plans for the business in the future?
7. Finally we like to end the show on your most embarrassing moment in business, so try and think of an embarrassing story you have had in your business journey. 

https://mandiribeach.club/

This episode is a perfect starting point for anyone who hasn't ran a facebook or instagram ad before; or for people who haven't ran any successfully. We go over the fundamentals of why facebook ads are so powerful, and the simplest building blocks of the ads.

This is the first part in a longer series about facebook ads, where both of us take on the challenge of trying to make our first profitable ads.

How do facebook ads work?

1. Advertising is split into three groups, campaigns, ad sets and ads. 
   • Campaigns are a group of ad sets that have numerous amounts of creatives. You set the objective at the campaign level. Creative can be the images, video or whatever you choose to advertise with. 
   • Ad Sets are the different settings that you use for different audiences. 
   • Ads are the creatives or post. Text + video or images.
2. What is the infamous facebook pixel and why is it so powerful? 
3. Once they have interacted with an ad, be it a comment, like, share or click they will fall into a particular category or user.
4. What is the aim of the game? To convert into a sale so that the CPA or CPC or CPS is less than the cost of the margin.
5. Facebook ads are killing traditional advertising - because they are so targeted and learn. The whole - front of mind brand element is a myth. 

Fast Bucks Challenge 2

Can we make a profit on facebook ads in 2 weeks?

Rules - 

Unlimited budget
Not allowed to use agencies
Have to try and sell something

When we started the show we made a deal. We make 20 episodes, sit down and review whether it's worth carrying on or to quit. We launched our first episode on 5th April 60 days before this, which marks our 20th episode! To date we have had 850 downloads, some phenomenal guests and have consistently aired the show twice a week. Our Instagram page was a total disaster, but have we done enough to keep this podcast going??

Join us as we review our successes, and our failures in the journey of starting a podcast. 

What’s the point? To grow our listenership, and to retain those listeners long term.

Continue consistently “turning up” and putting out 2 podcasts per week.

• It is important to be consistent with the content for multiple reasons - it might help with the algorithms, it keeps our momentum going and forces us to work fast and effectively, the episode we miss might be the one that gets traction

Creating the website and trying to master SEO.

• As we product long form content, it compliments blogs and articles. Leading from the examples we learnt from Jiles and Nick Loper.
• Start building a mailing list, so that we can communicate directly with our listeners.

Start writing/transcribing 1 or 2 articles per week for the website

• We will begin turning our episode themes into articles or blog posts. Some of them will be long form “step - by - step” style, some of them short form “7 things that…” style.

Leverage other people’s audiences, and get high value guests

• We will try and get guests who have large followings with active fans, they can then share the episodes with their audience as well as backlinks to our website.

Backlinks

• Backlinks give a domain authority, which helps google define whether it is an important site to rank in search. We can get backlinks by putting out really good content people want to share, helping out reporters, and writing guest posts for other blogs.

Create new and innovative content that might set us apart from other podcasts

• 2 part episodes like the quick buck challenge, and the 3 part complete Amazon FBA series are good pieces of content that not all podcasts are doing. We can continue to find exciting ways to inspire people

Working effectively and (when we can afford to) outsourcing

• We have to treat the podcast like a business, and that means minimising our input and maximising our output. Which frees up our time to be more creative and stops us from burning out with the podcast and other ventures.

In this episode we talk to Elliott Hawkins, the man who built a 6 figure e-commerce empire, adding a brutal twist to everyday items. 

Elliott started the Brutal Gift Company back in 2017 when he had a month off work. He explains how we discovered a gap in the market for balloons printed with rude slogans (rather than the usual nice messages) and immediately ordered 120,000 balloons!

Elliott's main sales channels are Amazon FBA and eBay, but he also discusses how and why he is manoeuvring his brand towards his own hosted eCommerce site. 

He talks about the steep learning curve his eCommerce journey was, but how the initial sales of the product gave him the confidence to keep going and keep improving his business methodology.

Originally naming his company Balloons Against Humanity, Elliott ran into some legal difficulties with a famous card brand with a similar name, before re branding to Brutal Balloon Company.

We discuss how using creativity can add huge value to a brand, by turning a commodity into a gift/luxury product; and why this is important to distinguish yourself in the market. Elliott discussed how you can change the value of everyday items by understanding the buying incentives of the customer, and making sure that the during the gifting process, both sides walk away happy. 

After having 12 months of reasonable sales, Elliott decided to quit his job to focus full time on his business, and talks about the struggles he went through before a big upsurge in sales from his Donald Trump "Dump on Trump" themed toilet paper.

Elliott talks about how he has been able to scale his business and product line, by using his previous market knowledge to estimate risk and order volume accordingly.

Finally, we consider the risks and benefits of selling on Amazon and what Elliot recommends to new sellers or people considering starting on Amazon.

Find out how we did in our two week long Etsy challenge. Is it possible to start from nothing and make a profit on Etsy in two weeks? Luke and Alex chat through their strategies (or lack of) as they take their first punt on Etsy. 

We discuss: 

• How much money we made (or lost) by creating a store from scratch on Etsy in 2 weeks with only about 15 hours of work each.
• Print on demand: pros and cons - why it is the best method for testing a new business.
• Benefits of the simple advertising platform on Etsy - if you struggle with the idea of advertising, this platform could be for you.
• Which products went well and which ones didn't. We talk about how we might scale some of the products that began to work.
• What mistakes we made, so you don't have to!
• Why it's an amazing challenge to do yourself and what you stand to learn

Who should be listening to this? If you’re thinking about selling a physical product then these tips and tid bits should help you out?

1. What is the point of packaging? Two aspects - to protect the product in transit and to present the product nicely on arrival. To give those tingly Apple unboxing moments. 
2. Two parts to packaging design. Artwork and hardware so we’re going to go through them separately:
3. Hardware: 
   1. the actual folded card. This is produced using something called a net, and this a flat file. Imagine unfolding a cardboard box, well draw a chalk line around it and there’s your net. Most is done using adobe illustrator. 
   2. If you’re stuck for ideas around a type of packaging to go for or don’t want to design your own, have a look on alibaba and just type in your product name and packaging and there should be some good examples. 
   3. Card comes in different weights. 
4. Artwork:
   1. this is your opportunity to stand out. You want your product packaging to define your brand and for it all to tie in neatly with one another. 
   2. Pinterest is your best friend here. Most brand and creative work is just reprocessing amazing ideas you see on other products and packaging for your brand. It’s loads of fun and can get some amazing results. 
   3. Colour palettes - again using pinterest to define your core colours and then use a website called coolors.com to pull out matching colourways to define your brand palette. This is essential for making sure the packaging and eventually the product images and packaging all looks like it’s from the same company. 
   4. File layout - when you’re sending a custom file to a supplier it will be on the same illustrator file on different layers, on layer one will be the die-cut, which will stamp the card out, then layer 2 will be the artwork itself, then layer three will be the fold lines - usually denoted by dashed lines, and then layer 5 is additional instructions like spot UV or maybe you want some gold embossing to get a bit of fancy details. 
5. Instructions & inserts - this usually done either on illustrator or using in design. Our packaging supplier can print from a pdf.  
6. Make sure you order samples! Very important for packaging. 
7. Typical prices for packaging.

Links

https://coolors.co/

Yep, it's true. If you've always wanted to sell products and didn't know where to start this is the episode for you. If your dream is to start your own clothing line or street wear brand don't do anything until you listen to this ep. 

We discuss:

1. What is print on demand? What are the best sites for print on demand? 
2. What are the pros and cons? 

Pros

• Easy Set Up: You don’t need to hire the best web designers to get your Print-on-Demand business up and running. There are countless plugins, templates, themes and guides you can use to launch your online store.
• Amazingly high quality assets
• Low Startup Cost: With traditional businesses, you must have a good stock of cash to purchase inventory and get your store up and running. With the Print-on-Demand business model, even $100 is enough to get you going.
• No Inventory Management: Your supplier handles pretty much everything from order printing, packaging, and shipping which means you don’t need to handle any amount of inventory. Much of your remaining time can be used to focus on making more sales.
• Ability to Customize: One of the biggest advantages of Print-on-Demand is that it gives you a chance to create and sell unique designs.
• Scale & Test with No Risks: With Print-on-Demand, you aren’t directly involved in printing or production so there’s no major monetary investment from your side. Plus, you can easily scale, test and modify your designs as and when you need to without any major financial risk.

Cons

Doesn’t offer that much range. Although it does do organic cotton!?

3.What is the best way of making your first sale? Find a popular niche 
4. Use it to build your credibility as an online shop. 
5. What type of products can you sell? Very easy to offer customised products. 
6. What is your typical profit margin? You can actually adjust the level of margin you expect to make on each product, anything from $1 per sale to $10 on a t shirt but it depends on the category.
7. Integrating with other platforms, i.e Etsy, ebay, Amazon or setting up your own store Shopify
8. Promoting products - platform ads - Etsy, Amazon. Or Google and Facebook Ads.

Useful Links

Chris Conrady (Custom print on demand expert) - https://www.youtube.com/user/InvolvingChris

Freelancing is the process of selling your work/expertise on a project or contract basis. Usually you and the client will define a scope of work, and you will either work on a single payment based on the project or on an hourly rate.

Freelancing can cover everything, but in this episode we are mainly focused on jobs paying over $50/hour (at a high level), which would cover most professional services in the USA and UK. If you are a Designer, Marketer, Manager, Programmer or you have a skill set that you know is sought after, then freelancing might be for you.

1. Websites like PeoplePerHour and Upwork allow you to advertise your services to businesses. UK based - Worksome is more premium, and have lower competition than Fiverr, upwork and peopleperhour
2. Should you set hourly prices or project prices?
3. Define what your ideal client looks like.
4. Create a portfolio that showcases your expertise and highlights relevant past experience. The purpose of your portfolio is to educate, spark interest, and convince potential clients that they’ll want to choose you for their technical needs.
5. Leaving video messages for people, or get them on the phone ASAP. It builds trust very quickly and increases conversion rates substantially.
6. Finding clients on these platforms often leads to more work off the platform, so try and find ideal clients rather than jobs.
7. Build the presentation as you work. This way you don’t double the time. 
8. Present your work and then present future work. 
9. Try to focus the client brief down to set deliverables. I will do A or B for you, not vague goals like - “I will increase your social media presence” “I will get you 200 more followers by X date” 
10. Build your credibility fast. Most of these websites work off reviews, so try and get some low paying jobs first to build social proof.