The Livelihood Podcast

Talking Points

1. Use a sales funnel, not a website.

2. Creating a value ladder for your business. 

3. Free content, Low ticket items (capture those leads!)

4. Mid and high ticket items

5. Driving traffic to your funnel

Summary
1. A sales funnel is a singular path along a purchasing journey with different stages along the way with an opportunity to convert a customer into the next phases of the funnel. The idea of a funnel is to reduce the amount of options to a customer, so that you reduce the purchasing friction (a confused mind is the enemy of a sale)

2. A value ladder is the framework behind your macro funnels. Most customers won’t buy everything you have to offer, and wouldn’t want to because they don’t know or trust your business. Over time you build trust and relationships with your customers and they may want to purchase more services or products from you. For example - A marketing company might first give you a free report, then a $200 audit, then $500 per month ad management, $3,000 ad campaign, $20,000 full creative and ad management.  

3. The best way to gather leads and contacts to begin trying to offer your goods and services to customers is by giving out free content that offers value to a potential customer (podcast, ads, website, blog); then to offer something FREE but more valuable in exchange for contact details (free report, video tutorial, webinar, ebook, book) or maybe a very low priced item like a $2.95 swiss army knife or a book.How 

4. We go into mid ticket items and what that means in your business.

5. We cover some of the ways right now you can consider driving traffic to your sales funnel to get you those sales. 

Help decide whether your should consider doing crowdfunding! It's a pretty confusing subject, but since we both have first-hand experience of running them, hopefully, it will help you make up your mind if it's right for you :)

Contents

1. Why crowdfunding is great (cashflow and risk). 

2. Build a funnel, not a community. 

3. Choosing the right platform.

4. Keep it simple stupid.

5. The single most important piece of advice.

Then we go through our quick tips:

- Get in touch with the crowdfunding platform you use and speak to them. Ask their advice on your page and see what they can do to help, this could be the difference between appearing on their searches and featuring in things like ‘projects we love’.

- Be (really) pessimistic with your delivery date. 

- Get the video made professionally, or go for a super simple video. 

- Set a date and just attack it. Put the blinders on and go.

- Know your costs inside out before crowdfunding - check out the webinar link in the cheat sheets. Includes a free Crowdfunding Costs Calculator. 

Contents - Launch Strategy

1. Getting your products to Amazon
2. Getting your first reviews
3. Amazon PPC
4. Customer service
5. Follow up an Email sequence to all buyers

Summary & Top Tips

• Create a shipment in Amazon Seller Central, and send your box identification labels to your supplier.
• Use helium10 link builder to artificially generate a search event when you give people the link to your product.
• Send your product link to people you know to buy your product and give “honest” reviews - WARNING: this is prohibited by AMZ, use with caution
• Alternatively - Amazon has an early reviewer program which costs $50 / £50, and incentivises the 1st 5 buyers of a product to review it.
• Use your keyword research to inform your PPC campaign
• You can run Ad campaigns based on keywords, similar products and product categories
• Run custom and automated ads for a week, then analyse your results. Scale the ads that are profitable, reevaluate the unprofitable ads
• When customers reach out with a complaint or query - always over-deliver on their requests. If someone has a complaint, offer a full or partial refund and let them keep the product.
• Reply to your reviews with additional information that might help other customers, and respond to poor reviews by apologising and ask them to message you so you can solve their problem.
• Create a follow-up email sequence for customers who bought your product. This is to ask customers for an honest review and to let them know a small amount about you and your business so that you can humanise your brand which entices customers to write a good review.

Join us as we talk more about selling on Amazon FBA, and focus on creating a listing that dominates your competition.

This episode we cover everything related to your Amazon listing, which is the product display page customers see when they search and click on to your product.

We discuss -

• Why you need to have an amazing product listing, and to outperform your competitors 100% of the time.
• Why you HAVE to create your own brand, and how to add "value" to your customer with your brand.
• How to get enhanced brand content, and why Amazon gives you more benefits for registering your brand.
• How to create great product images, and why you probably shouldn't shoot them yourself.
• Why product benefits are the most important part of your listing, and Alex's special technique for outlining benefits.
• The psychology behind your customers purchasing choice, and the methods we use to increase conversions.
• The two sales techniques of removing "pain" and increasing "value", and how you can influence your customers with sales copy that sells them.
• What are keywords; How to find your keywords, and the best place to put them in your listing.
• Why you will have 7x conversion rates selling on Amazon compared to other platforms.
• Luke's "sneaky" competitor comparison image that instantly increases your product value, and decreases your competitors.

Join us as we introduce ourselves properly and run through our experiences of selling online and starting businesses. Together we have both started, grown and even sold Amazon businesses. In this episode we discuss:

1. Find a category & find your product
2. Order samples
3. Design your packaging
4. Create your listing
5. Launch

We end by revealing our most embarrassing business moments. 

Summary & Top Tips

• Make sure your chosen product keyword has enough people searching for it to sustain your business. 
• Try to work with suppliers with low Minimum Order Quantities (MOQs) the higher the MOQ the more money you’ll have to spend upfront. Try to avoid adding your own brand to the product itself as this will usually result in a high MOQ (500+)
• Order samples and use the product yourself! Try to imagine how you’d feel about the product as a customer, is there anything that can be quickly improved?
• Read the reviews of similar products, if they’re all high reviews, then your product is likely to receive similar reviews. 
• Stick to one region at first, don’t start translating your instructions and listings to other languages until you’re confident the product sells well. 
• If you’ve never designed packaging before, ask the supplier if they already produce packaging. If so you may be able to produce your own artwork but keep the physical box design.
• Try to think about the product benefits that you’re providing, what’s the actual value that’s being provided. Is it in line with the price you want to charge?
• Be careful of all the different margins because they stack up. For a product costing £15.00, you want to be aiming for <£3.50 all in for product, packaging and shipping to your warehouse. These are known as COGS (of Cost of Goods Sold), basically, everything you need to spend before you can sell your first unit, they’re calculated per unit.
• Don’t set up Amazon seller central until you’re ready with your product since it costs around £40/$45 per month.