GSDdaily Jason Drohn

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.

Why email marketing is important?

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.



1. No-cost Sales Generator

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.

2. Content marketing

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.

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

How does an eCommerce Referral Program work?

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.

Setting-up eCommerce Referral Program

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.

Shopify

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.

Digital Products vs eCommerce Products

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 ware...

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.

Choosing Products For Your E-Com

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.

80-20 Rule

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.

Where To Source Your Products



1. Alibaba

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.



2. Amazon

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.

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?”

How I started my first eCommerce Store

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.

Two Ways of Sourcing Product

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

1. Find stuff that you’re going to sell yourself.

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.

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.

Getting Back At It

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.

…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.



1. Keyword Research

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.



2. Record A Video

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.



3. Video Transcription

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.