Top Ecom Advice from Purple Mattress & More

Ezra: Bob’s your uncle. Robert’s your mother’s brother. Hey, Ezra here behind the scenes at the Blue Ribbon Mastermind. I don’t always say it like that, but this time, I thought I’d come with a little power. It’s a group of seven and eight-figure E-Commerce business owners. Half of them are Amazon business owners. Half of them are traditional like E-Commerce Shopify retailers and we get together and we share what’s working in our businesses. I talk about marketing and what I’m doing and what I’m up to and how I’m developing products that are sort of good for the world and profitable, you know, businesses that have a mission attached to them. And some of the stuff that we focus on like direct response and Facebook ads and video. And we hear from members about like what they’re doing, how they’re winning on Amazon, how they’re winning in E-Commerce, how they’re going to retail, how they’re using television as a means of visibility for their products. And so I thought it would be fun to sit some of them down and ask them like, “Hey, what are you guys doing in 2018? What are you looking forward to? What do you have your attention on?” So this will just be some interviews to some of my members. I hope you enjoy it.

Bryant: Bryant Garvin, I’m the director of the YouTube, Search and Display Advertising at Purple. I also run a consulting and training business called Stacked Ads. 2018 looks crazy. We have actually invented an acronym called B-S-C, it stands for bat-shit crazy. Like, people are like, “Hey, are you going aggressive?” “No, we’re going B-S-C.” And that’s really Purple, like, as an example, right, how quick it’s grown from zero to where it’s at today. Same thing with everything else that I’m working on. It’s just crazy growth. It’s stretching the limits of what we can do. One of the most important pieces that everybody misses, especially when talking about YouTube advertising, is everybody tries to put it into the AdWord Square Peg or the Facebook Square Peg and it’s really a round and it just doesn’t fit, right because people that are going to YouTube are completely different than the people that are going to Facebook. They’re there to do one thing, watch a video, and you’re interrupting.that experience, so the likelihood that they’re gonna click on your ad and go to your site, like they may with a Facebook ad or a Google Display Network ad or even the search ad, right, is very slim. But what does happen is it builds awareness for your brand.

Vanessa: Founders in this space, a lot of times, come up with an idea that they developed in their kitchen or their garage and the thing with the product-based business is you can get going quite quickly, which leads to a lot of opportunity, but it also leads to a lot of challenges. They’ll pivot too much or they’ll try too many different tactics at too many times they or not do it for long enough. Developing the mindset of how do you assess something in your business to keep that focus and knowing when you should pivot, when you should persevere, or is this something you actually need to stop and you need to pause to move forward. In these businesses, because they are predominantly online, founders can work in a silo. And so, really putting yourself out there to ask questions and really develop a network and get the help that you need is something that I see a lot of founders struggling with as well.

Michael: My name is Michael LaHatte, I’m a serial entrepreneur, we have a eCom business, we run it on a Shopify store. Yeah, selling’s, selling, you know, I mean, the stuff it takes to sell our market has been the same things cavemen were doing or whatever, you know what I mean? And for thousands of years, people have been persuading each other. Once I wanna learn something, I study everything, yeah, I just dive off. I’m like a bulldog with a dirty sock. I just won’t let go until I figure it out. And so I start studying. I knew Adrian Morrison was doing eCom, and then Ezra, big daddy in eCom, and a lot of other guys, so I’m just started following everybody because I knew I needed to learn how they were doing. I knew had to sell, I knew how to market, but I didn’t know how to do it with a physical product online efficiently, effectively, correctly, and all that. And once I fit all those pieces together, that’s all I needed. You know, you can’t be a one-man-show for long because, like, our company had to get to 1.5 million a month and did everything on the digital side alone. But by that point, you’re like an octopus on roller skates. You can’t continue that, you’ve gotta hire a team, you gotta find your weaknesses, hire and replace, better talent. Our goal this year is actually 250 million total. I don’t know if we’ll hit it. That’s like I was saying in there, I’ll die trying, you know, but I know for sure, we’ll probably do a hundred million online. I think people are looking for an easy button. There is no easy button. You get run over looking for an easy button.

Will: My name is Will Mitchell, I run StartupBros and Simply Organic Beauty. 2018 for us is an exposure year. We have a message that we know resonates with people. And I think when you have a message that you know is resonating, is making an impact in the people’s lives that you’re trying to affect, the game becomes scaled, the game becomes getting that message out to as many people as you can. A business is just a way for me to communicate a message to someone. If that message that I’m communicating is not having an impact on that person, if their core identity is not resonating with what I’m saying, no amount of marketing is gonna fix that.

Jony: My name is Jonathan [SP] Volk, and I have an E-Commerce business, an automotive E-Commerce business. In terms of SCO, a lot of business owners are really sleeping on it. They’re focusing mainly on paid traffic, I feel like. And SCO is one of those legs in a stool that’s gonna help increase your valuation and also just be another platform for you to grow on. Explosive growth has come from SCO strategies that we’ve implemented, but it’s a layer. You really gotta layer things upon each other. And there’s no one particular strategy that’s gonna build you into this, like, overnight success. It’s a long-term play. I think we’re all trying to build long-term income. We’re not just trying to make cash and get out, build quality products, and so if that’s what you’re trying to do, SCO makes a lot of sense.

Ezra: Call it Saran because it’s a wrap. Kinda always wanted to say that on video. That means it’s over. We’re to the end of the video. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. If you’re interested in Blue Ribbon Mastermind, you have to be a, you know, $50,000 or over a month retailer. Check it out, you know, smartmarketer.com/mastermind. It’s a really amazing group. This is not meant to be like a pitch video for Blue Ribbon Mastermind, but while we’re talking about it, I thought, “Hey, why not? I’ll tell you about it.” So we are the only group of 80 plus, 7 and 8 figure traditional and E-Commerce retailers, and we’re great, we’re open, we share with one another, we help each other. I believe there are power in groups. I believe that community is where it’s at in life and that you wanna get together with folks who are like-minded who are, you know, gonna support you in your journey. So if you’re not at that level and you’re just interested in, you know, more free courses and content about how to grow your business, please stay tuned to the Smart Marketer Blog, if you’re not watching this on the blog. And if you are interested, check out smartmarketer.com/mastermind. My name is Ezra Firestone, thank you so much for watching.