My Easy-to-Copy Content Marketing Strategy

Ezra: Hey, we’re live. Ezra Firestone here, new.smartmarketer.com. I got some stuff to talk to you about today. I’m gonna double check on the old mobile device here, make sure that we are indeed live on the Facebook page. It looks like we are. I’m gonna go ahead and share that to my personal profile and there we go. Okay. So, a lot of stuff. You’re too fat, you’re not the right color, you’re too hairy, you’re not tall enough, you don’t look right, you don’t smell right, everywhere you go you’re getting this conditioning that you’re wrong. And you believe it. That’s the problem that you have is that you buy into all that stuff. And the only difference between you and I and where I’m at in my business and where, if you’re a subscriber of Smart Marketer and you’d like to go, is that I don’t. I don’t buy all of that messaging about how I’m broken and need fixing. And that frees me up to play offense. I’m not playing defense, I’m not worried about my appearance.

I don’t think that…you’re gonna receive as a person–I’m changing the subject now midstream–but you’re gonna receive all this messaging about how you’re broken and wrong and flawed and need to be a certain way to be right. And if you just let all that go, if you just have yourself as you are now as right, it’s easy to get better. Good things improve faster than bad things. If you think that you’re bad and broken and wrong and nothing is right, then you can only get to good. You’re already starting from bad, if that makes sense. So if you can approve of yourself and if you can approve of who you are as a human being, then it’s easier to improve. It’s easier to move in the direction of positive things in your life because you have now as right instead of having now as wrong and trying to fix it. You’re approving of where you are now and then you’re moving in the direction of more. It’s just a little switch in how you think about yourself, a little switch in how you think about things.

It also helps in your relationships with the people in your life. What you will find is if you start approving of people, genuinely approving of them, actually legitimately approving of them, all of the sudden they’re a lot more fun to be around. They’re a lot nicer. They’re more willing to do the things that you want them to do because you’re actually coming from the perspective of finding them right as they are instead of telling them all the ways that they’re screwed up and then asking them to change. Negative reinforcement doesn’t work. But you have to genuinely approve of someone.

So I think that’s a big one for people who are looking to improve their lives, grow their businesses, move in the direction of having more in their life, is have yourself as right now. Have things that…you know, don’t buy into all this conditioning about how you’re flawed that you’re gonna get from society. They’re gonna tell you…this is how people make money. They tell you that you’re broken and then oh, they have the solution. They handily have the solution to this problem that they’ve just convinced you that you have.

So I was at this…I just got back from a three-week trip. I went and visited my parents in California, which was really fun. Then I did a workation with my team. Actually, I was calling it a team retreat and then–don’t worry, we’re gonna talk about some technical business stuff here in a moment–but I was calling it a team retreat and I thought, “I really ought to reframe that and call it a workation so people expect that we’re going to be working and -cating.”. Which we did, we worked and we -cated. And we 20 of our 40 team members in Santa Cruz, California, which was really fun, in a big house. And I did some content, I shot some behind-the-scenes. So I’ll release that in the blog soon. Then we went and we ran our Blue Ribbon Mastermind and then we went to the Traffic and Conversion Summit, where I spoke and I also had a booth.

And it was really interesting the experience of abandoning my routine because a lot of people…like, routine is a really, really, really good thing, right? Getting into routines and doing the same thing consistently over time. You hear me harping on about consistency all the time. Anytime I’m doing content, there’s something in there about how the skill set that you wanna develop as a human being is the skill set of mastery. Which is simply the willingness to put your attention in one area over time, being willing to pick up that instrument every day for 30 minutes and play it. I’m gonna go ahead and unplug my phone here. Pick up that instrument every day for 30 days and play it, being willing to consistently put your attention in one area over time, it’s a very…whoops, now my phone’s dead. It’s a skill set that you wanna acquire. And routine is something that allows you to…it sets you free. It gives you…you’re doing this at this time every day. And so you end up with this routine but routine is not the goal.

Routine is a tool that you use and you’re going to break routine. Like if you have it that any time you break a routine, a new diet, a new workout program, whatever it is that that’s bad, then you’re hosed. Because you’re gonna go in these ebbs and flows of solid to your routine and then breaking your routine. So you wanna use routine as a tool. It’s not your actual goal, it’s just a tool that you use to achieve your goals. And so this trip I broke a lot of my routines. And it was kind of nice. You know, I got some…a fresh perspective, I got mixed up. But man, it was exhausting.

And the point that I’m getting to is that it was exhausting. And one of the common ways that I see people being victimized is by their emotional state. So they get into some emotional state where they’re tired or they’re agitated or they’re angry or whatever that emotion, they’re sad and then they let that dictate their actions. You can feel emotion and choose as a person to act how you wanna act. Your emotional state does not dictate your actions. You are not a victim of your emotional state. You can feel a lot of intensity of emotion and still make the choice of how to act.

A good example of this is that someone will be out of control with rage until a bigger badder person walks in the room. Then guess what? They get it under control. So you really are in control of your emotional state and you’re really in control of your actions at all times. And it was interesting for me because I speak…so that’s a really freeing viewpoint. That’s a really…it kind of opens you up and has you feel a lot more responsible for your life and a lot more free when you take responsibility for your behavior. And you don’t have it that the way that you feel should then dictate how you behave. That’s not a valid excuse in my world. If you are behaving some way because you’re overcome with emotion, I don’t buy it. I mean look, sometimes it’s gonna happen but in general, as you go through your life, you can be responsible for your behavior.

And so I speak on these stages. And so I spoke at Traffic and Conversion Summit in front of like a couple thousand people,and you always feel this intensity of emotion. You feel like your heart’s beating and your excited. And it’s a big a thing. You’re getting up there, you gotta perform, you gotta deliver value. And help people grow their business and stuff like that is what my agenda was for this thing. But I do this little routine where before I go on, take a couple deep breaths, I feel that emotion. And this time I was so tired that I didn’t have as much of that. I didn’t have as much of the intensity because by the time I got to my speaking slot at this big event, I had come from workation, I had come from running my mastermind. And so I was really tired and that being tired actually helped me. So I think one the things I’ll do, I’ll take that data point…I’m a big fan of looking at what happened and using that for your benefit in the future. And so what I found was that maybe I should do a workout before I speak on stage so that I’m a little bit…you know, I’ve gotten a little bit of that energy out.

Anyways, if you…we’re gonna get into some content here. I just was kind of kicking this off. I can see we’ve got several hundred people with us which is kind of cool. If you just joined, we’ve got Daniel Sanchez from Spain, we’ve got Joshua Singer telling me to preach. Dean Turner say’s, “What’s up?”, Rico says I did a great job at the Traffic and Conversion Summit. Thank you so much. If you have questions about your business or specific to anything that I’m talking about, feel free to chime in with them and I will answer them in the comment sections. My homie Rob from the big island of Hawaii or maybe he’s from Maui.

But anyways, two quick points about how to have a little bit more sense of responsibility for your world, responsibility for your life, is number one, you don’t have to a victim of your emotional state. And number two, if you don’t buy into all the bullshit that’s being sold to you about how you’re so flawed, you’re a little bit freer, you’re not playing defense, you’re not constantly trying to fix yourself. You can let go of all of these viewpoints about how you’re flawed, and how you’re broken, and how you’re wrong, and how you don’t smell right, and how you’re not the right shape, and how you’re not the right age, and how you’re not the right size. All this stuff that you’re being sold about how you’re broken, you can let go of that and that frees you up to play offense instead of playing defense. And it gives you sort of the ability to see a bigger game.

And now we’ll get into business stuff. So I see Sue Ellen Hughes is in the house. Kevin has the question that, “What is my content strategy like for Smart Marketer and my other e-commerce businesses?” I will get into our content strategy in just a moment. Firstly, I’d like to show off a new feature of our Zipify Pages application which I think…which we had been working on. We’re like several hundred thousand dollars invested in this application. If you don’t know about it, it’s an application that allows you to make long form and other types of landing pages and product offer pages for your Shopify store. One of the features that we’ve just finished is the ability for it to connect to your theme and use your store’s header and footer.

So in a second here, I’m gonna go to the computer and we’ll take a look. So here you can see this is my store, Boom! by Cindy Joseph. You’ll notice that I have this header and I’ve got a footer here. And on many pages, I also have this header which has some imagery of my target market in it. Now, it used to be inside of Zipify Pages. If you were to create a page, for example, just put in any random page here and you were to create that. And the cool thing about Zipify Pages, by the way, is we have all these different blocks in here. We have headers, we have dynamic product blogs, we have timers and all this kind of stuff. So you would put in your header, the header that you wanted. You’d then add in maybe you wanted to go into like a product offering section where you wanted to show off one of your products. Or maybe you wanted to have like perhaps a video element. Or maybe instead of using a custom page, you wanted to use one of our templates in here. Based on our proven pages that we’ve tested in our business, you wanted to use a page like this or maybe one of our video pages. Whatever it was, you used to have to use the Zipify header and footer.

Well, what we’ve recently finished and will be rolling into the application on Monday, which I’m very excited about and I’ll just add another page in here, is the ability for you to have a custom header and footer for your store. So let’s say, for example, I threw some content in here–I’m a big fan, as you know, of long form left-right content. So I’m like text and image and then maybe I wanna go image and text underneath that, so I got that long form going on. In the page settings what I can do under layout is I can use the theme’s header and footer and save that. And then when I publish this, what’s gonna happen–I’ll just publish this to the store for a second and preview it on the store is it’s gonna dynamically pull in the header and footer from my store.

So now I get to use the drag-and-drop functionality and drag-and-drop sort of layout of Zipify Pages, all the different blocks, all the different ability that we have in here to create high-quality landing pages for your e-commerce store but sandwich it in between your Shopify store’s header and footer. So it almost replaces themes in a sense. So that’s a really cool feature that we just finished, that we’re super excited about for all of you as Zipify Pages customers. I know many of you watching this are Zipify Pages customers. That’s one of our flagship products.

I’ll just show you real quick that all these videos, everything that I do, Smart Marketer, these videos that we produce, the content that we put out there, is sponsored by us, Zipify Pages. I’m gonna play a quick little video about Zipify Pages for those of you who don’t know it. And when you get back, when we all get back in like two minutes, I will start answering the questions in the feed. So, Zipify Pages, check it out. I’ll tell you about the sales page when the video is done playing and I’ll see you in a minute.

Voiceover: Looking for a quick and easy way to create high converting landing pages and sales funnels for your Shopify store? Well first, what is a landing page? Well, it’s any specific page that you send traffic to to prompt a specific result. Let’s say a newsletter sign up or a holiday sales page or any goal that you might have. And if you create a series of pages that share a common goal–let’s say a landing page, a sales page, and a post-checkout thank you page–then you have a sales funnel.

Landing pages are perfect for growing your business by boosting leads and sales. But right now there’s a big problem. To create a landing page for your store, you can either hire a designer and a developer to create one for you–and that takes time and money–or you can use a landing page builder, which is faster and less expensive. But the problem is none of the landing page builders on the market integrate with your Shopify store. So you have to deal with confusing plugins and subdomains and skewed analytics, which is extra cost and extra hassle.

Well now, there is a solution. Introducing Zipify Pages. Zipify Pages is an e-commerce landing page and sales funnel builder that seamlessly integrates with your Shopify store. Start by choosing a template from our ever-growing template library. These page templates come directly from our eight-figure e-commerce stores that are built on Shopify. We test what works and we put our best templates into Zipify Pages. After selecting a template, it’s easy to customize it to fit your store by using our drag-and-drop editor. You can choose from our collection of conversion elements–or blocks, as we like to call them–like featured products, countdown timers, social proof sections, and more. Once you have the page just the way you like it, click publish. It’s as easy as that.

You now have an amazing new page published right to your Shopify store. Your page will look great on any device. It’s 100% mobile responsive and all of the data is under one domain. So tracking leads and sales and Facebook is easy, simple, and accurate. High-quality landing pages and sales funnels as soon as you need them. Zipify Pages, check it out today.

Ezra: Zipify Pages, that’s our application. You can go to zipify.com/apps/pages here and you can learn more about it. This is the sales page for Zipify Pages, it will tell you all the different things that are available in it. And we are gonna double the price. We’re at 750 active members right now. Once we get to our 1000 members, we will be raising our pricing because we’re not making any money on this thing right now. We’re super heavily invested. We just need to get our user base, our flagship user base, and then we’re going to…once we reach our 1000 member user base, we will then raise the prices to be more inline with what they should be.

So now–and that’s again at zipify.com/apps/pages–I will start answering the questions in the feed. We’ve got over 180 people with us live right now, which is cool. Thanks for coming you guys. This sort of like spur of the moment. We didn’t plan this, I didn’t email you about it ahead of time. I just went live and so I’m really happy that a bunch of you guys are here with me. I’ll start answering some questions.

Just a reminder of what we discussed a few minutes ago. Everyone is gonna sell you on how you’re broken and flawed and wrong. And if you can not buy into that then you’re not spending all your time in playing defense. You feel right about yourself, you can then create a business and life that you’re interested in. And also, you do not have to be a victim of your own emotional state. So those were the two points that we covered from a sort of mindset perspective when we started this. So back to the…if you have questions, things you wanna ask me, you have my attention. I am here, I will pay attention to you, I will answer your questions about how you can grow your business or about how you can have more pleasurable relationships or about whatever you’re interested in asking me. I may not answer if it’s weird or creepy or something. But for the most part, I’ll probably answer it. So here we go.

Kirian says he’s loving Zipify Pages. Thanks, man. Frank’s in the house, Eric Young’s in the house, Phil’s in house from Calgary. Okay, Kelvin Ma says, “What’s your content strategy like for both Smart Marketer and your e-commerce businesses?” They’re a little bit different. I’ll start with e-commerce because I think most people are running an e-commerce business here now. I would like to pull up a page here. I’m not gonna pop up my screen just yet but I wanna pull up a page to give you an idea of a certain something real quick. Take me a second to find it here. I’m gonna have to log in to the back-end of my store, actually.

So when we look at content, what you have to understand is that what your business is, is a series of communications and a group of people. So what you’re doing is you’re engaging with a group of people around the collective experience that they are having. So there are groups of people who are having experiences. And a business creates content and engages with a group of people who are having an experience about that experience and offers solutions to problems that that community faces.

So if you look at Smart Marketer, we are having the collective experience of being interested in building businesses, in being entrepreneurs, in growing our businesses online, in managing teams. And so what I do is I create content that relates to that topic that this group of people is experiencing. And then I make offers to that group of people that I think would be beneficial to them: courses, software, things like that. For Boom, it’s about the experience of being a woman over 40 in this society and what that means and what that looks like. So I create content about that particular experience that group of people is having and then I also make them offers. And so what I’m looking for here is my Valentine’s Day sale. And I have found it. So let’s take a look at this.

So what I think a business should do…and let’s go back to face camera for just a moment. Two things. Number one is once a week at minimum, you should have a piece of content that you are emailing to your subscriber database. There’s five ways that you can communicate, that a brand communicates with its customers. Number one, email. People are on your email list, you email them. Number two, pixeled audiences. Meaning they visited your website or they’re a Facebook fan or they’ve engaged with you in some way And you have put a pixel on their computer, which means you can target them with advertising. So two, ads. Number one, email. Number two, ads.

Number three, Facebook Messenger. It’s a new channel of communication. We are going to see the rise of Messenger as the way that we engage with businesses. You’re gonna book your travel inside of Messenger, you’re going to buy your products inside of Messenger apps, you’re gonna order your Uber inside of Messenger apps, you’re gonna make reservations at restaurants, all gonna happen. The way that your phone now has 1000 applications on it, it’s not gonna be that way. It’s gonna be one Messenger app and all these different services are gonna plug into that API. And that Messenger app is Facebook Messenger. Over the next 18 months, you’re gonna watch this happen, it’s amazing. So then there’s Facebook Messenger, there are desktop push notifications and mobile push notifications which most people aren’t using yet.

So when you look at the fact that you’re essentially a…your content that you have is distributed through multiple communication channels. So when you talk about content strategy, I assume you’re asking, “What do you communicate and when and how?” So those are the ways that you communicate. Whenever we have a new communication to make to our community, we email it, we send it to the folks who are subscribed to our Facebook Messenger, in Facebook Messenger push notification, we use a desktop push notification, we run ads about it. We communicate it on every channel that people are paying attention to us, we post it across all of our social channels. So what exactly should you do? Well every six weeks, you should run a sale campaign. Every six weeks without question, without fail, you should be offering your community some kind of incentive to do business with you again. And I’ll talk to you about how to keep them engaged and how to stay in conversation in a moment.

So here’s an example. And even if you’ve got 50 people in your community, it’s gonna still work. It will still work if you’re doing the whole process, which is engage with relevant, high-quality content that’s interesting to that group, which we’ll talk about in a moment. And every six weeks have some form of discount or some reason why they should engage with your product. Here is an example of our Valentine’s Day sale page. It actually happened on February 17th. It was the Valentine’s Day weekend sale because we didn’t get our stuff together. And we had headline, sub-headline call to action. It’s a single item order page, so this is not actually a traditional sales page that we would do. It’s offering one item.

And what we did that was interesting was we used what’s called a pre-purchase order bump. So you’ll notice that most of the time, you add a product to the cart, they go to the cart and check out. Here, what we’re doing is the product gets added to the cart when they click the add to cart button but instead, we drop them on a page that says, “Hey, would you be interested in this other product at a discount?” You can see it here. We’ve got a little bit of a progress bar going and then we have the option for them to engage with other products that are complimentary or to shop our store. And then you can click add to cart here and it’s actually the sale is over, so it’s wrong.

And one of the things that you wanna be looking at as a business owner is average order value. And you owe it to yourself to figure out how to have a high average order value because if you can increase the amount that people are ordering every time they buy from you, you then have more money to do advertising, more money to invest in better products, more money to invest in better customer support, money to create a better experience for the people who are engaging with you.

So I think you should be running a sale event once every six week. And I think once a week, you should be sending out or amplifying via advertising, high-quality relevant engaging content. It doesn’t have to be content that you can create, it can be curated content. You could find a YouTube video about knife skills for your group of people who are chefs and you can send it out, “Hey, check out this cool video we found.” Post it to your blog. So once a week, you wanna send an email communication with some kind of content that is topically relevant to the conversation that the community is having. And there isn’t a business that’s out there that’s not engaging with a community of people about an experience that they’re having. That’s what businesses do. So whoever you’re serving is having some kind of experience, is some group of people. And so you wanna talk to them about that. That was a bit of a long answer.

Lonnie says to keep a smile on your face. Bart’s here from Western Australia. I don’t know if that’s mate, Australia. Yeah. That’s more Australian. I’ve been working on my Australian accent, mate. “Ezra, what is that mike? It sounds and looks amazing.” It looks amazing, does it? Does it look amazing? All right, I guess it does. It’s got one of these big what have you’s here. It is a…I got my man Charles out here just doing it, just on the ball. He says it’s a Shure SM7B. So that’s what it is, I don’t know.

“Is there a software out there that I can find about what’s selling more on Facebook in a pacific niche?” I think you mean specific. I don’t know about Facebook competitive intelligent software. “Can you use this tool for construction?”, my man Kevin Roberts is asking. So this tool that I was showing off is built for the Shopify platform. Shopify is a e-commerce store builder. It depends on what kind of website your business is running on. I imagine that your business is probably running on a WordPress website, in which case I’d recommend a different landing page builder software. But I would recommend doing long form landing pages that are about specific construction projects, “Hey, we’ve got a roofing page. And hey, we’ve got a shed page,” or whatever kind of construction projects you’re doing.”

All right, what other questions? Man, we’ve got a lot of people here. Oh, there we go. We’re back to live. Nancy from Florida is in the house. Elad wants to know if my mom or dad is from Israel. No, they are not. “How important is it to have a flagship product?” I think it’s super important to have one thing that you’re known for. Look, if you’re in the kind of business where you’ve got thousands of SKUs, you’re selling a bunch of auto parts, you don’t need that. But if you’re gonna make advertising the way that you engage…you know, if you’re gonna make advertising how you grow your business where you’re gonna advertise, get people’s attention, engage them in a conversation, and attempt to convince them that it would be smart to do business with you and that you have a solution that is beneficial to them, then you’re gonna want something that you’re selling first. So yeah.

“I love the video explaining landing pages. I’m not thrilled about being on video. How can I create videos like that on my store?” There’s a cool service called the PowToon, powtoon.com, there’s animoto.com, PowToon is really sweet. You know, you can hire somebody. There’s whiteboard videos. “Should you have a countdown timer to 1000 users?” Oh yeah, I probably should. Good idea. All right, Shawn Francis says he already purchased Zipify, will the price be increased? No, you’re grandfathered in.

“What system do you use for email marketing on Shopify?” Well, I will just show you that…first, don’t go anywhere, let me log in real quick, Ant. The system that we use is Klaviyo. And what I like about Klaviyo, if you look at it here, what you can see is that it pulls in my revenue data so I can see how much revenue I’ve generated, I can see how much of that revenue came from email. I can see how much of that revenue came from specific email flows, like automated emails, how much of it came from broadcast emails.

So when we were talking about the content thing, you can see…like I send a content email, this is just an email, the piece of content that’s relevant to my community–skin care tips, for example–they still make money because I’m sending people back to my website. But the goal isn’t to make money. The goal is just to engage them in a conversation and then run a sale event, like the Valentine’s Day sale. Here you can see I sent 12 emails over the course of…like, you know, started on February 17th. So it’s a Valentine’s Day weekend sale and it ran…each one of these emails is profitable, by the way. And it ran all the way to February 23rd. So yeah, I use Klaviyo, I really like Klaviyo for Shopify.

All right, Peter says–you can go back to my face camera, which you are–“How would you use Zipify Pages to launch a new product? And which of your Zipify’s Page templates would you recommend for a product launch?” I’d probably use the long form product offer page. I’d build out a long form left to right product offer page that had video on it. The thing about communicating a message to a consumer is different people prefer to consume content in different formats. Some people like to watch, some people like to read, some people like to look. So when you have a sales message, something that you’re offering to someone…and really, that’s what you’re doing, right? You’re like, “Hey, person,” this is a human-to-human interaction. It’s them…your customers are not they. It’s somebody is gonna consume your web page, is gonna read that, is gonna look at that, is gonna watch the video and decide whether or not what you’re offering is relevant to them or valuable to them.

So you wanna make sure that when you have an offering, that you are displaying and communicating in every available media format. So the page should have video on it, it should have imagery on it, and it should have text on it so that it’s friendly to every type of person who likes to consume in every different type of way. I know, for example, I watch, I don’t read the pages. And there went my audio. Don’t worry, we’re still here. The camera I think just has a 12 minute something or other. So we are live, we’re here. This is my screen. I’m gonna look down for some other questions and the face camera will be back just like that.

All right, Joshua Parker wants to know about making Zipify Pages work with subscription applications. We do have an integration almost finished with the subscription application. So be on the lookout for that in like a week. All right, “I would love to have your focus abilities.” I don’t have any special abilities, I’m just some guy. I’m just some dude who’s super interested in e-commerce, right? What I have is a willingness, I have will power. You should read the book “Will Power”. I’m willing to do the work, I’m willing to every day put my attention on growing my business, every day focus on…it takes eternal vigilance. It takes a daily commitment to whatever you’re interested in. That’s all it takes. It’s really that simple. This is the big secret here, okay? Whatever it is that you’re going for, put attention on it every day. That’s all.

So it’s not like I’ve got some special super secret skill set. I just am willing to put attention on my relationship with my wife every day, make an effort towards having that feel good and having fun there. Put attention on my business every day, move my body. I’m willing to do it and there’s a lot of reasons not to do it: you’re tired and you’ve got other commitments and there’s a lot of reasons not to. You’re gonna be confronted with several reasons to not do the things that you wanna do. It’s easy to sit back and watch four hours of television every night. That’s a little easier than putting attention towards having more in your life in whatever capacity that is. And I feel like I have a responsibility to do that, right?

Like, I have figured out something that most people never figure out, which is how to generate a lot of wealth, right? That’s something that everyone seems to be chasing. Society will tell you, by the way, that wealth creation and being successful and that’s what it’s all about. You gotta do that money, you gotta make money, you gotta be successful. But they’ve done all these studies and it turns out that after like…in our society anyways, if you live in America. I know there’s a lot of people who aren’t in America here but this study I think was done specifically in U.S.A. After you reach $75,000 in income which, by the way, is a lot of income, you don’t get any happier when you make more money, it doesn’t bring you fulfillment.

Like, it’s a much more popular game. Success is a much more popular but actually less rewarding game than having fun. Having fun, having hobbies in your life, having intimacy and connection with other people, that’s really where it’s at in life. Let me tell you, as someone who has gotten to the point where you’re supposed to now have everything that you ever wanted in relationship to money. By the way, I didn’t start with money. I started in an apartment with zero dollars and 300 square feet, in New York City, working at a yoga studio, working at a make-up shop, playing poker for a living, hustling. I mean, this is all created and it’s great. Money can buy you comfort. You can buy comfort, for sure. You can buy a lot of comfort and that’s great and it’s fun to have things. But the point that I was making was that I feel a responsibility, as someone who has the ability to generate surplus, to generate surplus and then use it for causes that I believe to be noble to do good things in the world. Donate to charity, whatever that happens to be. I’m not gonna go down the road of what that is but I think you have the same responsibility.

We live in…I mean, it’s great here. We have it really good. The standard of living that most of the people watching this video are used to is unlike any standard of living ever in history. We got televisions and we got access to food and we’ve got shelter and we’re not worried about a bear killing us, for the most part. Unless you’re living in the wilderness while you’re watching this. So I think that’s a responsibility to then use that gift to do something good, grow your business, support your community.

All right, Chase wants to know if I have an affiliate link for mini chat. I wish I did. They don’t have an affiliate program yet. Phil’s in the house, chill with Phil. What’s up? That’s my man. “What’s the first step in retaining emails?” Don’t understand the question, you can re-ask it. Let’s see, Manfred’s in the house, “Hey Ezra, can you break down your seven first email topics in the AR? I remember you did that in the course.” Well, I think what you’re asking about is my post-purchase autoresponder sequence, which I will show you here.

So this is my post-purchase email sequence. So this is after someone buys from me. They get a series of email communications that are designed to do a couple things: you know, let them know that it was a good idea to purchase from me, that that was smart, that, “Hey, you’ve done well. We are very happy that you purchased from us.” The first email that we send out is like, “Hey, thank you so much.” We acknowledge people for what they’ve done. We acknowledge them. We say, “Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. We’re super happy that you’ve bought from us. Here is a video on what you can expect. This is when it’s gonna ship, here’s what the box is gonna look like, here’s how often you can expect to hear from us, this is who we are.” We tell them what to expect.

Then we have a couple of emails that we call pre-arrival excitement builders. These are these emails here: day one, three days, five days. And these are designed to build excitement about the product that is coming, right? Like “Hey, this thing’s coming,” get them excited about it, show off some social proof, show some testimonials of other people who are happy with that product. Then we move into what’s called a cross-sell. And you’ll notice that this email–and it may be hard to see on the screen if you’re on mobile–is only going to go to people who’ve never order the product that it’s about. So it’s a dynamic cross-sell, meaning it’s gonna be communicated to folks who bought one product but not another.

And one of the things you should know here, look at the difference here, right? These emails that aren’t designed really to make money, they still do. People who get this, we made $1,000 in the last 30 days on just a welcome email, so these emails are making some revenue. Every email’s making some revenue. But look–and this is just an announcement email, it doesn’t even link anywhere–but look at this. Look at the difference. It’s like 10 times the revenue from this email because it’s a specific sale email, right?

But what I wanna point out about that is it’s a long form video message. What you need to think about in relationship to a business that is trying to engage people in a conversation and provide a solution is it’s a collection of conversion assets working in concert with one another to achieve a specific result. It’s a collection of conversion assets–and I’ll explain what that is in a moment–working in concert with one another to achieve a specific result. What is a conversion asset? A conversion asset is a customer testimonial, is a product sales video, is a landing page, is an email, is an advertisement. So all these different things work together in concert to achieve a result that you want, which is a conversion.

And so in this case, the conversion asset that we are leveraging here is a long form video, it’s an hour-long video. And I think that most people are so focused on short form content, right, thirty-second videos for Facebook and two-minute product videos that they forget that long form content is even better in certain cases than short form content because it creates more of a connection. It creates more of a relationship, it creates more intimacy between a person and a brand. And so you want to also have in your sale sequencing long form content. 10-minute videos, 15-minute videos, 20-minute videos where you tell stories, talk about who you are.

What people wanna know is your viewpoint, what your brand actually thinks. You gotta take a stand for something. You’ll notice that people in sports who are the most popular are the ones who are the most polarizing, who have viewpoints. In the sports that I follow…I used to follow mixed martial arts very closely, I love the sport, I’ve been doing martial arts my whole life. So Conor McGregor, Chael Sonnen, some of these polarizing figures who have firm stands end up with huge fan bases because they take a stand and they express what they actually think about a given subject matter. And you’ll end up with more rabid fans, you’ll end up with a more engaged fan base if you’re willing to take a stand on something in your community. Like, “We sell pants and we believe that…” I don’t sell pants but, “We believe that the way that most manufacturing is being done is not good because of this. And here’s what we think about.” You gotta take a stand for something.

Then we attempt to generate a conversion asset, here on day 12, right, with a selfie request. People love to take selfies. If you can really convince anyone, people just wanna take these things and take pictures of themselves. So we say, “Hey, take a picture. We’ll enter you into a contest. Take a picture of yourself with our product and sent it to us and we’ll enter you into this contest.” And we end up a conversion asset that we can use in advertisements, use on our web pages, and stuff like that. We then ask for people to take a survey to tell us what they thought about our business and then we also ask for them to do a selfie video. So we’re generating conversion assets. We’re asking people to take a survey about their experience so that we can then find out how to serve them better.

All right, Ruben St. John in the house. Kurt Elster, the man. The unofficial Shopify podcast, by the way, if you’re interested in that. Let’s see. Man, there’s so many questions here. Rob Angol says $13, don’t know what that means. Jeremy is asking if I offer these email sequences in Zipify or Smart Marketer. So I have an email marketing course. By the way, if you’re interested, check this out. You can go to new.smartmarketer.com/allstars. This is what the page looks like. We are in our super early bird phase. We have our big e-commerce All-Stars event happening August 4th and 5th in Austin, Texas. Right now, super early bird ends April 14th. It’s gonna be August 2nd and 3rd in Austin, Texas. You can get your tickets now. The tickets are gonna go up in price. You wanna be this bird right here. You wanna be that nice pink bird, or you could be the early bird, or you could just be a standard bird. Nobody really wants to be a standard bird.

Man, if you want to take your e-commerce business to the next level, you should come to this event. Something special happens at these live events. It’s like you are so busy in your daily life: you are taking out the trash and you’re doing the dishes and you’re worried about work and you’re just in your routine. When you step outside of your routine, when you spend two days focused attention on growing your business with the industry’s best speakers–me, I’m bringing in a lot of really cool people that have never spoken at my events before–it’s gonna be great. I’d love to have you there.

And right now the tickets are on sale and also the reason I remembered this is because he’s asking how you can get our email marketing flow, find out the actual copy swipe files and what we’re sending to people, when we’re sending them, the broadcast we send, and how we do sale campaigns. We have a training course called “E-commerce Email Marketing Advanced Automation and Broadcast.” It’s kind of a long name but that is dropping on April 3rd, so next week we’re putting out the first module. And it’s a $1,500 course. If you buy E-commerce All-Stars and come to the event, you can get it at a discount. We offer it on the post-purchase one click upsell page, you get the offer for email marketing mastery. Otherwise, you can keep an eye on your inbox for next week when we announce that this email course is available.

Christa Brooks, in the house. What’s up, Christa? We use Klaviyo for our emails. Rico Glover’s here. Sue Ellen, “Can you share your Facebook Messanger ads experiences with us?” I’m gonna do a whole presentation next week on Facebook Messenger: how we’re using it, why it’s good, what’s beneficial about it, the ways that we’re using it, the ways we’re using chatbots. If you’re not on the Smart Marketer email list, go to new.smartmarketer.com, just like this. And you can click this little button right here, Get My Free Training, it will pop up a big picture of my head here. Enter your email and your name in there and we’ll get you on the email list. And then you will be notified when we released that Facebook Messenger training. It’s coming next week.

Continuing…wow. We’ve got 92 comments on here. “Or can we just make a purchase from Boom?” Yeah, you can make a purchase from Boom but you’d only see one of the sequences. “Smartmarketer.com, what’s your opinion on advertising in Europe?” I think it’s a good idea. If you can fulfill in Europe, if you have a way to ship stuff to Europe, then you should advertise in Europe. “What’s the number one mistake people make in landing pages? And what is one detail, in your opinion, that you must have on landing pages?” I think on a lot of landing pages, people focus on features. They focus on, “This product is metal and it is made of steel. And this and that and the other thing.”

It’s like, no. Features don’t sell. Yeah, you gotta mention your features. Benefits, ownership benefits. Why is it beneficial to own the product? That’s what you gotta communicate. So for example, people buy apparel because it makes them look cool. That’s why you buy apparel. That’s why…everyone has a way that they are presenting themselves to the world, right? I’ve got my man bun that everyone makes fun of. This is deliberate. I don’t look this way on accident. I’ve decided that this is how I wanna look, this is what I wanna wear. That was a specific decision that I make. And so using apparel as the example, if you know that the reason buy stuff is because they’re looking to achieve a certain visual effect when people look at them, they wanna look and be perceived a certain way, then you focus your messaging around that.

If you know that it’s beneficial if people buy beauty products because they also wanna look good…and people buy stuff because they wanna look good to other people, they want to be approved of, for some emotional reason. There’s a bunch of reasons why people buy stuff but essentially what you want your landing page to focus on is the benefit of owning the product. I buy electric skateboards, I’m super into them, I have several of them. In fact, Ant, you wanna hand me my little skateboard? I’ll show you the new one that I just got. This is now my travel skateboard, it’s very small. Got Ant Charles, get up in here, dog. Get in here for a second. My man Ant Charles, tech man, out here making this stuff run. How are you doing? You wanna show off your Smart Marketer hat?

Ant: Yeah.

Ezra: You wanna say anything to the crew? You’re off camera, there we go.

Ant: Thank you for watching.

Ezra: Yeah, all right. There’s Ant Charles in the house. This is my travel skateboard, okay? So I buy skateboards. I’m into them, I like them, I take this thing with me. I’m gonna actually put it under my feet right now. Why do I buy skateboards? Because I like to skate. So when I watch these videos of these electric skateboards and it’s showing off the ownership benefit, “Man, you throw this thing on your back, you can ride it to and from work, you can throw it down in the city,” shows me the benefit of owning that product. So you need to understand what is driving people to purchase your product and then you need to show off and demonstrate that ownership benefit on the product page.

Adam Killam, in the house. What up, man? That’s my man, Adam Killam is a very sharp marketer. He’s a Canadian dude, he says “Eh” a lot, as they do. We’ve got, “What’s the number one thing people need to have in place before they can rapidly grow their business?” Yes, I wouldn’t say there’s one thing that you need to have in place before you can rapidly grow your business. You need to have a good product, okay? You need to be out…okay, I’ve got a lot of viewpoints on this but the first thing is that if all you’re trying to do is make a dollar, if that’s your mission, you’re hosed. You can’t just be out to try to make money. You’ve gotta be up to something greater than that. You need to be playing a bigger game than just trying to make money. There’s a higher game available.

How about serving a marketplace? How about having a better offering than anyone else? How about having something that you wanna do in the world or some cause that you wanna contribute to? Like you gotta have a reason beyond you wanna make a dollar so you can have a fancier skateboard, or a fancier clothing, or whatever. There’s gotta be something behind, otherwise, you’re gonna be like this other woman who just asked, “How do I focus?” You don’t care enough to focus is your real problem. If you actually cared, you would focus. It’s not that hard, you just do it. You wake up every day and you put the work in. And some days you’re gonna slip, you don’t beat yourself up about it. You just keep on keeping on, man. Life’s a garden, dig it. All right, it’s a Joe Dirt reference for those of you for those of you and let’s just pretend that that didn’t happen.

All right, so we have, “What’s the site with the VIP?” Oh, Michael Bay wants to know. It is new.smartmarketer.com/allstars. Right here, in the menu bar, new.smartmarketer.com/allstarts. You can attend our event in Austin, Texas. I’d love to have you down there. “What’s your favorite landing page site and why?” I like Zipify Pages, man. That’s my landing page builder. I built it, I like it, I think it’s the best one out there. I think you should use it. Let’s see what else we got going on here. 187 people live with us right now and 114 comments, 1,700 views total. So about 10% of the people who opened the video are sticking with me, I appreciate that. If you have questions, I will answer them. I’m here, I’m paying attention to you right now.

And you know, I’ve gotten pretty good at this business stuff. And I’ve been focusing, in my own business, on how…like in my job, as the CEO, as the person who is guaranteeing 40 people’s paychecks on a monthly basis, right? As the person who’s responsible for this operation actually working is to navigate, not drive, okay? I spent my whole career driving, right? You’re probably driving, most of you watching this: you’re doing everything, you’re operating, you’re figuring it out, you’re actually doing it. And then will come a time where your time is more valuably spent figuring out what needs to happen, holding the vision, holding the container for what you’re creating, figuring out where you need to go. It’s hard to navigate if you’re stuck behind the wheel driving.

Now that’s not to say that you shouldn’t be in the weeds, that you shouldn’t be implementing, that you shouldn’t know what you’re doing. I’m obviously a big implementor, I’m all about it. But it does mean that if there’s something that you’re doing that someone else could be doing, then they should be doing it. So you need to become effective at buying help. You gotta think of it that way, too. You’re buying help.You’re not hiring a team or building a team, you’re buying help. And when you buy help, the thing about buying help is that it gets better over time. So if you’re paying someone for 10 hours a week of their time to help you out in whatever it is you’re doing, the first week they’re not that good, they’re learning. By the ninth week, that 10 hours is now worth 40 because they’re way better, right? So help gets better over time.

And the goal is to consistently figure out what your highest value use is. Maybe your highest value is actually running the advertising, or maybe your highest value is actually writing the sales copy, or maybe your highest value is sourcing the product, who knows? Whatever it is, that’s what you need to be doing. For me, it’s figuring out what needs to happen, who needs to do what, putting the pieces in order but not actually setting up the Facebook ads anymore. You know what I mean? It’s like I’m no longer using my…being at the most beneficial that I can to the organization if I’m in a role of actually operating, I need to be making sure this thing actually works, you know? So I hope that answers your question.

Sam wants to know if I have two kinds of products in my store, one with the Zipify Pages and one with the Shopify layout. We’re in the process of transferring all of our product pages over to Zipify Pages right now. All right, “What’s your cost per purchase on your awareness campaigns versus loyalty campaigns?” So, the way that you’ve gotta look at advertising is really not awareness and loyalty, it’s kind of all of it working together because it’s no longer possible to…I mean you can be, but not at scale, are you gonna be profitable just focusing on generating new customers. You have to have retarget and you have to have loyalty.

For us, we are in this interesting position where we spend $5 million a year on advertising. And so every woman over 40, in America, has seen our ad a million times. So when we first started out, it was real cheap to generate sales. But then as we got way more visibility in the marketplace and everyone had seen us a bunch of times, our cost per acquisition rose. So we’re at this point spending between $30 and $75 on an initial sale and between $4 and $12 on a repeat sale. But your market, your average order value…like my average order value is about 80 bucks. It’s a lot harder to make a sale for $80 than it is to make a sale for $20. So numbers are kind of fickle in that way. Numbers are kind of fickle so it’s really about your market.

We are at 7 p.m. We’re gonna keep going. I’ve only got 5% left of juice on my computer and I got 5% left of juice on my phone, so we’ll see how long it keeps us. “Hey, Ezra. Thank you for sharing your time and wisdom. I’m starting my first store and I’m worried about presentation. Do I need a fully-built store to start or is it feasible to start with just a couple products?” Super feasible. Start with one product, okay? Get that to work. Advertise to one product, figure out who’s interested in it, test some advertisements, modify the offer page, test some communications. Like, you don’t need a whole big product line. Nice to have another product that you can re-engage with and advertise and say, “Hey, you might be interested in this other thing.” It’s nice to have two but you really don’t need more than two to start.

“Can I send you a private message?” Sure, I don’t know if I will respond. My customer support team will get it. Depending on what it is, we may or may not respond, so I promise nothing other than that yes, you can send me a private message. If it is reasonable, I’ll respond to it. “Hey, Ezra, you inspired me to start my e-commerce business. It turned out that I decided on importing skincare products from Korea. I found that starting with Facebook advertising is a good idea. Do you have anything that I can pay to get help from anyone from your staff?”

We do have a Facebook advertising training program and I believe it’s at…let me just see where it is, here it is. So it’s kind of a mouth full. If you go to this URL right here–and I’ll just let it on the screen for a little bit–it is pages.new.smartmarketer.com/3-dash-part-facebook-video-advertising-mastery-watch-video-1. I can’t even say it, it’s such a mouth full. So you’re gonna have to look at that and type it in. What I’ll do is I’ll actually post it in the comments here. I will scroll down and I will refresh this page here and then I will post this right into the comments for you so that you can go to that URL and you can get our Facebook video ads mastery training program. There’s no way for me to pin that comment, so you just gotta find the comment from me in the feed. And while I’m here, I might as well give you a link to Zipify Pages because I like to offer my stuff. So there we go. Now you can also go and check out Zipify Pages.

All right, other questions. “What percentage of your sales come from sending emails?” What you can see, when we look at our revenue here, is that in the last year–so let’s just pull for the last year–that 31% of our revenue came from email. And we’re trying to get that to 40%, in2017. We think we can. If you look at the last 90 days, we’re at 30%. The last 30 days we’re at 28%. So we’re not doing such a great job but we’re working on it. And I think that this year, by the end of this year, we will up towards more like 35% in aggregate.

“Do you recommend that all products should have a video about them on the store’s page?” Yeah, I think every product should have a sales video, I do, I really do. We have now been going for 53 minutes, I think it’s time to end this thing. Are there any last questions that you really just have burning in there that you need answered while you have my attention? I will be back at some point. The goal was to do these things once a week, didn’t quite work out that way. You know, we’re getting to them as much as we can while still maintaining that we are serving our customers and running our businesses. But I’m happy to do these and answer your questions.

So, “Hey, brother, I hope you’re not mad. I kicked your butt in that Mongoose game. We were just starting to advertise on.” I think I won ba…didn’t I win badger-mongoose-cobra? So it’s badger-mongoose-cobra. For those of you who don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it. Some guy at an event challenged me and I’m not one to back down from a challenge. So I took him up and he is now claiming that he won, which is not how I remember it. So, you know, selective memory I guess. Dan says he bought my email course. Thank you for purchasing it. It will be very beneficial to your business. “Do you have any themes that you recommend?” I do not. I recommend my own theme called the Proven Profitable theme. And I think we’re done.

So hey guys, thank you so much for hanging out with me for an hour. I didn’t intend for it to go that long. Once this posts, go back and watch the intro because I think that that little bit of shift in how you look at yourself and how you view yourself in relationship to the world, with everyone telling you that you’re too fat and you don’t smell right and you don’t look right and you don’t make enough money and you’re not tall enough and all this conditioning about how you are flawed and need fixing and spending all this time playing defense trying to fix, instead of letting all that go knowing that you are a right person wherever you are in, you know, any one of these areas that people measure themselves.

People like to measure themselves, right? They measure themselves in relationship to how they look, they measure themselves in relationship to how much money they have, they measure themselves in relationship to a number of different things, right? You’ll see sort of like markers that society will dictate whether or not you’re like successful or a right person. So if you let all that bullshit go and you can have pure intent and not be playing defense all the time, inhabit that you’re right now, good things improve faster than bad things. Easier to go from good to better than from bad to good and we kind of went over that in the beginning. So go back and watch that and I’ll catch up to you on the next one. Thanks for watching.