261: How My Student Kym Campbell Makes $400K/Year Helping Women With Their Fertility

261: How To Use Challenges To Grow Your Business With Kym Campbell

Today I’m really happy to have Kym Campbell on the show and Kym is a student in my Create A Profitable Online Store Course.

But her story is different compared to the other students in my class in that she doesn’t sell any physical products.

Instead, she’s taken her business SmartFertilityChoices.com to over $400K in revenue this past year with a membership site and digital courses. As it turns out, marketing is marketing and it applies to both physical and digital products online.

Today, Kym and I discuss how she grew her business based on what she learned in the class.

Want To Learn How To Start A 6 Figure Ecommerce Store?

Create  A Profitable Online StoreDid you enjoy listening to Kym’s story? If you would like to create your own profitable online store and join a community of like minded entrepreneurs, then sign up for my full blown course on how to create a profitable online store.

My course offers over 100+ hours of video and includes live office hours where you can ask me questions directly.

If you want to learn everything there is to know about ecommerce, be sure to check it out!

Get My Free Mini Course On How To Start A Successful Ecommerce Store

If you are interested in starting an ecommerce business, I put together a comprehensive package of resources that will help you launch your own online store from complete scratch. Be sure to grab it before you leave!

What You’ll Learn

  • How to use SEO to grow your traffic
  • How to use challenges to gain email subscribers
  • Kym’s Google Adwords strategy

Other Resources And Books

Sponsors

Klaviyo.com – Klaviyo is the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store. Created specifically for ecommerce, it is the best email marketing provider that I’ve used to date. Click here and try Klaviyo for FREE.
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Privy.com – Privy is my tool of choice when it comes to gathering email subscribers for my ecommerce store. They offer easy to use email capture, exit intent, and website targeting tools that turn more visitors into email subscribers and buyers. With both free and paid versions, Privy fits into any budget. Click here and get 15% OFF towards your account.
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Avalara.com – Handling sales tax is complicated. Fortunately, Avalara simplifies sales tax with real-time tax rate calculations and automatic return filing. And the best part is that Avalara already integrates with your existing accounting, e-commerce and marketplaces like Amazon, so it’s super easy to setup. Click here and get a FREE TRIAL.

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Transcript

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I’m happy to have another student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course on the podcast Kym Campbell. Now Kym runs Smartfertilitychoices.com and grew to over $400,000 in revenue this past year based on many of the concepts she derived from the class. And in this interview, we’re going to find out exactly how she did it.

Before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Whether you are getting your business off the ground or looking for new ways to scale, Klaviyo offers fast, simple and repeatable ways to grow. And with Klaviyo you can personalize your marketing, build your customer relationships and automate your online sales. And it’s now easier than ever to create amazing email and advertising experiences. So I want to introduce Klaviyo’s his new entrepreneur growth guide. Packed with must read blog posts, case studies and getting started content, this guide helps you prioritize what to do next for maximum revenue growth.

Now moving to a new marketing platform can be intimidating but Klaviyo helps you get up and growing fast with proven technology and countless support resources. Now you can actually check out this content for free right now Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, that’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com/mywife.

I also want to give a shout out to Privy who is also a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now, what does Privy do? Well, Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all my email capture forms. And I use Privy hand-in-hand with my email marketing provider. Now, there are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prices in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this. And when I implemented this form email signups increased by 131%.

I’m also using their new cart saver pop up feature to recover abandoned carts as well. So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve and try the tool for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ for 15% off. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve, now onto the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Kym Campbell on the show. Now Kym is a student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course. But what is different about her story compared to some of the other students in my class is that she hasn’t created or it she’s not selling any physical products online. Instead, she’s taken her business Smartfertilitychoices.com to over 400k in revenue this past year, based on many concepts that she’s learned in the class. And as it turns out, marketing is marketing, and apparently it applies to both physical and digital products online. And also Kym has some tricks up her sleeve that she’s going to share with us today on how she builds traffic and customers. And with that, welcome the show Kym, how you doing today?

Kym: I’m doing well Steve, thanks so much for having me.

Steve: So Kym, please let the audience know about your business, what exactly you sell and how you got started with this.

Kym: Sure. So I’ll go into the origin story, I’ll try to not be too long winded about it. So I used to actually play music for a living. And I don’t know if you know many musicians, but being a musician is actually quite a difficult profession to be in. So even though I was signed to a small label, and I had a deal in Japan, I actually did all my own publicity, all my own marketing, tour booking, etc. So I was working during the day doing the business side of things, and then playing gigs at night and touring. I wasn’t making a lot of money at that point, because the music industry was quite broken with the internet coming in and people downloading music for free. But it was something I was really passionate about.

But I met my husband in my late 20s and I was heading into my 30s, we were starting thinking about having kids and I realized that it wasn’t really the lifestyle that I wanted because I didn’t want to be away from my family. My mom was a single working mom and I grew up in daycare and didn’t see her that much. So I just wanted something different for my kids. So in 2015, I started doing a lot of research and I came upon things like Pat Flynn’s podcast, four hour workweek, and that really resonated with me, because the idea of lifestyle design and creating a business where I could eventually be really available to my kids, do something I was passionate about and also actually earn money was very appealing.

So at the time, my husband and I were also trying to get pregnant, and we’d been struggling with infertility for quite a while. And I’d been diagnosed as well with PCOS, and we kind of climbed up the ladder of fertility treatments. So it was kind of a natural thing to think, okay well, that’s something that I could start a blog about and write about. So I started my blog in middle of 2015 and opened up a bunch of different social media accounts, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. And I kind of did the classic thing that you’re taught, because I was listening to a lot of podcasts at the time where you create a lead magnet. So for example, I had a fertility checklist and kind of used that to start collecting email addresses.

And then I created an autoresponder series and the second email in the series, I just had the second email that was it, asking what were people struggling with the most? And that kind of helped me understand that the most common question people had were diet changes and how I was doing that to just help manage PCOS. So that was quite exciting for me. And I came up with the idea of doing a free 30 day diet challenge. So I think I might have gotten the idea from your podcast actually with simple green smoothies.

Steve: Oh, yeah, that’s right, with [inaudible 00:06:44], that’s correct.

Kym: Yeah. So I was like, oh, that would work so well for what I’m trying to do. So I created this 30 day diet challenge.

Steve: So Kym, let’s back up a little bit just for the listeners. I know I was going to ask you what PCOS but if you wouldn’t mind just explaining that very briefly and how many people it affects?

Kym: Sure. Yeah, so PCOS stands for polycystic ovarian syndrome. And it’s a hormone disorder that affects about 15 to 20% of women. It can cause a range of symptoms, including irregular periods, acne, weight gain, [inaudible 00:07:23] and it’s also quite common to struggle with infertility. So that was kind of how I was diagnosed in my late 20s.

Steve: But it is treatable without drugs.

Kym: That’s right. That’s right. But I think the reason that our business has done so well is that a lot of women, when they do go see a doctor, it’s not — they’re normally given the pill, or put on Metformin. But actually, the number one treatment for PCOS is diet and lifestyle changes. But a woman doesn’t have that sort of time with the doctor; it takes more than 15 minutes. So there is really this niche that needed to be served that wasn’t being served, where they needed someone who could really stick with them, and hold their hand while they make these massive lifestyle changes and diet changes.

Steve: Okay. So the best way to treat this is through a lifestyle change and that’s kind of where your content comes in.

Kym: That’s right, exactly yeah.

Steve: So let’s talk about your blog real quick. How do you get traffic to the blog?

Kym: So it started out with social media. That was kind of our main driver. At the first it was Instagram, then later probably Pinterest was a bigger driver than Instagram. But now it’s our blog. So for the last year, we’ve just seen tremendous growth. And that was just because of our blogging strategy really, we just kind of doubled down on SEO and blogging and that’s really where we’ve seen massive growth.

Steve: Okay, so most of your traffic comes from Google search.

Kym: That’s right, yeah.

Steve: So can we talk about how you come up with the content? Or did you just start writing about your own problems and the traffic just came? Or was it a very deliberate strategy to get traffic?

Kym: In the beginning, it wasn’t super deliberate and I was just kind of writing about my journey. But we didn’t see much traffic at all from that. So it wasn’t until I actually bought your course so that was the end of 2017. And you have like an entire section on SEO. So I went through all of that, I was listening to podcasts. And I started to become really intentional about the way that we did our blogging. And that’s when we started to see a massive increase in traffic.

Steve: Okay, so can we talk a little bit about that strategy that you use specifically?

Kym: Sure, yeah absolutely. So basically, the first step is I’m just trying to pick a keyword that I want to go for that’s really relevant to our challenge, because that’s really where all of our signups come from. And then people that do the challenger, it’s quite similar to what the program is. So we really try to stay within really relevant keywords to our product and to our challenge. And so then we basically — so I actually co-write with my husband. So he’s got a postgraduate degree in food science, and we spend about a month co-writing, and just write like the most epic blog post ever, basically.

Steve: By epic like what is the length of one of these typical posts?

Kym: Yep. So around probably 6,000 minimum to about 11,000 words.

Steve: Wow okay. It’s like small book.

Kym: Yeah, it’s massive. But it works and it actually suits our personalities really well, because we’re just perfectionist and I think we’d probably struggle to write something under that. And it’s a massive topic. These keywords that we’re choosing, you kind of need that many words to do it justice and to write the best blog post that exists on the internet about that topic.

Steve: Can we talk about that a little bit. So at 11,000 posts, wouldn’t it make sense to like split into two different keyword sets? Or are you targeting just one keyword set for that monster post?

Kym: Basically just one keyword set. So they’ll be like — so for example, I’ll give you an example. PCOS diet, that’s like a huge one for us, because it gets about maybe, I think in America 18,000 searches a month. And that one’s probably about, I don’t know, 9,000 words or so. And within it, we’ll try to — so PCOS diet will obviously be in the URL and the title, the metadata description and obviously, throughout the blog, and some of our headings, section headings. And then we kind of will put more ones that are similar to PCOS diet, like best diet for PCOS, so I’ll pick five or six of those, and we’ll just put them in. But what I find is if we organically can rank for that main keyword, we’ll actually start showing up for like a ton of other ones just organically that we haven’t even tried to rank for.

Steve: And in terms of backlinks, do you have a strategy there?

Kym: No, we actually haven’t focused on backlighting at all, but we’ve still been able to rank between every blog post we’ve done for 2018, between probably one and four on Google for those keywords.

Steve: Nice.

Kym: Yeah, it’s great. I mean, I think some of the other things that we do within the blog posts that I think have helped is citations. So we have between like 25 and 50 scientific references within these big pieces. And I think it was the Morse Podcast I was listening to where they were kind of talking about how do you show Google that you’re an expert? And citations was one of them. And that’s just something that we just naturally do anyways because we’re very science based.

Steve: Yeah. For these citations, are you linking out then to these?

Kym: We are.

Steve: Okay.

Kym: Yeah, that’s right. Yep. So I think that kind of shows Google, okay, she’s linking out to all these scientific references. I mean, that’s the theory at least.

Steve: Yes. Yes. And would you say then that your content is like light years better than what else is out there on the front page?

Kym: Yes. Yes by far yeah.

Steve: All right. And is this a popular topic? Or I don’t know what tools you use. Maybe it’s a good time to talk about what tools you use, but what difficulty of keywords do you typically target with your blog?

Kym: So I mean, I mostly just use Keyword Planner to be honest.

Steve: Really okay.

Kym: Yeah. And I’ve just gotten really familiar with all of the keywords because I spend a lot of time on spreadsheets looking at the keywords and also just kind of identifying questions that, really common questions that people ask that they just ask over and over again in like different ways. But I mean, I did use, like I got a free subscription to Ahrefs. And I did kind of look at the competition farther into 2018. Like for example, PCOS diet, that’s like 40.

Steve: Yeah, that’s got to be.

Kym: No, no, sorry. That’s 20. That’s 20. So it’s actually quite a low…

Steve: It not bad actually.

Kym: Yeah, it’s not, although we were just able to rank for one that was 40, and gets maybe, I don’t know, 20,000 searches a month. But that took a lot longer to rank.

Steve: Do you find that your articles just naturally attract backlinks? I don’t know if you’ve looked at the backlink process.

Kym: Yeah. Well, I knew you’re going to grill me about all this because I’m on the podcast. So I’ve done — I was like, oh my goodness, I have to go back and start. So I did, I actually just looked at backlinks. And it’s really interesting, because we are starting to accumulate a ton of backlinks just naturally from ranking one, two or three for those keywords. So yeah, I mean, for me, like I just didn’t feel like — we only have so much time and I felt like we’re really good at writing these epic blog posts. And I just wanted to see how we could do without back linking and I think it’s working. I think we’re starting to just get those backlinks naturally.

Steve: Yeah, no, I mean, when you put out a publication that is easily light years better than the rest, Google recognizes that. And I’m sure that people who are searching for that topic are sticking on your posts for a very long time as well.

Kym: That’s it. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Steve: Prior to this interview, we had talked about ways to kind of accelerate getting into the search results, would you care to share that strategy?

Kym: Sure. Yeah. So this is quite an interesting one. I hadn’t heard anyone talk about it on a podcast before and I’m a total podcast junkie. So I should know. So we had — my cousin actually came and visited and he works for Amazon. And he’s a developer. And he helped develop their search algorithm within Amazon. And he kind of studied the Google search algorithm as best he could before that, and I was kind of grilling him when he was visiting, saying, what can I do, we’re not ranking for anything, our site is quite new. We have really low domain authority, what can I do to try to rank these blog posts?

And he said, well, you could try something which he had tried, I think, for a few websites he had created where he actually ran Google AdWords, and just used it as a way to feed Google data about the blog posts to kind of accelerate kind of working the way up the search results. And yeah, so I mean, that’s what I did. So I started running Google AdWords to the blog posts. And I tried to create really clickable titles that would get a really good click through rate. So we used a lot of how tos and listicles. And I basically just set up a campaign; I do manual CPC, set it to like $20. So it’d always show at the very top and outbid everyone else. And it works. So we get really high click through rates, quite low bounce rates, so Google would actually see how popular the post was and that people actually want to stay on it.

Steve: When you set the bid at $20, how much were you actually paying per click just curious?

Kym: Yeah, not that much, so ranged between probably 30 cents and $3. It really depends on what we’re trying to target, the keyword we’re trying to target. But because we had such a high, we’d get quality scores of between eight and 10.

Steve: Sure, yes.

Kym: Yeah, yeah. And we’d get a click through rate of between probably 12% and 30%. I feel like that’s kind of…

Steve: That’s insane actually.

Kym: Yeah. But it’s because it’s a blog post I think, we’re not running these ads where it’s trying to sell something, we’re just leading people to really epic content that they want to stay on the page, they want to read it, they’re ending up – they’re probably going to other pages on our site and I think we got rewarded for that. Yeah, so it wasn’t too expensive.

Steve: I don’t know if you’re going to have this data ready, but I’m just kind of curious what your onsite metrics look like for that monster post. Like how long do people stay on that page?

Kym: I don’t know. I don’t know to be honest.

Steve: Unprepared Kym, I’m ashamed.

Kym: I knew you were going to ask that question. I mean, I think from the past, looking back, maybe a couple of minutes, but I think it’s hard I think because they’re such epic posts, there’s probably a lot of people will like read it and like, oh my goodness, this is like a book. But what we did to kind of help aid that is we do create, like all of our blog posts or listicles. So at least, if people go on there, they can at least kind of get to where they want be within the post. But then of course, we would have those people who would stay on it forever. And I would think that it’s those sorts of metrics that Google is looking at. I don’t really know what our average time on page is to be honest.

Steve: Do you do any other media like YouTube or podcast or anything like that?

Kym: Yeah. So we just do Instagram, Pinterest. I mean, I started a Facebook page and Twitter, but that really doesn’t do anything for us. But Instagram in the beginning was our biggest driver. And it’s probably about, I don’t know, maybe 15% now of our signups, but probably I think it’s about 60% now is Google.

Steve: One thing I did also want to talk to you about is your email list growth strategy because it’s pretty intricate from the way you were describing it to me earlier. And I cut you off earlier when you’re talking about this 30 Day Challenge, so let’s talk about how that works.

Kym: Sure, sure. So I would say that the reason that our email list has grown so much is because of the challenge, like for sure by far. Probably 90%, 95% of the people that sign up to our list do it because they sign up for the challenge. And I think the reason that it’s so popular and we get so many signups is because we just give so much value within that challenge. Like you could literally charge for it, like it could be a month long course that you could charge for, we just really went all out.

It took a couple months to build. So we give weekly meal plans and shopping lists. And we have a pretty intricate social media strategy. So we’re posting every day on, we’ve got a Facebook group where we post every day, and we do it on Instagram as well, we’re sending out emails daily. We have nutritional video lessons that we send out probably for the first half of the challenge and mindset videos where we’re trying to just help people I guess have a growth mindset because it’s a pretty major thing to change your diet. It’s actually really difficult to do.

Steve: It’s not just a diet, it’s a lifestyle change right?

Kym: That’s right, exactly. Yeah, I mean the challenge is just diet, it’s then our paid program where we actually focus on additional lifestyle changes like stress management and exercise.

Steve: Let’s talk about that. You mentioned you give so much away in this 30 Day Challenge. Does it overlap a lot with your 10 week program?

Kym: No, I don’t think so. I think if anything, it really complements it. And because changing your lifestyle is massive, you can only tell people so much in a free 30 Day Challenge. And we also just focus on diet. And I think it takes a lot longer than 30 days for you to be able to kind of make these changes. And also we go into so much depth in like nutritional lessons and we have an intuitive eating program within the paid program. We have a sugar rehab module. So it’s just so much more value that I think if anything, the challenge really prepares people to be able to do the program because there’s so much in there.

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So how do you get me to sign up for the challenge? Like what am I supposed to get out of this 30 Day Challenge?

Kym: Basically just support in learning how to change your diet and actually helping you implement it. So I mean that’s where like these weekly meal plans have been just incredible. I think that’s the biggest reason why people sign up is that are actually getting weekly meal plans. They’re tailored to women who want to manage the PCOS through diet. There’s a lot of information out there on how to change your diet and it’s really confusing, and a lot of people are saying different things. And not many people are giving recipes.

So I think with the challenge, it’s like they have one person who’s giving them scientific backed information, who’s giving them video lessons, who’s giving them these weekly meal plans and kind of holding their hand and we’ve got a really good community element to it as well. So I mean, it basically sells itself like people just — it’s like, oh my goodness, this is free. Everyone just wants to sign up because there’s so much value in it.

Steve: Does the challenge have to change or is it the same challenge that…

Kym: No, it’s actually the same challenge every time. I mean, it’s so intricate, I think it’d be pretty crazy to have to do it again, or even change the meal plans because we’ve done the meal plans to the point of where you use a certain element from one dinner, you use the extra tomato for your next meal. It was like two months of work to actually create the meal plans and the shopping lists. But what’s interesting is we do find that women are doing it over and over again. So I didn’t actually expect that. Yeah and there’s actually a lot of women who end up doing it multiple times before they’re even ready to do the program.

Steve: How does the lead then work from the challenge to the 10 week program that you sell?

Kym: Yeah. So we basically start — how do we do it? So we send out — so the challenge — probably three days before the challenge starts, we start basically sending people emails every single day. And I think it’s day seven, we start kind of exposing them to the fact that we have this paid program. So we start actually sending out sales emails. But we run like an early bird special. And that’s kind of how it’s like, oh, if you’re — because people are actually the most excited about implementing changes we found during the beginning of the challenge. We used to kind of only start telling people about the program at the end of the challenge, and it actually seemed to work a lot better, kind of telling them about it in the beginning makes people very excited.

Steve: Yeah that makes sense.

Kym: Yeah. So we basically have like a little banner for when people go to our different videos on the challenge pages, we start sending out sales emails about this early bird special. And that’s pretty much it. We don’t sell it on our social media channels at all, because we found that that didn’t really work very well. So it’s mostly just via email. And then it’s just on our challenge pages as well.

Steve: What is the price point of the 10 week program?

Kym: So we we’ve split it into so it’s tiers. So we’ve got three different price points. And so we’ve got like a Kickstarter, which is 147, we’ve got a lifestyle membership which is 247. And we’ve got a premium which is 347. But we end up selling almost all the spots just through the early bird specials. I don’t know if you — it might be an interesting story if your audience does want to hear about how we majorly failed when we first commercially launched it because we realized people were really price sensitive.

Steve: I love a good story, yeah go for it.

Kym: So yeah, so when we first started the challenge, we right away pre sold the program to the first set of challengers, because I kind of had the idea for the program at the same time I had the idea for the challenge. And it pre sold really well. So we made about — we presold at twice, we made about $25,000 and we hadn’t actually built it yet. And I think it was about a 5% conversion rate on each both times that we sold it. So that said to me, okay, oh great, people are going to — this is definitely going to work. So we built the program, my husband took three months off; we put a lot of time and effort into it. We hired a developer and we hired a couple staff and spent quite a lot of money and built it. Everyone went through it, we had like a beta program. People loved it. And then we launched it commercially. But I increased the price to the price points that I just told you. And we launched it to literally crickets. I think really like four sales.

Steve: Really?

Kym: Yeah.

Steve: For 349 price point or the $149 price point?

Kym: So we had the three price — I think we had that three tiered price point and at that point nobody bought anything.

Steve: Huh, okay.

Kym: Yeah, it was crazy. We totally freaked out. And so we basically, we sold it to four people. And so we had to say, look, we’re not going to run the program. And we pulled the program and we basically surveyed everyone who we had launched it to and hadn’t purchased. And the majority of the people said it’s too expensive. We’re not willing to pay that much. And that was really hard for me because I was like, well, it’s actually worth this much like I had gone kind of looked at what else was out there, what other programs that were similar. And I just kind of thought our program blew everyone else’s out of the water, like it was pretty cool. And I was well, what do I do, because I don’t really want to lower the price and make it look like a cheap program because it’s not. It’s actually a really valuable digital product.

And so I thought, okay well, maybe I could run an early bird special and discount it. And then people still — it’s still I feel like it doesn’t lose its value as much. It’s still like kind of placed as a high value product but it is at the price point that people are actually willing to pay for it. So that’s what we did.

Steve: That’s interesting.

Kym: Yeah, and it works really well.

Steve: What’s the discount for the early bird special?

Kym: So we actually, we run two different early bird specials. So we run for the first half of the challenge, we run a 50% off.

Steve: Oh wow, that’s significant, okay.

Kym: It’s significant yeah. I mean, that’s what people seem to be willing to pay, like we tested a bunch of different price points and that seemed to be the one that sold it really well. So we do 50% off for the first hundred spots. And then after those spots are filled, we’ll do 35% off for the next hundred spots. And then after that, we’ll go full price.

Steve: And what is the breakdown in the different tiers and why did you decide to do tiers in the first place?

Kym: So being a podcast junkie, that was kind of like a no brainer for me to do the tiered strategy, because I thought well, people get to decide how much they want, how much they want to pay and how much they want to get. And I think that it works really well for selling the program. And sorry, what was the original question just how we came up with the tiers?

Steve: So one, why you do the tiers and two, what is the distribution of sales among the tiers?

Kym: Okay. Yeah. So basically to sell it better. I thought the tiered pricing would work really better and I think it does because I would say we get an even distribution throughout the tiers, but we definitely get the most premium sales so the most expensive, because with the premium, you get like a customizable meal plan where you can actually customize your meals, customize your shopping list and there’s a few other goodies, but that would be the main one. And that seems to be what people really want the premium for.

Steve: There’s a reason why I asked you that because a long time ago I had three tiers as well. And I found that the students that weren’t getting the stuff in the highest tier were less likely to be successful and that was a moral dilemma for me.

Kym: Oh, interesting.

Steve: So what I ended up doing is I just upgraded all the lower people to the highest one and I just did away with that. This is a long time ago of course.

Kym: Yeah. I mean, I have heard some really pretty amazing success stories from women who have done the lowest tier. So I think it works. And I think because the program is so big, and it can be overwhelming because there is so much information that some women only want to focus on diet, which is what our Kickstarter tier offers. Whereas other women actually want to try to do it all, they want to change their diet and also add in exercise and stress management. So I don’t know, I think it works just for our niche quite well.

Steve: And do you — is your launch like evergreen or is it literally like a launch where it closes and then you open it again?

Kym: It’s live. And the reason it’s live, and I don’t think we’ll ever go evergreen is because the live element of the challenge and of the program is probably like the coolest thing about it and I think what attracts people to it the most. So having this community of women that are going through the same thing that are making these changes together, it’s just really amazing, and it works really well. And I think taking that live element out would just make it not as valuable. And also obviously it helps for creating scarcity, etc.

Steve: Sure, so this 30 Day Challenge, does that mean you just do it once a month?

Kym: We do it once a quarter.

Steve: Once a quarter okay.

Kym: So we’ve worked it out where we could run the challenge up to four times during the year because it’s 10 weeks, and then we run a challenge leading up to each program.

Steve: I see. And then the 10 week program, what happens after 10 weeks?

Kym: So yes, I mean, after 10 weeks the program ends and then people go into an alumni group. But what we’ve found that was actually quite interesting is that a lot of women were doing the program multiple times. And so we created like an alumni discount price. And anyone who’s done the program before can purchase it again for $29 for the original tier, like membership level that they purchased that and that’s actually been really popular, and also really valuable to us because all of these women that have already done the program before and are in our Facebook group are like amazing. They’re answering the questions for us. They’re providing inspiration and support for the other women.

Steve: It’s very interesting actually, so they’re having a much lower price for the same content?

Kym: That’s right, but because all the content is downloadable, really the only aspect they’re getting is if they bought the premium, they get the customizable meal plan, which can be quite useful and it generates a shopping list. But it’s more so that live element of being in that group. So for me, that seemed like a reasonable price, because it’s almost like, because we were thinking for a while about creating a membership site or something like that. But I think creating that just alumni, we call it an alumni repeat special kind of — works really well.

Steve: It’s interesting. So this Facebook group for the 30 Day Challenge, does it reset every time you do it?

Kym: It doesn’t, it doesn’t. And if you want to talk about our Facebook group, your audience might actually find it interesting.

Steve: Yeah, let’s talk about it.

Kym: It’s pretty cool. Yeah, so we’ve got about I think over 30,000 people in our group now. And it’s become really, really valuable to us. We do spend quite a lot of time and they’re like admitting, but at the same time, it’s actually become like quite a good source of leads for us. So we get probably 15% of our program purchases and signups come from the Facebook group alone, we get a lot of social proof. So within our Facebook group, we get a ton of people posting success stories daily, like really amazing success stories, which I think is great social proof that what we’re teaching people works really well.

And it also is really great for inspiring others to show, okay, I can do this, this is possible, because I do find that with a lot of women, they just really struggle to make the changes. So being in kind of this group atmosphere where they’re seeing these success stories is really powerful. It drives a lot of traffic to our website. Yeah, and we post in there quite a bit.

Steve: Can we talk about back in the day when the group was zero people, how did you kind of foster the interaction between the members?

Kym: Yeah, I mean, it grew so quickly that it was pretty easy to do that, because we launched the Facebook group at the same time we launched the chat. We actually just created the Facebook group in order to have a place to host the challenge on social media. And it just grew really quickly. So basically I think at the time I was using Meet Edgar. So I would just post blog posts in there. I just created discussion topics. I would post some lead magnets like diet cheat sheets and checklists. We do weekly giveaways. It was yeah, it just really naturally happened.

Steve: How did you get people to join the 30 day challenge in the first place, or is that just kind of organic through SEO?

Kym: Originally, it happened because of social media. So Instagram probably was our main one. So we would basically tell everyone on Instagram we’re doing this free challenge, we post about it quite a bit. And then because we would be posting the challenge like day by day, similar to how like simple green smoothies does it day by day within Instagram, people would be like, oh, what’s this challenge, I better sign up. So that kind of would funnel people on to our email list. And then we would say, look, if you’re doing the challenge, this Facebook group is a really great place to join as well if you want to do the challenge on there.

So Instagram was the main one, and then Pinterest, basically driving people to blog posts from Pinterest. And within all of our blog posts, we talk about the challenge a lot. We might talk about the challenge too much but I think it works really well. And it also like we include success stories from the challenge within all of our blog posts. And so that’s kind of now where most of our leads are coming from is people finding us in search, reading these blog posts, hearing about the challenge, the success stories, and then signing up from there.

Steve: I know you mentioned a customizable meal plan in your premium package. How does that work? Do you like hand create meal plans for these people or?

Kym: We do, we do? And it took us about nine months to build the program. It was like a really — it was a massive passion project I would say. Yeah, so we basically — it’s got about 200, over 200 recipes now in it. And yeah, it was a really big job. And we basically took it — I mean if you find it interesting, took a plug in, and then customized it to create this kind of customizable meal plan. So we basically create a meal plan that people get over the 10 weeks, we drip it out, it’s always nine days in advance. And we basically say, look, this is what you’re having for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And there’s a recipe index so if people want to, they can switch out a recipe that they don’t want that we’ve put in their meal plan for dinner and switch it out for something else. And they can add in snacks and drinks and then that will populate out a shopping list.

Steve: Nice. Nice. I kind of wanted to kind of end this interview talking about physical products and your strategy. I know you didn’t end up selling physical products and I was just kind of curious the decision to not do that. And why do you want to sell physical products in the first place because this was kind of already going on even beforehand.

Kym: It was. I mean, for me, it was a lot about — when I was thinking about physical products it was really about how do I diversify? We’ve created this program, and we’d created a few eBooks and it was just kind of trying to brainstorm what to do next, what to create next. And I had the idea of — I was seeing other bloggers, I think that was really the influence for me, starting to put physical products into their stores. And I thought okay, maybe that’s something I should do. And I was basically a huge fan of yours and a longtime listener on your podcast and knew that you had a course. I don’t think I’ve ever actually read your blog or gotten an email from you. I literally was like, oh, I love him, I love his podcast.

Steve: Interesting, okay.

Kym: Yeah, I went straight away and bought your course because I thought if anyone is going to teach me how to do physical products, it’s got to be Steve. So I signed up for your course and I did a lot of your lessons. And a lot of them helped me just for digital, for our digital products, SEO and Facebook advertising. And you pretty much go into literally anything you possibly need to know if you’re going to be online. But after doing your course, I was like, oh man; this is tough, like physical products.

Steve: You know what I was just thinking that would work for you Kym would be some sort of journal or accountability journal.

Kym: Well, that’s so funny you say that Steve, because that’s like the one thing that I’ve decided I actually might do. That’s so funny that you say that.

Steve: Oh okay yeah, just for the listeners out there, we didn’t have this conversation beforehand.

Kym: No.

Steve: And that’s like a really low, pretty simple thing to source. And it’s low risk.

Kym: Yes, yes. And I actually have a lot of notes and I’ve done a lot of brainstorming. And I do think I’ll do it. It’s just hard for me to justify it only because I feel like it would be a lot more work than creating an eBook.

Steve: Yes for sure, yes it would be.

Kym: It is, it’s a lot more work. But I do think that if it’s something that would really benefit my audience, then I’ll do it. It’s just a matter of time.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Kym: Yeah. I mean, so that’s I guess that’s where we’re at with the whole physical products thing.

Steve: Okay. I mean, I think it would add value. I mean, granted, I don’t exactly know what your 10 week program is like, but it seems like having something physical too as an accountability tool would add value to your 10 week program?

Kym: Yes, yeah. So I mean, there’s a few different things, we could do a workbook that goes along with it that people could purchase with the program. But I also love the idea of having something like lower priced products because we get about a 2%, 3% conversion rate on the program. And there’s heaps of women — I’m saying heaps, because I’ve lived in Australia for so long. But there’s a lot of women who do our challenge who just can’t afford a program or don’t think it’s worth the money. So I think having some sort of lower price point product would be really useful for them.

Steve: So Kym, where can people find more about you and your program and 10 or 15% have this ailment. And so, I’m willing to bet that a lot of listeners out here are probably experiencing some of the symptoms. So where can people find you online?

Kym: Yeah, sure. So I’ve got two different websites. So Beatpcos.com and that’s where we host the challenge and where our program is. And then my blog is Smartfertilitychoices.com.

Steve: Just curious, why did you decide to split that into two different sites?

Kym: Yeah, so with Smart Fertility Choices, I came up with a name originally when I was blogging a lot about fertility. And we’ve kind of niched down a lot into just serving women specifically with polycystic ovarian syndrome and doing that through diet and lifestyle changes. So it just, I’m really struggling at the moment of actually what to do if I want to move my blog over to Beatpacos.com. I’m just a bit nervous about the technical aspects, but it’s just that I just needed to do the name change because Smart Fertility Choices just didn’t make a lot of sense.

Steve: So does Beat PCOS have monster content on it, or is it just for the challenge?

Kym: No. It’s just — yeah, at the moment it’s like a bunch of pages selling the program. And then we run the challenge on there as well. So we basically open pages up during the challenge that we then send people to via email with the videos and meal plans.

Steve: Got it, I would not change. It’s very risky and it’s not worth it.

Kym: Oh, interesting.

Steve: I had friends who tried to switch domains to something that they bought that was a little more appealing. And I have one friend actually right now, he lost 85% of his traffic and he’s been hiring SEOs and whatnot, and they still haven’t got it back. He’s considering switching back again now. It’s unpredictable.

Kym: That’s so interesting. Okay.

Steve: Some people experience like a 30% loss and it comes back within a couple of months; other people just lose the traffic. Most people don’t have the stomach to sit through like more than like four months’ worth of significantly lower traffic, but it has happened with some of my colleagues. So it’s hit or miss.

Kym: Okay, that’s really, I’m so glad you said that. Yeah, I am – that’s something I was actually going to email you about. So it’s one less email you have to get from me.

Steve: So Kym, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I mean, I know I learned a lot and I’m sure the listeners got a lot of value out of it as well.

Kym: Yeah, it’s my pleasure.

Steve: All right, take care again. Thanks a lot.

Kym: Thanks Steve.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now when it comes to online marketing, it doesn’t matter whether you sell digital products or physical products, the principles of selling are all the same. For more information about this episode, go to Mywifequitherjob.com/episode261.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied to your e-commerce store. Now if you want to give it a try, it is free. So, head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to Mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s Mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.Mywifequitherjob.com.

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