But before we begin I wanted to give a shout out to Seller Labs for sponsoring this episode, and specifically I want to talk about their awesome Amazon tool, Scope. Now if you know me I always get really excited about the tools that I like and use, and Scope is a tool that actually increased my Amazon sales on several listings by 39% within the first week of use, crazy, right?

Now what does this tool do that could possibly boost my sales so quickly? Well, quite simply, Scope tells you what keywords are driving sales on Amazon. So here is what I did. I searched Amazon and I found the bestselling product listings in my niche then I used Scope to tell me exactly what keywords the bestselling listings were using to generate sales. I then added these keywords to my Amazon listings and my sales picked up immediately.

So today I use Scope for all my Amazon products to find high converting keywords in the back end as well as for my Amazon sponsored ad campaigns. So in short, Scope can boost your Amazon sales almost immediately like they did for mine, and 39% is nothing to sneeze at. Right now if you go to Sellerlabs.com/wife you can actually check out Scope for free, and if you decide to sing up you’ll get $50 off any plan. Once again that’s Sellerlabs.com/wife.

Now I also want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show, and once again I’m excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not a different provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores and here is why it’s so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought and that adds a lot of functionality. So let’s say I want to send an email out to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I have ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now on to 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 have my buddy, Nathan Chan on the show. Now, Nathan is someone who I met recently at Social Media Marketing World and I’m really glad that we met. He is the owner of Foundr Magazine, which is a great resource to hear the stories about today’s successful entrepreneurs and learn what’s needed to be successful yourself in the business world.

And he’s had some incredible guests on his site and podcast including guys like Richard Branson, Garry Be, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, and other famous entrepreneurs. And what’s even more amazing is that he attracts most of his traffic through Instagram of all places.

Now, if you are look at Nathan’s account or Foundr Magazine’s account I should say, he has over one million followers which is crazy. So today I was hoping to do a deep dive into Nathan’s Instagram strategy and how he’s used IG to grow his magazine and his podcast. And with that, welcome to the show Nathan, how is it going man?

Nathan: I’m doing great, thanks Steve. Thank you so much for having me brother. It’s an absolute honor.

Steve: Dude, it’s an honor to have you on the show. It was a pleasure meeting you, what, a couple of weeks ago, was it now? I think you are still jet lagged; it was last week, probably, right?

Nathan: Yes, it feels like last week, it was like yesterday man.

Steve: So Nathan what’s the story, man? Why did you decide to create a magazine of all things?

Nathan: I wish I could tell you it was like a crazy strategy, but I just kind of fell into it dude. I was working in a job that I really didn’t like. This was what? Four years ago and I never started a business before, but I started to read a lot of books around personal development and also just you know 4 Hour Work Week, Rich Dad Poor Dad, just you know all these great kind of iconic books you can grow rich that people read to improve themselves.

And there was two books in particular that really, really changed my perspective, almost made me see the matrix. I think when you are working nine to five job, corporate job, it’s easy to think that’s all there is. That you are not going to start businesses, nothing at all possible but those books opened up my mind to what is potentially possible, and that sparked the seed of really deep interest.

So I started listening to podcasts like Pat Flynn and reading his blog, or we speaking to Yarrow. I used to read Yarrow’s blog. For these guys it was like so cool and then as time went on I was like you know what, I think I should do something. So I started playing around with affiliate marketing and I remember I created this website called bestsmellingcologne.net which was absolutely ridiculous at the time. And then what happened was this opportunity came about.

This guy that I was following, his name was [inaudible] [00:06:16]. He was creating this software, this SaaS product that would allow you to produce your own digital magazine, and I just thought that was such a brilliant idea. And then so I fell in love with the idea of producing a magazine, but I didn’t know what the topic was. At first the topic was going to be on horse racing, because horse racing is really big in Australia.

Steve: Interesting.

Nathan: And then I ended up — that didn’t end up working out. I was going to do with one with my best friends and roommates at the time that I was living with, and that didn’t end up working out. And we said no, this is not going to work because he got a full time job and he couldn’t do anything on the side, and then I was like I’m going to do my own thing but he was a horse racing journalist.

So I was going to be like kind of marketing and tech guy sort of thing, and that’s when I was just like okay, what else could I do? And I just wrote down a huge list of things that I’m passionate about, I’m interested in and just started deep diving into thinking about how I can differentiate myself in the market place which is a really, really key thing and I’m glad that I did.

And yeah, I identified that there wasn’t really a business magazine in the space that spoke to aspiring novice stage, at least stage startup founders and entrepreneurs and also millenials. And yeah, that’s kind of what happened is I just was like okay, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to stay in my day job and do this on the side and see how it goes, and I’m going to give it a good hard crack for a year and then it just kind of took off and the rest is kind of history man.

Steve: I vaguely remember when I first heard of you and I think like one of your first big names, like the first guy you landed was like Richard Branson, right? I want to say, was it?

Nathan: Yeah, yeah, it wasn’t the first one. We are related with Richard Branson. He was in the first four months, three to four months that I landed interview with Richard Branson, and that was for issue number eight.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: And we didn’t start the podcast right away. With the podcast it’s only been around for two years. I started the magazine exactly four years ago now.

Steve: Who was your first big name guy that you got?

Nathan: I don’t know. Classify big name.

Steve: Well, like a Richard Branson type. Like, I’m just kind of curious.

Nathan: It would be Richard Branson then.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: It would Richard Branson, yeah, yeah.

Steve: That’s when you came on the map for me and I was just curious like how did you get him first of all? Like what’s your outreach strategy?

Nathan: So a few things, we wrote an in-depth blog post 6,000 words to detailing the exact process. So you can go there, foundrmag.com/getinterviews. No opt in required, just check out the blog post, it’s really, really in-depth but the way — that breaks it down to really, really deep level. But the main premise of it Steve is one, I find out who the gate keeper is. Who is the person that’s going to be the decision marker because it’s usually actually at this level with an entrepreneur that’s famous or an influencer that is as famous or influential as Richard Branson, he’s in our niche, the entrepreneurship niche, they don’t even really make the decision. It’s actually a PR person usually or you pass on to their assistant.

So you need to find who that gate keeper is. It might be an agency that they are paying. I’ve got a lot of individual through agencies, like that is how we got our first interview was actually both of our interviews with Tony Robbins, dealing with separate PR agencies. So it depends on the gate keeper, you need to find the gate keeper, assistant, PR agency or internal PR person in the company. How do you find that person?

You can use a tool like Clearbit, C-L-E-A-R-B-I-T. You can use a tool like Email Hunter, you can just do Google searches on LinkedIn to find out who that person is that’s head of PR or whatever, and then you need to start contacting them. You can call with email and you can use tools like rebound.cc which automates your follow up, say that person doesn’t respond you can see, you can do something like that, or you can call them on the phone which is something that I actually prefer more times than not now. And you just keep following up and if they say no, they say no, if they say yes, they say yes.

Some people like for example Barbara Corcoran of Shark Tank, she said no then I come back to her a year later. So I spoke to her assistant and I found her contact details from her personal website and then I come back. So it’s all about the follow up too man, and it’s all about also making it a no brainer by finding out what that person wants.

So for example before I met you in person at Social Media Marketing World I actually interviewed Tony Robbins in person in New York and that came about because he was launching his new book Unshakable. So it’s a great way to find people that are looking to do interviews at the present time is when they are launching a book or a new company. So for example you can go to the Amazon coming soon list, and I’ve already identified, I sent someone in my team. I’ll tell you right now you find this interesting, I’ve opened up my slack, just give me a second.

I identified, I was looking in the app, Amazon coming soon literary last night of people we might want to interview, and I said these are the people you want to get in contact with, because I don’t do the outreach anymore, someone in my team does the see up. And there was somebody that is launching a book — yeah, so there is Kevin Kelly the founder of Wired Magazine. He is launching a book called Inevitable Understanding Technology Forces of the Future, and then there is also Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and Foundr of LinIn and she’s launching a book called Plan B — no, Option B I think, or Plan B.

But either way they are two targets and they are going to be looking for a lot of press, and they are going to be much easy to get interviews with as opposed to going in cold. And they are super busy trying to grow their company and super attached to whatever their mission, what they are driving and it’s not a focus. So with Richard Branson, I played on the fact that his first business magazine, his first business venture was a student magazine and also that our audience is young entrepreneurs and he does a lot of work on helping, and he’s been working with the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Steve: Did you have an audience at that time?

Nathan: No.

Steve: No not at all. So he just did it because his story resonated with him, right?

Nathan: He did it more than anything because one I played on the fact that his first business venture was a magazine. Two, I pitched the right person and three, because we had a magazine. A magazine is much more powerful than having a blog or a podcast or like, and it’s so much more influence. I can’t put my — it’s hard to explain Steve, but there is a lot of credibility that comes when you produce a publication even if it’s just digital in the app store. There is a really high perceived value.

Steve: Interesting, okay.

Nathan: Just like if you have a TV show versus a YouTube channel, you know what I mean?

Steve: Right, right, right, okay, okay. That’s interesting and then once you started landing one I imagine landing other big names is much easier then afterwards, right?

Nathan: Yeah, and we started to build up our audience and we were able to justify that this person, the exchange in value, their time versus exposing them to our audience was a mutually beneficial exchange in value. I got lucky with Sir Richard Branson and he really did help me get my start, and then I really built off the back of that in a big way.

Steve: Sure yeah, of course, of course.

Nathan: I’ve leveraged the shit out of that man; I’m not going to lie.

Steve: So I’m just curious, so you have this magazine and like if were to start today I don’t know if I would go into blogging or what not. I’m just curious so how does Foundr Magazine make money? Is it the traditional way with like advertising or do you have other ways of making money?

Nathan: Yeah, so we have an interesting business model. It’s a non-traditional media business model, non-traditional publishing model. So most of the traditional media companies, they just make money from ads and subscriptions, mainly advertising. We do make money from ads and sponsorship but it is probably the lowest tickets where we generate our income.

We have a membership site where we generate recurring revenue from. So that’s a subscription base. We also have the magazine which is charged. We charge for the magazine as well which is a subscription base, and then we also have educational courses and products and will eventually get into events.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: So that’s — and I want eventually build a SaaS products. So I see the magazine as the face of the business and then connecting people that follow the brand, the podcast, the blog, social content, all that free stuff. You know 99% of our stuff is free and then we kind of segment our audience finding out what their problems are as founders, entrepreneurs, if we can further solve them with educational courses, the magazine, membership site, events, a SaaS tool eventually etc. etc.

So that’s our model and I didn’t — I will not claim credit for this model. There is a company called Maquoda, M-A-Q-U-O-D-A and they help — it’s like a consulting company that helps old school publishers. Like people that have been publishing a magazine for like 20 years. They help them digitize it and make it, turn it to this business model that I discussed, I described. It’s called a multi faceted platform.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: Multi-platform or something they call it and their blog is amazing. So I just read all the free stuff off their blog and stole that idea.

Steve: What generates the most revenue for you of all those sources that you specified just now?

Nathan: Definitely the educational products.

Steve: So these are the courses, right?

Nathan: Yup.

Steve: Okay, okay, got it. Okay, so let’s get into the meat of this. So you have this magazine, you have some content, was that correct actually in the intro that the majority of your traffic comes from Instagram?

Nathan: Not majority, but it’s our highest traffic source definitely on social. I think organic might be marching it now because we are pushing pretty hard on organic.

Steve: So Google you mean, right?

Nathan: Yeah.

Steve: Organic Google traffic?

Nathan: Yup, yup, yup.

Steve: Okay. I was looking at your Instagram account and it looks like you have over a million followers, and what I would like to do actually is maybe take it from the perspective of someone who has like less than a 1,000 followers. Like how do you build it up to a million? And first of all what is the time frame with which you build those million followers and what is the fastest way to kind of build a following that’s very targeted?

Nathan: Yeah, sure thing. So I started on Instagram in November 2014. It was the same month that we launched the podcast.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: And I stumbled across it purely because I had left my job because I was working with Foundr on the side as I mentioned. I left my job and I stumbled across it because I was looking for a [inaudible] [00:18:05] channel and I don’t know — I didn’t know PPC and still to this day we are not that strong on PPC to be honest with you.

And yeah, I was testing many different channels and I tested Instagram and I just saw the subscriptions of the magazine spike, because I had a friend that has in fact a few different ecommerce businesses and was crashing it with Instagram two years ago as a traffic source. And he told me, he gave me some tips and I followed those for a couple of days, and I just saw on Google analytic our subscriptions spike, and I was like yeah, I’m on to something here.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: So I built Instagram to a million in about two years, two years.

Steve: That’s crazy.

Nathan: Probably two years and three months and…

Steve: All right, so what were these tips? You are killing me.

Nathan: Yup, yup, so pretty much the first thing I did was I did a competitive analysis looking at the kind of content that our competitors were posting on social because please note at this stage we had no presence on social. Now we have six figure followers on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and now our next focus will be YouTube.

But I had to do a deep competitor analysis to find out what kind of content other magazines, other people that were producing entrepreneurial content were producing on their social channels. And one thing that I found and I don’t know why but startup tips and facts and quotes just killed it for like Success magazine and all these other publications.

So I was like okay, let’s just test that, and obviously differentiate ourselves by posting photos of the magazine and the podcast and lessons learnt from the founders we had interviewed, and photos of people and bits and pieces, and probably we should show a bit more behind the scene stuff, but the core emphasis is “Start up tips and facts.” So it would attract the kind of people that are interested around entrepreneurships and startups.

And that’s what I started doing and every time that I posted about the magazine and told people to click on the link in our bio to get the free Richard Branson issue, or subscribe to the magazine. And I did a direct link to the iTunes link and we are on Google Play as well, but I’ve found that most of our revenue is generated from the app store and a lot of people that — 99% of the people that are on Instagram are on their phone.

So if you press on that Apple link in our bio, they just have — they are two clicks away. One click to open and it says, yes, do you want to open this app? Do you want to open the app store? You say yes and then you say the — you get taken right to the landing page to download the app and then one more click they press download, obviously put in their password and then they got the app. It’s like literary three hoops and jump. It’s a low — I guess it’s, there is low resistance to download the app. It’s free, you get the free Richard Branson issue, and yes that was the second thing.

I started producing content that our audience loved, then I started pushing people to click on the link in our bio. And then the third thing was I discovered that one of the fastest ways to grow an Instagram account is to get other people to share your content and to influence the marketing.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: And I did that at scale man, and I did pay a little bit but I didn’t really have that much money. So what I did was I paid a little bit but I convinced people and found people that had a similar size following to Foundr and re-share each other’s content, and that term, that method is called S for S, share for share. Share that for share that where you team up with other companies, people, pages, you name it and get them to share your content.

And if you do that, you do those three things; produce awesome content that your audience loves that resonates, that looks great. You do it at scale, like what we do. We post anywhere between five to nine times a day and you produce content that your audience love, that looks great with great aesthetics. You encourage people to click on the link in your bio. If your account is verified you can get people to swipe up on your stories like what we do a lot, and then also another thing that you have to do is make sure that you are consistent, never stop and then work with influencers. Yeah, you are in a good spot, man.

Steve: So let me ask you this, so you say you post five to nine times per day. I mean that sounds like a lot. If you are first starting out, is that what you would recommend as well or?

Nathan: No, no if you are running an ecommerce business you only have to post one to two times a day. You just have to make sure your photos of the products looks great and you have to make sure that photos of people using the products and people that you want to — your audience aspires and you have to know your audience aspirations, pains, gains, wants, needs, problems, frustrations, desires, and you have to match that into the brand and the communication of those images that you’re a putting out there. That’s really, really key.

So we don’t have any ecommerce based products. Well, actually we do. We are just about to launch a physical book. We are about to go live with that like we did Kick Starter but I know this because I know a lot of ecommerce founders that are crashing it plus I’m about to launch my own ecommerce business, and these are the things that we will do. And we also have students that have done our Instagram course that have made easily over a million dollars just from Instagram from doing this. Using influencers, getting people to take photos of the products, giving them away for free, doing giveaways, you name it man.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you’re interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both a video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online.

Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/free, now back to the show.

So in terms of just the actual images themselves, do they have to be professional? Like did you go out and hire like a photographer for your initial postings?

Nathan: No, so with full transparency, like this is what — I will tell you what we are going to do. It might be helpful actually, 1,000 followers, less than a 1,000 followers. This is where we are at now with my girlfriend’s company, right? And you can watch it grow man, you can follow along in a couple of months, watch it grow, okay. So we are starting an ecommerce business from scratch. We did pay a few hundred dollars to get a professional photographer to take great images of the products for the website.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: We will be able to use that collateral on the Instagram page but all the other photos that you see now for that product and the product if you want to check it out, you go to Instagram.com/Healthish, H-E-A-L-T-H-I-S-Hco, if you go to Healthishco you’ll be able to see that all those photos are taken with your phone and just touched up with apps. What’s really going to get the growth going, like we have already got people messaging us all the time with only a few hundred followers saying, when is this product going alive? How can I get? How can I get it? How can I get it?

And we’ve got a waiting list with only like 100 people on it, but it doesn’t matter. The point of the story is what you have to do is you need, you always need professional photos done to make it look the part, look great on the website and then the key thing is sending out that product. Allocating it 100 units, 200 units to fuel that user generated content and work with influencers. So you want to send like this bottle we are going to send to Valley Arcade I think 300 bottles, send to 300 influencers.

And we are going to absorb that cost because we know our margins and those influencers as part of the deal is they have to post to their audience and that’s one piece of content that we can use. Plus every single person that we send the bottle to gets a card where we encourage them to share and post on Instagram and we’ve incentivized it. So that’s another thing that we’ve done to encourage user generated content.

Steve: Let’s talk about the influencers, like how do you convince them to post?

Nathan: Give them the product for free bro.

Steve: And that’s good enough?

Nathan: Yeah.

Steve: So can you give me an example of like an outreach. So let’s say you’ve tracked down someone on Instagram. So one, how do you find their contact information? Two, like what does your outreach email look like, and what’s the size of these influencers right now in your case when you are launching this ecommerce product?

Nathan: Okay, so sizes really range. With full transparency, I think if we try to send a bottle for free to someone with 300k followers they probably will say yeah, we can post it plus its going got cost this, but we don’t want to do that.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: So we are going to look for influencers, micro influencers, anywhere between the size of ten to 50k, maybe upwards of, maybe close to 100k.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: And we are going to cut deals. The outreach depends. We go to the profile, if somebody’s profile has their email address on their profile then we know that they want to hear from us, then we send them an email, otherwise we direct message them.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: And then we just take it from there and it’s quite manual. But you just got to get down and dirt man, and from doing this at scale we will start to get other people to share our content, share photos with the bottle. Them having the bottle it will generate sales, it will generate us content and it will generate us followers, and as time goes on we’ll organically get more and more followers.

I’ve got a whole ton of other strategies that we can use that I can talk about if you like right now how we are going to grow it, but a big one will be influencers, and just working with them one to one and what the outreach looks like. We will just sell the product man. Sales process, hey, we are launching a health based product, this is what we are inspired by, this is our why, we’d love to send you a bottle in exchange for you posting, doing one post. If you are interested in this, here is the directions of what we are looking for, and we’ll just constantly follow them up until they post. Please email us once you post it.

Steve: Do you provide the image or do you have them take the image.

Nathan: No, they have to take the image. That’s what is very, very key Steve because it’s all about the user generated content. For a physical product it’s one of the best ways to sell man, is to show somebody else using it, every day people like me and you using the product. If you get models, it does work if you use Kim Kardashian or Kendall Jenner, it does work but the everyday people is what’s most relatable bro.

Steve: Okay, Okay.

Nathan: Makes sense?

Steve: Yeah, and then do you give them instructions on like what hash tags to use and like how specific are the instructions that you give them when they post?

Nathan: Yeah, look, that’s — we can get supper complicated or we can make it simple. It doesn’t really matter. We can get them to use the Healthish hash tag, we can get them to use the hash tag that lets us know so that we don’t have to always search or whatever. We can get them to use Healthish promo or whatever.

Like we can get a Healthish one, Healthish one, two, three. Like it doesn’t really matter, like we can’t tell what hash tags to use, but I think the main goal is one to expose your product to their audience, two to get the UJC, to get that content because all that content man and you want to get as much content as you can to build up this rapport and community around the brand and reputation and people using the product. That’s where it’s at.

Steve: Are there any tools that you use to find out like which influencers that you’d want to target?

Nathan: No, not really. You can do it manually, but there is Iconosquare. Iconosquare do have like a free search database and one of my friends Greta, she is launching an amazing influencer based tool called Hey, H-E-Y. It was called Nichify, if you search for Nichify or Hey you will be able to find it. But I haven’t used it yet but the platform looks amazing, we’ll probably start using that, but for the most part you can do it manually yourself.

Steve: Okay and I’m just curious like what has been your hit rate doing this?

Nathan: With Healthish with full transparency bro, we haven’t launched the product yet, so we have nothing to send to people, so we haven’t hit any…

Steve: Okay, what about when you were…

Nathan: But when I was doing Foundr, yeah I will draw from my experience at Foundr.

Steve: Sure.

Nathan: What has been my hit rate? In the early days obviously when we had no followers it was pretty rough dude. Maybe ten, 20% but as time went on…

Steve: That sounds high actually, to me at least yeah.

Nathan: Really?

Steve: Yeah.

Nathan: Well look, I was cutting deals too remember, like I was making friends with these people. I built up a book of around 20, 30 people that were in my roller decks which I would team up with and set up rotations of sharing content, and also some of them I featured in the magazine, I featured in the podcast, I featured in the blog. Some of them I mentored because I didn’t even have a product, I just had an Instagram account.

So it really depended on the mutually beneficial exchange in value. So it’s hard to draw on that one but yeah, it wasn’t really — I don’t think the hit rate was that high, but I had leverage. With Healthish I’m starting from scratch man. Hit rate would be probably I think not that high, but doing this process and being very, very gradual with it, getting down and dirty, doing things that don’t scale, this is what you have to do in the early days to build up any brand. So I have to be honest with full transparency, I’m not going to do the work, it’s going to be my girlfriend, I might help her a little bit, for the most part I’ve got run Foundr.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: That’s the strategy and that’s what we teach to our students that have ecommerce companies and they do very, very well, like we had a student that sells hair extensions. She generated over a million dollars last year mainly from Instagram, that’s her only channel and she did exactly that. Same with another one of our students who sells 4×4 tracks. He doesn’t see, what’s interesting for him is he obviously can’t give away cars for free because he charges like 30, 40, 50, 60 70k for these cars but he finds niche pages. So here is a key differentiation Steve that you might find interesting. There is three different kinds of Instagram accounts.

One there is a personal brand account that’s like Steve Chou. You’ve got your Instagram account, you are an influencer, you run entrepreneurship, podcasting, ecommerce, FB ads all these things. So if you are a personal trainer you’ve got your own personal — if you are a personal trainer you’ve got a big account, you’ve got a personal brand page account, right?

The second one is a company/ a company brand page. So that’s like a Foundr or Healthish or Nike or Daniel Wellington or any of these brands, right? And then the third one is a fan page. Have you heard of fan pages before?

Steve: No, I’ve not, keep going.

Nathan: Fan pages are a page that is 100% dedicated around a certain niche.

Steve: Oh yes, yes, of course.

Nathan: And they don’t have a brand behind it, all they literally do is post and build follower base and then they make money from promoting other people’s products, and there are so many young kids who want to go real date. There are so many young kids from the ages of 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 that I have spoken to that have these niche pages that I’ve worked with, I’ve cut all sorts of deals, I’ve done all sorts of things to get them to share Foundr’s content. And we’ll do the same with Helthis bro. We will not only work with micro-influencers and people with personal brand pages, I will use my networks and hustle to cut deals with these niche pages.

So these people that might have a collective of like a hundred million followers and they will have like literary 40 different accounts. One in fashion, one with watches, one in luxury, one on cars, it’s crazy. So those niche pages are ones that you want to try and work with as well. And then another strategy you want to build and this is something that my friend Greta did, and we are actually working on an ecommerce course collaborative ecommerce course with her that she’s teaching and she has, she runs Shopify to first build the business. She has four multi-million dollar brands and she told me she uses Instagram as one of the main traffic sources too for her ecommerce products.

And one thing that she told me was another thing you can do is actually create these fan pages yourself. So if you want to go real deep man, you can start to create two accounts, one a branded account which is Healthish which is around your brand and then two, I could create a health based account around health and fitness. Because anyone that’s following the health and fitness niche fan page they are going to be interested when every now and then throw in that product and fan pages are really, really easy to grow because people treat Instagram now like a vision board.

People post things that inspire them. It’s a little bit like Pinterest man. So there are a lot of people that create niche pages just for fun as well. So yeah man, there’s [overlapping 00:36:52]

Steve: Let me ask you; let me ask you this question. So the algorithm has recently changed so that they show more content that is getting more engagement, right? So I actually had someone else on the show and I don’t know if the episode is published yet, but they built their business through Instagram as well. And the way they started was, they were paying influencers and doing share for shares also, but what he told me was like, ever since this algorithm hit, like whenever one of those influencers shows one of their products, that post would not get as much engagement than their regular post and it is not working as well anymore. So I’m just curious what your take is on that.

Nathan: Yeah, look, there is no doubt about it that there was, there is conflict, it’s like Facebook man. Facebook or Instagram there is no doubt about it that two years ago Instagram was hotter and easier to get free traffic or a better ROI as opposed to now. But man, for me it works, for me it continues to work for our students and you look at Instagram and yes, the engagement isn’t as powerful as it was two years ago, but yes it’s still extremely powerful bro.

Steve: Okay, okay and then…

Nathan: Yeah, like I wouldn’t say that it is a channel that you should stop using just yet. In fact I would say it’s still a channel that you should be doubling down on right now and you can get an ROI because I see it day in day out.

Steve: Just curious, are you paying for ads at this point or are you still just doing everything organically.

Nathan: For Foundr or what we are going to do with Healthish?

Steve: Let’s start with Foundr because it sounds like you’ve been doing this for a while. Are you buying ads for Foundr right now?

Nathan: No, I hardly buy ads at all.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: I have gone through phases where I have and I haven’t but for the most part after we hit 100k we haven’t really bought ads. The only time I have bought ads is when I can see the ROI and might be promoting a product or something like that. Like for example when we did the launch for our Kick Starter book, the book on Kick Starter, coffee table book. So I might buy ads for that and I can measure the ROI but otherwise no. I don’t- and I get people to share and link in their bio and stuff like that, otherwise no, I don’t really pay for ads. We just do, it’s all organic, or we get people to share our content.

Steve: When you do share for shares are you having them change their link in their bio or are they just having them like at direct to your page?

Nathan: Correct, yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: Shares for shares unless I cut a deal with and I have done this many, many times where I cut a deal with an account where a million, I might cut a deal with an account that’s like a 100,000 followers. So we’ll post one of their pieces of content, we never post products; we always want to promote Foundr stuff unless I’m really helping out a friend like Daniel for example.

Steve: Wait, a mutual friend yeah.

Nathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, mutual friend. Yeah how we met big time because he’s actually featured me in his book as well. So like in that aspect, but I will never change linking bio but yeah, I will post the product but yeah, for shares for shares like if someone is 100k or at a million I say like yeah, yeah, post about that book and we’ll post like one of your quotes and we’ll link back to you and change the linking bio. But it will be with a niche page like a fan page man. Companies don’t do that really, branded page don’t do that.

Steve: Just curious like when you were small and like you didn’t really have a large audience at all like what did you have to offer? Like you mentioned like cutting all these deals and I’m just curious what some of these deals were early on when you were, when you had less of a presence.

Nathan: Fully subscriptions to the magazine, life time subscriptions, interview them for the podcast, interview them for the magazine, interview them for the blog, mentor them, a lot of stuff man, help them [overlapping 00:40:56]

Steve: You just get creative depending on what they want, right?

Nathan: Yeah, yeah intros, you name it bro.

Steve: Okay. I’m just curious like of all of these currencies like do you gather emails as well? I’m just curious like where in the hierarchy all these different social currencies lie? Like do you try to get an Instagram follower first or would you rather have an email address? Like what’s more valuable to you?

Nathan: Email.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: Our email list is quarter of a million. I built that. We’ve only been list building for two years. It was over 300,000 but we removed a lot of inactives or people that weren’t opening up our emails. So it’s a quarter of a million and a lot of that is being generated from Instagram and here is the cool thing, Steve.

The cool thing about Instagram yes, we can attribute how much traffic we drive, yes we can attribute how many emails subscribers we get but what we can’t attribute is the influence that we build, the people that follow us and the people that hear about the brand or might come back to us at one point in time. And they might have originally found us on Instagram or seen us on Instagram because we are everywhere and that’s the cool thing.

And that’s something that you know you cannot measure or track, but I’m telling you man, like we don’t do this anymore because I just couldn’t keep up, but when someone would sign up to our list we’d have an indoctrination series, right. And one of the things I would ask people is what is your biggest problem and frustration? I’ll write back, I’ll write back to every email. I’d also love to know how did you find out about Foundr?

And so many people man always start following me on Instagram, start following me on Instagram. Or they’ll say I can’t remember but most of the time they say, oh yeah actually this is when I’m asking somebody in person, oh, I can’t remember, oh, I think I’ve seen you on Instagram. So that stuff that can’t be attributed.

Some of my followers on Instagram that might not download one of our lead magnets from Instagram but then will promote the podcast, they might start listening to the podcast, and then they might have actually downloaded the Branson issue. They might go and check out the website, they might start reading the blog post and then they’ll see content upgrade. Like it’s just an ecosystem, but followers to me Steve don’t really mean anything, it’s for me how much traffic you can drive, how many email subscribers because that’s the core of our business.

The front end is the magazine, the podcast, the blog, social channels, but all leading back to the email list and the email list connects people to our products, with our sales funnels et cetera, products, or services and then yeah, so I’m always of the opinion, I actually don’t really care how many followers we have. Yes, it’s great for influence and yes it’s great for spreading the message, but it’s not owned media; I’m all about owned media, bro.

Steve: Okay. So you post between five and nine times a day, can you kind of describe like what those postings consist of, are they mostly content or are most of them like postings where there is a link in bio where you want them to click on something?

Nathan: Jab, jab, jab, right, hook Gary V stuff.

Steve: Okay, okay. So we are looking at mostly inspirational quotes with maybe one post that’s a link where you want to drive an email sign up it sounds like.

Nathan: Correct and we constantly alternate the lead magnets.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: So we have about 20 different lead magnets that we alternate between.

Steve: Can you describe what your — like you have a team that just generates this Instagram content. Like I’m just wondering for someone small out there who might not have a team like what is the really easy way to just put out Instagram content?

Nathan: It depends on the kind of business you are. If you are ecommerce and I really wish I could share with you how we do it from the Healthish brand once we launch because I really, really want to show you how it’s done for ecommerce, because I know you’ve got a lot of ecommerce people for the brands.

Steve: Yeah.

Nathan: But for Foundr man, it’s all run by VAs. I have two Vas that run the Foundr camp, that do our support, they do admin, they do loading up the blog post, the serious weapons. They run all of our social, so it can be easily done, it’s all about those systems. So I’ve got- we’ve got a graphic designer in that team and he set up these amazingly designed templates.

He did like 20 different templates and then he gave it to one of their VAs who knows how to sue Photoshop and in design, and then now she just uses those templates and he does little bit but for the most part she is creating the content and then we’ve got another one that’s posting it and has a list of – we’ve got some serious weapons in our team just VAs in Philippines that manage it all.

And yeah, look it just depends. Like I don’t want people to think you know, oh, Nathan is posting five to seven times a day. That’s what I got to do, you don’t. The key thing is being super consistent, building a community, being patient, being prepared to play the long game and utilizing influencers.

As I said we do have a course that goes in depth about so many other 30, 40 other growth hacking strategies if you want to know more, but pretty much it’s a combination of all those things. But producing content, I highly, highly recommend to really go down the path especially as an ecommerce business obsessing about UGC, user generated content.

Get your community that you are building up to stop producing that content. That’s where it’s at. That’s how you have an endless amount of content and you can use a VA or you can do it yourself and you just do social media Mondays. You create your seven posts or eight posts or ten posts, or 20 posts or whatever, spend two hours starting every Monday and do for the week and you are done. And you can schedule that up using like a tool like Later or Schedugram, totally up to you. But we posted all manually but yeah, totally up to you.

Steve: So it sounds like a good way to do this perhaps would be when someone makes a purchase you incentivized it somehow in some sort of post purchase sequence to send you a picture of them using in action which you can then use for your Instagram account, and then it kind of just feeds upon itself.

Nathan: 100% and you want to send a little cog with the product incentivizing it on that card with instructions about the product and getting, encouraging people to share and yeah, it’s all about the UGC especially ecommerce for content man, very, very key.

Steve: Is that the same with Foundr magazine as well or no?

Nathan: For us it’s easy to make those quotes and we produce a magazine issue every single month. We’ve got a hit — we are pumping out so much content man, it’s not hard for us and we have a team around us, but in the early days I used to get my girlfriend to help me. You can use little apps and this is if you want to create like, if you want to create images with writing like that you can just use a tool like Iconosquare or Wordswag, you don’t even need to be a graphic designer. It’s really, really easy.

Steve: Okay, so yeah, it sounds like your strategy would differ between an ecommerce store versus like a blog or a content based site, right?

Nathan: 100% but I know…

Steve: So it’s all that UGC for ecommerce.

Nathan: Yeah but I know how to grow a fast growing Instagram account no matter what the initial industry.

Steve: Okay, I’m just trying to summarize everything, so UGC and then rely on influencers share for shares to kind of grow your account gradually and keep up putting out content and occasionally put out an offer with a link in bio trying to get an email address or point directly to a product. Actually what would be your prerogative for an ecommerce store? Would you post them — would you have them go to like some sort of landing page where you can get email or would you just point it straight to the product right off the bat?

Nathan: For now we’ll point straight to the product right off the bat, but I will be running a series of tests like giving away coupon codes, free shipping codes, running random flash coupon codes, giving them to people, all sort of things. I think it would be a combination to be honest man.

Steve: Okay, and then you also advise to set aside some of your initial inventory for giveaways for these influencers, right?

Nathan: 100%.

Steve: Okay.

Nathan: And also running competitions, that’s key too. Another great way to network with other influential camps or you can do things like, you can do like a round up giveaway, have you heard of those?

Steve: No, go ahead, talk about it.

Nathan: So you can like if you run a health based product you can find ten other health brands and then you all promote it together; you all promote the giveaway together. And part of the rules of entering is you have to follow all these like ten accounts or something, stuff like that.

Steve: Cool and just you know what I’m thinking in my mind right now is all these things are things that I’ve done with email and it just seems — and that’s kind of why I asked you that question in the beginning. Like you can focus your efforts on getting Instagram followers or emails or turn your Instagram followers into emails. And so when I asked you that question you said emails were the biggest or more important than Instagram followers, right? So it seems like all these contests and all these shares, like these things can just go straight to email addresses instead, wouldn’t you say?

Nathan: Yeah, look, it depends on the product man, because we are switching between physical products and Foundr digital media company.

Steve: Yeah I know, it’s really confusing, yeah.

Nathan: So like for Foundr, I’m 100% focused on the email, for the Healthish based products, we’ll do a combination of both.

Steve: Okay, okay. Nathan, we’ve been chatting for a while and I appreciate your time and your expertise. Maybe we should do a follow up episode about your ecommerce brand once it’s actually launched; I think that would be interesting to the people listening here.

Nathan: Yeah, for sure, more than happy to man. Give me a few months, we’ve got a hustle, but yeah, you can watch, you can follow along anyone listening and yeah, please watch now, now the pressure is on.

Steve: Yeah, and I will link up all those pages that you specified, right? Was it satish? I can’t remember what it was now, but I’ll look it up. I’ll have my podcaster link all those up and we will follow you in real time. The pressure is on.

Nathan: Yeah, the pressure is on. Also man, well, thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation dude; you’re a great interviewer man.

Steve: Thanks man and where can people find you online?

Nathan: Best place you just go to Foundr.com, F-O-U-N-D-R.com, so Foundr without an E, .com

Steve: Sounds good, Nathan take care man. Thanks for coming on.

Nathan: Thank you so much Steve, absolute pressure brother.

Steve: All right, take care man.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Nathan’s story is incredible and it’s amazing how he’s been able to build his magazine so large on the back of Instagram, he’s the man. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode176.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is the email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase sequence, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. 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 also want to thank SellerLabs.com. Their tool Scope has completely changed the way I choose keywords for both my Amazon listings and my Amazon advertising campaigns. Instead of making random guesses Scope tells me exactly which keywords are generating sales and within the first week of use I saw a 39% increase in sales. It is a no brainer. So head on over to Sellerlabs.com/wife and sign up for free, and if you love the tool you will receive $50 off. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/wife.

And if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce 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 are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Now I’m always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another email provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores and here is why it’s so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they purchased which allows you to do many things. So let’s say I want to send an email out to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on exactly what they purchased, that’s a piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I have ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again that’s Klaviyo, mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I also wanted to give a shout out to my other sponsor, Seller Labs and specifically I want to talk about their awesome Amazon tool, Scope. Now if you know me I get really excited about tools that I use and like, and Scope is actually a tool that increased my Amazon sales on several listings by 39% within the first week of use, crazy, right?

Now what does this tool do that could possibly boost my sales so quickly? Well, quite simply Scope tells you what keywords are driving sales on Amazon. So here is what I did, I searched Amazon and found the bestselling product listings in my niche and then I used Scope to tell me exactly what keywords that bestselling listing was using to generate sales. I then added these keywords to my Amazon listings and my sales picked up immediately.

So today I use Scope for all my Amazon products to find high converting keywords in the back end as well as for my Amazon advertising campaigns. So in short Scope can boost your Amazon sales almost immediately like they did for mine, and 39% is nothing to sneeze at. Now right now if you go to Sellerlabs.com/wife you can check out Scope for free, and if you decide to sign up you’ll get $50 off of any plan. One again that’s Sellerlabs.com/wife. Now on to 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 have my friend Rachel Miller on the show. Now several months ago Rachel spoke at my conference, the Sellers Summit and she knocked it out of the part. There is like this huge crowd around her asking questions, and Rachel and has an amazing wealth of knowledge when it comes to building humongous Facebook followings with rabid fans. And she’s built multiple Facebook pages with more than a million likes, and she uses these pages to drive traffic and sales to both physical and digital products.

Anyway one of the most common questions that I always get asked is how to drive traffic organically to your website or your Amazon listings without spending a lot of money. And today Rachel is going to teach us exactly how she does it. And with that welcome to the show Rachel, how are you doing today?

Rachel: Steve, thank you so much. It’s great to chat with you again. I had so much fun with you at Sellers Summit.

Steve: Yeah, totally. So just for the listeners out there, Rachel has like so much energy and it’s awesome and it’s really infectious. So I know you guys are going to enjoy this episode.

Rachel: I might be a little energetic yeah, it’s been so much fun seeing people’s business grow and helping — I used to be one of those people hoarders who just horded people for my self and I’d collect these audiences and be like, I don’t want to tell you what my product is, I don’t want — now I’ve actually shown other people how to make almost the same audiences I have and it’s really fun to see, it just explodes. It’s not like mine stops growing. It’s just, it just multiplies, it’s so much fun.

Steve: And I’m actually a member of Rachel’s class and the stuff that she teaches really works. And that’s kind of what we are going to be talking about today. But before we start, Rachel, like what is your story? Like I know you started some ridiculously popular blogs in the past, but how did you kind of transition over to Facebook pages?

Rachel: Well, I started — my first blog was Quirky Momma. I started that one and then worked on it until it was 2.2 million and then left that business, and the cool thing is that after I left it was almost like a transition period for me. So I started a new one but I used a lot of the resources I had in the past. I used my other audiences, I used Quirky Momma to help build. So I got shares from big pages, I got shares from big friends, I had shares from like I would pay a couple of big bloggers money here and there to help share my content.

So I was using all of these resource that people had, that other people didn’t have to build this new page in record time, and I think I built it to like 500,000 in like less than a year. I think it was like 18 months I got to 500,000. But the thing is that it wasn’t replicatable if you didn’t have a large budget and if you didn’t have a lot of relationships that you could on.

Steve: But you build that first Quirky Momma site up to 2.2 million you said, right?

Rachel: Yes, yes I left…

Steve: That was from scratch, right?

Rachel: The first million was zero advertisement on that.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Rachel: It was all organic on that one. I did help in the sense we created relationships with other blogs and so we would all share each other’s stuff.

Steve: Okay, okay. But with Quirky Momma though, did you drive — was most of your traffic derived from Facebook for that first blog?

Rachel: Facebook and Pinterest, yes.

Steve: Facebook and Pinterest, okay, okay.

Rachel: Yes and then I roughly, with One Crazy House I got over nine million page views in 2016 from Facebook.

Steve: Just from your fan page, like without ads.

Rachel: Just from Facebook, yes.

Steve: That is crazy. Okay.

Rachel: No ads.

Steve: So with this blog then, so do you focus more on like the blog content these days or do you focus on like the Facebook page stuff?

Rachel: I focus on building audiences and right now my audiences are primarily Facebook and Pinterest. Facebook is the one that I’m exploding on right now, but I mean these principles can be used really on any social media platform.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So Facebook is the one that I’m focusing on but yeah, but I get my traffic and have grown my websites by building an audience. And then when you build that audience you can ask them what do you want and what makes your heart happy, and then give it to them and they become your die hard funs.

Steve: So would you say then that it’s almost not even necessary to have your blog? Like if you have this huge Facebook page, like doesn’t that kind of replace the blog?

Rachel: It does, it’s kind of crazy. But it does have a life of its own. You don’t actually need a website as much anymore. You can have a landing page with your products that you are selling and a Facebook page that has your audience like you are engaging with and use those seamlessly to promote each other.

Steve: And so how do you — I’m just curious how do you use these Facebook pages to make money right now?

Rachel: Lots of different ways. We’ve got — I do have seven, I guess eight now private label products.

Steve: Oh, you do? Okay.

Rachel: Yeah, I do have private label products that I sell. I do sell a couple of retail arbitrage products, and then I’ve also got where I sell affiliates of everybody else’s products. So I sell affiliates to find out what people are buying, and then I see if that thing that people are buying can I source that. And if I can affordably and easily with very minimal time effort on my part then I’ll go do that and if it’s going to take time, effort, research then I’ll outsource that task or not source it myself and just do an affiliate on it.

Steve: Interesting. So in terms of the products that you sell, are they — they had to be obviously related to your Facebook fan page, right?

Rachel: Yes, you have to find a way to connect that to your readers and to your reader’s hearts. So chalkboard labels, this is going to make your life easier getting ready for school because you are going to have all your products, your things that you need organized and if you need to change your label you just wipe it off and you can rewrite it. So chalkboard labels, they are very easy, quick to source from China, they are very cheap and I can have a high mark up on them. So that was one of my products that I sell.

Steve: So to develop that product, was that like a school based fan page?

Rachel: No, that one was to anybody who would want to write something on a label. So I would make an ad for it and I would put that ad on a DYI home site. I would do it on a preschool site; I would do it on even my cat site because you could label your cat food and label your cat products.

Steve: I see, I see. So you don’t really have to — so you build the fan page first and then you find products that kind of fit into the mold?

Rachel: Yes.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: Yes. So things like, I know my DYI home site loves to buy mats. There are certain types of mats that I sell the most of even when I promote other people mats. Like that’s the one that they all tend to go back towards. And so if I could, I actually can’t source because it like the brand will only work with this other seller wherever they’re like they are locked in the contracts, but whenever I link to that product I can sell more. I know I can put that product up on Facebook and I can sell.

Steve: So can you give me an idea of like how much product like as an affiliate first. Like what’s you process? Like how do you figure out whether it’s a home run or not? So you’ll post something about a product, what does the posting look like, and what are some good numbers for it?

Rachel: My best bet in my mind is to have something that’s entertaining. So something that makes someone smile, something that makes their day better. So a lot of my products that I sell I sell through memes or through photos of the products in use in someone’s life. One of my students just like two weeks, three weeks ago maybe sold a weaner dog paper towel holder.

Steve: Weiner dog, okay.

Rachel: I know, she sold out of it on Amazon and she’s just talked on her page about how it was kind of ridiculous that she had to sign her counter and she linked to the product on Amazon and sold out of that product.

Steve: So what is selling out? We are talking of thousands of units, hundreds of units?

Rachel: I don’t know how many units she sold of it, but Amazon went ran of stock.

Steve: Okay, okay and so was she an affiliate or was that her own product?

Rachel: She was an affiliate and she made over $2,000 on the affiliate sales of that product.

Steve: Wow! Okay and so typical affiliate pay is like 5%? Something like that.

Rachel: It ranges between four and eight depending on the product.

Steve: Four and eight, okay.

Rachel: So if it’s a household product, sometimes it’s up to eight.

Steve: So you would consider that a success obviously.

Rachel: Yes.

Steve: So from that point would you try to start sourcing it?

Rachel: Yes, if I was that person I would try to seek where I could find that product and then source it, and then I would control the traffic that goes to that product. So next time I put that link up it would always be my product that’s up there.

Steve: Okay and so you can put these links up over and over again on your fan page?

Rachel: Oh, yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: And once you have a winner, I tend to cycle them where they go up two to twice a month every other month. So it depends on how often.

Steve: Interesting, and so it’s important…

Rachel: Like a Christmas product I might have go every other month during the whole year but then during Christmas time it will go up every other week.

Steve: I see and then so when you have your own product you get to keep all the product profit. Do you also get affiliate revenue off of that also?

Rachel: Yes, if you have it set up where it’s a separate EIN for your affiliate and a separate EIN for your business that is selling the product. Amazon at least whenever I talk to them lets me have multiple accounts as long as they are all under different tax IDs.

Steve: Okay, this is really interesting. And so just for the benefit of the listeners here, what have been some of like your viral posts that have generated a ton of traffic for your stuff? Like what’s your best that you’ve ever done?

Rachel: My best personal one, well toilet paper is my ongoing one. I can sell toilet paper through Amazon Prime now that now delivery with a post about — one post is about kids playing with toilet paper, and the other one is about your cat shredding toilet paper, and basically saying you are out of toilet paper, lucky for me Amazon delivers in an hour. And then you can tweak lucky for me I get another shipment coming in next week because it’s subscribe and save.

So I push those products and that’s my ongoing one that sells the most, but my all-time best is these cat rolling pins. And I sold, I think I made like $2,000 off two $3,000 that month off of cat rolling pins, but I continue to make revenue off of that for like three or four months just on affiliate link and it took me three or four minutes to put it up.

Steve: That’s crazy. So what — sorry I don’t know, what’s a cat rolling pin?

Rachel: It’s a rolling pin like to make cookies. Like you know you roll out your rolling pin you know, only it’s got like embossed cats on it. So whenever you roll the cookies or whatever it is that you are rolling on has the shape of cats.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Rachel: And so that — my Crazy Cat Lady page went crazy about it, but here is the thing, my other pages also ended up going crazy with it too. So it didn’t just do well in Crazy Cat Lady, it did well in my Crazy House one and that one I said, know someone who is a crazy cat lady? So I framed it in such a way that everyone would share with their crazy cat lady friends.

Steve: I’m just trying to picture, in order to make a couple of thousand dollars worth of affiliate sales, that means you have — like how much traffic do you have to drive to make that off of a post.

Rachel: Well, I sold out of Amazon products, so I probably could have sold more but I brought in four million eyeballs to that.

Steve: That is crazy, okay.

Rachel: So but it sold out. So if I had known that it was going to do well I could have had multiple providers of that product or you know.

Steve: Is that one your own is that one affiliate also?

Rachel: That was an affiliate one.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So that was my best one that was an affiliate, yeah.

Steve: Are you planning on selling these cat rolling pins then?

Rachel: I was until I found out that there is like, like you have to make sure that they are like end up the paint on it is you have to have the paint test it and all of that other stuff. So it’s easier for me to not have to — that’s a lot of work to figure out what all those parts are so I don’t get sued. So I just have somebody else, it’s like I’m going to do the chocolate labels, easy.

Steve: Right, yeah, yeah, okay. That makes sense.

Rachel: I go the path of least resistance. So if it can take me 15 minutes to make money on it, it takes 50 minutes for me to source to chalk board labels. It’s going got take a lot longer to source that one in a way that I won’t get in trouble with.

Steve: No, that totally makes sense. So when it comes time to do this, do you — so you put up the fan page first and then you figure out what products make it in there as opposed to figuring out what to sell out first and then creating the fan page, is that it?

Rachel: Yeah, I create the audience because when you have – it’s like the cart with the horse you kind of need both. You need the cart which is your product that you are selling and you need the horse to drive that cart somewhere, the traffic, right?

Steve: Okay, right.

Rachel: So you need both. So I like to get the horse first and the find out what kind of cart fits that horse.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: What kind of products can that horse drag?

Steve: So let’s talk about, so now that we’ve kind of talked about the power of these pages that you are building, let’s talk about how you create one of these fan pages. Like how do I get started from scratch?

Rachel: Oh it’s fun, I like to do, I have what’s called the fast track plan and that’s where you can post win, but before you even start — and that plan is free and Steve can give you like a link to it.

Steve: Okay, yeah we’ll post it, just send it to me after this yeah.

Rachel: Cool. So you guys can follow exactly what I schedule in, but before I begin the fast track plan I like to do tests because you need to find out who your readers are, what they are going to relate to, and then where they are. So who your readers are, okay I want to do a niche about cats, or I want to do a niche about garages, or I want to do a niche about golf or whatever your niche is that’s what you have to decide first, so who your people are.

And then next you’re going to find out what they love. So if I’m a golf person I’m not actually a golf person. So maybe they like looking at golf courses, maybe they like looking at golf clothes, maybe they like looking at golf clubs. I don’t know, so I’m going to put six to nine different posts up and I’m going to boost them all to the same audience. So boost all the golf people and say, okay which one of these gets the most reaction out of you? Okay.

Steve: So you are buying ads to – so how do you figure out what audience to try?

Rachel: I try just the general one to begin. So if it’s golf, I will just try golf.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So golfing as an interest online. For my cats, when I just targeted cats and I found out by testing out the different types of content that the cats people related well to anthropomorphizing, is that the word? It’s when you make cat into a human.

Steve: Okay, right.

Rachel: So cat slumber party, cat acting like a toddler tearing up toilet paper, cat eating with a messy mouth. All of those things are making your cat to a human; those were the ads that really got the most engagement. So if I can sell a product by saying this makes your cat look like human, it will sell better.

Steve: Interesting, so how much are you so spending to boost these posts initially?

Rachel: Like two to three bucks.

Steve: Two three bucks, okay so not a lot of money.

Rachel: I don’t want Facebook to think I have money.

Steve: Okay. And then how do you know whether it’s good or not? Like that are some of the metrics?

Rachel: When people like that content then they like your page. Because my goal is not even to get that piece of content to go viral, my goal initially is just to build my audience. I don’t even want people to buy from me. All I want is to have them join my page and tell their friends about me.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Rachel: Think of it like the MLM. We’ve all seen like those pyramid schemes, right? Only instead of making a pyramid scheme where you are selling something, make it a pyramid scheme of collecting people where if you tell one person who is the die-hard fan about cats or golf clubs about how awesome this your golfing situation is, then they’ll tell two people and those two people tell two people and those two people tell two people, and next thing you know you have a large thriving community that you can engage with.

Steve: So in terms of like back to the ads, like you said you run a whole bunch of them, so do you just pick like the best one that generates the most like and then stick with that theme?

Rachel: Yes, that one tells me what people like. So I’ll do six to nine posts and then I might three to four more versions to see which ones people real — I always want to find the one that beat my winner. So once I find the one that okay, this is real, I’ve narrowed down exactly what my people want to say. After that now I have already gone to the cats, now I want to find where inside the cat realm are people most passionate and active about cats or about golf.

So maybe they are golf course owners. Maybe instead they are pro wannabes, pro golf wannabes, maybe they are the hobby guys who golf on the weekends. So you want to find where those people are who are going to become your most die-hard fans who are going to share your content for you.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So in the cat one, I targeted cats and that brought in likes when it was make your cat human, but what really brought in the die-hard fans was when I narrowed down and tried cat pages a little bit better, and then cat pages and cat products, well, that’s a little bit better. But I narrowed down to the people who can’t resist talking about cats are the people who work at no kill shelters.

Steve: Interesting, wait, so how did you figure this out? Would you say you started changing the audience’s around for your [overlapping 00:19:26]?

Rachel: Yeah. So once I found this one post converts to likes, now I want to make three more ads with that same post targeting different interests.

Steve: I see, okay.

Rachel: And see which interests then converts best, because once I know this type of post as well anthropomorphizing, and I know where those people are now I can make any post that’s about a cat as a human and target that audience and I know it will do well.

Steve: I see. So how long do you boost the post for it in the beginning? Like how much data do you need to gather?

Rachel: I try to just — I do two to three dollars each and I try to keep the same amount. So I’m going to do two dollars, I want to always do two dollars on my post, or three dollars, always do three dollars. It’s up to you as to which. I would not go higher than five dollars because you are wanting to stay a low budget because you want Facebook to think of you as an organic content source not as a money pot.

Steve: I see, okay.

Rachel: So I keep the dollar rate low, and then once — I like to send about 200 people to it because with 200 people I will know if there is a percentage of people that clicked through, if there is a percentage of people that buy. With 200 people I should be able to tell that information.

Steve: Okay and so let’s say you picked, like in that first experiment let’s say you pick like six really bad ads, like how do you know that they are bad? Or do you just always run with the winner?

Rachel: Whatever the best winner is, now that’s your winner, so beat that one.

Steve: I see, okay so do you do multiple rounds at this beginning?

Rachel: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Steve: Got it, okay.

Rachel: I may have done 15 rounds.

Steve: I see okay, so how do you know when to stop doing the rounds?

Rachel: When you’ve got — okay my last sales page I got it to convert at 34%. I don’t know if I can get a sales page to convert better than 34%, like that’s insane. So if you can get it to convert at 34% there is a point where you are like, that might be just as high as we can go, and now you can make another one so.

Steve: I meant in terms of like the, I guess in terms of like the metrics. Like do you look at the click through rate, do you look at likes, shares?

Rachel: Likes that then convert to your page as fans because what you want to do is whenever they like the content you ask them, hey, do you want to like my page? So there is an invite feature that you have if you have less than 100,000 fans. So you can say, hey do you want to like my page? And if the majority of the people who see that post like that post and then also go on to like your page, that’s a winner because that’s a person that’s already proven to click and to engage with your content. So they are already more likely to buy from you because they are already interacting with you.

Steve: Okay so I just want the listeners to know these facts. So if someone likes one of your posts you can actually invite them to like your page, right?

Rachel: Yeah, it’s so cool.

Steve: Is that a manual process or is there a way for you to just say ask everybody who’s liked?

Rachel: Unfortunately it’s manual right now. They did have an easier way but they took it away from us.

Steve: Okay and it’s…

Rachel: And it’s capped, so you get to do 500 a day. So what I suggest doing is like you, your spouse, your mother, you each get 500 a day to invite.

Steve: And so it sounded like you made it up to like a 30 somewhat percentage conversation rate off of this and then that’s when you knew to stop.

Rachel: Well, yeah I mean if you in your heart will know if you can top your win or not.

Steve: Okay, and then at that point you started looking at different interests to just further narrow down the…

Rachel: Duplicate, do it another time. So make another one, so you now have two that convert at 30% or four. Most of mine do not convert at 30%.

Steve: Sure, yeah, yeah. I was just trying to get a general guideline, yeah.

Rachel: I’m usually at the, a lot lower than that.

Steve: Okay, okay, and then you mentioned earlier like with our cat page you finally found this one group that just was, it knocked it out of the park, right?

Rachel: Yeah, that was the no kill shelter. For my crock pot page I found them in Mormon Women. So more Mormon Women because they I guess cook in bulk or they I don’t know, I tended to convert better from that. So it’s like, it’s funny how you find the people where they are going to convert the best but yeah.

Steve: Is there like a method for you to pick your audience? Like with the crock pot thing I would not have not thought of trying Mormon Women, it just seems random.

Rachel: It is random, it is. What I do is I interview my readers. Once I get a couple, I start realizing I’ve got a couple of die-hard fans, and it’s usually when you have about 500 readers, you have some die-hard fans on there. And so I interviewed my die-hard fans and I look for similarities in who they are and what they call themselves, and it turns out four out of five were Mormons.

Steve: Interesting.

Rachel: So I was like, oh I guess Mormons like crock pots, and then I started targeting that and it was true, I converted much better. So I don’t know what it was, I’m not Mormon but I just find that I found that audience. I’ve used for one of my doctors who’s taken my course, he’s a pain practitioner, and we targeted cross fit and you don’t necessarily know who it is until you start interviewing your readers, and we found out that his die-hard fans were cross fit people. And so we were able to then target his anti-narcotics use program to people in cross fit and it did well.

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Interesting, how do you interview your fans, like do you just say, hey, can we get on the phone?

Rachel: Yeah, I know it’s crazy. Some people say to give them a survey, but my thing with the survey is that you are asking them questions that you kind know the answers to or you are assuming an answer. When you are talking I would not have assumed my people were Mormons, or that they worked at no kill shelters. I’m not a cat person, I didn’t think of that out of my own.

It was from talking to them and them being, yeah, well my wife — one of the fans with the cat page, his wife had recently died and he’s like what my wife loved to do before she died, what I would love to keep her memory on is she worked at no kill shelters, and that was really important to her. And I was like, oh let me target no kill shelter next. Like the gold, the coins are falling. You know how like when you hit the lottery and all of those coins-

Steve: Yeah.

Rachel: I bet it was like this, whenever I saw it and it worked I was like, oh my word this is amazing because the cool thing too is when you find those die-hard fans, the ones those ads are the cheapest because Facebook, if somebody engages with you and they can’t help it. Every ad, everybody that likes it likes it; Facebook will give you likes for like 0001, I mean they are so cheap because every person that sees it converts, right?

Steve: Yeah.

Rachel: So that’s funny [overlapping 00:26:36].

Steve: What is their incentive to talk with you on the phone? Like I would be a little apprehensive if somebody randomly…

Rachel: I know it’s kind of crazy. I just would say, hey how are you doing, I am starting this page and I’m running it and I saw you interacted with me, and I was just wondering if I can talk to you about cats, and they did.

Steve: I guess if they are diehard fans they probably want to talk about it, right?

Rachel: I know it’s kind of funny they are. Six people I asked if I could talk to them and five said yes. And then with the Mormon one I think I had to go – oh it’s the crock pots that I think I asked like nine people and five said yes, and I think actually interviewed four.

Steve: That’s actually a really high percentage, I’m surprised.

Rachel: Well they are bored at home and they want to talk about cats, or they want to talk about cooking and their families.

Steve: Okay, so you hit upon no kill shelters and you found ads that anthro- I don’t even know how to pronounce it, anthropomorphizes your cats, so what’s the next step after that?

Rachel: Scaling.

Steve: Scaling, okay.

Rachel: So I found that making this about the cat is humans and this is the audience, well now all I have to do is do that a lot.

Steve: Okay, so how do you find the content? Like you are not creating this content, are you?

Rachel: Well, I was at the beginning and then once I was able to have some staff I started having my staff people, I always have my readers submit photos for me to use, and then I would have a staff person make them into memes and connect to Amazon products to sell.

Steve: Okay, but that involves a little bit of creativity, right?

Rachel: Yes, in the sense that I had to find somebody who is snarky, because I’m actually not very snarky. I’m kind of happy all the time, like what you see is what you get. I don’t like, there is no subtlety, there is none.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: And sometimes like snarkiness needs to have a little bit if subtle finesse if that makes sense. So it wasn’t something that I’m good at. None of my memes do well, the ones that I make. So I found somebody who’s really gifted at snarky comments and smart out.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: And she is really like really cheap. She makes a meme for a dollar a meme and I’m like, oh my worth, this is insane because for her it just takes seconds. She looks at the photos; she’s got snarky comments, the next photo snarky comment. And they’ve got meme creator software programs where you just type it in and move on to the next one. So she can do 30 images in an hour.

Steve: Crazy, so she must be a cat lover then, right?

Rachel: She is yeah; she is a snarky cat lover. So you do have to find somebody who is passionate in your niche.

Steve: Okay, okay. So is it required that you produce your own content or can you just like share all the other people’s stuff?

Rachel: Definitely not. Actually when you are starting your page I would suggest that you don’t share your own content primarily.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: I would suggest starting sharing at least half somebody else’s content, if not a little bit more than half. The reason being is that you want Facebook to see you as the place where all the good content in that topic area goes. So if this is going viral on Facebook land in your niche, you want it to be on your page. So Facebook is like oh, all of the best cat stuff is here, all the best golf stuff is here, all the best fly fishing equipment, it’s all on this page. So you become the leader in your niche, kind of like the best library.

Steve: Okay and so how do you go about finding all this viral content?

Rachel: I know it’s kind of crazy; you just go to the Facebook search bar.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: Yeah it’s that easy. You just type in fly fishing and then you get the top posts for fly fishing.

Steve: So for your cat example you would just type in cats or-

Rachel: Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: And I would say things like cats baby or silly cats. I would always add something with the word cats to make sure I narrow in on what my people are going to look for, but yeah, yeah you just type it into the search bar. And the most common stuff pops up. Facebook tell you this is doing well.

Steve: And then do you share it or do you kind of like download the photo and post it as yourself, as your own?

Rachel: When you are under 100,000 fans you want to share more from other sources than you download and upload. When you are over 100,000 you are going want to upload more than you share. Now you will always want to credit though because you are going to get into trouble if you download a photo and upload it to your page without citing.

Steve: Okay, so citing is just saying like I got this from this and this site?

Rachel: Tag the page and if possible add their URL, and even better is to get permission first but I don’t always have permission so I don’t always do that, but that’s the best case scenario. Legally you probably need to get person first.

Steve: Okay, but to tag them usually they don’t get upset?

Rachel: I have had like four-five people get upset with me about it, but I just don’t do it to them again.

Steve: Okay, and so why is it important share after 100 — like where is the distinction of 100,000. Like what’s the magical thing that happens.

Rachel: Under 100,000. Facebook loves when you get lots of likes and they reward you by you get to invite those likes to like your page. After you have 100,000 fans it kind of switches up a bit and you don’t get rewarded for having likes but by getting to invite them to follow your page.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: And the algorithm emphasizes shares now for your page.

Steve: Okay, and then when it comes to sharing stuff, like just because it’s popular that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be popular with your audience, right?

Rachel: Not necessarily but at the same time if it’s popular with cats and your cat page it’s probably going to be popular with your audience too. There is a high likelihood that Facebook is going to say oh, your cat page that’s cat content. We are going to show it to more people right now when you start your content out because we know that that post and your audience already fit together well.

Steve: I see, I see. And so in terms of posting stuff on your own page, like if it’s a dud do you want to remove it or you just leave it there and move on?

Rachel: I leave it there and move on because I don’t have time to mess with it, but I would love to have somebody test that. So if anybody in your audience wants to test removing and see.

Steve: Yeah, I’m just curious.

Rachel: I still might not do that out of practice but.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: You got to pick where you got to spend your battle and your time, but I’d love to see if that works.

Steve: So it’s important to always pick stuff that you think is going to go viral, right?

Rachel: Yes.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: And actually one of the things that we talk about, one of the secret ninja tricks in the course is something called dark posting and viral funneling. So that’s where you post something as an ad as you test to see which version does the best, and then that’s the version you are going to post to your page.

Steve: I see so let me just — you want to just to translate that for the listeners. So this is a post that’s not actually on your page, right?

Rachel: It’s not there yet but you make it ad out of a post and you test. So that way let’s say you have three videos of your cat product and you don’t know which one you want to put all your ad dollars behind and you know that like next week you are launching, so you only have one week to figure it out. You don’t have three months to test and whatever. So what you could do is you could put three different versions up in the ad. Put five bucks on each of them, see which one does the best, and then start there. So it gives you a little bit of a heads up, a head start.

Steve: Are you writing that ad against your own page or off of it?

Rachel: Yeah, you run it on your own page in a dark post, so it looks like a post on your page but it’s only going out as an ad.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So it’s only people that you pay for. So it tests. It’s a way to test your audience and it’s something that Buzz Feed, Nifty a lot of the big pages do.

Steve: I see.

Rachel: So you will never see anything on their page that hasn’t first been tested.

Steve: I see, so do you do that with all of your pages as well?

Rachel: Not unless it’s important.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So if it’s something that I’m going to convert from, I’ll do that. I’ll make that extra step, but if it’s just regular content I don’t that regularly, no.

Steve: Okay. So you are sharing other people’s stuff, you are sharing your own clever memes, how do you enter posts like links to your own content and links to your own products, Amazon products and that sort of thing?

Rachel: The memes a lot of times I use my memes to sell Amazon products. So you just find a way to connect to your product to the meme. So it could be the product is included in the photo of the meme or it could just be the cats is drinking water out of the toilet, and you are like, hey, they should have had this water fountain, because if they had this water fountain they wouldn’t need to drink water out of the toilet. And the meme has the cat drinking out of the toilet saying something about whatever; it doesn’t have to be related. Does that make sense? Like it’s related but not related. It doesn’t have to…

Steve: What does your cat rolling pin ad look like or your post? I’m just curious.

Rachel: Oh, know someone who loves a cat, know someone who thinks cats are great or awesome or know crazy cat ladies, and then the link, and here is where you can get it, your cookies will be amazing or something like that.

Steve: Okay, you obviously can’t — or actually can you post like product links for every post as long as it’s corresponds with the meme or?

Rachel: Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: I mean you could do product links all the time. You just want to make sure that you are not like pushing your product on them. So if you are pushing at them it gets a little bit spammy if that makes sense.

Steve: I see.

Rachel: So I would try to reserve ¼ of my posts to be a little bit more where I want to direct traffic to. So I don’t consider the memes to be traffic directing as much because I’m not saying go click here to buy this for 20% off. It’s more of building my audience, and if I happen to make sales at the same times, that’s amazing.

Steve: So there is no real call to action here. You are really guiding them to the content and then kind of indirectly as some people click then that’s great.

Rachel: Yeah and so like know someone who is like a crazy cat lady, what my call to action is, is to tag your friend who loves cats.

Steve: Interesting, okay so nothing about go buy here or anything like that or sale.

Rachel: No, no, so it looks like hey, I have a crazy cat friend, I’m going to let them know about this cat product too. So they are telling their friends about the cat product, I don’t have to.

Steve: What is a good percentage in terms of shares and likes when you post something of the people that view it?

Rachel: It depends on the type of product and the size of your page. So as you get bigger, you are going to have a slightly lower reach as you grow and grow and grow.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So per capita. So as you are beginning you get kind of like a oomph, a little bit of extra power behind your shares. So the sweet spot is like 50k to a 100k you have a lot of reach per capita. So yeah, it varies per page.

Steve: So what is like considered a good reach? Because I know Facebook keeps nurfing that, right? And so what percentage would you consider a good reach off of the number?

Rachel: I like to have each of my posts reach roughly 20% of my audience that then probably half of them reach it right now. So probably only half reach that target right now.

Steve: Okay, I mean that sounds really high compared to like what I’ve talked with other people, but perhaps they are not sharing viral stuff which is why it’s much lower.

Rachel: Yeah, and most of my content reaches, I’d probably say about half of my content reaches 20% of my audience so.

Steve: Okay, that’s really high and so that’s probably because you take the extra effort to only find stuff to share that you know it’s going to be popular.

Rachel: Yeah, I only want — I don’t want to cannibalize my page. So my audience is my primary goal and if I can keep them happy on my page, then they will keep buying from me. So if I can build that audience of people who love a topic and cultivate them, yeah.

Steve: So let’s switch gears a little bit, let’s say you already have a fun page and a lot of people already do, and let’s say the engagement is like really, really bad, do you recommend just starting from scratch or can you revive something that’s dead?

Rachel: We do have students who have been able to revive. We’ve had a couple of students who revived in massive ways. We’ve had one student who her page was at 25k for like years and she hadn’t grown with like a couple of thousands in like a year or two. Does that make sense? Like she’s just been 25k forever.

And so she grew her page to 265,000 by today and it’s been on like four or five months. So she went from 25,000 fans to 260,000 fans. So it’s totally, totally possible but she had to do it by focusing only on her audience. So how do I make them really, really thrilled to receive this content?

Steve: Okay, because I was thinking and we kind of had this conversation at the summit where I have a page where I have just been kind of posting my blog posts and lot of them get no engagement. And I remember you telling me to just stop that and then — actually you recommended I start over from scratch. I can’t remember what the distinction was.

Rachel: So it depends how much of the page is branded as you and how much you can brand as your reader. And you can still be branded as you and feature your reader. You just need to find a way to feature your reader more. So you can revive a dead page, but sometimes it’s easier depending on your size to just start over.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: Another thing you can do is that trick is to go in and check your audience. So you can go in your page settings of your page and then go to people in rows — people in pages I think. People in pages and you can see who actually is liking your page. So you can go down there and see, okay are they cat people.

For me I can see this person has cats or this person does not have cats, or I can see, okay wait a second I have got a lot of guys, I’m a mom mom’s page for DYI mom stuff and there is a lot of guys with all international sounding names. So they are probably not my audience. So I can see where I’ve been off on my targeting.

Steve: Okay, and do you recommend like let’s say you have a company. Do you recommend doing a company page or just some complete third party page that is unrelated to your brand?

Rachel: It’s best in my mind if you don’t look like a company because Facebook wants brands to pay. Facebook is a business, they are out to make money, but they also have a need to make people happy reading their content, have people engage in content.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So if you look like a content provider, i.e. the person who’s just really passionate about trains and just wants the world to see this new train engine that does X, Y, Z and all the other train people that love trains like to talk about it there. If they see you as that passionate train person, they are going to give you more juice to that train audience than you would if you were a train company selling a product.

Steve: I see, so if you already have like a company page that’s kind of dead, then you may as well just leave it as your company page and then start.

Rachel: Use it as a resume.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So like with my pages I have Muller marketer and it’s not a page that’s going to go viral, it’s a resume. So you can go there and you can see here is who Rachel is, here is what Rachel believes in, here is Rachel’s products, here is people who love Rachel. It’s a resume. But it’s a good and you can convert from it, but it’s not going to be a traffic driver, does that make sense?

Steve: Yeah, that totally makes sense. And what about the distinction between groups versus pages?

Rachel: Oh, groups are so much fun because you can motivate people to love you in a different way, connect with you. The problem with the group for selling say Amazon products is that you give a lot of your control away when you bring people on in a buy in like they do in a community because everyone now gets a chance to talk. So they might complain about your product, they might complain about you, they might complain — so for physical product sales, groups are harder to win at unless you are going to do like Facebook lives regularly, kind of like an infomercial system insider group.

Steve: I see but on a page they can still comment and there could be backlash still, right?

Rachel: But it’s easier to hide that backlash.

Steve: I see, I see.

Rachel: Whereas as in group you don’t have as much control over the backlash.

Steve: Okay so for ecommerce you still recommend going the page route?

Rachel: Yes because you can’t run ads from your group, you can only run ads from a page.

Steve: Okay, got it, got it.

Rachel: So now what I would suggest too maybe have a VIP group where they talk about discounts, or they give reviews to each other. Like you team up with six other Amazon people and you make a review group, and so all of your customers go here and then they can get early access to new products at a discount, and as long as they give reviews to each other’s group. So it’s like a corroborative review. I don’t know if that’s even legal or anything but that could be a system where you have a group that’s still meeting your needs.

Steve: Okay, okay and in terms of like the timeline, like when would you start actually start to link to products? Do you recommend having a certain number of fans before you start doing any of that stuff?

Rachel: I link to products right from the beginning.

Steve: Oh you do? Okay.

Rachel: Yeah, because I want to test to see what they buy, but my goal isn’t to get them to buy the product, my goal is to build my audience. So even if I’m putting that product up, if it’s going to take away from building the audience, then I’m not going to put the product up. So it’s not about me getting sales, it’s about me collecting those people.

Steve: I see so it sounds like the sales are just kind of gravy for you.

Rachel: Yeah, once you get the people the sales kind of happen automatically and you don’t even have to work for them. Like it’s not — I mean you don’t, it’s not that you don’t have to work for them, you still have to put the product up, you have to think about it, you have to find new products, so it’s not — but the effort of trying to convince someone to sell and to purchase is a lot easier when they’ve already told you what they want to buy.

Steve: Right, right, and in terms of what you are sharing, do you find yourself sharing more videos these days or photos?

Rachel: Videos, yes. Videos, videos, videos, but the thing is too you can kind of make those video photo things where you take a screen shot on your page. They’ve got like Camtasia has a screen sharing system and you can take a photo, put it on your page, make the Camtasia over that and then just run it for five minutes.

Steve: Oh, and that works too, interesting.

Rachel: Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So it looks like a video but it’s not a video. It’s kind of sneaky and I don’t like seeing them as a user but they do convert.

Steve: I see and that might just be temporary but yeah, for now that’s probably working well.

Rachel: It is, I can’t see it lasting though but yes, right now video is but you don’t have to, it doesn’t have to supper fancy. A lot of times authentic sells better than fancy and perfect.

Steve: Okay, so you are actually recommending like less polished videos for example. Like iPhones videos.

Rachel: Definitely.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: Something that your readers can say that’s me. So if the readers can see something polished and say, oh, that could be me then that works. So like purple has an egg, the egg falling on the mattress, it’s very well-polished, it’s very well screened but at the same time you are like oh, I could slip up. You can picture yourself putting an egg on your mattress and trying that.

So you want to have something where the person can picture themselves in that scenario. Most of the time people can picture themselves with a cell phone and they feel like it’s a real product review versus somebody just talking trying to sell them something.

Steve: Interesting, okay yeah so all these principles it sounds like will translate directly over to running Facebook ads for your products. Like instead of saying, hey we have a sale, put – run a Facebook ad for just some meme and just link to your product and just see where it goes.

Rachel: The word sale actually will hurt your reach because sale assumes you are a business and Facebook wants businesses to pay. So instead of using the words sale, say this is rock bottom guys.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Rachel: I can’t believe this one, go grab it quick because it’s going fast but that’s…

Steve: So you are saying these trigger words actually reduce your reach.

Rachel: Yeah, we have a whole list of the banned words somewhere in the course too.

Steve: Cool, cool.

Rachel: And like words from a place like go get this now or it’s a buy one get one. Could you believe what I got to leave the shopping cart with double or something like that? So you can- I get to leave with double or something. That way you are saying I got two without saying buy one get one.

Steve: Okay. So it sounds like you can get by sharing other people’s stuff for the first 100,000 and then once you pass 100,000 fans you got to start kind of inter-mixing your own stuff in there.

Rachel: Yeah, I would suggest starting, making sure that you’re starting to focus on shares after 50,000 for sure.

Steve Okay.

Rachel: Before that is good too but after 50 for sure, but by 100,000 if you are not, your page is going to have a hard time growing, and you are just going to be stagnating.

Steve: Okay, I’m sure a lot of the listeners will be happy just to have 100,000 fans.

Rachel: The cool thing about 100,000 is you can just coast at 100,000 too for a long time and drive traffic decently. So it’s not, it’s like my Crazy Cat Lady page now. I’m not really working on growing it as much because it’s at 100,000, it’s driving traffic. It’s a lot faster for me to share somebody’s stuff than it is for me to create new and so I’m just kind of coast at 100 and keep making money of what I am. So there is nothing wrong with once you get to that stage duplicating it and saying okay, I’ve got one, I’m making money, I’m selling, now let’s get the second page going before we want to scale those to kingdom come.

Steve: What about in terms of content like blog posts. Is it fine just to post the link to your blog post like when you are not trying to sell something?

Rachel: I would instead of uploading a link; I would use a photo or a video to drive traffic to a blog post as well because…

Steve: With a link in the content or notes?

Rachel: In the description, you can put in the description or in the content, either one, comments.

Steve: Okay.

Rachel: So I try doing both really if you have time. I schedule everything ahead of time so I don’t always remember to go back and put something into the comments, but yes, you can put into the description and into the comments.

Steve: Interesting, because it works better when you put in the comments.

Rachel: It does but that requires you to then baby sit it.

Steve: That’s true.

Rachel: And from my opinion the value of the, it works better versus my time of now having to go online four to five times a day at a certain time to post, I’d rather one more time a week and get the whole week done.

Steve: Okay, well this has been really great information Rachel, and believe it or not like this 40 minutes that we’ve been talking like just blew by really quickly.

Rachel: Oh, it’s been 40 minutes already, wow?

Steve: Yeah, it has crazy, right?

Rachel: Yeah, wow!

Steve: But Rachel where can people find more about your teachings? I know they work and you’ve had amazing results, where can people find you online?

Rachel: I have a Facebook group where we, you are part of it, we get all nerdy and we talk about Facebook algorithms and this does better and we crowd source and we test okay, well this wording is not doing well, what does well? What video does well? And we test new stuff all the time, and its Facebook page strategies but there is links, I’ll give you the links so you can share and make sure you get…

Steve: Yeah, absolutely, cool.

Rachel: Yeah, it will be easier for people to click through on that link and you will always find me.

Steve: Yeah, for user, for sure, let’s do that. Rachel thanks a lot for coming on the show. I feel like we covered a lot in just 40 minutes, maybe it’s because you talk fast and you are always full of energy.

Rachel: I do I talk way too fast. I know it goes really fast. I love collecting people and this is really fun topic for me. So thank you.

Steve: And one thing I really like about Rachel too is like a lot of the money that she makes goes to charity also, so I mean yeah.

Rachel: I know we can build the whole school, I’m really excited.

Steve: Yes exactly, do you want to talk about that real quick? What you are doing with that.

Rachel: Oh, do you mind?

Steve: Yeah, go for it.

Rachel: I’m like beyond over the moon over it. Yeah, we found — we are going to be building an entire school for 300 to 400 students in Kenya in internally displaced person’s camps. That’s where people who were moved out of their communities by force due to segregation now get to have like a brand new school and hopefully in the future we’ll get to put in wells and electricity. I want to make impact on more than just me and even more than just those people whose businesses aren’t healthy. This is the chance to kind of make a difference on the world and I’m excited by it, so yeah.

Steve: Yeah, so I mean if you support Rachel you are supporting Kenya as well.

Rachel: Yeah, thank you.

Steve: Thanks a lot for coming on the show Rachel, really appreciate your time.

Rachel: You have a great day.

Steve: You too, take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Rachel is awesome at creating viral Facebook fan pages and I’m actually taking her class right now and I highly recommend it. So if you are interested in learning more about Rachel’s teachings, head on over to mywifequteherjob.com/Rachel. And that’s R-A-C-H-E-L. Now for more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob/episode175.

And once again I want to thank Seller Labs. Their tool Scope has completely changed the way I choose keywords for both my Amazon listings and my Amazon advertising campaigns. And instead of making random guesses, Scope tells me exactly which keywords are generating sales, and within the first week of use I saw a 39% increase in sales. It is a no brainer. So head on over to Sellerlabs.com/wife and try the tool for free, and if you like it you will receive $50 off. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/wife.

I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce 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 auto pilot. 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 blogs and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce 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 are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Now today I’m thrilled to have Sue B. Zimmerman on the show. And if you don’t know who Sue is, she is actually known as the Instagram expert, and she is going to teach us today how to start a highly engaged IG account.

But before we begin I want to give a quick shout out to Seller Labs who is a sponsor of the show. And specifically I want to talk about their brand new tool Ignite which helps sellers manage their Amazon sponsored ad campaigns. Right now I’m actually using this tool to manage my Amazon sponsored ad campaigns, and it makes things a heck of a lot more convenient.

So number one I’ve always found it a major pain to generate my PPC reports on Amazon, cut and paste the data over to an excel spreadsheet and use pivot tables before I’m able do any analysis. Now Ignite pulls all that info for you automatically and allows you to easily see what keywords are working and what are not immediately, there is no need to manually create reports or play with excel.

Second of all unless you’re a data geek, Amazon campaign data can be hard to understand, and what is cool is that Ignite makes keyword and bidding recommendations on the fly that can be applied with just a couple of clicks.

So let’s say one of my hankie keywords is bleeding money, well Ignite will alert me of that fact, and I can reduce that bid immediately. So bottom line Ignite makes managing your Amazon’s sponsored campaigns so much easier, and the fact that they provide me with alerts means that I no longer have to monitor my campaigns like a hawk.

So if there are keywords that are doing well, Ignite will tell me to add them to my exact match campaigns. If my keywords are losing money, well Ignite tells me to either remove the keyword or to reduce the bid. So head on over to sellerlabs.com/steve where you’ll find awesome tutorials on how to run Amazon PPC ads and the opportunity to try Ignite for 30 days for free. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/steve.

Now I also want to give a shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. I’m always super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another email provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it’s so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought, and that makes it extremely powerful. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, that’s piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email that I send.

So Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now on to 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 excited to have Sue B. Zimmerman on the show. Now, Sue and I met through a Mutual friend and I actually recently watched her speak at Ryan Deiss’s Traffic and Conversion Summit. Now, she is known as the Instagram expert and travels across the world sharing her Instagram expertise.

She also runs two popular online courses called Ready Set Gram and Insta Academy, and she’s actually a well-known speaker that specializes in Instagram. So today what we are going to do is we are going to explore ways on how to increase your Instagram following, and how to use Instagram to sell your products online. And with that, welcome to the show Sue, how are you doing today?

Sue: Hey, it’s so great to be here, and yeah Ryan Deiss’s event just like rocked the house. That was the largest stage I have ever spoken on in my life, and I have to be honest, I was a little nervous.

Steve: So what’s funny is I was going to approach you afterwards, but then you were mobbed with like 20 people and I didn’t think I could fight my way into the middle there so.

Sue: Yeah, I think it’s because I was giving away a pen that really enables people to do Instagram stories, and because the conference is primarily men, their fingers are large, and it’s hard to do like the fine script on a phone. So everyone wanted a pen and I shoed everybody out into the hallway where there was really good, what I call #hotelfilterforgoodlighting, so we could take a ton of photos to post on Instagram. So like, I gave a little workshop in how to take the perfect selfie photo after.
Steve: What’s funny is one of those few conferences where there is always a line for like the men’s room, but there is no line for the women’s room which I always find odd.

Sue: Exactly, exactly, yeah.

Steve: So Sue, how did you get started in business and kind of what led you to specialize in Instagram?

Sue: Yeah, great question. So I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, I actually had my very first business when I was a teenager. And then through the years I’ve always been that person that saw opportunities and trends in primarily consumer product space. I was heavily involved with clocks and [inaudible 00:05:44], the little two dots that you put in the clocks.

And I even was on stage at QBC, with one of my businesses which was a double sided sticky tape that allowed scrap bookers to embellish their photos, because I’m the person who has always loved photos and my most prized possessions are my photographs.

And so it’s really ironic fast forward eight years after being on stage at QBC that I’m now teaching a global audience how to embellish their photos to put on Instagram, their digital platform using third party apps, and all kinds of fun tools to really enhance what I call their digital magazines.

Steve: You are thinking giblets, yeah.

Sue: And yeah, gibits [ph] to go, yeah digital magazine because like I, Steve, I believe that Instagram is essentially that, it is your digital magazine for your business, your brand your product or your service where if you craft the perfect bio, and we certainly can go over with that is a new show, awesome photos or videos not only per post, but they cohesively all go together as a whole magazine.

You can certainly attract the right followers, the right customers, the right clients and ultimately grow your business, and I really think that there is a big disconnect with you know, people understanding this. And so when I had my retail store on Cape Cod I was selling clothing, jewelry, and accessories all with a very preppy, nautical vibe.

And I quickly learnt that by posting images around the products that I sold, not just the products that I sold but the beach and the sunset and the yachts, and like the whole vibe of Cape Cod and Hide Ranges- which always got a lot of likes, I could essentially craft that perfect magazine. And eventually my business throughout that summer grew 40% from using Instagram, and before using Instagram I was using all of other social, because I taught social media off season when I did run my store.

So I’ve been versed in social media, I’m very visual; I catch trends and opportunities before they go mainstream. And I knew that Instagram was going to be a big deal because of the visual component, because of that magazine opportunity that you – and even because people always say, when they were walking in my store and they are like, “Can I post– can I take a picture of…

Steve: This is the physical store?

Sue: Yeah.

Steve: Okay, got it.

Sue: The physical store and I had an ecommerce store. Yeah, so people would walk into my store and I would always ask them after they purchase something if I could take a picture and usually they were like holding up what they bought, and they are like, ‘sure.’ And they are like, “Oh my God! I love Instagram.” And I’d be like, why do you love Instagram? And the answer over and over and over again Steve was, because it’s fun, it’s fun. And I don’t think people think of social media as fun, I think that they think of it as a time sack, and often pull down rabbit holes.

So I knew I was onto something from the success that I had at my store. And because I love teaching, empowering and helping other people make money, I knew that I had a platform to teach. And so I just started teaching, but you’ll be excited to hear that the way I got on stage and stage is all over the world is from doing podcast interviews, and the very first…

Steve: Interesting.

Sue: Yeah the very first one I did was with Michael Stelzner, the owner of Social Media Examiner. And as soon as he was done interviewing me he was like, “Damn, I need to get you on stage in Social Media Marketing World,” and I’ve been there speaking ever since.

Steve: That’s funny because that’s how I met Mike. He just had me on the podcast. The podcast literally went live like three days ago or whenever you post them, and so are you telling me that the speaker engagements should start coming in any minute now?

Sue: Oh, yeah, I mean, well here is the thing I believe. When you — I say yes to pretty much every podcast opportunity as long as it aligns with kind of where I am in my niches, and they have the market that I want to amplify and broadcast to, because I love that I get interviewed from people all over the world. From Australia, from Israel, France, Spain and I’m talking and people are, you know- I’m in their ears all over the world, and then they are opting into my email list because I have a free download that I talk about, and they are coming into my community, and that is how you grow a business.

Steve: Let me ask you this. I was curious when you were talking about growing your businesses 40%, the one on Cape Cod, were people actually going to your bio and clicking on the link, or were you getting that data from just whenever someone made a purchase you asked them, how they found you?

Sue: Exactly.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: So my store was tiny, like 10 x 12 on the inside, and then I got to merchandise on the outside and so it was a very, very intimate store in a community, like in a country club community.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: So it was kind of like friends and family and then you know visitors from the Cape. So every time someone checked out, it was mandatory for my employees to ask, how did they find us.

Steve: Got it, okay.

Sue: And often they would hold up their phone and say, “Oh my God! This picture on Instagram.” Like I have to have this anchor bracelet or I need this tunic, and by the way to the guys on the call, tunic is like a beach cover up.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: So yeah, so they would check a box and we would know where that sale was originated from.

Steve: Okay, and then in terms of your brand, Sue B. Zimmerman, where you teach these classes, like how do you generate traffic to that site? Is it primarily Instagram traffic also that leads to your courses and classes?

Sue: So that’s a great question, so the way my business model is set up is that we craft an epic blog post every week, and in that blog post not only is it written words teaching, but also a YouTube video. So I have a YouTube channel and today we hit 10,000 subscribers.

Steve: Nice.

Sue: So I’m super excited about that, and we get a lot of traffic from YouTube because of the search engine optimization from Goggle obviously.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: And when we publish that blog post Steve, we create custom links, UTM links so we can track, and we have different links for all of social. So we have a link for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Those are primarily the spaces where I am most frequently broadcasting.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: And so we are able to track the success. Now we treat each blog essentially like a launch. So the blog is published, it goes to our email list first because those are the people who know, like, and trust me and are already in on the inside of my life and community, and have some connection to me. And then they are more likely to share it, comment on the blog and then after it’s gone out to our email list, that’s when I’m all in on social.

So that’s when I would post on Instagram, both my personal page @SueBZimmerman, my business page @theInstagramexpert, and occasionally on my company page which is @spzteam which is my team page, my team manages that.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: So we will amplify on Insta. I used to do a live stream on Periscope; I was an early adopter on Periscope. I have over 22,000 followers there, but things have really changed significantly over the years since being there. So now I amplify on Facebook Live, and I now have an Instagram Live strategy that I’m using to amplify even though it goes away as soon as you stop the broadcast.

Steve: Are you using that instead of Periscope now?

Sue: Yeah. It’s so funny you asked that, like as of yesterday, when I talked about a webinar that I’m doing this Thursday, I went on Periscope first, I had only 53 people watching live, and then I had a lot of replay, and then I did my second Instagram Live ever and I had over 360 people on.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: And here is the thing, they were so happy to see me, they were so engaged in like, “Oh my God! Sue is on Instagram Live, this is so great.” And I’m like, “Ask me a question, ask me anything.” And they are like, “Are you kidding me? This is amazing, I have Sue’s attention.”

So I know that Instagram Live is a good place for me to be. So now we’ve got the blog, it sits on our website. In the blog we also have some links to our free strategy guide, we have some links encouraging our audience to click to tweet, and we’ve got people leaving comments and people sharing it.

And I’m really proud of this blog because this year we were nominated as one of the top ten blogs from Social Media Examiner. So just to have that credibility, and the reason I’m saying this is not to brag but to say when you go all in and commit to doing something consistently over time, it really can pay off. And so we knew this is where we needed to create stellar content and become known as the Instagram educator. And I know my handle name is the Instagram expert, but I like to pride myself on being a really great teacher and educator.

So that is essentially what we do, and so the link on Instagram Steve, gets changed out for the various reason. One, usually the link is our Instagram strategy guide, and that’s what you see most frequently.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: That sits on our website, that sits on our Facebook page, but if we are in a launch, like I was when I did Marie Forleo B School a couple of weeks ago, and right now I’m in a launch with my business coach Lisa Larter, we have a webinar for Thursday. We switched out all those UTMs; we go all in on the launch. And right now we are driving traffic to synapse for the webinar, but before that we were driving traffic to our blog, and the article on our blog had to do with the content that people would want who would sign up for the webinar.

So it’s all about money, money mindset, like how to get a handle on your money. So the bog always matches up to the campaign that we are doing. So we can — you will love this obviously, we can drive traffic once people click on our blog, we can retarget with Facebook ads.

Steve: Sure.

Sue: And so the blog is always the seed to the next content, to the next campaign. And when I say seed it’s like we are not selling anything, we are giving great value through content that we can amplify. And then this Thursday when I do the webinar, you know right now my link is for signing up for the webinar, and then after the webinar the link will get switched out to purchasing the course or the class that we are offering from the webinar.

So it’s very, very strategic and it’s very formulaic, and we’ve had great success with launches when we do it this way, did that all make sense?

Steve: Yes. Let me ask you this, so there is a couple of things that you said there, so wherever you put together a blog post, you use the link in your Instagram and usually that link is the link to your blog post unless you are doing some sort of launch or promotion, is that accurate?

Sue: Yes, a launch or promotion and then when we are done with the launch or the promotion we go back to the strategy guide. The strategy guide, my Instagram strategy guide is always our list builder.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: So Suebzimmerman.com/guide gets anyone listening, our 17 page free Instagram guide, and that is where we build that. I know they can trust factor because we do have a nurture sequence, about seven days after you opt-in to that guide where you really get to know me more.

Steve: It sounds like that would be a better link because you are getting an email list, an email address as opposed to just a regular blog post, right? So Like what percentage do you have that link up as opposed to the content?

Sue: 75 to 80.

Steve: Okay, 75 meaning the opt-in or?

Sue: The opt-in, the opt-in is there most frequently.

Steve: Okay, got it, got it. Okay, and then once you have them you probably have an auto responder sequence that walks them through.

Sue: Yes, yes.

Steve: Okay, I’m just curious myself, like, how big is your Instagram following and like how much traffic does it actually drive?

Sue: Great question, so because I have three different accounts, there is — some of the followers probably follow me on both, so I have — I’m opening up Instagram right now. I don’t pay attention to my numbers as much other people might, but I have 46,900 on my personal account.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: So that’s a shit ton, that’s a shit ton, right? And then I’ve got on the Instagram expert which is my business account where I share Instagram tips, tools and strategies, I have almost a 1,000 more 47.7.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: And then on my team account we have almost 3,000, and here is what I want to say to the listeners. I have a ton of people following me and a lot of those followers could be 13 year olds for all I know, and aren’t necessarily my ideal followers. I really wish that people would unfollow me who aren’t there to engage, because they kill my engagement rate.

So you know, I get suggested to be a follower because in the bio on Instagram it says, I’m an Instagram marketer. So anyone searching for Instagram or marketing, I come up and they start following me. I pay attention to those who leave real authentic comments, and who actually engage in my content. To answer your question, we get about 250 opt-ins a week from Instagram.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Sue: So I care more about that number than my followers, and from that we can nurture people over time. Now this is not including any paid ads or Facebook and all the other stuff, you know.

Steve: Of course, these are just people clicking on your link in the bio and actually signing up.

Sue: Yes, yes exactly.

Steve: Okay, got it. And let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk about selling physical products, because a large portion of my audience sells either on their own store or on Amazon. And so what I want to do today is let’s pretend that I’m an ecommerce store, which I am actually selling physical products, so it’s not that large of a stretch, and I’ve come to you for help, right? So what questions would you ask me, and how do you formulate a social media strategy?

So for example, my store I sell wedding handkerchiefs and wedding linens. So if I were to come to you for help, like how would you walk me through an Instagram strategy?

Sue: Well I love it that you have a very niche account; a lot of people don’t have that. So you are not just wedding, because wedding is so broad.

Steve: Right.

Sue: You got handkerchiefs and that’s so cool, like I love that. So what’s the most important thing for people to think with an Instagram strategy is who is your customer, and where do they hang out. You literary need to know where they hang out, where they vacation, where they shop, what their interests are. And I’m actually going to use one of my favorite Instagram accounts to really go deep with this stuff.

Steve: Sure, sure.

Sue: So the Drybar which is one of my favorite Instagram accounts is where you can go and get a blow out. So Alli Webb is the owner of the Drybar, I met her on [inaudible 00:21:32] Interview with her back in the day when Blab was a thing, and she not only has physical locations in the US, she also has some in Canada.

What I love about the Drybar are so many things. The main thing is that when I physically walk into the Drybar, I literally feel like I’m walking into their Instagram account. Alli knows that her customer who sits in the chair to get a blow dry has kids, likes fashion, likes fresh flowers, lots of people have dogs and they like funny quotes.

And so when you look at that Instagram account, it’s not just about a blow dry, it’s about their brand color yellow, their language that they use. Everything in their branding has to do with the bar, so all of their products are named after anything that you know, chase sack, tequila, money maker, like there are so many play on words, like a shot of this.

And so I love the branding and the language and the visuals around everything, and there is a lot of user generated content, there is a lot of celebration of the people who work for her. And so that knowing exactly what your customer or client loves will help you set your strategy up for success.

Steve: I just want to figure that out, like in a brick and mortar store, it’s a little easier but like if you are online how do you figure that out?

Sue: You’ve got to do surveys; you’ve got to survey the people who have either purchased from you in the past or inside of a Facebook group. Like ask them, I mean I would, I know from my free Facebook group, Instagram results for business and anybody can join that; there is 6,000 people in there.

I know from the pain points and the questions that they ask there what my content should be that I cover when I’m teaching, and then often you know, put into my paid course. And then I have my VIP group for my online course Ready Set Gram. So the more you communicate with and know exactly the language that they speak, and what they like, the more you can create content for them.

This is not about you and what you like, it’s about what do they love seeing and learning, and I think a lot of people on Instagram get this piece wrong. Does that all make sense to you?

Steve: It does. So the idea is to find out who your target customers are, and then create images that kind of follow through with that brand that appeals to those people. Here is a question that I always have with Instagram, like how do you measure the effectiveness of a campaign, outside of the link and bio?

Sue: Okay, I’m going to answer that in a sec, but let me just go back to one ninja tip for you before we go to the next question.

Steve: Okay, Sure.

Sue: So most businesses know who some of the brands are that not only do they buy your wedding handkerchief, but maybe they also buy — give me like the most popular designer dress, is it Valentino?

Steve: Vera Wang, Vera Wang.

Sue: Okay, so maybe they also, so you know that the people that buy your handkerchief also buy Vera Wang. So if you go to Vera Wang’s Instagram account, you can look at who their followers are, and you can start engaging in those followers. Now this takes time, this takes like creating a spreadsheet and really — when I say engaging, it’s not just like double tapping, liking, and writing a comment that says nice pic.

I’m talking about what is it that you like about what you are looking at and why, and you can get their attention. And so if you did this to five or ten accounts every day, you can get their attention and their eyeballs on you, because every time someone leaves a comment on Instagram you get a notification, and let me tell you something, everyone looks at their notifications.

Steve: Interesting, okay, so these are just followers of Vera Wang in this example, right?

Sue: Yeah, but people that follow Vera Wang are following them for a reason, and if they are following them and you are telling me that Vera Wang is one of your buckets, then that makes sense for you to be following that, or is it people that have their weddings at you know, in the Bahamas or at Turks and Caicos, or at the high end Regency, like knowing literary where your clients hangout on in Instagram, then going into those accounts and engaging with them.

Steve: Interesting, so are you looking for just the largest followers of that account?

Sue: No, I’m looking for the right followers.

Steve: The right followers, okay.

Sue: It’s never about being popular, it’s never been about the numbers for me, it’s always about the right follower.

Steve: Interesting, so what is your — how do you figure out what the right follower is?

Sue: So the right followers, if you go into Vera Wang and you’re looking into the followers and then you click onto their account and you see that they are getting married, and they are planning a wedding.

Steve: I see.

Sue: And you are like damn, they are planning a wedding, I got the perfect thing for them. Like you got to literary know what they are doing.

Steve: So you comment on them and then you tag them, and what would be an example of something you might say?

Sue: You don’t tag them, you just comment.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: And you can say, “Hey I see that you love Vera Wang and that you are having a wedding, I thought you might be interested in you know, I think you might be interested in my account.” I wouldn’t say I think you would be interested in buying this from me. I would just say you know, I think that you might be interested in my account, you know, very, very — it’s just like you are having a conversation with one person. Not all, not 600 million people on Instagram, but a real private conversation with the person that you think would be your ideal customer or client.

So I mean I could go even deeper with a comment, but it’s literally taking the time to craft a comment that makes sense based on the post that you are leaving a comment on.

Steve: Okay, that makes sense. So it’s really going deep as opposed to blasting so to speak? Like I’m going-

Sue: Oh my gosh, I cannot stand the blasters, get rid of them.

Steve: I know they are always, there is like a thumbs up or nice post or whatever, I just ignore all of those.

Sue: I block, I delete, block, and report anything that’s not legit.

Steve: Really, okay, interesting.

Sue: The more you do that, the more they’ll go away. No one messes with me anymore.

Steve: Okay, and so you get their attention and then hopefully they will go and check out your account. I’m just curious how frequently you do something like this. Is this every day?

Sue: Okay, so I don’t need to do this anymore, because of the way and my account is growing and the exposure I get from everything else that I do, but when I was starting out and I had under 1,000 followers, this was a strategy that worked extremely well.

Steve: Okay, so this is like a way to get your first 1,000 followers so to speak?

Sue: Yeah, and it’s a way to be – well is to continue to grow. So again I get 100 new followers every day on both accounts.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: And it’s because I’m often a suggested account to follower now, because I have so many followers and you know, I’m not like, oh my god, I have so many followers, but compared to most people I have a lot of followers. And so I’m suggested and people just start following me, but I look at a lot of these accounts that follow me and I’m like oh my gosh, I could never even look at that account or follow it, because there is nothing to do with what inspires me.

I only follow accounts that give me aesthetic value, who entertain me, educate me, or teach me something new. I’m not one of these people that follows just to be nice.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: I follow so that everything that I see in my newsfeed is content that I want to see, because here is the thing you need to know with the new algorithm, the more you double tap and like and follow random ass accounts just to be nice and just like they did it for me I’ll do it for them, that’s the content that’s going to show up in your newsfeed.

The more you are very discerning and selective as to who you follow and why you follow them, that content will show up in your newsfeed. And so you’ve got to be really strategic with not only what you are posting, but how you are engaging and commenting.

Steve: So in terms of people who follow you that are spammers, is it in your best interest then to block them, because if they don’t engage in your stuff, that hurts your account?

Sue: Yes, absolutely.

Steve: Okay. So let me ask you this question though, when and how often do you go through your account and prune the people who aren’t engaging?

Sue: I don’t do it anymore, because I don’t have time for it.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: But it definitely affects my engagement rate. So if someone were to say, oh, I just heard Sue B. Zimmerman on a podcast, she’s the Instagram expert and you go on and you look at my account and you are like wow! She has 47,000 followers, but you go and look at my post and you are like, okay, so she has that may followers, but she only gets like two to 300 likes per post, like what’s up with that?

Well number one, I don’t pay for likes, some people do. Number two, I don’t hire people in China or India to like my photos, some people do. Number three, I don’t use hash tag automation to get people to do things either. Everything you see on my account is 100% authentic, and so what I tell people is look at the comments that I actually do get and look at the conversation, but more importantly Steve, is I’m getting opt-ins to my list.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: And that is my success measure, and so I come out of these very differently than a lot of people on Instagram who feel like it’s all about, like, oh my God! You got to get the engagement rate where you want. Do I want more engagement? Absolutely, I would love more engagement, but you can’t force that.

Steve: Let me ask you this then, what is your view on using hash tags then?

Sue: Oh, I definitely you have to; I mean hash tags I think the magic is in the hash tags until you are like a famous celebrity or a famous account or a famous brand.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: Famous brands like people naturally follow and have notifications turned on. You don’t have to have such a strong hash tag strategy, but if you are looking to show up in certain conversations and I call them hash tag hubs, you need to be very, very, very strategic with your hash tags, and I do have a hash tag hymn book, Suebzimmerman.com/hh. It’s under $30 and it literary is the 35 top industries on Instagram, and the best hash tags to use that we researched.

Steve: I was going to ask you that question actually. So how do you choose a good hash tag? Are you looking for volume or you are looking for something niche?

Sue: You are looking for the places where the people who you are trying to attract hang out.

Steve: Okay. Are there any tools to help you figure out these hash tags?

Sue: Well, Instagram does suggested hash tags based on the ones that you use, and there are some hash tag tools out there that I don’t pay attention to, because I know how to find my best hash tags.

Steve: Okay, if you can give like one strategy for finding the hash tags that you use that would be great.

Sue: Yeah, so what you want to think about is like, maybe a broad hash tag around the space that you serve. So for me it’s Instagram for business.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: Instagram tip, Instagram strategy, Instagram speaker, Instagram webinar, social media, which is broad, but I’ll use event hash tags like #SMMW17; I’m speaking at Social Media Marketing World. Obviously I want to show up there using event hash tags like #TNCS2017 for Traffic and Conversion. I’ll use event hash tags before, during, and after an event so that I always show up in the top nine. Those are more niche, and I love event hash tags because I definitely want the people at the event to find me and connect with me.

So event hash tags, also location based hash tags. So I live in downtown Boston in a high rise, so I’ll do #Bostonbusinessowner, #DowntonBoston. I also have a house on Cape Cod, so I’ll do #Capecod or #Farlethheights where my house is, and it’s so important to do location based hash tags if you do workshops, and I’m doing workshops on the Cape and here in Boston. So businesses in the area will be like, Wow! She’s local; I need to connect with her.

So there is all kinds of strategies around your location, around your industry, around the products that you sell. So when I had my store and I sold nautical jewelry, #nauticaljewellery, #anchorenecklace, #nientackitredbaseballhat.

Steve: Do you look at the volume of those hash tags in determining which ones to use, or is it just what you think is relevant?

Sue: Both. So the ones that have a lot of people like okay, so Lily Pulitzer and Vineyard Vines, they have like preppy, like a lot of preppy hash tags in there, so you know you really can’t compete with those bigger brands and get seen in their hash tags, but you can get ideas of what would work for your business in those hash tags. So the most important thing to do Steve is to look and see what content is being curated in those hash tags, so that you don’t land in a hash tag that’s all porn or something.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: Sometimes people use random ass hash tags and they don’t even look at what content is being curated, and it’s like OMG! Do you really want your brand to be shown up in that hash tag?

Steve: Okay.

Sue: All the popular hash tags on Instagram I say stay away from. Like #Instagram you know, #likeforlike, #instafollow, #pickoftheday, #outfitofday. Like you and 600 million other people are using those.

Steve: I was going to ask you this question, how do you feel about like for like?

Sue: Nothing, No.

Steve: Okay, you don’t do any of those or share for share or okay.

Sue: Here is what I say, here is what I say Steve, and you can quote me on this. You should never ask for a follow, you should earn it by giving value.

Steve: Okay. Does that imply that you are also against paying other people for some exposure back to your page?

Sue: Yeah, I know people ask me all the time if they can pay me for a shout out, and I don’t. Everything I do is authentic. I am a collaborator and I tag naturally brands and businesses and people that I love. I am not an influencer; I mean I am an influencer. People send me free products all the time, and I do tag them in my posts, I talk about them in my Instagram stories, but I’m not looking to be making money this way.

There are influencer marketers that get paid to post on Instagram, I’m not that person. But it’s an industry and it’s definitely valid, I’m not dicing the industry, it’s just not what I do.

Steve: Okay, and so you would not pay someone to accelerate your account getting larger?

Sue: Never, because it’s not going to be with the right people for me.

Steve: Interesting, okay. Even if there was like another Instagram person out there who specializes in teaching Instagram, would it be relevant?

Sue: There is like 500 people that specialize in teaching Instagram or so they say.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: For me it’s always attracting the right person.

Steve: So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about content, like if you can provide some tips, because that’s most of the story, right? You have to, yeah.

Sue: Yeah, yes, so yeah, so content, there is two types of content — I’m just getting a sip of water, hold on a second.

Steve: Sure.

Sue: There is two types of content; there is engagement content, and then there is traffic driving content. And on Instagram the content that gets the most attention is the engagement, is the fabulous photo or video that looks so good that it emotionally pulls you in, because you know, it’s making you laugh, it’s educating you in some way or inspiring you, and you are just like, oh my God! That’s so cool or that’s so funny, oh my God! I love that.

And so that’s the double tap, and I say don’t just double tap, like talk to Siri [ph] and say why you like it. Don’t just like do the lazy thing. If you are going to take the time to double tap, take the time to leave a comment, but then there is the promotional post, the post that you are posting to drive traffic to the thing.

So for me right now if you open up either of my accounts, you’ll see a promotional post, a traffic driving post, because I’m doing this webinar. Now these posts typically aren’t as pretty or exciting or interesting to some people to double tap, like, and comment on. However there are people that want to learn about money mindset, and then numbers that you need to pay attention to in your business, so that when I promote a webinar that I’m doing, people are interested, they are double tapping, they are liking and they are commenting.

But here is what the listeners need to know. If you do more engagement posts and less promotional posts, you’ll get the engagement, which means you’ll beat the algorithm, which means more people will see your posts when you are doing those engagement posts, because engagement is all about likes, comments and now saved post. It’s a new feature on Instagram where you can save a post by tapping on the little ribbon on the bottom right of every post, there is a little ribbon like tab that you can save a post, or you can take a screen shot of a post. And so Instagram counts that as engagement.

So the more engagement you get, the more reach you get. It’s not so much about the impressions, but it’s about the reach. And when you have a business account on Instagram which all your listeners should have, you can look at the reach and the impressions for each post on Instagram, and you can promote and boost each post on Instagram, and you can do ads right from Instagram when you have a business profile.

Steve: Do you boost your posts?

Sue: Occasionally.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: So it depends, if I’m in a campaign, yes or when doing Facebook ads. Our Instagram Ads do extremely well because we know all the different elements and Morgan on my team on the SPZ team does all of my Facebook and Instagram ads, and often gets interviewed on podcasts about Instagram ads. So if you want to have her on talking all about Instagram ads, she’s awesome.

Steve: Okay, what was I was going to ask you next? So with your account then what is your ratio of engagement versus promotional posts?

Sue: So I would say once a week I’m doing a promotional post for the strategy guide unless I’m in a campaign. I’ll do two or three a week.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: You know when I was heavily into — I’ll give Marie Forleo as the best example because it’s the biggest campaign that we do. It’s over a month long. Every third post was almost a traffic driving post, either to the training series, to the webinar or to buying B School.

Steve: Okay, and in terms of the engagment, like is there a certain percentage based on the number of followers that you shoot for?

Sue: No, I don’t shoot for anything other than real organic engagement. I really — to be honest Steve, I don’t get caught up in the numbers as much as in the comments and in the conversions.

Steve: Okay.

Sue: I just don’t, it doesn’t impact me that way, because I know I’m attracting people I’m meant to be serving.

Steve: It’s funny, it’s very interesting that we are talking because I had someone else talk about Instagram before you, and their strategy was completely different. They are all about like social proof, getting followers and then kind of driving that traffic even though the percentages wouldn’t be as high, it’s just interesting.

Sue: Yeah, I guess it’s because I’m such a seasoned, successful entrepreneur , and I know that community trumps everything, and authenticity and like I just, I don’t play the follow game, it’s so not my thing and it’s just who I am.

Steve: Can we talk about business accounts for a sec?

Sue: Yeah.

Steve: If you transition over to a business account, do you end up losing anything or is just seamless?

Sue: It’s seamless and I think you gain so much because you gain access to all the insights and the ability to assess how many followers, the gender of your followers, the demographic of your followers, what time of day do your followers engage? What day of the week do they engage? I mean talk about looking at data; you can do it right in the app under each post. You can view your insights from each post, it’s crazy, yeah.

Steve: So when you have this data, does that imply that you’re posting at a specific time also?

Sue: Yes, I know that 12 to 1PM EST is my best time to be posting, that is lunch time for me and then again typically six to eight at night, but it’s different for everybody.

Steve: Okay, and in terms of frequency, like how often do you post?

Sue: I’m finding that the less I post the more engagement I get, because I do show up at the top of the algorithm for a lot of people that follow me. So if I wait things out and don’t post daily, like I say within maybe 30 to 48 hours, I do a lot better with my reach.

Steve: I see, so you post just at most it sound like once a day.

Sue: Yeah, I mean once a day or once a day and a half, every day and a half.

Steve: Every day and a half, interesting, okay, wow! So there’s been other people I talked to that recommend posting like three or six time a day. It’s just very interesting.

Sue: Oh my God! I would unfollow them in a second. It’s too much.

Steve: So if you are looking at analytics that we were just talking about, like which specific metrics do you actually focus on in determining what sort of content that your customers like?

Sue: I’m looking — I used to spend a lot of time in Iconic Square, but now I just spend my time looking in Instagram and seeing what people — like I’m looking at the reach. I’m looking at the reach of my post, like you know; there is two numbers that you look at in your insights. It’s either; the impressions — now the impressions can be impressions from the same person more than once.

So someone logs into Instagram, they see your post, they log, they are doing their work, they go back and they see your post again because it’s still at the top of their feed, so those are the impressions, but the reach is how many people is it actually reaching. Those are the — that’s the number, like how many people is it reaching and what kind of comments and engagement are you getting.

Steve: Okay, and are there any tools that you use to like post on Instagram or manage your accounts.

Sue: Yeah, so I love Planoly, that’s my go to favorite right now, but also Hootsuite is awesome and Buffer, you can use Hootsuite or Buffer. Planoly now has, where you can plan your Instagram stories too. You can schedule your Instagram stories, which is a great new feature.

Steve: Interesting, so when you plan out one of these posts, do you still have to – I actually don’t do it this way, I do it manually, but do they just send you to a link where you actually start to manually approve it before it goes live?

Sue: So you download the app and as soon as you schedule the time there is a push notifications to your phone, it says, “Do you want to post it now?” And you say, “Post now,” and then you just double tap in the description, and then copy and paste your whole description that you write.

Steve: Got it.

Sue: It will direct to your desktop yeah.

Steve: What is your view on photo content versus video content now?

Sue: What’s my view on what? You went in and out?

Steve: Photo content versus video content.

Sue: I do both, I think videos tend to get more, I do a lot, I do animated gifts from my graphic designer. I also do, I also do every set hash tag, every 7th post I have a video tutorial that I do, so that’s a hash tag that I created, don’t go crush tagging my hash tag anybody, #every7thpost is a video tutorial that I teach. So video definitely has a huge, I think more people are interested in seeing good video, I also use the video right within the Instagram app which is the start and go video, which can really be a creative way for you to get content out there. So I do video and I like video.

Steve: Are you finding that it works better than images, or it gets more reach than the posts?

Sue: You know both do very well for me, and very well is so different for every person. I’m more concerned about the aesthetic magazine look and feel that we talked about at the beginning of the interview, and making sure that the content is always on point with who, you know, what my followers, what my ideal customer, client wants to see.

Steve: I see, so you are very concerned with when someone first opens your Instagram account, the layout and how everything comes together on that one page with thumbnails?

Sue: Yeah, I want each post to stand alone as a very, very valuable post, and I want you to be able to look at the whole feed and get a sense of who I am and what I do.

Steve: Okay, so last question here, when you are looking at someone’s account and the account is just bad, meaning there is no cohesiveness or anything, do you actually have that person go and delete like their images and start from scratch, or do you kind of just start from then on posting content that kind of matches the realm? Does that question make sense?

Sue: Yeah, I tell them to download my strategy guide. Yeah, I mean you can either transition into learning and doing it better and say this was me then, this is me now. I think people seeing how far you’ve come sometimes is actually quite exciting, or you can do what a lot of people is delete. People delete posts all the time, they don’t get engagement, or they don’t think is working.

Steve: Is that something you recommend doing, like if a post has no engagement you just delete it?

Sue: I don’t know, it all depends, I think it’s only human to keep things and show people how you’ve improved. I don’t need the social proof every day. I would rather people — I would rather be able to say to someone, I understand where you are because I’ve been there, and you know I’ve been teaching for almost five years now.

So I’ve learned a lot and I’ve tried a lot of different strategies, and Instagram is constantly updating, improving, and making this little app a positive experience for everyone. So I’m all in on Instagram and know that it is absolutely the platform that is most visually appealing to everyone who’s on social media.

Steve: Okay, we’ll Sue thanks a lot. I mean we’ve been chatting for quite a while now and I want to be respectful of your time. Where do we want to send the listeners? You mentioned a strategy guide, you want to just give a quick update again where people can find you?

Sue: Yeah, so first I want everyone to take a little challenge that I do when I do interviews now is love for you guys to come on over to @suebzimmerman if you are interested in seeing my comings and goings on my personal account, and that’s just simply understanding how to create a personal account. But more importantly my business account @theinstagramexpert and @theSPZteam. And the challenge that I like to do on this podcast is to post, to have you guys post a photo listening to this interview, taking a great photo, maybe a #deskie and using the #suebmademedoit.

Steve: Okay, yeah that will be interesting.

Sue: So when you do Sue B made me do it, you will be joined with over a 1,000 people who have taken this challenge, and you’ll be able to meet some other awesome people who have listened to me speak or do a podcast interview, and it’s a good way to connect to some awesome people. So that and then they should @mention your account as well. I don’t know what account it would be.

Steve: It’s My Wife Quit.

Sue: Oh, My Wife Quit okay, so there you go, and so that way Steve will get a notification that you @mentioned him as well, and then yeah, everyone here you should be definitely be downloading my strategy guide which is Suebzimmerman.com/guide.

Steve: Okay, that’s easy to remember.

Sue: Yeah, you got to make it easy; if it’s not easy people don’t do it.

Steve: Hey Sue, thanks a lot for coming on the show, really appreciate your tips, and I’m sure the listeners will find it very valuable.

Sue: Yes, absolutely.

Steve: All right, take care.

Sue: Bye, bye.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. I’ve actually been using some of Sue’s strategies for my own Instagram account, and my IG fan base has been steadily increasing as a result. For more information about this episode, go to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com/episode 170.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and 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 auto pilot. 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.

I also want to thank SellerLabs.com as well. Their tool Ignite is what I use to manage my Amazon PPC campaigns. Instead of the old tedious way of generating reports and analyzing your ad campaigns in Excel, Ignite aggregates all that info for you in one place and allows you to quickly visualize your data to make decisions fast.

So not only does it save time, but it also makes managing your Amazon campaigns so much easier. So head on over to sellerlabs.com/steve and sign up for a free 30 day trial, once again that’s sellerlabs.com/steve.

And if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce 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 are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.