The Active Marketer Podcast with Barry Moore: Mark

Welcome to episode 80 of the podcast. In this episode of the podcast I welcome back long time friend of the show and marketing automation rock star Chris L. Davis from AutomationBridge.com One of the most difficult things to do with marketing automation is get started. You see that blank screen, a blinking cursor and it all becomes just a little too hard. Consequently we either end up putting it off or worse yet making some half-hearted, unplanned and undocumented stab at it, only to have it break or blow up in our face later. That is why this week's episode is dedicated to strategy and planning, we want to help you build something that will last. The post TAM 080: Strategy & Planning with Chris L. Davis appeared first on The Active Marketer.

Welcome to episode 79, part three in a three part mini-series dedicated to showing you how you can generate online income quickly. During the Corona virus lockdown many people have lost their jobs either temporarily or permanently. Now is the time to think about other ways you can generate some income. This three part mini-series will give you some ideas on how you can get up and running generating income online or get started with a new online business. The post TAM 079: Generate Online Income (Part 3), with Dan Norris appeared first on The Active Marketer.

Welcome to episode 78, the second in a three part mini-series dedicated to showing you how you can generate online income quickly. During the Corona virus lockdown many people have lost their jobs either temporarily or permanently. Now is the time to think about other ways you can generate some income. This three part mini-series will give you some ideas on how you can get up and running generating income online or get started with a new online business. The post TAM 078: How To Quickly Generate Online Income (Part 2) appeared first on The Active Marketer.

Welcome to episode 77, the first in a three part mini-series dedicated to showing you how you can generate online income quickly. During the Corona virus lockdown many people have lost their jobs either temporarily or permanently. Now is the time to think about other ways you can generate some income. This three part mini-series will give you some ideas on how you can get up and running generating income online or get started with a new online business. The post TAM 077: How To Quickly Generate Online Income (Part 1) appeared first on The Active Marketer.

With the number of nifty SaaS apps used in your business growing by the day, it becomes vitally important to be able to get those apps to hand off data and work together. Using tools like Zapier you can build marketing automation workflows from simple to as complex as you need. learn to collate and automate […] The post TAM 076: Automating With Zapier – Mike Knoop appeared first on The Active Marketer.

In this episode I welcome back long time friend of the show Chris L. Davis, formerly of LeadPages and now director of education at ActiveCampaign. Turn the light bulb on and start planning.  #podcast @activecampaignClick To Tweet There are so many things you can do with your marketing automation, sometimes you just need to sit […] The post TAM 075: Riffing on ActiveCampaign – Chris Davis appeared first on The Active Marketer.

A lot of the folks I work with and talk to have trouble finding their voice when it comes to writing emails and landing page copy. So in episode 74 I talk to Chris Ducker about how to find your voice and build a personal brand Chris Ducker and I chat about finding your voice #podcast #branding #onlinemarketingClick To Tweet We Chat About: How the personal brand business evolved The transition from the forefront brand to the personal brand Why people find it hard to speak their own “craft” What are the means necessary to establish a personal brand   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations, discounts and special offers and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy YouPreneur.com ChrisDucker.com Virtual Staff Finder Virtual Freedom – The Book Also check out our huge list of online marketing tools Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. PODCAST Transcription: Barry: Welcome to the show, Mr. Chris Ducker Esquire. How are you sir? Chris: Esquire? I love that. That’s never been done. I’m very good sir, thank you for having me. Barry: I understand you’re going back to the UK soon for a bit of a visit. Chris: I am. Just gonna eat some fish and chips, drink some proper tea, you know that kind of stuff. Barry: Lovely. I was hoping that you sir, could share with some of the audience, some of the folks that I work with we’re building up their sales funnels and their autoresponder sequences, the introduction sequences, and sales sequences, and they always seem to come unstuck when it comes to writing those emails, the content for those emails. It becomes, “Oh I don’t know what to say here.” They seem to have a lot of trouble finding their own voice. I know you’re really great about creating a brand around yourself and helping people do that through your Youpreneur programme. I was hoping you could help some of the listeners find their voice and help them define who they are as a brand. I’m super interested in your journey in that area. I know you originally came on to the “internet scene” quote on quote, with Virtual Staff Finder and your book Virtual Freedom, which is great by the way. Chris: Thank you. Barry: So I guess my question would be, what was the impetus to go from, you had success around that in being the Virtual Staff Finder guy, what was the impetus to go from that to the ChrisDucker.com brand? Chris: Yeah, and that’s a great question. I mean, very honestly, the ChrisDucker.com brand was around a long time before the Virtual Freedom book. I’ve been blogging and podcasting since 2010 the book came out middle of 2014. I got the book deal with a traditional publisher because of the Chris brand. The way that traditional publishers, and we’re not going to turn this into how to market book conversation, but the way that traditional publishers work is that they go after people that have established good sized followings. They’re not buying you or your book, they’re buying all the people that are going to buy the book that are already buying you, right? I probably would not have got that traditional publishing deal, as would a lot of other authors as well, if I didn’t have the following that I had based around my personal brand already. And that’s why you go live and you sell 8,000 books in one week. It is what it is. I think what’s happened with my brand over time is that it’s pivoted. This is one of the beautiful things about building a personal brand based business. Because when you build the business around you and what you stand for and what you’re all about, as and when your passions and your wants and needs and desires change from a business perspective, your audience can make that change with you. Or they can end up, obviously, not wanting to follow you any more and that’s absolutely fine as well. But if you go to ChrisDucker.com and you search the blog archives there’s over 600 blog and podcast posts on there. You’ll see everything from virtual assistant outsourcing delegation type content, you’ll see lots of productivity stuff because I’m a bit of a productivity hacker I want to try and get the most out of my days. You’ll also find a lot of information in regards to building a business based around your personal brand and your experiences and have a cash in on that experience. You’ll find a lot of other thought leader type stuff. Why entrepreneurs should stop avoiding the word fear, why we should be more professional in our entrepreneurship and all this other sort of stuff. So I think the personal brand really lends itself to you as the entrepreneur and as the voice and you can pivot and change as you want to move into the future. And you can’t do that as easily, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you can’t do that as easily when you’re a brand based business, but with a personal brand based business, it’s a lot easier to be a little flexible. Barry: Yeah, I guess the crux of my question was, it seemed like there was a point in time while the Chris brand existed, it wasn’t the forefront brand, Virtual Staff Finder was the forefront brand I think. Chris: Yeah. And Virtual Staff Finder is still a business it’s still making a lot of money every year, and it’s still something I talk about, and I’m still the all out owner, I have no partners in it, et cetera, et cetera. But I think, yeah, it was a very deliberate pivot from my end. Because to be honest with you, I wrote Virtual Freedom, it’s 65,000 words on delegation to virtual staff and building virtual teams, I have been interviewed over 200 times on the subject on virtual staffing and outsourcing, I have keynoted stages all around the world on that very topic since 2010, and to be honest with you, I’m kind of tired. Barry: Fair enough. I was gonna ask you that. I’m like, “Are you just flat out sick of talking about it?” Chris: I don’t think I’m sick of talking about it, I think I’m just tired. And there’s a difference between the two right? It’s not like I don’t enjoy the idea of helping people leverage their time by outsourcing and delegation, I do. I absolutely thrive on that because I know when you’ve got the right help around you, you can grow, and support, and build your business a lot faster. I’m still a big advocate of delegation and outsourcing and the rest of it, but I just honestly got tired. There’s only so much you can say about one topic. And this whole time the personal brand of me was developing and picking up speed and was getting stronger. So I started to get people coming to me saying, “Hey, how do I do that? How do I build, market and monetize my brand, my experience?” And that’s the area that I’ve now pivoted into and I’m loving it. It’s a lot of excitement, lot of passion based people to work with. Obviously with the Youpreneur community, I’m in there everyday with everyone talking up a storm and it’s just been an incredible last couple of years. Barry: That transition where ChrisDucker.com came to the forefront, was there a point where it was just a mental flip of the switch where you’re like, “Right, I’m going to put 90% into this and 10% into that.” When one eclipsed to the other, I know it was a deliberate strategy, but was there a mental flip like, “Right, this is what I’m doing now, bang.” Chris: Yeah, there was. I remember I was in San Francisco, I was in a great little tea house with my buddy Corbett Bar, and Corbett at the time, we’re talking 2012 right so it was a few years ago, but Corbett at the time was making quite a name for himself in the online business world as a coach for brand based bloggers. Particularly on helping bloggers find their voice, figure out who their audience was, et cetera, et cetera. I had gotten to know Corbett just as a friend through meeting up with him at conferences and mutual friends and things like that. We were sitting there having a tea and we were talking about things and he was asking me questions about what I wanted to do in the future, how I was going to build the blog, and to be honest with you I couldn’t answer the guy. I just couldn’t answer him. I just didn’t have the answers to the questions that he was asking. And he kind of sat back and said, “You’re not happy are you? You’re not happy doing what you’re doing.” And I said, “No not really to be honest with you. I’m doing it because people want it from me and they eager and I like the idea of having a tribe and a community, but I’m wouldn’t say I was happy doing it.” And he said, “Well I’m telling you now, if you don’t turn that around you’re going to burn out and it’s going to be horrible.” We actually worked together on and off for a couple months and he really really helped me clarify where I wanted to take my personal brand moving forward. So I owe a lot, a lot for the overall success of my personal brand to Corbett because it was that afternoon and a few Skype calls after that that really helped me get my crap together when it came to that side of things. Barry: And that process of solidifying your personal brand so to speak, what did that feel like? Was it a struggle like, “Wow this is harder than I thought it was going to be”? Or was it just kind of, a natural extension to what you’d been doing already? Chris: I think it was a natural extension. When I first got active online I was blogging and podcasting and video blogging as well over at VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com. Under that brand and that name across the board. When people talked about my blog or my podcast, they wouldn’t call it Virtual Business Lifestyle. They would just call it Chris’s blog or Chris’s podcast. So the brand was already developing slowly anyway. Once I made that mental shift it was a relatively easy move to make. Except for the web design side of things. That was where I really struggled actually at first to kind of find my visual brand. What colours? What was the logo going to look like? What fonts was I going to use? Et cetera, et cetera. But we put together a great first ChrisDucker.com website and it served me really really well for what, three years almost. We updated a couple of years ago. Barry: Yeah I remember that. I remember when that came out and it’s not dramatically different now, but it certainly was unique, it stood out. It was like, “Yep, that’s Chris.” Chris: Yeah. Dude, my designer had a tonne of people going to him saying, “I want a site like Chris’s.” So I know I did something the first time around. And we still get that know with the current website even though I kind of feel like the current site does need a little bit of a renovation it’s a little dated now compared to some of the other personal brand sites out there. But hey, we do one thing at a time right? Barry: So that transition, what did you find the most difficult in that? Was it defining the look and feel that was going to be Chris? Or was it more esoteric than that? Chris: No the one thing that I promised myself when I made that decision to go all out in the personal brand business side of things, I said to myself, “I’m going to be me all the time.” That was the most important thing. No smoke and mirrors, no hiding behind curtains, and I think by doing that and by making that clear decision, it allowed me to really, I don’t want to use management speak that blue sky approach to “Think outside the box” and all that kind of stuff, but it allowed me to really just do me. You know what I mean? Just be me. And I think people want to business with other people now a days. They don’t want to do business with brands or smokes and mirrors and curtains, they’re not interested in that. I think people appreciated it. I get messages all the time from people saying they appreciate the transparency and that I share a little bit of my personal life on live video, they can see a little bit behind the scenes so to speak. Quite regularly I’ll pop open Periscope and people will just sit and watch me work and ask questions and I’ll just for 20 minutes here and there. People appreciate it! It sounds a little cooky, but people appreciate that stuff. They want to see the real you now a days. That’s part of the personal part of personal brand you know? Barry: I’m watching you Chris. Chris: Yeah exactly! It’s very Steven King when it wants to be. Barry: I lost my train of thought there. Chris: It was a ad lib, Barry. Barry: Oh thank you, thank you so much. I think maybe it’s just the circles that we both travel in, but I think online especially has become, there’s a niche for everything, and it’s kind of almost become the personality economy right? Chris: Right. Barry: I can buy product A anywhere from anyone these days so why should I buy it from you because I resonate with you or I like what you’re doing or whatever. I think if you’re missing that component to a reasonably sized online business, you’re missing out. I was consulting with this really great company in Australia and they send out organic fruit and veg boxes to people and they’re like, “How can we get more.” And I’m like, “Well you need someone to lead the tribe. There’s a tonne of people who love what you’re doing, but you haven’t given them a flag to rally around. You haven’t given them a person to lead that tribe. You need someone in the company to step up and be that personality, that brand, so that people can identify it’s more than just a box that shows up it’s a whole socio-economic system that you guys are putting money back into the local community, you’re doing organic farming. Yeah, so I think that personality plays a huge, huge part in it. You see so many people in the Youpreneur community that you’ve got starting out on this, and I see a lot of people, as I said at the beginning, trying to craft their copy, so to speak, who find it so difficult to speak in their own voice. Why do you think that is? Chris: Well I think what happens is when people are starting out they do what they should do and that is they hop on other people’s mailing lists to see what they’re up to, to see how they’re doing things, to see how they’re launching, and engaging, and all the rest of it. And then what happens is they just end up copying them. Which is, you know it’s fine to emulate, it’s fine to get inspiration and ideas, but all out copying is not going to get you anywhere any time soon. I think the most important thing is when you get started writing email copy, website copy, landing page copy, sales page copy, anything above and beyond content right? There’s a difference between content and copy right? So content is blog posts, it’s podcasts, transcriptions, it’s all that sort of stuff. When you talk about sales copy, and I’m no expert here, I still hire copywriters myself from time to time. Barry: Oh for sure. Chris: When you this is not your strength you should not try and do it. But, you can’t hire a copywriter for every single piece of copy that you need written. Unless you’re very, very well off and you don’t mind investing in it, which is fine if that’s the case then go for it, I know I would. I know I would. If I could afford to invest $50,000 every quarter in copywriting I would absolutely do it. Now obviously, can I afford it? Yes. Do I want to put 50 grand a quarter there? No. There’s other things I could be doing with the money is I guess what I’m saying. I think what’s important is that you just talk like a human being. This is the big thing is that people try to get too sales-y. Just talk, tell stories, tell stories, be honest. Part of the launch funnel for the Youpreneur academy that we are bang smack in the middle of, the second email that got sent out was me just telling the story. It’s a long form email, it’s a good probably, 6-700 words it’s quite long for an email. But it’s just telling the story of how I made a mistake when I first launched Youpreneur and how the terminology meant that the first launch of the community was not as successful as I wanted it to be, and how we’ve made changes not only to the terminology that we use but also to what is actually happening behind the door so that we can help the most people and affect the most change with our members. People have eaten that email up. They’ve eaten it up. Some people are sneaky, they might get on your list with more than one email address, so even though we’ll eliminate current members from our marketing, there’s no need for them to get them if they’re already in, right? We’ve actually had emails, just literally in the last 24 hours, from current members who have already paid and they continue to pay on a regular basis for access, I’ve actually had emails from people over the last 24 hours saying, “That was some serious copy. Like I would totally buy if I wasn’t already a member.” So you know you’re doing something right when your members who are already paying say, “Hey can I pay again?” You know what I mean? I think that’s what it is. Just tell stories. Be yourself and try not to over think it. I think that’s the big thing, people try and over think these things too much. And by the way, you’ll never get it right. Not even a copywriter will get it perfect but it’s just a matter of learning it with every launch, with every open rate, with every click through rate that you can see you know? Barry: Yeah. A couple things back there that I want to loop back too. One even if you could afford or chose to use a copywriter for every single piece of copy, you’re going to have to train him or her to speak in your voice anyway. You know what I mean? So it’s all congruent with the rest of your brand. If you don’t know what your voice is to start with it’s going to be very, very difficult process. Chris: Yes, indeed. That all comes back to defining who you are. What do you want to be known for? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? That self awareness is very important in that process of defining who you are. What problems can you solve? Who do you want to solve them for? That’s the first week as part of the Youpreneur academy, that is right front and centre, defining who you are, and it’s probably the most important week of that 12 week programme no doubt about it. Barry: Nice. And the other thing from that is, like you said, being open and honest and sharing your quote on quote “mistakes” or “set backs” or whatever you want to call it with everybody as well. I think that makes you even more relatable. It’s like, “Oh the great Chris, he can do that, he knows what he’s doing he doesn’t make any mistakes.” It’s like, “Oh wait, he makes mistakes, I make mistakes.” Chris: Dude I make mistakes everyday almost. If you’re not falling forward then you’re not moving forward. That’s the way I look at it. I’m more than happy to make mistakes. I’m like anybody else I get pissed off if it costs me money, but let me tell you something. Never make those mistakes twice. Never, never. So there you go. Barry: For sure. All right, so we talked about why it’s important to put a stake in the ground and identify who you are as a brand, so on a high level, what are the first steps involved in that process? Chris: Sorry, just repeat that? You cut out just a little there. Barry: Sorry, so we talked about the importance of putting a stake in the ground saying this is me, this is what I stand for, and creating a brand around you and what you do. What are the first steps in making that from an idea into a reality? Chris: Yeah, great question. What it really comes down to, like I said, is focusing in on what you believe you are the best at, right? It’s okay to get a little selfish here. It’s okay to get a little egotistical here because without you figuring out who you are, you’re not going to be able to continue to build out the strategy of your personal brand business moving forward. It’s all about crafting, first and foremost, your story. What’s your backstory? People want to know who you are, what you’re all about, and what you’ve been through. What will happen is at the same exact time you will attract the people that understand you and what you’re all about and get your vibe, but at the very same time, just like a magnet, I call this marked in like a magnet, at the very same time you will repel the wrong people away, the people that you don’t need in your customer book. The people who will ask for refunds on day 29 of your 30 day refund period. The people that will bitch and moan over a $99 product after sucking your brain and your energy for the last 30 days. You don’t need those people in there. So you create your story, you create your story you create that attractive character story that people want to attach themselves to to begin with. And what will happen is, by doing that, you’ll understand what you need to do to be able to build rapport and gain trust, which are the two most important parts of the sales process, to be able to not only remain original in a very crowded space, no matter what industry you’re in it’s crowded, but more importantly than remaining original, it will also be to gain that clarity for yourself and the people that you end up serving in terms of what you are actually all about. So that’s the first thing, to develop your story, develop your backstory, develop that attractive character that you need to be able to build rapport and gain trust. And then, the next thing is to really get into that self awareness vibe. So you make a couple of lists. What I did when I went through this many years ago, I got a piece of paper and I just drew a line down the middle of it, and on one side of the line I put all the things that I knew I was really good at, and then on the other side I put all the things that I knew I struggled with. It’s funny, because in that first column it filled up really quickly, but that struggle column, it filled up very slowly. That’s a mental block right there because we don’t want to admit that we’re not good at certain things. Us entrepreneurs we’re wired differently to normal human beings right? So we believe we’re brilliant at everything. But once you understand what you’re not good, once you understand what you do struggle with, it allows you to then focus on the things that you know you’re really good at. Like, flatter yourself. Flatter yourself. Think of all the things that you know you’re really, really good at. So that’s the second thing I would do. Make those two lists, the flatter list and the struggle list. And then third and finally, in regards to the beginning of this process is, and this is a little morbid but stick with me here, sit down, and this is a huge exercise that I’ve done with thousands of people now, but it’s a game changer. You have to sit down and you write an obituary for your business. Okay? You’ve achieved everything that you’ve wanted to achieve, how do you want people to remember your business? That little exercise right there, again, a little morbid, but it’s so good. It really helps you to see where you want to be long term as well. Sometimes you gotta do that and then reverse engineer it back you know? Barry: Yeah for sure, that’s a powerful exercise. I did a similar thing at a workshop once and we actually sat in a cemetery and wrote an obituary and a goodbye letter. Chris: That’s taking it to a whole new level that one. Field trip everybody! Barry: Yeah it was pretty weird. We wrote goodbye letters to all the important people in our lives and it was like, “Wow, there’s a lot of undone shit I need to work on with these people.” So it was an amazing exercise if you have the guts to do it for sure. All right, so we might wrap up with a little common errors. You’ve helped tonnes of people along this journey, what do you see as common mistakes or common stumbling blocks that people seem to fall over again and again? Chris: Yeah, that’s a really good question, man. For me, one of the biggest things that I see people trying to do is trying to be too much to too many people. We all know the power of niching down and understanding that it’s better to serve a smaller group of people in a more direct manner than it is to try and serve a broader, larger group of people in a very broad manner. And it’s still the number one mistake that people make. Don’t be a social media expert. Be the Facebook ads guy for dentists. You understand what I mean? Your entire marketing angle can be so much more powerful when you know exactly who you’re talking to and exactly what you’re talking about. Don’t be the guy that teaches you how to become a better basketball player. Be the guy who’s going to teach people how to become a better forward or a better centre or a better point guard. Yes, you’re instantly eliminating four positions on that court, but by doing so, you can really fine tune your message to those point guards or to those centres. For me, it really does come to niching down. You’ve got to niche down it’s a big mistake people make more than anything else. Barry: Yeah, you can always expand out from there. And- Chris: Well that’s the beautiful thing about pivoting. You’re in control right? Barry: And, it makes your instantly referable as quote on quote “that guy” or “that girl” It’s like, “Oh you need this? You need to talk to Chris.” Chris: Yeah. That’s right. And I found that with Virtual Staff and with outsourcing for many, many years. I still get it now, but there are more people on the scene now then what there was four or five years ago when I was focusing in on that properly. But I became the VA and outsourcing guy. And now, slowly but surely, slowly but surely, after really two and a half solid years of focusing on my personal brand, I now starting to see that, oh you need to go to Youpreneur or you need to go to Chris. Forbes just did a piece of me in terms of personal brand business as well. When you see big name press houses like Forbes picking you up and what you’re all about, you know what you’re doing is starting to work. It’s not something that can happen over night, and that’s where patience and that long game mindset in business comes into play. But I think as long as you’ve got your head screwed on right that you’ve truly done that first exercise and defined who you are and who you want to serve, I think it’s what it’s all about. Barry: Awesome. We’ve been mentioning here and there, but for the listeners who aren’t familiar, do you want to tell us a little bit about Youpreneur and personal question, why the relaunch? Chris: Youpreneur came about as a direct result of putting on smaller mastermind events of travelling around the world speaking. I’ve been very blessed to be invited to speak in keynote at some very, very large events. US, Australia, UK, Europe, all over Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and what not, and I saw two things happening over and over again. It’s actually quite obvious but a lot of people I don’t think give it the eye balls and the head space time to figure it out. First and foremost, entrepreneurs are lonely. They are. We’re lonely. Barry: For sure. Chris: It’s a very, very lonely battle being an entrepreneur and building you’re own business, particularly an online business where a majority of people working from home don’t get out much and all the rest of it. So that’s the fist thing, the fact that it’s a lonely journey. The second thing that I discovered from doing these smaller masterminds, and this was the big one, was that nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. Nobody. When I used to do these mastermind sessions, 10, 12 people, in the room, all day long, by the time we were done, it was an absolute guarantee that someone, in fact everyone at that table, was going to have a huge value bomb dropped on them by somebody else at that table by the end of the day. Whether they knew them before that day began or not. That’s just the power of getting together with like minded people who get it. Who get it. I wanted to develop a community that could give that support, and give that accountability and have that get it mentality, but also one focused on serving people that I, based on the fact that I’ve now truly got to the point of deciding who I am and figuring out that definition of who I am and those that I want to serve, I wanted to create that community that was going to serve people that were building brands and businesses around their personal brands. So guys like coaches, authors, speakers, bloggers, podcasters, experts, consultants, that kind of thing. We launched in 2015, we’re now relaunching with a new angle. So it’s no longer just a community angle it’s more of a training programme with a community angle because the feedback was that a lot of people liked the idea of being part of a community but they also needed the hand holding and that step by step approach to get started with things. So there’s the relaunch strategy behind what you now see at Youpreneur.com but it’s been an interesting journey, Barry. It’s not something that I would have thought that I’d be doing five years from now, but now that it’s been up and running for a couple of years I’m very, very happy with the way it’s come together and obviously I’m pumped for the future of it. I think it’s gonna continue to grow and it’s true, or rather it’s very clear to see that we’re serving people in the right way, and more importantly, the right people. That’s I think what has made the big change to the growth of it above and beyond everything else. Barry: Awesome. If you are interested folks, if you’re interested in getting your brand to go you can head over to ChrisDucker.com. You’ll find all the information there. Where else would you find it right? But ChrisDucker.com. Chris: It’s got to pretty much be a personal brand, that domain name. Barry: Well sir, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today and your expertise and your knowledge in your journey. Do appreciate it and I know all the listeners appreciate it as well, and all the safe travels on your trip to the UK. Chris: Thank you my man, and I appreciate it and thanks for having me on it was a lot of fun. Good chat. Barry: All right. See you online. The post TAM 074: Finding Your Voice and Brand With Chris Ducker appeared first on The Active Marketer.

A lot of the folks I work with and talk to have trouble finding their voice when it comes to writing emails and landing page copy. So in episode 74 I talk to Chris Ducker about how to find your voice and build a personal brand [Tweet “Chris Ducker and I chat about finding your voice […] The post TAM 074: Finding Your Voice and Brand With Chris Ducker appeared first on The Active Marketer.

In episode 73, I talk sales tracking and conversion optimisation  with Scott Desgrosseilliers, from Wicked Reports.  I love Wicked’s tag line. “Half Your Marketing Is Wasted.  Do You Know Which Half?” Wicked reports lets you track sales back to where they originated. No one’s gonna say, “Look at my .6% click rate,” but he made 3.5 x his normal average revenue on…Click To Tweet Scott has seen lots online sales and lots of online marketers and he shares how to optimise your marketing spend to generate the most sales. He also shares the tactics that are working now. Bullet Points We Chat About: Tracking How to get better conversions Case studies What is working now UTM tracking   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations, discounts and special offers and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy WickedReports.com Also check out our huge list of online marketing tools Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player.   Barry:  I’d like to welcome Scott Desgrosseilliers to the show. Welcome, Scott. Scott:   Welcome Barry. Psyched to be on. Thanks for having me. Barry:  Now I’ve been hearing a lot of good thing about Wicked Reports from some of my colleagues and I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet but I wanted to get you on to talk about one, what it can do for us, and two, since you see so many marketers doing so many campaigns and so much tracking, I’d love it if you could share some kind of consolidated insights from all those people as to about what works, how to do it the right way and how to do the wrong way. That sound good? Scott:   I’d love to. Barry :  Ah, cool. Scott:   I’d love to. Barry :  First of all, for the listeners who aren’t familiar with Wicked Reports, can you give us a little bit of a rundown on what that is and what it does? Scott:  Sure. Wicked Reports, we transform data into action and answers. We’re strictly focused on the small and medium business market. People that are at Facebook, spending anywhere between $1000 and some customers go up to $200,000 a month, but once you’re spending $1000 a month, we can tell you what’s working and not working in your marketing and save you at least half of that each month, just by showing you things that never turn into customers, if nothing else. Barry :  What kind of stuff are you tracking? Scott:  We’re wired into a couple of things, AdWords and Facebook. We automatically are pulling cost at the ad level, so there’s that. Then we are wired into CRMs and sales systems, such as ActiveCampaign and Stripe and Shopify, so that we can base your data on actual real leads and sales, not based on pixels fire, because there’s a lot of issues with pixels and Facebook agrees with us. We’ve met with them three times already. They’ve been very keen on what we’re up to already, even though we’re somewhat small in their eyes, I’m sure, but they’ve recognised the problem enough to work with us, so it’s been exciting. Barry : You’re saying, for example, you can attribute a sale to a particular Facebook Ad or a particular click on a Google AdWord or something like that. Scott:  Yeah, so we’ve wired into the systems, then we add our click tracking and the combination of your ad accounts, your email accounts, and your sales in the clicks that we’ve seen, we combined that all together, because my background’s in data warehousing, to figure out what’s important or not important in your customer’s journey in attributing ROI based on actual sales, so you can then up the spend, or up the effort on things that are working where the message is matching the market for customers and stop doing things that are just getting leads that don’t do anything or things that are unprofitable. Barry :  You can do the same thing with, say, links in outbound emails, for example. This email went out. It generated x number of sales based on- Scott:  That was the original two things I did back in 2014. This used to be a pivot table. It’s like a jet engine now. It was a pivot table people would pay me for. It was get leads in from Facebook somehow and then email them until they buy, and that alone made my friend’s lobster business tonnes of money just doing that. It was really fun to be able to show. He sells lobsters. Ships them online. You go to his website and you order live lobsters to eat and then they show up whenever you pick in the future. We were able to show that women 45 to 55, who don’t live in this area of the States known as New England, but like one of the sports teams from that area, were his best customers over time and that was pretty cool to see. Barry : Wow, that’s pretty granular. Scott:  Yeah, it was because then you knew how to talk to them. Also, it was a cool, psychographic thing. No one would like a team from that region unless you lived there at one time and then maybe you would miss the food, so it was really cool to see. Barry :  So there’s someone living in Scottsdale that likes the New England Patriots and they’re buying lobster from this guy. Scott:  Yep. Exactly. California and Florida are the most expensive places to ship. They’re also where he does his most sales and he was real worried about $40 to ship the food. No one cared. They bought. Barry :  Anything else in particular about Wicked that you’re super excited about? Scott:  The issues with a lot of analytics tools out there, there’s tonnes of gorgeous, analytic tools. They just make data look very beautiful. I like to think ours is beautiful but there are definitely some that make it more beautiful. Then there’s other ones out there that rely on something called event tracking, where you have to tell the analytics programme that something occurred in your business and that fails small businesses. I consulted for another CRM for a long time, over 100 businesses of theirs and saw that no one could get this set up right. I was like, you know, it’s not the business’ fault. It’s the process. When I set out to create Wicked, it was like I need to have full proof attribution that doesn’t rely on someone doing a bunch of work in order to tell the statistics that are gonna run your business that something happened. That’s a big thing that we spent a lot of time on and we have all this help built into the app now so that when you’re looking at data, you know what action to take based on what you’re looking at because you can actually pick real world English questions and then the data will reformat and philtre itself to give you the answer. You don’t have to remember how to use all of our reports anymore. Not that they’re that hard, but now you don’t even have to worry about it. You just come in and pick a question. Which of my emails performed the best and we’ll just resort everything for you. Which of my Facebook Ads are best for cold traffic lead gen? Well, that’s a totally different ad than the one you’re gonna use for retargeting and so we’ll repick all the necessarily things to give you that answer. Barry : You also track the customer lifetime value over time. Is that right? Scott:  The big driver we’re doing is what’s the customer lifetime value over time and how does it relate to what it cost to get them? What’s that mean on the ROI? If the ROI is high, you should keep doing it and if it’s not, you may ne shouldn’t. We’ve got another one that shows how long until someone’s valuable. It could be that you’re gonna break even during the ad but you’re gonna really make out in 90 days so that’s good to know so you don’t kill the ad. We’ve got that type of stuff in there as well. Barry :   All kinds of cool stuff like buying time, time of day, which day’s better. Scott:  Buying time’s a fun one. I learned this from a guy, Craig Jacobson, who’s a marketing whiz and I said, “Hey, can I build this in as a tool, as a report?” He said, “Have at it.” I always like to give intellectual attribution. The concept here, and this is one we can do without any tracking, we take all the customer info and we figure out what time and day it was for the customer in their time zone when they bought, which is key for any internet business that’s selling information. Your customer is everywhere. To figure out when you should send your email because it’s never 8 a.m. All the CRMs usually pick 8 a.m. because they had to pick sometime or they pick, the time they opted in is always the time we’re gonna send the email. What the theory is which holds up is, you should send when people actually buy because that’s when they’re thinking about the problem that you solve the most and it really holds up well. To change your emails to that time, you make more money and it’s brainless. Just change the time, that’s it. Where’s the bar highest? What time is it? Okay. I’m gonna change my emails, send then, and you just made more money right away. That’s always a big hit because it’s easy. Easy and makes money. Barry :  Love it. Just before the call, we were talking about some of the other stuff that you’ve seen that people do well and then people do incorrectly or not so well. Maybe we can talk a little bit about some of that stuff. When it comes to Facebook advertising or AdWords or tracking the ROI, what’s the best way to go about it? Scott: There’s a big thing to explain about a problem.  It’s not gonna take a long time but there’s a big problem. Facebook’s had a couple issues with their metrics which they’re dealing with. The big thing is they’re using something called last click tracking for their conversion tracking. You go in there and you see you had a bunch of sales in Facebook but they may not match how many sales you actually had in your Shopify or your Stripe or what have you, and the more channels you’re advertising in, the more each channel’s claiming all kinds of credit for your success and that’s because they all say, “Hey, if you clicked in my platform within 30 days, and then you bought, we were the converting factor,” when it’s very likely to have been email, or it depends on how sophisticated your Facebook advertising is, but it causes people a lot of confusion because it’s always showing an inaccurate performance measure. The other factor battling the small business is, it’s gonna take time usually, to acquire and convert a customer from a prospect to a recurring customer, and that value can’t always be measured in the time that the ad was running. If you’re getting a brand new cold lead in, they might need to know a lot about you before they’re gonna buy your $2000 coaching or join your $100 a month SaaS or whatever it is you’re doing. They’re not likely to just, “Hey, here’s a brand new business. I clicked on an ad. Here’s my credit card.” Wonderful if you can do that but that’s not gonna happen enough to show that the ads are valuable. What we find that works best for people and why we designed the app this way around different attribution models is, your campaign should have a different intent behind them, rather than just spring and pray and I want everyone to buy or everyone to do something from this one set of ads. You should have a campaign that’s for branding. That’s like you’re just trying to get your brand out there and show your best content, or your best videos. Your best whatever you have related to what you solve. Then you want a campaign based on, okay, you’ve seen my content. Here’s your best way to get them on your list. Lead gen. Some people can get away with just doing a lead gen right away. You want to find out to cold traffic but often you need to brand yourself first. Then there’s a separate retargeting which you’re gonna do which should be a separate campaign. Then there’s the, you already know about me, you’ve already seen my stuff, you’ve already maybe opted in a couple times, I just want you to buy my stuff, campaign. Why you separate it that way is because each one of the success of each of those intentions of advertising, the measurement of each of them should be based on sales attribution of the goal of that campaign. If you’re just doing cold branding of content to someone that’s never heard of you, you just want them to click over and read and hear about you. Then what we measure is the first click ROI. Show me all the first clicks that ever turned into customers and calculate did they spend more than it cost to get the clicks? When you’re doing lead gen, it’s like I got all these cold leads. Did they spend money with me? Did they spend more than what they cost? If so, this is good lead gen. You should keep doing this and if not, you shouldn’t. Then if it’s retargeting, it’s of course, what was the last thing they opted into before they bought? That’s the best retargeting we should do and then if all of a sudden, they get in my recurring programme and spend thousands with me, well, hey now I know this is the type of campaign to run only once they’ve already been on my list for a little while. Then I hit them with this lead [inaudible 00:11:37]. Last click for converting is, this is when they’re warmed up and I know they’re ready to buy. This is what I should show when they’re at that point in time. Not right away. Hey, buy my stuff. Buy my stuff. Barry :   You’re saying like you can have in the middle of that, in a lead gen to sales, retargeting stuff. You could say you’ve got three lead magnets on our side, three opt-in opportunities on our side but opt-in opportunity, lead magnet number two, is the one that converts to sales more. Scott:   Exactly. It’s the one that attracts the buyers. You could do a survey or a contest. Get a tonne of crappy leads. Everyone wants to win stuff and the idea is no one wins and then I’m gonna have all these cheap leads and I’m gonna offer a discount to buy what my contest was. I haven’t see that work yet. It may. I’m sure probably there’s gonna be five example of “Oh, it works all the time” but I’ve never seen it and we’ve dealt with a fair amount of people so I’m confident saying not your best strategy. Barry :  While we’re on that subject, what have you seen that works the best for turning an opt-in cold, not necessarily cold, but a semi-cold opt-in warm up into a sale? Scott:  That’s tricky. I’ll give you some example of what worked for certain people but saying, “Hey, this works all the time,” I get nervous about doing that because it’s that market at that point in time and based on- Barry :  That problem and that- Scott:  How that person speaks and how they speak to their customer. That’s why you gotta have these campaigns set up right and you got to test them because you just download. I mean, digital marketer has killer stuff. You have some great stuff and just because it worked for you guys, doesn’t mean it’s gonna work for the other person because they way they apply it, the way they’re priced, the way they’re positioned, that’s why I can’t say, “Hey, go do this and it’s gonna make you rich.” What I will say- Barry :  Let me rephrase that. What have you seen that works well? Scott:    Here was one that worked well and what lends itself to how we had to track it to know it worked well. The lobster guy let’s me share his data and I know this one well because I’ve given this example before. He did a 52% off coupon and he thought he was gonna get a tonne of sales because it was gonna expire in a certain time frame. He ran it. He spent $5500 over a month, which a big spend for him, and during the timeframe, he made 3700 bucks revenue. He lost $1800 on the campaign which sounds like that wasn’t a good idea. But over time, those leads ended up spending almost $40,000 with him. He actually made 8 to 1. What he found then, for him, was an expiring coupon attracts people who maybe if they don’t bite on that, they’re the type of people that are willing to pull the trigger and buy some food from him. Then you can dig into the campaign and the 80/20 of which message to which market. It was specifically to two lookalikes they had from his Christmas customers 2014’s lookalike audience that 9 to 1. He made money 9 to 1, so he goes, “If I need to go shake the money tree, I show expiring coupons to this audience and it’s gonna attract leads that eventually buy. It was down to that one precise level, and it was “likes Dean & DeLuca Foods,” some upscale food seller here targeted. Then some of the other ones, the ROI was okay. He still doubled his money but [inaudible 00:14:59] still great but this fantastic ROI was really like this supersonic ROI. The more you dig in, the more he can really leverage it the next time. Barry : Did he do that? Did he go back to that lookalike audience a couple more times? Scott:   Oh, yeah. [inaudible 00:15:17] lookalike audience is cold and then a Facebook consultant came on from Facebook and said, “You should really update this lookalike audience to refresh it because it’s December 2014.” Barry :   Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Scott:  At that point, the guy probably had other interesting things to say but I was just like, “Okay. We can’t listen to this guy. This is the golden goose audience of all time. We made him $100,000 on one audience over time. We’re not touching that thing. I don’t know what you guys are doing but this is the greatest algorithm on earth, this one lookalike.” I would recommend that as well. Take your best customers. Throw them in and have a lookalike. Depending on your level of Facebook, maybe that’s Facebook Targeting 101. I don’t know but lookalikes crop up as a top audience a lot of the time for customers of ours. As long as the lookalike population is, we looked at his. he had a couple thousand. He probably had around 10,000 customers at the time. We took his top 1000 and threw them in as a lookalike and then we took his Christmas 2014, when he had the greatest month of his life, and threw that up as a separate lookalike and those two continually make money. They just make money all the time. Barry :  It’s interesting. You come across that stuff you wouldn’t necessarily, intuitively think is what’s gonna happen. Scott:   Or how straightforward it is. It’s not like super rocket science. Just take your best customers, Facebook and you find some of this. I could have some other real interesting Jedi stat tricks but that just works really well. That one. Just go do that would be my personal opinion. Barry :   Any other stuff you’ve seen work really well that you were maybe surprised about? Scott:  Let me think. What else? Oh. Yes. Personal emails with a discount that aren’t actually even related to the product. Email, my little speech on email is, I think open rates, it’s great if you can get an email open but you should start from, does the email sell, and work your way back. Then, does it get clicked on? Then worry about opens because you might get a lot of opens because you have witty subject lines and no one really takes any action that you want, or they might just be opening because they’re in their phone. Open rates, not an accurate metric anyway because they gotta be downloading the pixel, so I wouldn’t worry about open rates. A guy send an email about he did the marathon and then he says, “Oh, by the way, buy my stuff. Here’s a discount. Marathon. 54% off,” and I got it and I was like, “Who cares that you ran the marathon?” I was like, “Great but this emails gonna be a dud,” and it did. It had point, I’m just creating a course on this right now, it had .6% click rate. No one’s gonna say, “Look at my .6% click rate,” but he made three and a half times his normal average revenue on an email. Then he did another one which was even bigger, some other awful thing. Not the marathon but some other … oh, his birthday. “It’s my birthday. I want to offer you a gift.” I was like, “How cheesy is that?” It’s not copyrighted. This guy actually [inaudible 00:18:28] can really write. “Hey, it’s my birthday. I’m so grateful for my business so save money on my stuff,” instead of just saying, “Save money on my stuff,” right? He did nice times. His average email is a little over two grand an email. He does well on email. That’s two grand an email. That’s great. He did $18,000 on an email and it was the exact same crappy, not crap, but exact same strategy emails each time. “I have a deal.” It was the same thing but “It’s my birthday and I have a deal,” and it’s a picture of him when he was eight with his brother or whatever and the click rate was, yeah that’s what I was thinking and he’s a friend of mine and I was like, “Oh, Jesus.” That was a 1.5% click rate. 120,000 people got it but only 1100 clicked and he made 18 grand and it wasn’t because the price was super high. It was his normal price. $100 ticket. Just people, I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense to me. I would offer that up as personal stories. I tried it when I was doing the course. My wife and I just had our third baby. We said, “Save money on the Kickstarter Wicked Report. Put in code [ADELINE 00:19:41],” for her name. My email list was tiny at the time, a couple thousand people. Boom. I had like five or six sales on an email. Normally our sales process is people need to see a webinar. They want to see the product in action. Well, boom. I had a list and I don’t know who had seen it or not. I just emailed it out. You know what? It grabbed me out of six sales and we don’t have a lot of [inaudible 00:20:04] and out lifetime value’s really high so that was a great email. Barry :  I know what I’m doing tomorrow. Scott:  It’s shocking. It shocked me. Barry :  When I started talking, I was like, “Oh, I sent out an email about a marathon. I wonder if that was my email he was talking about.” Scott:  This guy’s a friend of mine and it wasn’t like, “You’re so annoying,” I just was like, “I don’t think this is a good idea, man. Who wants to know about your life?” I was wrong and that’s why I like data because everyone has opinions in the board room where you’re on your Skype call. Do this and don’t do that but data settles it. Customers settle everything. Not “See? I told you. I have way more clickthrough rates so I had a better idea.” No, you don’t. It might just have been some people clicking because you had an attractive member of the opposite sex or same sex, depending on your persuasion, it might have just been that and that’s why you got the clicks. That didn’t prove anything. If people turn into customers from what you do, then you know what? You get the bragging rights. That’s why I love it. I love data. It helps businesses grow. Then they know. They actually know what the heck’s going on in their business. It’s fun. Barry :   Or the pixels fired a dozen times for some reason on their email. Scott:     All the time. Barry :   Huge tracking anomaly. Scott:    Yep. Barry :  All right. Let’s look at the opposite side of that coin. What are some things that you thought was gonna work well on a campaign, or something that was gonna work well and ended up just tanking? Scott:  I’ve seen sweepstakes not work or contests. I’ve seen contests not work often in terms of customers. someone would get a tonne of leads who would get so excited behind them. You always see them bragging about how cheap their actually traffic was but never how many customers they got because they don’t get a lot. It doesn’t attract the people to buy for whatever reason. Not enough. A lot of the ones I’ve seen, I should preface it, I haven’t seen anyone have any luck with it. What else? Refer a friends. Hey we’re gonna go viral because everyone’s gonna refer everyone because they get points, yada yada. I have this theory about a couple of those type of things. You hear them and people get excited and think they’re gonna work because it’s newsworthy when they actually do work so it becomes news and then people talk about it. “Look at that thing that worked.” It’s like everyone’s starting a SaaS business now because Uber and Airbnb and like five other companies are worth a lot of money so now everyone says, “Oh, it’s so easy. I’ll start a SaaS and I’ll be rich.” Because it’s newsworthy that ten of them did out of the millions that have tried it, so I feel that with contests and with refer a friend, there are examples. “Look how I grew my email list to 100,000 in five months.” That doesn’t happen very often. It doesn’t. Barry :  Who cares how big your email list is if it doesn’t make you money, right? Scott:  Yeah. Exactly. Barry : That’s like say, “I’m gonna go become an actor because Brad Pitt makes 20 million dollars a movie.” Yeah, there’s two guys making that much money. Scott:   Yeah, so those are the ones that I would not say invest your money in gadgets. You’re really just focused on what’s your core message funnel and getting that to work and then the world’s your oyster. If you got a product market fit with a funnel that converts, you just obsess about that, then you can get in on all the gamification and cool, fun, different, unique ways of promoting your business. Just get your core, “I have something. You need it. Please buy it.” If that works, then you’re in business. Barry :  I think as entrepreneurs, the example I use is entrepreneurs orange juice, where you got a bag of oranges and you go to grab a fresh orange. You squeeze like 10% of the juice out of it and then you’re kind of bored and you grab another orange and you end up squeezing like 10% of the juice out of 20 oranges instead of just taking that one orange and squeezing 90% out of it before you move on. Optimise what’s working before you go for the next shiny thing. Scott:  We’ve seen people optimise a certain funnel and just take it to way further than I ever thought they could get. They make some success. Make 20 grand a month and I’m like, “Wow. They did a good job there.” Then months later, they stick with it and they’re six figures a month. I don’t see this happen on a daily basis but it’s consistent enough. You get something that’s working. Then you just pour gasoline because people can get traffic for you. If you can convert people, then they sky’s the limit. Just worry about that. Worry about what makes people become customers and then once you have that down, then you can always find people to buy your traffic, send you traffic, affiliate you traffic, something. Barry :  For those listeners out there who maybe aren’t doing much or any of this conversion tracking and sales attribution stuff, where’s a good place for them to get started? How do they take their first steps? Scott:   Whatever you’re gonna do, you need to find out if it works or not. If you aren’t going to be ready for a solution like Wicked Reports, let’s say you’re just starting out, at the minimum, read up on Google UTM tags. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module which just happens to be some weird name that the company that Google bought, branded it but it stuck. It’s UTMs. At a minimum, put UTMs on the things your doing to just see if anyone cared enough to click, so rather than doing stuff and then seeing, “Oh, look. I have 100 more hits today. I wonder where that came from,” you actually have some visibility in the canned Google reports. Based on your UTMs, you can use Google Analytics to at least see what are those people doing. It’s not easy to get the deep level of stuff, in terms of attribution, you’re not gonna get any of that, but you can at least see do people care enough to click. That’s the first start. At least you’re seeing there’s some interest here. The other thing then, when you’re prowling around, your Google Analytics at that point, just use the 80/20 principle of just say, “What’s the top two or three things out of what I’ve been doing that’s actually working?” Then you can test all your content that way. Just use different tags and if you’re posting it on Facebook, you could tag it if you have a following there, or if you’ve got an email list of some kind or whatever. Then you can see, okay. I’ve tried these ten things and here are two things that people actually seem to have at least responded to somewhat, and then if that excites you, whatever they responded to, at least you have a data lead into something you can exploit for benefit for everyone. Barry :  For those listeners out there who might not necessarily know what we’re talking about with UTMs and what they can track, you’ve all seen them. They’re those big, long URLs that have a whole bunch of stuff in there. Can you explain, perhaps, what are the things that a URL UTM parameters can actually track? Scott:  Yeah, sure. What it is, you’re putting tracking on anything outside of your site or web property, I should say, your click funnels, or your wordpress site or your sales page or what have you. You’re putting stuff, oh. I guess that wouldn’t be for this audience. Barry :  That’s all right. Scott:   Edit that one out. Sorry. You’re trying to figure out … with … lemme start this over again. Let me think about this. The purpose of UTMs is to say, where are people coming from? If nothing else, so what you can do, whenever you’re posting a link about your site or your landing page or whatever you are sending them to that’s yours, you can add string of text on the end of the link which Google Analytics will grab and then keep track of for you. Then that will give you a basis of figuring out why did this person come to my site? There’s five variables they use. One being source, which would be at a very high level, meaning I posted this on Facebook or I posted this on Twitter or this was from my email system. That would be how you would use the source parameter. What it is, is you have a parameter called source and the value if whatever you type in. What you should type in is whatever is going to make sense for you on the report. That’s really the only driving factor of it. I find that putting at a high level, Google or Facebook or email is best, because you want to use source to just see at a high level, what channel is bringing me traffic? That’s not enough to scale but it at least gives you a clue. Medium’s the second. That’s the medium that delivered the link. They clicked on a link from somewhere. What was it that delivered the link to them? On Facebook, if you’re doing a post, a medium is a post. Email, you’re sending an email, so the medium is email, and so on and so forth. Twitter would be Tweet. Pinterest’d be Pin. It’s a delivery mechanism. You may find my posts are getting more than my blogs or vice versa. Then campaign. Campaign, if you’re sending it from your email, you want it to match the name of your campaign in your active campaign. Then it’s very brainless. You say, “I did this campaign, an active campaign, and here it is in Google Analytics,” so you want it to be clear so you know where to go in your email system. If you’re doing a Facebook advertisement, you want it to match Facebook campaign name. If you’re doing, just lead gen on social randomly, just call it social lead gen because that’s all you’re really doing. Then you don’t have to get caught up in naming each campaign differently because then if you don’t have a lot of clicks, you’re gonna have a hodge podge of small click counts. Whenever you’re doing it on social, just call it social lead gen. The other two are not talked about a lot, particularly term. I call term neglected child [inaudible 00:30:16]. Barry :  The neglected urchin. Scott:  Yeah, yeah. Neglected urchin. Content should be whatever it is that’s gonna remind you of whatever you were posting about. If you’re linking to your new blog post about UTMs, if I was, I’d call my content blog about UTMs, because then I know that was what got them over there. Or if it’s an ad, you want to know what the ad it is. When I’m emailing out, “Go listen to Barry’s podcast,” on my list, it’s gonna be Barry’s podcast, then I know, Barry will know they came from the podcast about Wicked Reports. That’s what I would do for that. By the way, that medium would be podcasts, is what I would use. Then for term, which no one really used it a lot, and Wicked Reports was a heavy driver back in the old days. Now we do a lot of auto-tracking for people. They don’t need to even think about this stuff but term is audience. When you’re looking at a big pile of data, you want to know was this my Twitter fans? Was this a particular search term in Google if you’re doing AdWords? Was it a particular Facebook audience or was it my email list? It’s really slick to be able to compare those. Term was just meant to just be for search term but then Google started hiding search term. If you’re doing AdWords, they put the keyword in there that was searched so you can grab that if you use Wicked Reports. I don’t know if you’d be able to do it now if you’re just starting out. With term for email, you put existing list or existing email list, so when you’re prowling around you know that was my email list that did that. For Twitter, you’d say Twitter fans or Twitter followers and same with Facebook, Facebook fans, Instagram followers. We’re able to track someone’s Instagram. It makes them 30k a month. It’s unbelievable, just from that link in their profile. They have a pretty large following. They had no idea. They’re like, “You’re the first person to tell us,” and it was just a UTM string that made sense that they could understand, was really the key. It’s simple but it’s easy to get lost in the complexity. Really whenever you’re setting those values, again, I’m gonna repeat myself here, just make sure they make sense to you, whatever you pick, because you’re the one that has to be able to make a decision off what you’re looking at. Barry :  You can always put those in a spreadsheet somewhere so you can go back to them later. Scott:    We get people off Spreadsheet Builder just so if they wanna freelance on their own, they can at least have some insights. That’s the easiest way. Then it’s clean so it’s a good idea. Barry :  All right, Scott, I know you got some cool things coming down the pike in Wicked Reports. You want to talk a little bit about that? Scott:  Yeah, we got some real cool stuff coming. We haven’t tracked organic that well. We have made people build links for organic and now we’re gonna be actually tracking organic coming in January so if you have a big, heavy site that’s referring you traffic, you’ll know, or if all your traffic’s from a search, you’ll know. We have organic tracking coming. We’ve got a couple of new slick integrations. Our Shopify app will be in the App Store in a couple weeks. It’s already working but it’ll be officially blessed by Shopify here. We have row level data quality alerts, which is a mouthful to says. Barry : It sounds impressive. I have no idea what you’re talking about but I was really impressed there for a second. Scott:  Oh, okay. Let’s see. I was thinking, “Oh, man. I need to make this easy.” What it means, is when you’re looking at data, if for some reason, it needs your attention, either because you really crushed it or because it’s doing quite badly or because it’s doing so bad that it’s probably we detect that you didn’t out tracking on a link or something. You have a little visual indicator of different colour or simple. Then when you click on it, the page slides out and actually instructs you on how to fix it. Small businesses, medium-sized business, you got so much going on, you might forget to track something or you might not notice, I’m losing a tonne of money here, and so we’re doing more aggressive alerting and triaging the data for you to give you the actions you need to take on it. That one’s been a long time coming and it’s finally ready. That combined with our questions, where you can just pick a question and we give you the answer, and even further, if you’re not happy with your performance, we have something called the Wicked Academy, which actually is up already. We’ll lead you to the specific lesson that can help for that particular situation. It could be, “Hey, your email stinks.” One of them’s personal email stories and one of them’s countdown timers. Here’s some stats. Here’s how to measure it. Here’s how to do it. Here’s where to get a timer because those are easy things to do but people just get caught up working and you forget. Oh Jeez, maybe I should just do a timer. Just make your money. Throw a timer on there. People always buy more. That’s all coming up the chute. There’s more too. We love innovating the products. What we do is we talk to the customers a lot. We talk to about 20, 30 customers a month to say, “What are you using? What are you not using? What do you need? What would make your life easier?” That’s how we have all the product now is based on what the customers need to grow their business. It’s what we do. It’s got us this far. Barry :  Well, thank you so much Scott. We might wrap it up there. If people want to find out more, it’s just wickedreports.com. There’s nice little demos, nice little walkthrough there that demonstrate how the product works and what it can track. I want to thank you for your time. Thanks for coming on and if somebody wants to reach out to you for a little bit more information, how’s the best way to do that? Scott:  There’s a couple ways. Off the web site’s probably best because we have live chat on there. It’s staffed by my brother. He’s one of the people who will then Gchat me if need be and he knows everything about the product himself so I would say live chat off the site’s always best. The other thing is we have on demand webinars there so you can learn a lot about the product immediately if you’re more interested. Barry :  Awesome. Well, thanks so much Scott and I look forward to seeing you online. Scott:  Awesome. Take it easy Barry. Thanks for having me. The post TAM 073: Sales Tracking With Wicked Reports – Scott Desgrosseilliers appeared first on The Active Marketer.

In episode 72, I talk to Jake Hower from FuzedApp.com about some advanced ActiveCampaign integrations. A question that comes up a lot is “how do I tag or segment people based on how much of a video they have watched?”. Jakes explains how to do that and how to do it the right way. Check out these advanced #ActiveCampaign ninja moves #podcast #marketingautomationClick To Tweet Jake also shares some other ninja tricks like how to do facebook ad retargeting based on ActiveCampaign tags. So listen in, for some of advanced ActiveCampaign ninja tricks. We Chat About: Tagging based on how much of a video someone has watched Facebook website custom audiences Facebook retargeting Automatically syncing FaceBook lookalike audience   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations, discounts and special offers and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy Fuzed Wistia Also check out our huge list of online marketing tools Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 072: Advanced ActiveCampaign Integrations – with Jake Hower appeared first on The Active Marketer.

Episode 71 is a Tactical 20 episode all about the automation split testing feature recently released by ActiveCampaign Check out this tactical 20 episode on automation split testing #podcast #marketingautomationClick To Tweet For a full walkthrough on how to use automaton split testing check out this post Four Things To Run Split Tests On: Your email copy The length of your sequence The wait intervals between emails Your offer   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy Automation Split Testing Walkthrough TAM 059: Using Goals In ActiveCampaign  Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 071: T20 – Automation Split Testing appeared first on The Active Marketer.

This is the last episode in our ‘payment series’ and this time I am talking about ThriveCart, what it can do, why I like it and why I switched. ThriveCart hasn’t been officially released to the public yet.However, I have been using it for quite some time and I really like it. I go over some of its major features and how you can get lifetime access to ThriveCart at a very special price. Join my Automation Nation Facebook group to find out more about the special VIP lifetime Deal We Chat About ThriveCart Features Such As: Payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal and ApplePay Who is ThriveCart for and who it isn’t for Why I like it One off products vs. subscriptions vs. a hybrid Customer management Customer lifetime value Integrations with membership platforms and autoresponders Upsells and downsells Order form bumps Multi-currency Affilaite sales Dunning   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the best stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy ThriveCart Automation Nation Facebook group Stripe PayPal Other Payment Series Episodes Episode 63 – How To Choose A Payment Platform Guide To Online Payment Processors Episode 64 – ActiveRelay Episode 65 – SamCart Episode 66 – Simple Payment Platforms Episode 67 – Listener Questions Episode 68 – Shopify With Kurt Elster Episode 69 – WooCommerce With Jason Kadlec Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 070: ThriveCart Overview appeared first on The Active Marketer.

WooCommerce is a strong contender for the top spot when looking for options to create a traditional online store. It is a WordPress plugin that can handle all requirements for an eCommerce site . In episode 69 I talk with Jason Kadlec from ActiveWoo, who shares his insights and experiences with WooCommerce and specifically how it integrates with ActiveCampaign. WooCommerce and ActiveCampaign an powerful ecommerce combo  #podcast #woocommerceClick To Tweet This episode is a continuation of payments series which was started in Episode 63. The payments series is designed to help you nail down your requirements and pick the best online payment platform for you business. So if you are in the market for a new shopping cart, make sure you listen into to all of them before you make your choice. Special Discount On Active Woo For Podcast Listeners – $15 Off What we chat about WooCommerce background Other product types where WooCommerce can be used Flexibility of WooCommerce carts especially with taxes and shipping Comparison with other shopping platforms What is ActiveWoo and the ActiveWoo extension Interfacing with ActiveCampaign What is a “customer value field”? How “refunds” are handled Starting with WooCommerce Must have extensions for the new WooCommerce If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy WooCommerce ActiveWoo Gravity Forms CrazyEffective.com SUPsports.com Stripe PayPal Subscriptio Other Payment Series Episodes Episode 63 – How To Choose A Payment Platform Guide To Online Payment Processors Episode 64 – ActiveRelay Episode 65 – SamCart Episode 66 – Simple Payment Platforms Episode 67 – Listener Questions Episode 68 – Shopify With Kurt Elster Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 069: WooCommerce with Jason Kadlec appeared first on The Active Marketer.

Episode 68 touches on one of the more traditional cart platforms. Shopify is not only for kickstarter e-commerce sites but can tackle big enterprise brands as well. Listen to Kurt Elster talk about Shopify, who it is right for, and how it can help you and your online business. Find out is Shopify is right for you.  #podcast #shopifyClick To Tweet This episode is a continuation of our series on payment solutions started with Episode 63. This episode deals with a total hosted e-commerce solution. We Chat About: Shopify and its growing community Brief description of Shopify What you can do with this e-commerce solution Features of this platform Commonly used apps that work with this platform Content management and marketing features Profile of a Shopify User List building using Shopify Advantages of this platform Starting with Shopify If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy Shopify EtherCycle Ecommerce Bootcamp use coupon code “barry”  to save 40% Kurt Elster The Unofficial Shopify Podcast ThriveCart Other Payment Series Episodes Episode 63 – How To Choose A Payment Platform Guide To Onlilne Payment Procesors Episode 64 – ActiveRelay Episode 65 – SamCart Episode 66 – Simple Payment Platforms Episode 67 – Listener Questions Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 068: Shopify With Kurt Elster appeared first on The Active Marketer.

In episode 67, we continue the payment series by answering a few listener questions about online payment platforms Listener questions on how to take online payments #podcast #paymentsClick To Tweet This is one podcast in a series of podcasts and posts designed to help you navigate the often times confusing world off online payments and what you need to do to get up and running. Check the links below for other episodes in the payments series. Special Deal On Thrive Cart Other Posts In The Payment Series: Guide To Online Payment Processors TAM063: How To Choose A Payment Platform TAM 064: ActiveRelay TAM 065: SamCart TAM 066: Simple Payment Platforms If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here.   Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy PayPal Stripe ActiveRelay Thrive Cart SamCart Easy Digital Downloads Stunning.co Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 067: T20 Listener Payment Questions appeared first on The Active Marketer.

If your needs are simple and you don’t need all the extras in the high end cart platforms, or you just want to validate a concept quickly, try some of these simple online payment options sometimes simple is all you need #podcast #onlinepaymentsClick To Tweet More explanation We Chat About: PayPal buttons Stripe as a gateway Simple optins to be up and running in a few minutes   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy PayPal Stripe MoonClerk SendOwl Easy Digital Downloads TAM 63 – How To Choose A Payment Platform Guide To Online Payment Processors Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 066: Simple Payment Platforms appeared first on The Active Marketer.

Episode 65 continues the payment series that was started in Episode 63. The series covers payment processes, shopping carts, order forms, everything you need to take money online and manage those customers once they buy from you. This week’s guest is Scott Moran of SamCart. On average, one click upsells increase sales by 68.3%. Listen in to this week’s #podcast #paymentsClick To Tweet SamCart is a feature rich shopping cart platform with many advanced features to increase average sale value, such as an order form ‘bump’, one click upsells and product funnels. It is really designed with optimisation of the sales process in mind. On average, one click upsells increase sales by 68.3% Where SamCart also excels, and many of the other cart platforms fall flat, is in their customer management and reporting. All your sales metrics are in one place and easy access to important customer information isn’t just a bolt on afterthought like so many others. Watch this video that  highlights the 16 elements you can add to your checkout pages to 4x your sales We Chat About: How SamCart got started What is a “One-Click Upsell”? What is an “Order Bump”? Guidelines for order forms to make it better and convert more sales SamCart integrations with both Paypal and credit cards Post sale customer management What is “Subscription Saver”? Who is SamCart right for? What is in the pipeline for SamCart development   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy Guide to online payment processors TAM 063 – How To Choose A Payment Platform Automation Nation Facebook Group SamCart GET A 90 DAY FREE PLAN PayPal Infusionsoft (I won’t even bother posting the link, seriously, why?) Zapier Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 065: SamCart With Scott Moran appeared first on The Active Marketer.

In episode 64, we continue our ‘payments series’. This week I talk to Dan DeWitte, the creator of ActiveRelay.  Why I wanted to highlight ActiveRelay first, was that it is unique in the payments space in that is is designed to work with ActiveCampaign from the ground up. New payment platform specifically designed for @ActiveCampaign. http://autom8.im./arClick To Tweet Most of the other payment platforms that integrate with ActiveCampaign do it as an afterthought. Meaning that they have their payment platform in place and then try to bolt on some ActiveCampaign integration. Set yourself up with a free ActiveRelay trial account and check it out   ActiveRelay started with ActiveCampaign in mind and currently is only focused on integrating with ActiveCampaign. Consequently the integration is super tight allowing you to do things at a very granular level.  Have a look at the product integration screen below. ActiveCampaign integration doesn’t get any better than that. So if  you are a Stripe user and ActiveCampaign integration is high on your list of requirements, check out ActiveRelay.   Bullet Points We Chat About: Why create the product in the first place Where it fits in the marketplace Some of the cool features Who it is right for How to get started   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here.   Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy Guide to online payment processors TAM 063 – How To Choose A Payment Platform Stripe PayPal ActiveRelay Bean Ninjas  SamCart Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 064: ActiveRelay with Dan DeWitte appeared first on The Active Marketer.

In episode 63, we are beginning a “payments series” highlighting a number of payment platforms that integrate well with ActiveCampaign. There is no “best” payment platform, only the most appropriate for your needs. So you have to have a clear picture of what exactly you need before you try to choose a solution to your payment needs. Don’t get it wrong. How to choose a payment platform. #podcast #payments #shoppingcartsClick To Tweet So, before you choose any payment platform or shopping cart, make sure you create a list of requirements. Trying to find a cart without doing your requirements first is a recipe for disaster. You’ll end up not getting what you want and you may have to change carts, wasting time, energy and money. So listen in and learn how to come up with an objective set of requirements before you go looking for a new payments platform. A big element to consider when evaluating any payments solution is how well it integrates with the other systems you use. You can find out more about ActiveCampaign integrations in Episode 25 of the podcast Bullet Points We Chat About: Which payment gateways do you need? One off payments or recurring? Traditional ‘add to cart’ functionality? Do you need upsells and cross-sells? What does it integrate with? How well does it integrate? Customer management Sales metrics Do you need an affiliate program? What kind of volume you are going to do?   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here. Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy Guide to online payment processors http://autom8.im/mSamCart ActiveRelay PayPal Stripe Zapier Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 063: How To Choose A Payment Platform appeared first on The Active Marketer.

In episode 62 of the podcast, we check back in with Cate Richards to see how she is getting along with setting up here sales funnels Marketing automation case study part 3 #podcast #marketingautomationClick To Tweet   If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff! Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here.   Links Mentioned In The Show ActiveCampaign The Active Marketer Academy Case Study – Part 1 Case Study – Part 2 Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes On Stitcher Radio Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player. The post TAM 062: Cate Richards – Case Study Part 3 appeared first on The Active Marketer.