Book I’m reading: Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson
This book is a great read if you’re trying to increase your traffic to your website – which is everyone who has an online business
In the book my main takeaway has been the dream 100
Basically what it means is when you think about your customer – and get to know them
You think to yourself ‘who are they following online?’
‘Where are they already congregating online?’
‘What blogs do they read, who’s podcasts do they listen to?’
You should start to come up with a big list of answers to these questions.
This is your dream 100
List out 100 people, podcasts, blogs, brands or websites that people are following
But not just any people, your dream customers
Why is this useful?
Firstly, you begin to see that your people are not spread all over the internet, they are already congregating in these places
Second, you can then begin to try and contact the people who own these blogs, podcasts etc and try to access them and their followers
Something you can build up a relationship with them and if they love your product they may even endorse you to their fans
Otherwise, if they are big enough you can actually run ads that target only people who follow that person who has a lot of your dream customers as followers
It got me thinking of our dream 100 for BusterBox.
Big dog podcasts, big dog trainers or celebrity vets, YouTube influencers etc
In the new year we’re planning to begin reaching out to them and offering free boxes and seeing if there is any way of working together
I’ll let you know how it goes
DISCLAIMER – This is not a strategy you should be following if:
You are just starting out and have less than 2-3000 subscribers
You have no team and plan to do all the work yourself
You are not getting good/any results from your current marketing efforts
Why?
The fastest way you can start getting results is to optimise your site to convert, set up email marketing systems and drive traffic via ads (I have a course to show you how to do this)
Influencer and partnership strategies are the long game and take 1-3 years to start to reliably get results. Even then, they are not as reliable as building a scalable advertising system.
Since we:
Already have our marketing system built and optimised
Are seeking ways to grow outside of Pay per click ads having grown to 10K subs from it
Will be delegating all of this work to our staff (we can afford staff because we have used ads to build our business up)
This is something we’re exploring – and have no idea whether it will work.
Nevertheless I recommend the book, go check it out!
Join my Newsletter
I’m starting to learn one thing: Subscription is very important, but to make real money in the e-commerce industry you need to effectively sell subscriptions AND one-time products
Not on the same website – sell one time products on your backend
Make sure you’re selling other things to your customers that join your subscription (also covered in my course)
It’s hard enough to get a customer signed up – having found your ideal customer don’t be afraid to upsell them or get them to add products they loved to their next box
We do this really effectively at Christmas because we introduce gift baskets, dog beds and other high ticket items for our customers and email list to buy
The funniest part about it is: Most of the sales don’t come from the leads email list
Most of the sales come from our customers – even though they already get BusterBox they still want a gift basket with more toys and a new dog bed
When you have found the right customer, they will want to spend more with you!
This is a strategy we intend to keep exploring next year as we aim to make as much as we possibly can from each customer we find.
Why?
Advertising is getting tougher and more expensive
The economy is not looking good
It’s going to be harder to find new customers
Ensure you are making the most money possible off of the customers you have.
If you have an online store then direct some of your customers or email list to it. If you don’t simply write them an email offering them something cool and tell them to reply yes if they want it.
If you have their details in your system you can charge them and add it to their next box without any hassle from the customer’s side. (We did this with our gift baskets and sold over 200 of them this year)