Elle McCann - Ignite Your Creativity and Refine Your Business with Curious Themes

it's really shocking to me how many times i will go to review a store and there are broken links of either images not loading the collection isn't linking right the add to cart button doesn't work and i think it's just crazy to me that almost i would say at least 95 of the time i can find at least one broken link on a site you're listening to ecomonics a debutify podcast your resource for one-of-a-kind insights into the world of e-commerce and business in the modern age this is joseph i'll be presenting a wealth of industry knowledge from interviews with successful business people and our own state-of-the-art research your time is valuable so let's go [Music] l mccann of curious themes joins us today to shed some backstory on the development of the web through the perspective of a web developer we discussed the importance of quality design anesthetics something to beautify as quick to help you out with by the way we also take some time to discuss the importance of wellness in this episode as l had previous experienced burnout something no one here is immune to as someone who's also experienced it we cannot emphasize the importance of catching it early so have a good listen l mccann it's good to have you here thank you so much for being on ecommotics how are you today good thanks so much for having me i i feel like i might have switched energy just slightly between our pre-chat and our and our recording uh yeah that was just things being kicked off no i love it excellent so first question i've got for you it's the most important question it's the kickoff question our listeners are meeting you for the first time so tell them who are you and what do you do yeah so i am a web developer and i've been listed as a shopify expert for over eight years now i specifically do a lot of educational content about shopify and e-commerce in general i i love e-commerce overall but shopify is definitely my my go-to platform so i do a lot of different training and just overall content around the shopify platform because uh debutify is a shopify template we don't really like put much energy into looking at the other templates but have you dabbled in the other platforms at all have you had any major takeaways or any experiences like what makes them so different yeah so i actually first got started my degree is in web development and it's really kind of random but i started my very first business was a wedding invitation business because i love hand illustrations and at that point this was like 11 years ago i was really looking into launching an ecommerce store and so i tried woocommerce and big commerce at that point and both of them were like subpar and then i found shopify and was like oh my gosh what is this and keep in mind this is 11 years ago that shopify blew my mind and it's gotten so much better since then so they kind of took me from the very beginning but i've still done a little bit of stuff in woocommerce and big commerce and i still think hands down shopify is the way to go fair enough i mean we we certainly feel the same way about that although i mean you know you never know in the future maybe we'll we'll make templates for the other ones but as far as we know it hasn't been brought up yet so let's make sure that there's a full scope of your work just our listeners know everything you get up to as far as the e-commerce space goes you provide one-on-one service to other shopify sellers which has netted you the shopify experts title and partnership your youtube page which you mentioned online courses store reviews uh i also found like a store creation guide did i miss anything there no that's that's a lot of it um i don't really do a ton of one-on-one work anymore just because i've really kind of wanted to reach as many entrepreneurs as possible and there's definitely a time limit with one-on-one work so i've kind of pivoted a little bit more in the past year or two years to more education through youtube and online courses but no you pretty much covered i have noticed that i don't think there's been really any exceptions so far but everybody that i've asked to do the one-on-ones they find that it's hard to scale because it's so much effort put into one person and yeah you know you are making a significant difference to them but versus that same amount of energy put into a course or a series that you can help hundreds if not thousands of people there is a pretty significant difference in returns one guest she uh she tried to maximize value by going on trips so that at least you can go to their physical location and see something new having to experience oh cool so yeah people try their best to get the most value out of it but i definitely understand like there are there are limitations to it yeah for sure so your your brand uh curious themes yes where did that idea come from so i actually originally started creating wordpress themes and so i sold different wordpress themes that i created this was a good 10 11 years ago and that was where the name came about i've actually just celebrated my 10-year business anniversary in may oh congrats yeah i'm excited about that so the name came about from wordpress but i kind of just stuck with it i had planned at some point to do a shopify specific theme um but i kind of again have kind of gone more into education and i haven't created that yet so maybe some point down the road um we'll see but yeah the names just kind of stuck all along so what we're gonna do is i have a couple of um i will say strategic or process questions uh just so that we can get a sense of you know how you work and what insights that you provide to people in a general sense and then what i want to talk about as well is uh is more of that history uh because one parallel that you and i have is that we've both been in our respective fields for about 10 years i got into podcasting and media uh 10 years ago there's no university course for it uh but you know i i would i would check out my credentials to uh other people in the industry at this point at the very least so one of the things that you do is or rather it was part of your package is the store review now i understand that would probably fall into like the one-on-one work so i don't think you do that too much at this point but i think it would be helpful just to hear some of what you would do when you do the store reviews what are some of the things that stick out to what are some of the things that you notice that people typically need to work on and adjust when they bring their stores to your attention yeah so i actually do a lot still of store reviews and consultations because i find that that's kind of the thing that i get questions about the most is okay i've launched my store but i'm not really getting the sales that i expected like what's wrong where's the disconnect is it with the paid advertising is it with the traffic is it with the store itself and sometimes it's a mix of all of that but it's really shocking to me how many times i will go to review a store and there are broken links of either images not loading the collection isn't linking right the add to cart button doesn't work and i think it's just crazy to me that almost i would say at least 95 of the time i can find at least one broken link on a site so i would say my biggest takeaway for people is to before you hit launch and push that out there or connect your domain just go through your site and click on every single thing like make sure your images are in the right places and that they load it's going to take some time but it's worth it and you're not going to frustrate people because if you're going to spend all this time and effort and even money sending people to your site you want to make sure they have the best experience and that they're not just going to go well that didn't work like got a 404 page and then leave it sounds like a lot of people aren't putting themselves in the position of the customer at any point but they only put themselves in the decision of the seller i mean me i'm i'm a perpetual customer there was a window of about three months where i was pretty addicted to ordering things on amazon and and every day things would be arriving so you know i'm used to expecting to have a good shopping experience and that is crucial for people who are setting up their own stores and who are not only going to go against other davids but they're going to go up against all the goliaths as well so a lot of small details like that and one of the things that i was wondering too is if you've ever encountered people who maybe don't put value into the aesthetic side of it maybe they don't put value into the image quality or having a cohesive color scheme so i guess the two-parter would be a has us come up and b is how do we convince people the importance of the visuals and the aesthetics yeah absolutely i think that's kind of the catch-22 with shopify is that you can get your site launched up like launched in like an hour two hours like you can get really going really quickly however it's gonna look very different a site that takes two hours to do versus two weeks and just thinking through and making those design tweaks bringing the branding throughout not just in the color scheme and photos but also in the wording that you use where it doesn't just seem like it's a copy paste from a drop shipper and it's actually like worded to where you're speaking to your ideal customer directly i think that is kind of a huge disconnect where people just kind of get a little bit too in the weeds of okay i just got to get this launched here's the specs for the products and that's that instead of really thinking about the customer and you know if i'm coming to this what problem am i trying to solve what thing am i trying to fulfill like what am i looking for and it's not going to be a bullet point spec sheet of your product information i want to you know have some emotion and some feelings that i get from seeing your site and from you know the hope and excitement of purchasing as well and they also want to hear from the person as well from the about page and they want to know like what cause they're supporting or what's the mission behind the store as well yeah absolutely i think that's one of the pages that people are the most shocked about whenever they go into google analytics and they see that oh there's a lot of traffic coming to the about page but people don't spend a lot of time on it i think that's a huge opportunity where you can tell you know more about yourself your company why you started the business even highlight you know your favorite products maybe your process throughout the way and really just highlight it more to where people get more kind of into the process and the brand and it's not just another thing that they're purchasing because yeah it's great to have someone buy your product one time but if you could get them to buy it multiple times that's way better so the more that they can get into the brand itself the better you're gonna do overall in business all right so one more uh practical question and then we're gonna get into some of the history of your of your development um part pardon the expression since web development um so what do you consider to be the back end essentials in terms of what apps or what integrations that shopify stores should have uh to you know stay up to date i would say the biggest one especially for this time of year like with any kind of holiday promotions or anything like that would be upsells i think it's a huge opportunity to upsell people on your site again you've already spent the time and effort and money of getting someone to your site so if you can increase that average order value then that's going to translate into hopefully more sales for you so i think upsells is definitely an app that i always recommend first and then i also love doing like rewards program apps where you can really kind of build that loyalty and hopefully get them to come back and do repeat purchases as well okay that is a is a unique one i will say i have asked other people this question and as well i've done my own research that's the first time at least as far as i can recall where somebody had mentioned upsells so let's take a note of that one all right so this is this is the fun part for me because one of the things that i saw in your research is that you as an entrepreneur you've always been an entrepreneur and it says as early as like your earliest business was a lemonade stand i tried to do that too by the way i tried to do like um a yard sale that i would just like perpetually put all my stuff out and just try to sell one guy came by he gave everybody a dollar he didn't take anything but he just wanted to give us a dollar i felt so good about that so here's where i want to know if there is a a consistent line from maybe not necessarily the lemonade stand but from all of your business ventures really up until now have you noticed any consistent themes about your acumen or just the way you you approach business yeah i've always had very people-focused businesses but i am very processed i'm a very very analytical person and it's funny because with the lemonade stand i actually look back at it now and i laugh because i didn't know what a lot of the business terms were obviously at that point but i was doing a lot of what i do now in the lemonade stand so i would totally like squeeze it was fresh squeezed lemonade so i would squeeze the lemons right in front of people so they could see that it was fresh squeezed i was telling them the process showing them everything and then i would also do upsells and i would sell them i would have fresh baked cookies why not add a cookie to it and i had no idea i was just trying to make money and i was crushing at the lemonade stand like i would have my sister and friends come over because they wanted extra money and so it's funny because seeing those trends kind of apply from a young age on into business i think as soon as you think about who the person that you're serving is and what they might want whether it's you know lemonade in a cookie or you know this upsell of whatever your product is i think really just kind of keeping the customer in mind and creating a business that's people focused whether it's a social mission or you're helping the individual customer i think has been kind of the the carrying force throughout all the different businesses and what happened after the lemonade stand so what were some of the other things that you attempted probably up until you got into web design yeah so i i did the lemonade stand for i live in tennessee so we have pretty warm weather throughout the year so i did that for i would say like elementary through middle school i did that for a while and then i i've always been kind of an artist at heart so i used to do portraits in high school i would draw people's portraits then i went into wedding invitations and now my current business which is uh web design so when you got into web design this was see i was 20 years old so yeah it was about 10 10 years ago i'm 30 now and i'm trying to put myself back into like what was the the overall feel of the marketplace as to whether or not people saw that this was something that they can turn into a career because i know there was like a dot-com burst uh in the 2000s everybody was putting money into these and with the exception of like amazon and i think ibm most companies they didn't get past that dot com burst so suffice it to say there was a lot of uncertainty in the market but you jumped into it so at that time what did you well what did you think was going to happen did you see that this could turn into a career did it start as like a side hustle uh you also went to school for it so that's important to note too that they were teaching it in class but uh yeah i'd like to hear more about the history of what was going on at that time yeah so i graduated college in 2010 and the huge recession hit in 2008 2009 so i was coming out to a really not so good job market especially for more creative fields it was kind of rough so i knew from the beginning that i wanted to always have my own business and so i kind of use that as a kind of jumping off point at going to businesses specifically that were local like restaurants things like that and pitching to them of this is how you can bring in more business and it definitely was a harder sell because at that point even in 2010 people didn't understand the importance of even just having a basic website with your menu and your contact information on there so it was a little bit harder of a cell but i think especially as the years have gone on with e-commerce and the platforms have gotten as robust as they are now i think it's really set it up to you know it's it was kind of shocking with everything happening in 2020 of how many businesses still weren't online in 2020 and we're just like oh i guess i finally need to create an e-commerce store now at this point so it's kind of interesting that it's taken so long for some people to realize it but i think overall the the times are changing and people realize that now but yeah it's been an interesting journey especially graduating into a not so pleasant workforce and seeing how that's come about just in almost 10 years later having another recession yeah yeah uh well i mean i guess i'm i'm lucky in the position that i'm in uh because i can i was working remotely before uh another one of these hit but i do feel for a lot of these businesses especially in the restaurant industry where they have to they have to adapt into food service deliveries like a yeah food delivery services excuse me such as uber and and diner dash and all of those just so that they can continue to have a connection to their customers and here's the other observation that i picked up i'm listening to what you're saying so first we we talked to say we'll just use the restaurant industry as our frame of reference and you're telling them that this is going to give them an important maybe an advantage this is something really important for them to do but other restaurants weren't doing it so it was for them it was an opportunity for them to stand out and to have a little bit of a better line of communication to their potential customers and then over the course of 10 years it had become standard to the point now where if somebody isn't doing it they're actually missing out is it's not an option anymore it's like now it's basically a requirement so the bar has been raised for everybody over that time yeah absolutely i think that same thing is happening now where everyone definitely thought it was going to take 14 days before we can start going to restaurants again and i was off by a lot and so now we're we're gonna have to we're gonna be dealing with that again and so now that adaptation is coming back right now well listen if you're not on these delivery services you're probably going to have to shutter yeah well i think if anything i mean 2020 has been a hard year for a lot of different people especially entrepreneurs as well but i think it's really taught people whether you have your own business or not about how you just have to be flexible and kind of pivot and almost even think about different income streams and i think that's what's so great about e-commerce is because yeah you could have a nine-to-five job and then you could also have an e-commerce store as a side hustle so that you're kind of patting yourself a little bit i know whenever kobud was first hitting here in the states i was watching wall-to-wall news coverage which is not healthy don't recommend it but i was just like oh my gosh like everything's gonna go under like no one's gonna have money to purchase from you know e-commerce stores and businesses are gonna go out and i just instantly kind of went to a worst-case scenario and after a couple days it was like okay how do we pivot like how do we you know set things up in business you know i definitely pivoted a lot more to youtube at that point and was getting a lot more uh consistent with my youtube content because i saw the need of okay there's a lot more people that are at home now going what do i do and that's where you know they have time like let me show you how to do this with you know video so i think if anything 2020 is going to teach the lesson of you really just have to be flexible and and think about different ways that you can make money i agree with that and then i think to each individual person can review themselves as an asset because even if somebody might not be able to continue writing their restaurant if they're adept at food they can always do their online course they can always do their own youtube videos so yeah it's it's been an opportunity and other people have talked about this too is that yes there's negatives but there are positives too so it is an opportunity for people to turn to the internet as the all-encompassing resource that it truly is and just figure out what can i do and how can the internet help me with that yeah absolutely yeah so one of the things that we talk about a lot in the show is mindset it's it's it's critical i mean everybody that we talk about in terms everybody we talk to about mindset agrees that if you don't have the right state of mind you're not going to get very far and what's worse is that if you do succeed without the right mindset it'll just crumble and when i was going through your youtube videos you put out a video about burnout that you were experiencing and i don't get to ask too many people about burnout because i'm not just gonna like randomly put that question in my set and be like so did you burn out like that either you admit it or i'm just gonna assume that uh you know you you didn't but you put yourself out there and it's been about four months since that video so let's do our listeners a favor and just talk about that experience like why you hit burnout uh what maybe if there was warning signs and then how you've gotten over it and the position that you're in today yeah absolutely and i'm so glad that you asked us because i think mental health especially for entrepreneurs um is so important to talk about so this was actually my second burnout which is i guess good in a 10-year career but overall you know entrepreneurship has some really high highs and some really low lows and you do have to kind of ride the roller coaster a little bit but there are warning signs like you mentioned that you can kind of prepare for so this burnout was specifically related to i re-recorded both of my online courses and for whatever reason i thought i was superwoman and could record and edit all these courses by myself it was a 120 videos each ranging from 5 minutes to 15 minutes and i did it in about a six week time on top of recording my two videos a week for youtube so it was just i don't know why i decided to do it like that looking back now i would have definitely spaced it out a lot more but i just put way too much on myself and um that was definitely the cause for the burnout but i'm glad that so whenever i had my first burnout was let's see like six years back and i was working 90 hour weeks i was doing a lot more one-on-one work then and i just kept going i worked 80 to 90 hour weeks for about two years straight so i just way just way burned out and thankfully this time around i had learned the lesson of you've got to take a break like whenever you're you're having too much going on and step back and go you know what this isn't worth it i have to stop thankfully my husband nicely reminded me to take a break as well but yeah i think that's something that you have to really think about of i think at least for me i get really excited with a new project or a video that i'm working on and i'll just want to like get you know get it done now and i'm so excited i can't wait to work on it but really stepping back and going okay are these timelines that i have imposed on myself realistic can i actually do this what am i going to give up and i think for me i understand a lot better now that by saying yes to something i'm saying no to something else so for that six weeks i said yes to recording all of my course videos again but i also said no to sleeping to exercise to eating properly to hanging out with my husband and dogs and friends like i said no to way too many things that it just put me in a place where there's no way i couldn't have not burned out honestly i'd like to ask you about the sensation in particular even if it gets down to like what chemicals you think were at their peak because i want to make sure that if anybody and i i assume that a lot of our listeners are younger and they're looking to get into the industry so they might not have like experienced anything like that do you recall any of the particular like say that you wake up in the morning and how how it really made you feel in the most pragmatic sense honestly it was severe depression like i couldn't get out of bed like i would wake up and just be like no i'm not getting up like i'm going to lay here and i don't ever plan on getting out of this bed i you know lost my desire to eat all that kind of stuff so i definitely feel like i could relate it the most to depression but the moment that it happened for me i actually have video proof of it um i did not share that but i was sitting in front like you know my my youtube lights were on everything was set up camera was going and i kind of fumbled over a sentence and then all of a sudden i just lost it and just started like crying like crazy and was like whoa what is happening and that was kind of this sensation of i feel like almost i was trying to keep everything together i messed up one little thing and then it was just like nope no more i can't do this anymore uh okay two more questions about that and then we'll we'll get into some of the other um well actually some for instance pinterest that's one of the things i wanted to ask you about some of the other videos for instance ask you about that too but i got two more for you and then we'll move on so the first one was did you notice any warning signs or did it just kind of like like that no there was definitely warning signs i was having to record a lot of the videos at night because i was still doing like editing and other client projects throughout the day so me i was sleeping about two to three hours a night and i would be at my computer like trying really hard not to fall asleep and also trying not to like tear up at the same time editing videos at 4am and i would set like you know goals for myself of like okay you get this done then you can go to bed at four and then sleep till six doesn't that sound great so there was definitely warning signs of i could feel the the tension and feel like for me i'm an outdoors person and not being outside with my dogs not going on hikes i could definitely feel um just you know not getting the sun on me was starting to really affect my mood to where i would be a lot more snappy and not as kind and not as patient so i think just kind of everybody's different so just knowing what your your normal state is and noticing whenever things like that are coming up is definitely a clear warning sign and then the other side of it is what steps you've taken to be back in the happier position that you are now yeah so first off i took about two months off of youtube which was kind of hard for me to do because i had been on youtube for five years and i've been trying to put out content consistently twice a week but i had to just step away and say no i can't do this so i think for me doing the burnout video and then just stepping away it was kind of a way of letting everyone know like this is what's going on and now i have to step away so i think that was really helpful for me and then now kind of moving forward i've gotten a lot more into self-care and morning routines where i spend a lot more time journaling reading books things like that that things that i get energy from and excitement from but also just looking at my schedule and i say no a lot more in terms of like i can't do that timeline i can't work this day and just being a lot more honest with myself of like okay yeah i could do this in a week but maybe let's add another week on there just so that i i have some space as well of if things go wrong or i don't feel like being on video this day and just kind of extending those timelines out i one thing i wanted to uh to touch on because i had seen a video i think probably last week where he pointed out that some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know the steve jobs and the elon musks one of their innate talents is their ability to say no and i remember a couple of uh incidents that happened uh growing up that made it difficult for me to do that one of them was the first job that i had uh i don't know how popular this sport is in the states uh because i think it was invented in michigan but it's called whirlyball where people get into bumper cars and they've got lacrosse scoops and they scoop up a ball and they'll try to hit a sign post with it and if they hit the center it goes and you get three points as opposed to one it's it's a fun sport at least i assume i was never i got a chance to play it but that's not true i got to play once or twice and i was working consistently for about three or four months and usually the boss would call ask me what hours i want and he calls and and i wasn't up for it i just i wasn't feeling good about working that week and so that was it two or three more weeks go by and he doesn't call me and so i call him and i says oh you know what happened you didn't you didn't call he says well you know i give the hours to the people that they want to and that imprinted on me because it made me think that if i'm if i ever say no it's going to have consequences that are going to unfold in ways that i can't perceive the other side of it was my my dad he tried to instill a lot of good work ethics into me and most of them were good but again it was that same thing about if you have to work you have to work you don't refuse to work because it's too it's just too important and even to this day it's still a hard thing to get over but it's it's very important and and i just wanted to thank you for bringing that up because people have to understand if you if you keep saying yes to everything you will end up in a position where you will say i can't and you'll mean it and you'll physically be unable to do something yeah it's crazy how like little incidents like that happen in life and we don't even realize that it shapes our beliefs on things i had heard many times growing up that you know oh you're going to be a starving artist and i think i carried that with me for a long time of like well i have to say yes to every job that comes my way because one day maybe there's not gonna be any jobs and then i'll be a starving artist and it took a lot of work to go through that and go okay no like money's still coming in jobs are still coming in you're not starving you can say no if something's not a good fit or you just don't want to do it there's um well there's two parts of that one of them is a i just realized for the first time that we could have just combined it and called it starvist or something like oh i like that yeah i've been i i've been referred to that before in the past and this is the first time i realized we would say that uh so i'm gonna mark a note of that uh contact webster this the other side of it is is to flip the script is that when somebody says starving artists yeah okay it's uh my bohemian uh vest and my my waffles and i'm not you know and i only have so much uh money so yeah i suppose that there was a little definition of it but there is also the the idea of craving being being hungry for results being hungry to create something it's the it's the creative drive it's being you know we eat food to satisfy our physical or physiological needs but we create art to satisfy our our spiritual needs and our and our emotional needs and to and to know that we've like left an imprint in the world so credit to the to the artist community for realizing we can turn the tables on that and also a lot of artists have found a lot of work these days patreon gum road and doing your own stores yeah selling selling your crafts online this has got to be one of the best times for an artist to be alive by far oh absolutely a lot less persecution yeah i love watching i watch so many different youtube channels that are artists that are just you know all over the place of what kind of art styles they have and they have huge followings on youtube and then they have their own merch and they're selling custom pieces and it's like wow this is this is really a cool time to to be alive and to be a part of where you can really just put anything that you're passionate about and just put it out there and there is definitely a community that's going to go hey i really like this like thanks for sharing and i think that's something that's really cool that maybe our parents generation didn't get definitely grandparents didn't get but our generation can really kind of take that and just share it with the world and i think it talks a lot more about you know kind of spreading the happiness as well yeah i mean i'm gonna we'll switch gears but i just want to point out one other thing is you know my my parents they it meant a lot to them to to work and for me to have a job and i think they inherited that fearfulness from their grandparents because you know they were alive during one of the largest most devastating conflicts known to man at least you know to date and so you know you never hear that maslow's hierarchy of motivation how like you know people start off and they just need to get their their food and then their their secret their safety their security and then it goes higher into social emotional self-actualization i think society collectively has had to undergo that hierarchy of motivation right now we've had to take a step back because now we're actually stuck in safety and security but you know over the course of of our development our parents they inherited that feeling of not being secure and i think they try to impart that onto our generation about you know you have you have to make sure that you that you're working and that you have to take care of yourself and i think you know dad i didn't ever have to actually leave this house we owned this property so i think our our generation we've we kind of mastered the same i would say we mastered the social side of it because of social media to the point of excess and we are moving towards self-actualization where people are going to find what they can do to have influence on other people and since we've been talking about artists so much i think this is as good as time as any to transition into pinterest which i know you've talked about i've listened to other interviews you've done pinterest doesn't get brought up too much on this show the only other guest we've had chronologically speaking was uh mark chapon uh so he introduced it to to me and the and our listeners and i don't want you to feel like you have to like explain the what it is because my my listeners should already know that chronologically speaking but what i do want to hear about is your one your take on pinterest and how you feel it fits into the stores um on a on a like a practical level how pinterest is actually connected to shopify and potentially how it connects to other parts as well because my mindset is that pinterest is like a self-contained system yeah so i love talking pinterest excellent for me i feel like pinterest is kind of the same reason why i love youtube it's an evergreen platform like so many times with facebook and instagram you know you put a post up and your reach is you know 24 maybe 48 hours then after that like that's that's toast it's on to the next one where you know some of my most like watched videos every single month or ones that i created two years ago on youtube so it's kind of that evergreen thing that can keep working for you and pinterest is exactly the same so you can create content once kind of put it up there and then people can keep pinning your your images for years to come a story that i love to share is i had created a pin for a lead magnet guide that i had created for my site and for e-commerce and i had done a pinterest ad for twenty dollars about two years ago at this point all i put in was twenty dollars and it's still the most viewed pin the most repin pin and it's still the most amount of traffic that is sent to my site from pinterest every single month and i just spent twenty dollars two years ago so it's so great to have that kind of evergreen content because i think especially if you're a solo entrepreneur and you're having to wear so many hats well yes you definitely need to have you know a presence where your your people are online if that's facebook or instagram but having a platform kind of work for you and constantly trying and boost you even years down the road with the content like on pinterest i think is really key and especially for like online shopping you never know when someone's going to be looking for whatever specific thing that you're selling so pinterest is honestly kind of like a huge visual search engine and i think that's why it's so great for e-commerce because yeah you can create you know a gift guide and make it a little bit more fun and engaging but you can also just put your products up on pinterest as well and you were talking about the functionality of it shopify actually recently like a few months back had launched a pinterest sales channel so it's four shops that are in the us and canada but it really easily connects in with your pinterest business account so it sets up the tags for you and it starts adding your catalog into pinterest so it's really easy to get started i think they even have like 100 ad credit so you can try things out making kind of the bar to get started with pinterest if you have a shopify store really low okay so as you're describing this to me one of the things that i would just want to hop onto pinterest real quick because i one thing i don't know is if the the advertisements are on the same playing field as say just like you know regular images that somebody would post because usually there is some separation between even like google search results they will tell you which are the ads results versus which ones are the organic results which of course can also be adjusted in their own ways but i'm on pinterest right now and i'm just looking through and everything just like on like the home page looks like it's a pin so is oh oh there we go i see one yeah it should say sponsored uh i see an ad promoted by yeah yeah so yeah so it looks like um they're they're treating the ads with this almost the same reverence that they treat the images themselves where you can see the promotions uh underneath the image this might be kind of like a i guess it's a kind of a nebulous question but i think it's still a curious one to ask just because of the relationship between artists and their sales have you encountered any pushback between people who are saying hey but you know we just want to use pinterest for for the images and for sharing art so it almost seems i'm trying to think of a better word than sacrilege but i guess i'll just go with that sacrilege for the ads to now be on the same space have do what i mean has anything on that along those lines come across your radar honestly i haven't really noticed um anything like that and a lot of times i'll get like if i run an ad for an e-commerce product i'll get a bunch of people actually pinning and saving the ad image and then other people re-pinning that there so i don't think people mind it as much um that it's there as long as you're seeing like you're kind of setting it up as being helpful so i think that's kind of one of the things to think about and i'll tell my clients like yes it is kind of nice to do like you know a product image to put it up there but it's also nice to do things like gift guides or like you know if you're selling baby products you know five must have items for new moms and creating kind of an image like that where people are yeah it may be still sponsored in a paid ad and once you go to the site it's your products but you're being really helpful too and it's i think that's how people use pinterest the most it's kind of like cataloging different ideas and you know grouping things together so any time that you can add value to people and make things even easier for them i really don't think that people mine and go oh well i'm not going to save this or click on this just because it's an ad i think it's more about the value that that you're bringing to them yeah and just to test the two i clicked on say an advertisement for wix and yeah it just takes you directly to wix i click on an advertisement for mazda then it goes directly to them and so that was one of the things that i wanted to know too which i just discovered for myself so listeners one thing to note is that the line between the ad it's a very straight funnel from the ad to the advertiser's website so that's good so you said that one of the ads it was 20 and it's managed to last year after year after year so with that in mind what can ad creators and copywriters do to give their advertisements that kind of long-term lasting power yeah so for pinterest i definitely recommend um first off you need to think that if you're gonna do advertising on pinterest it's a lot more of a slow burn than like facebook instagram facebook instagram you can see within like you know 24 hours is this ad gonna work is it not pinterest you need a couple weeks i typically what i'll do if i'm creating a guide or something like that that i'm going to turn into an ad i will create let's say five different templates so that i have different copy that i'm using different images different text stylization different sizes things like that to where i'm kind of varying it up a little bit and then i'll just pin all of those pins organically onto their appropriate board and really see what kind of just takes off organically first of what people are clicking on the most and then once i kind of get a little bit of reach and information after about two weeks then i'll turn one or a couple of them onto a paid ad and just put like 10 20 bucks let that run for another two weeks see what happens and then after that once i know okay this is really doing well that's when i'll start increasing the budget there so it is a lot more of a slow process but keep in mind that it's gonna last longer overall so you can you know then at some point turn the ad off and it'll still keep going years after and people will pin it and it still continues on and you just don't get that with you know facebook and things like that for advertising so what is it exactly about the pinterest algorithm that keeps these things running is it like if it continues to generate interest then it continues to show on these new feeds so let's just say for instance you do a um an ad for a blender and i'm looking at blenders the organic activity is what's keeping it still relevant in the earlier search results is that right exactly so you want to have you know a pin that's going to get a lot of organic reach of people just pinning it and re-pinning it um and that's going to be what kind of keeps it going long after so the more engagement that you have you know pinterest like every other social media platform they want to keep you on the site as long as possible so if they know hey if i show this pin you know eight out of ten times people repin it and they're looking at it then they're gonna show that so i think just being mindful of you really want to get people to engage with it you want to you know you don't want to have just a white background and your product photo on top you want to make it enticing either with a lifestyle photo or doing some kind of text overlays just come up with some creative ideas to kind of get people's eye to grab gravitate towards there and want to save that for for later on and yeah and pinterest i would say out of all of the platforms is probably the one that most encourages artistic expression and most encourages creativity it's a creativity board to begin with yeah so it was cool too is that when you're talking about how you can track the progress of them in the backend side that was pretty similar to what data you can what you can do in the facebook ads as well you can you can see how the progress is going you can stop running the ones that aren't working well uh invest more into the ones that are working well and then you can scale from there so as far as working on the back end it's probably going to be more familiar for people who've done facebook ads than than not is there any other tools or any other backend features that you can let us know about for people who start using pinterest ads yeah so i will say that pinterest doesn't have anywhere near as detailed targeting and demographics as facebook does however you can still add you know the conversion tag to your site so you can track you know people who come to your site as well as go off of specific keywords so that you can be you know tracking different keywords and seeing which one people are the most likely to engage the pin with based on the keyword but i would say overall it's just in terms of pinterest compared to others i would think of it more as not just a short term kind of advertising platform but more of a long-term strategy so while it is great to advertise on pinterest i would also think about ways to just build up your boards and your page there organically so i love the tailwind app and this is a software and it's tail like t-a-i-l um but it's a really helpful tool to help you schedule your pins so if i'm running paid ads for my pins i'm also going to be creating different ads that are going to be complementary and if they like the the ad and manage engage with that then they might also like these organic pens that i'm doing as well so not just running you know just ads there but also kind of just filling out your boards more and thinking about pinterest as an overall strategy of you know if you're creating blog posts on your site you know make sure you create some pins for them and you're just thinking of different ways to engage with people and especially knowing who your ideal customer is and how you know what kind of content they may like and getting them to come to your site excellent so i definitely hope i mean i for one with respect i haven't set my own store up yet my goal with it is to set one up mostly just to test and just to kind of play around with so i can understand these things a little bit more intuitively and yeah i mean i will say that of all the different platforms advertise on pinterest is it it sticks out to me because i'm a creative too like i have my own artistic inclinations uh what's funny of those i i did your quiz your online quiz on your website and uh it ended up telling me that facebook advertising would be the ideal one i think it was just because some of it had to do with with budget but i would imagine too that pinterest would be another one of the answers to that quiz are there any other answers besides facebook or pinterest that the quiz would let people know about yeah so the quiz on my site you could get results anywhere from facebook instagram pinterest and google instagram pinterest and google okay yeah a lot of people don't get um when i look at the analytics of it all a lot of people don't end up getting google just because you have to have a pretty nice budget for google you can run through things pretty expensively but i think that's where pinterest can really be set apart especially if you have a low budget getting started because you can kind of you know create these pinterest ads with just a little bit of money and then kind of just let them run for a couple weeks and then come back you don't have to feel like you know for me if i'm running facebook ads i'm checking them multiple times a day because if something goes sideways i i could lose a lot of money really quickly so i'm wanting to constantly monitor this where pinterest is a little bit more of a set it and forget it like i'll even set like a calendar reminder every like monday and be like okay you need to check your pinterest ads one assumption that i make about our listeners is that most will probably be drop shippers or we'll try drop shipping and a lot of the time a lot of the drop shippers that i've talked to they they use it as a base for a while but then they move on some still commit to it but even those ones in large part have considered where they want to go after this because i don't think people want to be like drop shippers for the rest of their lives they tend to do other agencies and so there's one contention that i can see which is that in drop shipping operations a lot of them might not really be intended to have longevity to them sometimes it's it's a seasonal thing for instance and so they set a store up for six months and then and then they let it go so i i can see how pinterest might not be the ideal fit because you want the the longer the ad is on pinterest the more you get out of it so i i do want to hear your opinion on drop shipping and i know you did a video on it but i i didn't see that video if you're a fan of it if you're not a fan of it whatever your opinion is don't worry we get lots of different opinions from all over so i do want to hear your take on it and how you feel it fits into the e-commerce space yeah so i'm a fan of drop shipping i think it's a great way to test products test ideal customers and really kind of get your feet wet get started i think ultimately the goal is if you find a good product or a niche that you're in you kind of want to switch to more manufacturing so that you can have or you can reduce your cost and make a little bit more profit margin and have more control of the process but i think you're right like for if you're just looking at it for doing you know a store for six months then yeah probably pinterest wouldn't be the best just because it takes longer to advertise and you're gonna get a lot quicker of a flood of traffic from facebook and instagram as well as you know you can turn the ads off and that be that where if you once you turn the pinterest ads off like that's fine but it can still keep getting repinned and people are going to go to your site hopefully later on and be like oh the site's not here anymore right so i do think like you were saying for drop shipping probably doing more facebook instagram could be a better solution for a short term but if you are looking for building kind of a longer term business or maybe even just testing the products first with drop shipping then switching to manufacturing those products or still staying in the same niche i think pinterest could definitely work for you and i know one of the things that you prioritize is when people are designing their websites the brand has to be quality and it has to gain people's stress and i think that's an issue with with drop shipping because the incentive is to and in a lot of a lot of the cases like if you hear about these are the winning products for halloween so you gotta you gotta get on that before halloween is over so in your mind how does a drop shipper square the relationship between a quality brand that can gain people's trust with the inherent risk of selling a product that frankly they might not even see it for themselves at any point well i think that's one of the things that i recommend that they do is that they actually order a sample there's been many times where i've thought that a product looked great online and was looking at potentially selling this in one of my own stores and then as soon as i ordered a sample and got it here it you know fell apart within a week or you know it was jewelry and if it was left out on the counter it started like rusting and turning green after just a week and it's like okay you need to get their product and test it out first i get that sometimes things are a little more seasonal and you're trying to get something done in a certain time period but you're just going to end up getting people upset with you or getting chargebacks if you don't have a quality product so i do recommend that you get some kind of a sample and do some kind of testing period throughout um you know if it's a necklace that you're doing like wear the necklace in the shower see what it looks like once it gets wet and it sits out on the counter like are people am i going to get a flood of emails in a week of people being really upset because they don't you know put it in a airtight bag or something like that i think that's an important part to just make sure that yes you're trying to capitalize on certain time periods but that you're still making sure that you focus on quality and the overall brand experience because you know if something comes in the mail and it's just in a bag and it doesn't have any kind of messaging inside or even your logo um i definitely sometimes will forget what i've ordered and i'm like wait what is this like oh i forgot i ordered this um so having anything like that where it's gonna be i always say like make it seem like it's a present in the mail like where you're excited you open it and you're like oh my gosh i'm so excited like i do a lot of subscription boxes um for a random things like hair care and stuff like that and the hair care company i use they always send stickers and it's like i never use the stickers but i get excited and i open the note and it says you know my name on the card and things like that so any kind of little touches i think can go a long way of how you can build a brand and build that more sustainably long-term and just focus on the quality as well and that's something that i certainly would want to think about for my own prospects however far into the future they may be which is setting up a brand setting up a general niche store so that when these seasons roll around i don't have to go through the process of setting up a brand and building familiarity with it i would already have the store ready to go and then i would cycle product in and out so that's that's kind of like what came to my mind uh hearing what you're describing but frankly i haven't seen anyone in that regard talk about that so that's something i'm going to want to look into we're getting uh close to to wrapping up there's a couple of other things that i just want to get your take on and by the way for for people i'm curious to a lot of these are things that i had learned checking out elle's videos so there is a lot more on the youtube that will expand on even the things that we talk about here this one blew my mind um the the loaning uh payability app it's a sorry it's an app right okay yeah for listeners not familiar with this this again i was really taken aback by this because uh shopify stores could qualify for up to 250 000 in funding now maybe you've worked with clients who've qualified but i what do people even do with that kind of money on a shopify store well a lot of times it's really based off of what your goal is of what you're doing so they're not going to just give you 250 k just to do advertising a lot of times it's more building out infrastructure ordering more inventory hiring up team members maybe some advertising costs but a lot more times it's more about the infrastructure overall so i think for that it's more just making sure that you have a plan of okay maybe even there of okay showing that you have a drop shipping product that you have been selling really well and now you're looking for manufacturing and you're going to be manufacturing it in house but now you need these special tooling equipment things like that that cost additional money so getting a loan for that but showing that you have the track record of the sales already for it yeah okay that makes sense because depending on your margins there's only so much equity that you can earn from it to then make those those next jumps into manufacturing okay that clears that up all right i got two more and then we're gonna do our wrap up for you so the next one i want to get your take on is print on demand i haven't really talked to anybody about this um this is something that my girlfriend and i we've we've talked about doing before because well i'm an artist and she's a much much better artist and it's it was exciting about it this is something that we were doing before i even joined debutify is that we would uh well i say we but it was mostly her draw images mostly the corgi and put it up on redbubble and zazzle to try to sell it to those markets i don't i don't necessarily think our our listeners will go on to redbubble we can't if they want to but what would you how would you say people can get uh print on demand setup for their shopify stores and like what what can they get out of it yeah so i love print on demand because you can really kind of come up with your own niche and your own audience kind of like how we were talking before like you can find any kind of people online like you can you know then market to corgi specific groups and run ads to people that have corgis and you you already can target them so much with facebook so you can create any kind of image that you like and then through print on demand you don't have to be part of the process you can create the design once and then then your job is to just send the right audience to your site but what's great i think about these print-on-demand apps like printful and printify is that you can add it easily into your shopify store and then create the products from there of just uploading the design you know setting up the product and then they take care of the rest which is also you know of course really nice but they're still going to be on your site so you still can have you know you're not sending them to redbubble where you're not able to track things as well you're still able to have you know your facebook pixel and then target audiences based off which products they viewed specifically or do dynamic ads and you're building that brand loyalty as well so i think it's a great way to really test different things and especially when you're kind of getting started to see okay the you know corgi design is a big hit it's the biggest seller on a mug people don't like it as much on a towel things like that and so you can really test things out and kind of get to know your audience a little bit more especially before you you know potentially then maybe you want to you go okay this is a huge seller i want to start manufacturing this myself now you know exactly which product to manufacture so you don't have a thousand corgi towels in your garage that you can't get rid of yeah i might be an outlier but i think i would love a corgi towel oh i would love a corny towel like i said that and i was like maybe not tell i would love the towel yeah it could maybe maybe maybe the mugs won't take but point stipulated this is actually like a personal curiosity because one of my like pet projects that i've had in the back of my mind is to make a a specific like uh a yearly agenda i've i've been using yearly agendas for seven years now and i've already got my 2021 and i've already started writing some dates into it because my buddy's wedding you know fingers crossed is coming up in may i say fingers crossed for reasons uh that are obvious to anybody listening to this in 2020 2021 but what i wanted to design one in specific do you know of any print-on-demand applications or services where they give you that kind of flexibility where you can actually like put a product together to that degree not for planners there's definitely a lot for like journals but for planners themselves i think you might have to go with more of a printing company and maybe do a small run print of that i'm not really familiar with any planners but that would be a cool one to do for for sure okay thanks for that it's uh it's been nagging away at me for for some time now so i just want to get it out of my system all right i got one more that i want to get your take on and then we'll give you a chance to uh to wrap this up which is a reward programs so there's another one that we've talked about now i've done some reading up on reward programs and not naming names but the person was going off on how people would end up having a stack of like 12 to 15 cards where you know buy one coffee but buy eight coffees get one free um and i for one being a bubble tea fanatic i have a bubble tea card i quick story i go to the to the to the tea shop and i and i buy two teas and she snaps at once and i look at her and i say well i bought two t's is it per purchase or is it for tea she says well it's per purchase so i said why don't i just buy one then i'll just come out and i'll just come back in and buy the other and she gives me a blank stare and like yes yeah okay give me my second stamp she she won that battle by the way but i don't know so with reward programs is how do people integrate this in a way that's effective and seeing as how this is all done online we're not really sending rewa

2021-09-04 03:26

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