armur
Regular Member
- Jul 20, 2017
- 457
- 248
I'm an introvert. I have social anxiety. I'm a tech geek.
Give me a coding assignment and I'll sit day and night to get it done. I just love it. However, ask me to market my skills and my social anxiety kicks in. I start getting self judgemental.
I read these wonderful marketing/promotion techniques and methods on BHW and go "I should definitely try that out", but when the time comes to actually do it, my mind figures out that there are a surprising number of other things on my To-Do list - those that don't involve social media or talking to other people. This is one of the reasons why I've vehemently stuck to SEO when it comes to driving traffic to my POD store.
So why POD?
Well, we've got a great graphic designer working on our team (team of freelancers who work together) and I'm good at the tech stuff - setting up sites, maintaining it, etc. So the best option to monetize his design skills was to go the POD route. The POD scene in my country is still very much in its nascent stage - so the market is definitely there.
What we've done so far
I've put my coding skills to good use and developed a neat bulk mockup generator and product uploader for our website. So all that the designer has to do is put the design PNG into my custom software and click Go. Boom - it automatically generates mockups in various colors and creates various products(tees, sweatshirts, mugs, etc.) with all the necessary variations. If you've done this manually, you'll know that it is painfully boring and incredibly time-consuming.
We've partnered with another small business who have a great supply chain set up to manufacture and fulfill the orders as they come in. Orders from our site automatically get pushed to them and they take care of the rest. I've put several hundreds of hours into making the site look wonderful as well as function perfectly (remember those surprising number of other non marketing things that my brain comes up with?
). Similarly, the designer has worked insanely hard (he's even started complaining of back pain ) to put out around 700 designs so far. Saying they are good would definitely be an understatement.
The result is that we are operationally as strong as any POD store could possibly be. Marketing wise though, we are severely lacking We usually target small local niches specific to our region and there aren't that many search keywords with volumes that we can effectively target. We've ranked on most of these 20-200 monthly search volume keywords and the result is that we get around 1-2 orders each day. We've also registered as sellers on a few large e-commerce platforms and have listed all the products there as well. Yeah, my software takes care of upload to those sites as well These sites bring in around 1 order a day.
What's Next?
To justify the effort that we put into this website, we would need to get at least 10 orders a day. So that would be the immediate target. Post that, we'll need to continue growing to about 100 orders a day for this to become an effective source of income for us.
How do we get there? What's the plan?
I wet my feet in Facebook+Instagram ads last month and instantly disliked it. Relatively low margins in POD means that unless you get great ROAS (Return On Ad Spend - one of several such terms that I've grown to hate), you are simply gifting your money to Facebook.
From what I've learnt in the Affiliate space (I have an Amazon affiliate blog that makes a decent amount each month - haven't touched it in almost two years now), providing value to people is the best form of marketing. So in order to start getting eyeballs on our POD site, I am going to provide value to people in two ways:
1) I will be publishing articles with useful information in the niches which I'm targetting for POD products. For example, if we've got a bunch of great vintage car designs, I'll target long tails and other keywords in that niche and publish useful articles - this way, I'll get people already interested in the niche to visit my site. I'll add the vintage car POD products on the sidebar and get eyeballs on them. This should work well in theory. Let's see how it goes in practice.
2) I will be creating small 60 word snippets of various useful and interesting articles in the niches that I am targetting (along with a link to the full article in case they would like to read that). These, along with the featured image can be put in neat templates and shared on WhatsApp (to existing subscribers), Facebook groups, etc. as images. Surely nobody's gonna report that as spam.
Something like this
How will this help the business? Well, the idea is that we'll be placing a QR code + wa.me link to join our WhatsApp list and receive updates on that particular niche in the images that we share. Once people have signed up to our WhatsApp updates, they'll directly receive these snippets. We'll also push our products and new designs in the same niche as and when we launch them. The aim will be to grow the number of subscribers for each niche here.
How am I going to Stick to the Plan?
This is easy. I'll be using the Green Streak technique, of course. I've previously used this technique (when I initially started freelancing) to great use. In fact, it's only thanks to the Green Streak technique that I've been able to grow from no job, no money & always feeling miserable to where I am today.
What is this Green Streak Technique?
It's a way to build habits and stick to your goals in a disciplined way. You'll need a calendar - preferably a large physical one that you can hang by your bedside. This is so that you notice it every day and feel proud of what you've achieved and how far you've come. You'll also need green and red highlighters.
Once you've got these things, you need to set yourself a minimum target for each day. For example, if my goal is to become fit, I would set my minimum target as 15 minutes of exercise each day. This is the absolute minimum that you should be able to do even if you are traveling, fall sick or have other important commitments. Then, there is the ideal target. For our fitness example, that would be something like a 1-hour workout. This is what you should be regularly doing and exceeding on good days. When you're exceeding the ideal target with ease and by a large number, you can consider increasing it. However, you should leave the minimum target as it is.
For each day that you achieve the minimum target, you take the green highlighter and highlight the day on the calendar. You keep doing this and you will notice a green streak emerging. The aim is to keep doing these basic tasks and completing the minimum targets for each day. Failure to do so will earn you a red day - thus bringing your streak to an ugly end. Here's a pic from one of my previous journeys:
That brings us to the last question:
What are my targets?
Well, since this is work-related and I have two things that I want to do - I'll split the targets in two as well.
Weekdays:
Monday to Friday, I'll be focussing on creating snippets, sharing them, and thereby growing my subscriber base. Hence, these will be my targets:
Minimum Target: 1 snippet each day
Ideal Target: 3 snippets each day
Hoping to beat that ideal target each day
Weekends:
I'll do the required keyword research for useful articles in the niches where we've got products and then write and publish them. My targets will be:
Minimum Target: 500 words per week
Ideal Target: 1000 words per week
I'll probably work on this through the week and publish the content whenever it is ready. Once I publish the required article each week, I'll award myself the green days for that week's Saturday and Sunday. This would allow me to enjoy the weekend (provided I've already published the content during the week) without getting stressed about losing the green streak. Slightly complex system I know, but I do have to accommodate the fact that I often go hiking on the weekends and cut myself off from all communication
How will I keep myself accountable?
Through this journey thread, of course. I'll post each day with a small brief about the day's marketing efforts and a picture of my calendar with the green streak (hopefully a long one!).
So there you go folks, let's get this journey started
Give me a coding assignment and I'll sit day and night to get it done. I just love it. However, ask me to market my skills and my social anxiety kicks in. I start getting self judgemental.
I read these wonderful marketing/promotion techniques and methods on BHW and go "I should definitely try that out", but when the time comes to actually do it, my mind figures out that there are a surprising number of other things on my To-Do list - those that don't involve social media or talking to other people. This is one of the reasons why I've vehemently stuck to SEO when it comes to driving traffic to my POD store.
So why POD?
Well, we've got a great graphic designer working on our team (team of freelancers who work together) and I'm good at the tech stuff - setting up sites, maintaining it, etc. So the best option to monetize his design skills was to go the POD route. The POD scene in my country is still very much in its nascent stage - so the market is definitely there.
What we've done so far
I've put my coding skills to good use and developed a neat bulk mockup generator and product uploader for our website. So all that the designer has to do is put the design PNG into my custom software and click Go. Boom - it automatically generates mockups in various colors and creates various products(tees, sweatshirts, mugs, etc.) with all the necessary variations. If you've done this manually, you'll know that it is painfully boring and incredibly time-consuming.
We've partnered with another small business who have a great supply chain set up to manufacture and fulfill the orders as they come in. Orders from our site automatically get pushed to them and they take care of the rest. I've put several hundreds of hours into making the site look wonderful as well as function perfectly (remember those surprising number of other non marketing things that my brain comes up with?
). Similarly, the designer has worked insanely hard (he's even started complaining of back pain ) to put out around 700 designs so far. Saying they are good would definitely be an understatement.
The result is that we are operationally as strong as any POD store could possibly be. Marketing wise though, we are severely lacking
We usually target small local niches specific to our region and there aren't that many search keywords with volumes that we can effectively target. We've ranked on most of these 20-200 monthly search volume keywords and the result is that we get around 1-2 orders each day. We've also registered as sellers on a few large e-commerce platforms and have listed all the products there as well. Yeah, my software takes care of upload to those sites as well These sites bring in around 1 order a day.What's Next?
To justify the effort that we put into this website, we would need to get at least 10 orders a day. So that would be the immediate target. Post that, we'll need to continue growing to about 100 orders a day for this to become an effective source of income for us.
How do we get there? What's the plan?
I wet my feet in Facebook+Instagram ads last month and instantly disliked it. Relatively low margins in POD means that unless you get great ROAS (Return On Ad Spend - one of several such terms that I've grown to hate), you are simply gifting your money to Facebook.
From what I've learnt in the Affiliate space (I have an Amazon affiliate blog that makes a decent amount each month - haven't touched it in almost two years now), providing value to people is the best form of marketing. So in order to start getting eyeballs on our POD site, I am going to provide value to people in two ways:
1) I will be publishing articles with useful information in the niches which I'm targetting for POD products. For example, if we've got a bunch of great vintage car designs, I'll target long tails and other keywords in that niche and publish useful articles - this way, I'll get people already interested in the niche to visit my site. I'll add the vintage car POD products on the sidebar and get eyeballs on them. This should work well in theory. Let's see how it goes in practice.
2) I will be creating small 60 word snippets of various useful and interesting articles in the niches that I am targetting (along with a link to the full article in case they would like to read that). These, along with the featured image can be put in neat templates and shared on WhatsApp (to existing subscribers), Facebook groups, etc. as images. Surely nobody's gonna report that as spam.
Something like this
How will this help the business? Well, the idea is that we'll be placing a QR code + wa.me link to join our WhatsApp list and receive updates on that particular niche in the images that we share. Once people have signed up to our WhatsApp updates, they'll directly receive these snippets. We'll also push our products and new designs in the same niche as and when we launch them. The aim will be to grow the number of subscribers for each niche here.
How am I going to Stick to the Plan?
This is easy. I'll be using the Green Streak technique, of course. I've previously used this technique (when I initially started freelancing) to great use. In fact, it's only thanks to the Green Streak technique that I've been able to grow from no job, no money & always feeling miserable to where I am today.
What is this Green Streak Technique?
It's a way to build habits and stick to your goals in a disciplined way. You'll need a calendar - preferably a large physical one that you can hang by your bedside. This is so that you notice it every day and feel proud of what you've achieved and how far you've come. You'll also need green and red highlighters.
Once you've got these things, you need to set yourself a minimum target for each day. For example, if my goal is to become fit, I would set my minimum target as 15 minutes of exercise each day. This is the absolute minimum that you should be able to do even if you are traveling, fall sick or have other important commitments. Then, there is the ideal target. For our fitness example, that would be something like a 1-hour workout. This is what you should be regularly doing and exceeding on good days. When you're exceeding the ideal target with ease and by a large number, you can consider increasing it. However, you should leave the minimum target as it is.
For each day that you achieve the minimum target, you take the green highlighter and highlight the day on the calendar. You keep doing this and you will notice a green streak emerging. The aim is to keep doing these basic tasks and completing the minimum targets for each day. Failure to do so will earn you a red day - thus bringing your streak to an ugly end. Here's a pic from one of my previous journeys:
That brings us to the last question:
What are my targets?
Well, since this is work-related and I have two things that I want to do - I'll split the targets in two as well.
Weekdays:
Monday to Friday, I'll be focussing on creating snippets, sharing them, and thereby growing my subscriber base. Hence, these will be my targets:
Minimum Target: 1 snippet each day
Ideal Target: 3 snippets each day
Hoping to beat that ideal target each day
Weekends:
I'll do the required keyword research for useful articles in the niches where we've got products and then write and publish them. My targets will be:
Minimum Target: 500 words per week
Ideal Target: 1000 words per week
I'll probably work on this through the week and publish the content whenever it is ready. Once I publish the required article each week, I'll award myself the green days for that week's Saturday and Sunday. This would allow me to enjoy the weekend (provided I've already published the content during the week
) without getting stressed about losing the green streak. Slightly complex system I know, but I do have to accommodate the fact that I often go hiking on the weekends and cut myself off from all communication How will I keep myself accountable?
Through this journey thread, of course. I'll post each day with a small brief about the day's marketing efforts and a picture of my calendar with the green streak (hopefully a long one!).
So there you go folks, let's get this journey started
