This is why today we’re talking about marketing trends and what’s super important, to keep your business growing, hey guys, my name is Jade and I’m an 18 year old entrepreneur and know that intro was not fake.
I actually did drop out of high school to start. My online business and as you can tell it’s, going pretty good um. No, I’m playing it’s been a really big blessing to have my job, be the Internet and have a business literally tapping my fingers on the keyboard. But the reason why it’s been really great is because recently I started a software company called PBJ. It stands for personal brand journey and we’re a text messaging platform, and I’ve received a ton of questions about why I started a text platform and why so many influencers on Instagram are leaving Instagram for this text app and today we’re going to talk about just that.
If you’re, like, hey Jade, I really don’t give a about your text platform. Why do I need to wash this keep on reading selling because we’re going to talk about why you should care and how it’s going to grow your business? If you are influencer and B, I’m going to teach you how it’s going to make you stay relevant and actually get more engagement with your audience. So if you want to know how to grow your brand online, whether it’s YouTube Instagram wherever keep on reading alright.
So first, let’s talk about why you should care about text, message marketing and how it’s helping businesses literally make more money by using this little platform. Now just for someone who’s a beginner text message marketing is just not another word for someone else’s phone number. It’s a little bit more complex and sophisticated, at least that’s what I like to hope, because we literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars into this platform.
So I hope it’s different than an actual phone number, but basically, to give you guys context the difference between a text platform and then a regular phone number is just one main thing, which is the ability to send broadcasts. So obviously, if you have a phone number, you can’t like just do a mass text to all your contacts, but with a text platform, it’s optimized to basically send your messages all in one click.
So that’s just the main reason. However, it sounds simple, but it’s still a little bit more complex. Obviously, if you’re a brand you most likely want to see how many of your contacts are purchasing your products, so you’re able to also just track data about link, clicks or like purchase history stuff. That’s fancy e-commerce terms that probably isn’t relevant to the average human, but I nerd upon so back to today’s topic, which is all about why influencers are doing text in the first place.
I’m pretty sure Ashton Kutcher is using text marketing as well, which is pretty impressive. If you don’t know Ashton Kutcher, neither do I, I think, he’s a famous celebrity actor in America all right. So the first reason why everybody’s migrating to text is because it has intimate conversations so text has a 90 percent open rate. I mean it’s pretty obvious for the one of us the last time you actually checked your email versus check your text messages.
The reason why this is important is because an email marketing a brand might want to send you a notification or an email if they have a flash sale. It’s the same reason why a Victoria Secret will send you a 24-hour coupon, so you can purchase in that time span. Companies like Victoria’s Secret, are able to make millions of dollars just for that one single email now email has a open rate of like a 20 percent average, which basically means text is like 5x of that and we’ve done that research like people check their text messages Way more than email, so companies like Victoria Secret, are hypothetically able to make 10 times more money.
Just because text is such an intimate platform and people just check it. Often, as a consumer on pbj, whatever kryder’s is named, Rob he has like 2 million subscribers on YouTube and he sends a text broadcast when he’s dropping his next apparel line and giving coupon codes to those special people – and I believe text is just one of those Things, that’s so intimate it’s like I don’t know it’s like it feels like you know them, so we found a great results from just that.
Interaction versus any other platform. I mean like not to my own horn, but, like text is just one of those things that is just built to feel humid and I feel like in this world of social media people or like influencers, can just look like little models and just like stick figures And just an object, so I definitely think text gives a human personalized experience that is really hard to replicate on social media.
Alright, so number two is scalability like I said, the main difference between a text platform and a regular phone number is just the ability to send a message all at once. This is called the broadcast on our platform. Oh, by the way, if you guys are curious, I don’t know a lot of software’s that have this platform for creators. It’s just a really big barrier entry with text marketing means you have to have like partnerships with t-mobile and cell providers.
In order to do so. Sigelei, don’t know any other people other than like two other companies, so I don’t have any much contacts of like what other people are doing, but on our platform broadcasts where you’re able to send a message in one click to all your contacts at once. The importance of just sending a broadcast all at once is like. If you have 10,000 contacts, you don’t want to type a message to every single one.
So it’s just the same way: you’re able to post on Instagram you’re able just text people immediately and is engaged with them on this spot. Now we’re going to quote our boy Kevin Jonas from the Jonas Brothers. If you guys do not know what the Jonas brother is, I am so sorry your childhood must have been rough. Just can tell, he must have been great. Obviously I didn’t have the best childhood. Why am I talking Kevin Jonas says we need text for everything from releasing new projects to selling tickets, to any call to action that will engage our fan base so as a musician, Kevin Jonas is saying that it’s super important he’s able to like update people.
Real-Time using text because, on any other platform, there’s like an algorithm in the way, I really do believe text just cutting all the middleman and you’re able to send a notification directly or just like waiting for instagrams algorithm to promote you. I know a few of us are like sick and tired of getting like a hundred likes on Instagram when you have like a thousand followers. Imagine you’re able to reach all those a thousand followers using text, because you have that direct notification.
So, yes, if you don’t believe me, you could believe the Disney star himself Kevin okay! Thank you, Kevin, alright. So before I just talk about the last reason why people should care about text, it’s just to talk a little bit about why I’m making this article in the first place. I just really hope this isn’t a giant sales funnel. I genuinely want to help you guys grow your online business. I know a lot of you have ecommerce stores or you’re trying to start a company.
I think text is the best way to really engage a customer base in any other way. I’ve really never experienced this much intimate connection. I have my own phone number. You guys can text it out if you want to try out a platform and see what it’s like, but basically I just think it’s really unique. So if you guys want to know how you can use text to grow your business, I will link below a training to teach you guys how to use SMS to triple your sales, and I’m really excited to just teach more about this new technology.
Just because I’m really pumped – and I haven’t seen too many people talk about it, so check the description box. If you want to know more about text marketing and use it for your own business today. So the third and final reason why everybody’s leaving social media for text is because it’s new you’re, probably going to hate me because marketers just ruin every single platform like if you’re going to used to be cool.
Until now, it just becomes a show for people to flex, and it just becomes thirst traps like I just don’t feel as comfortable on Instagram anymore. It is just mainly due to people over optimizing their content. It’s going to happen to text message just because I know so many marketers and brands are going to use it to talk to their customers one day. Consumers are just not going to interact anymore because there’s too many people doing it.
It’s like the same reason why I don’t check my email anymore. I have a feeling in literally two or three years, it’s going to evaporate. Now, our boy, Gary Vaynerchuk, is talking about text marketing. This is probably the most interesting thing brewing because if you asked me what the counter point of social media is its text message – marketing very personal in your own world. But I don’t think he’s really talking also about the fact that we literally only have two and a half years before this becomes a little bit overdone.
So if you’re someone just thinking about it, I definitely isn’t a best been important to take, because it’s better to be early than too late, because the minute you’re too late. No one cares and I feel, like that’s the scariest thing about social media like because I get a lot of questions from you guys about how to grow online. It’s literally about not necessarily being the best but being the first in mind, because the minute there’s too much competition, you lose the game and I really do believe.
That’s why people on tik-tok or new platforms that jump on it early have the best light, because just as less people doing it, so you can stand out more, and I really do believe that text is like that new thing that if you literally don’t take it Like if you’re not going to listen to me, it’s fine, but your business will suffer because I know so many other companies will take advantage of it and eat your company alive or your brand.
So in other words, don’t listen to me. It’s okay! You reap the consequences, that’s that I’m really aggressive. I’m really sorry well, like I said the third reason, what I think it’s just so important to jump on. It is because it’s new, I don’t necessarily think we actually have a lot of time before we can take advantage of it fully. So if you guys want to learn more about tax marketing or kind of hop on it, I will link below my platform called PBJ.
So you guys can sign up for a demo. I am the founder, so you guys can most likely sign up for a phone call with me, if not someone for my to mostess to and how these get started with text. I hope you guys learned a little bit about text marketing and why I really do believe in it me like comment below and let me know your thoughts if you’ve any questions, I’m happy to explain more about this whole technology and world.
I fell into shout out to the commad winner the supposed to be B to the next F this, if you guys want to learn more make sure you subscribe to my blog, and I will link below part 2 of this article, where we talk about how to Use this into your marketing strategy for your brand catch, you guys on the next one good, bye,
Meet the guys behind one of the top-rated pumpkin seed snacks on Amazon.com!
Today, to talk about ways to boost your sales during This COVID-19 crisis by running promotions or offering coupons, We realize that it may seem Counterintuitive to offer discounts or coupons when times are tough but now’s the right time, because you wan na encourage your customers to Continue to buy from you And let’s face it, some of your Customers may be struggling so a good promotion or Coupon may be just the thing they need to get them to Make that buying decision Over the past two weeks, I’ve Seen, restaurants and stores offering unique things in My area here in San Diego, For example, I’ve seen Some of my favorite stores and restaurants selling gift Cards at a discounted rate – and this is a great way – To earn revenue right now and your loyal customers who love to come to your establishment, they’re going to wan na do so more than ever, when social distancing Is a thing of the past, Some restaurants that I Know have gotten creative with their take-out options too.
I’ve seen some of them. Offering free dessert with take-out orders and some are selling full or half trays of Their most popular items at a great price Yeah most of the companies That I buy products through online are offering Free shipping right now, which I’m super frugal, so I love this And with more and more people, Turning to online shopping, especially during the COVID-19 crisis, this is a no-brainer And, of course, the other Thing I’ve seen are a lot of special coupons and discounts.
With my favorite retailers, I’ve seen offers for Buy-One-Get-One free or a certain percentage. Amount, if I spend so much – And I know a good sale – can Entice me to buy something that I’ve been thinking about Yeah totally. These are all great ideas for running promotions during this time Darlene can you show us how To create coupon codes for our Websites, + Marketing, Ecommerce customers Yep I’d, be happy to do.
That Emma, let’s get to it, We’re going to start on the Websites + Marketing dashboard From there. Let’s choose Marketing and select Coupons, Select, Add to add a new coupon We’re now on the Create Coupon page. First, we need to create a coupon code. This is what customers enter. During the checkout process, If the coupon you’re creating Is representing a certain sale or free shipping make That part of the code, For example, running a sale right now on the COVID-19 crisis.
You might want to use STAYSAFE Or STAYHEALTHY as the code, If you aren’t feeling Creative, that’s, okay, you can click the Get A Code link and one will be generated. Just for you We’re going to use STAYSAFE. The code can be between Three and 30 characters and it’s not case sensitive Now, you need to select when you want the coupon to start and end. If you don’t want the coupon to expire check the Never End box, The Options section is Used to add restrictions to the coupon, You can limit the coupon To a product or category Just check the box and Make your selections You can also set the Maximum number of products per order that will receive the discount, For example, you only want To give 20 % off of one item, The next option gives us the ability to limit the number of total uses that the coupon can be used by everyone, not just one customer.
For example, you want To give 20 % off, but only to the first 100 customers, You can add that restriction here. If you want to require A minimum order total you can add that in this section, Maybe you’re offering a coupon for $ 10 off once the customer reaches A certain threshold We’re not going to add any Restrictions at this time, so we’re going to click, Save Now you’re back on the main Coupon page.
You can see an overview Of the coupon details and you can edit the coupon By clicking the pencil icon or delete it by clicking the trash, can That’s it. That’s how You make coupon codes. Thank you, Darlene, Hey! That does look pretty easy. I hope you thought so too, Once you have your coupon set up, make sure you share the Information with your customers put it front and center on your site and send an email to existing Customers to let them know and don’t forget to share Over on social media too – And we understand that Times are tough right now for everyone, so letting your Customers know that you’re still here ready to help Them is always a good thing.
It was great to see you Emma Yeah. You too Darlene stay healthy, Stay, safe,
Who is helping with your digital business footprint?
I think I have one of the coolest jobs in the museum because I actually get to play with the Stuff all the artifacts in the museum are, is what I take care of them, So I acquire Them I research them. I work on exhibits with them. It’s a lot of fun, Working with Financial Potion was awesome, They’re a great team, easy to work with fun to work.
With and they create a great product in the end Worked with them on two projects, One was with the Chandler Sports Hall of Fame Where we sat down with Chandler Sports Hall of Famers and did oral history, Style interviews and those interviews could be up to an hour long and the team At Financial Potion did a great job editing those down into three to four Minute segments to create a great story of the Hall of Famers and what they did And what they achieved And the other project we did was we had Financial Potion come in and shoot b-roll footage of an exhibit that we did at the museum.
It was called “, Un-American, Japanese Internment in Our Backyard.”. They came in and just kind of shot some article of the exhibit Some of the Interactive’s, the Features and we’ve actually used that footage to put ourselves up for a National award that we’re looking forward to getting with the help of Financial Potion, The team that Financial Potion is great to work with Communication is easy.
It’s quick! The turnaround time is really quick. They Don’t drag anything on, it’s all business You get in there. You start the Project, you do the project, you wrap the project up and it’s always on time and Always timely, which is important, I would recommend and have recommended people to use Financial Potion for all sorts of article projects. Speaking from the museum they’re easy to work with, They understand what we’re trying to achieve.
And they want to work with us to tell the stories that we want to. We want to Help tell So I would recommend them to anybody. The Chandler museum is at 300, South Chandler Village Drive over near the Chandler Fashion Center, you can drop in and check out exhibits there. We have Tumbleweed Ranch where we are today in southeast corner of Tumbleweed Park. And that’s where we explore early Chandler history and agricultural History and it’s a lot of fun to come out here and just walk around and you Can always visit us online at www.
Chandlerpedia.Org?
Videos are truly an awesome way to get the point across. Any type of content from your business is important!
Some new skill sets right. Steve, yes about! You know what are some of the fundamentals of becoming a more persuasive speaker. Who is a spaceman? You don’t exactly be familiar with that three seconds, but whose speech to remember well, obviously the Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address is the most famous one right right, so Abraham Lincoln did was. He actually came off of his for know. He told the story.
The casualties in the battlefield and while it would kill the account so while we were fighting in the first place, he told that story to Gettysburg Address and when he told that story after he told the story he prescribed, that was the incidents. That was a story. That’s the I, after that he prescribed an action, he said so if we come together and men offenses put our differences behind us and then the venom that we will become one great nation.
So it sounds simple and it sounds very trite, but that could be coming enough, persuasive speak. What a lot of people do, what they lack is when they’re doing presentations it’s they don’t close up our speech properly. So, for example, you’ve got a title. You’ve got another title: that’s a solution to somebody came in to say, for instance, about a homeowner’s associate. I was in a home, an association for my neighborhood.
It was my turn to speak and, given you know, someone informative, you know presentation, I say well. What I’m going to do today is something that this is a title, my speech, if anyone speeches off anyone how easy this for anyone to build a deck and three weeks or less, you know the force, a commitment that that that now does not exclude women people That first time, people to incarcerate – and you know a lot of people wanting to get their hands at home improvement, so you’re going to you’re going to put off the audience, come up with three major points.
Those three major points me to be pictures to you help me out. One way to other Twitter means when you’re giving your presentation today, three weeks or less I’m going to discuss the materials, the materials that you isn’t, that expensive than thing is as expensive. As you see, and it’s not as labor-intensive and that’s where you golf and get the you know people in their speech with well, okay, well, thank you any any questions and it all gets a little.
I mean the speech so so then, how do you so? This is a good formula for people for people to use, but I think sometimes, even with the first part people struggle with, especially if it’s a it’s a it’s, a it’s a sales presentation or it’s a presentation to a group of people or it’s an online presentation Is people tend to ramble around the beginning of it rather than, as you say, you know, setting it up with a very, very compact and focused idea of what’s going to be talked about? They tend to sort of ramble and kind of go all over the place and try to sort of paint pictures at the beginning, rather than focus so recently, I’m contracting with the company – or I actually don’t do the persuasive speaking myself, some walking walking walking walking a Lot and I’m ferrell regenerative medicine around the country.
So when I go in, I build a little rapport with the folks by you know how familiar they are, how familiar they’ve been with stem cell. You know what was their awareness. I did a little work about myself. Very short, we run from little gels if I’m up in Canada. You know the weather contrast get right into it, like you say, but yeah people tend to do that and I think it’s maybe because of me they might lack a they may be.
They may be unsure of how to approach the audience mm-hmm so a little warm-up in the beginning, and then you want to go like your PowerPoint or what have you today? I’m going to just slide right in there with the river rapport and say you know. I know most of you folks are eager to learn about so-and-so and then BAM go under the title. So how do you help people, as I said it at the beginning? One of the one of the major challenges that we see nowadays is that a lot of presentations are now not done face-to-face right, they’re done virtually they’re.
Dumb luck we’re doing here – and this is – and this is a challenge for people – because sometimes you know – maybe your audience is invisible. They may not have their camera on or whatever, and you still have to give a persuasive presentation, but with zero feedback from the room right so often. So how do you? How do you advise people when they’re approaching virtual presentation? People can somehow you know, acknowledge it, but I’ve been through many trainings where they have to mute.
You know because they don’t want any questions upset the flow of the presentation. What I would do was, I would probably maybe throw some rhetorical questions out there better. Yet I would probably do some audience buy-in, even though I couldn’t hear back from them. Wouldn’t you think this would be putting this witness you know so just to get their participation even if yeah right yeah, because it definitely is a growing growing challenge for people when they’re, not always in front of in front of people.
Another part, is you know, how do you help people simply overcome fear of present right, because even people who have to do it as a job, sometimes it’s the part of their job? They hate their great one-on-one, but if you put them in front of a group of people, they’re like everybody, has an issue. Well, not everybody. People who have fear have issues and you can find out what that issue is a lot of people.
Think – and this is what used to go through my mind, it’s when you’re standing up there almost like naked, like people, can see right through your mind. If you have any other extraneous thoughts or thought about the audience for unconfident feelings, that people can know, people can read those that’s one thing: there’s ten public speaking tips that I think and I’m studying them up down in sideways, but one of them is 90 % Of your nervousness doesn’t show hmm try try to find a friendly face in the audience when we receptive face receptive is key because you don’t know what people that people have on their mind for people get intimidated, overcome the audience right.
So for that receptive face because you don’t know, what’s going through their mind and when you do it’ll make you feel more confident yeah, and I think the other thing too is what I would say to people is. Is the audience wants you to be good? They want you to succeed, they’re, not sitting there, hoping that you crash and burn. So you know you’ve got it. You’ve got an audience who wants you? Nobody wants to read somebody who’s struggling right.
It’s not it’s not a pleasant experience for anybody. So then, how do you help people? Okay? How do you help people bring some more dynamism to the present because that’s the other part, so maybe I’ll get over the fear put you’re, just dull right, you’re just boring and you just you’re just going to it. Monotone slide by slide and everybody’s falling asleep each section. The reason these things work for people are class work and they work for everybody.
I’d never get someone say that they didn’t, but it’s a two-day class. When we do a sweep. We, you learn a session. You practice it with a partner with somebody in the room. Then you perform it, but getting your point. I have a cold in exercise, and so when I do is I haven’t read something really morning matter of fact: I Arabia turn in a minimum tax. Malthus, get through with that. It sounds like I hold a Disney story out loud.
So what you do is you go way to the right? Okay, you break out you break up, because a lot of people may be afraid to be over enthusiastic right mm-hmm. So I go through that. That’s one of the things that I do in the in the class and overcorrection exercise. There’s some other little things than we do, but that’s one of the major things – and I think one of the other things is is: is people have to connect with their own material? You have to believe in what you’re presenting I mean.
I think if you go in and you just think yeah, I don’t really believe in what I’m saying on we believe in this product. I mean it’s really hard to come across or, I believe in a magnet Susie asked about seen. You know about some of the results that I’ve seen and you know some of the things potentials it has so I buy into it negative Susie ethic, which is point of public speaking tip number seven, because the more enthusiastic you want about your product, your audience, will Be pitiful, so what are a couple of things that you would advise somebody to do? Maybe somebody who gives who has to speak, you know regularly or whatever what are some ways they can start to take.
Maybe some inventory of how well they’re doing people have critiques on you know like, for instance, I’m actually doing a one-off for a home speaking coaching for the person. That’s hasn’t ended up the Wells Fargo Championship here in Charlotte, and he when I first came in, I said so tell me what you want help with it. Most people are willing and have been taking their own inventory and they tell you well.
I’ve got too many arms and I’m a little dull. I don’t know how to punch things out. I get nervous this way my hands issues with my hands, yeah and then so high done. Do you help them to overcome these and cuz? Sometimes, let’s face it. Sometimes you can think that you have a problem with something, but when, when somebody from the outside takes a look at – and they say well, that’s not actually what your problem is.
You’ve got your problems over here right. So so, how do you help people? I mean cuz, I could come to you and say: oh, listen, Steve. You know this is my issue, I’m away from my hands too much, but you then read me and you go it’s not your hands, it’s something else I mean. So how do you help people focus in on the right things? You know you can find out what the issue is. You know maybe they’re flailing their hands because somehow someway they’re nervous.
I tell people, I say if you are nervous, use your hands to dispense matter. I mean some people are just going to for abundant energy than others. How did it talk other issues? That’s just sort of an experience, experiential thing that I find out when I’m doing the workshop, like, for instance, this person didn’t tell me most recently that they were there. Pauses were almost like that right there around our homes, okay, so they had a funny way of doing a.
Let me know funny way of doing it home because somebody probably said don’t do homes and they got they still have that nervousness right. It’s it’s! It’s really fascinating, though, when you see that how much people beat themselves up over over things right and how they get, how public speaking can you know become such a bit, you know, can create such you know, fears we said in people because they think that there’s So many components to it become back from to your formula.
Your formula is a pretty straightforward one to follow right. Yeah it takes it takes it really takes ounds simple. Only have people come up there and practice and do it they somehow someway run that action into the benefit, but you’ve got ta. You got ta, stop rhythm, you got ta just and what I do in my public speaking class. Is they work that stories? First comes now or that stories first I get this story done.
I say: okay, now tell me the action, the action you want, people to take and the benefit they’re going to receive from doing it boom. I say: go out there and tell your story and then just simply at the end of its thing, this is the action I want you to take. This is a benefit like your parents, hmm when you’re kids, they just say, don’t be the trigger, don’t fix this or don’t do the chore? Well, you did, they never told you why somebody would receive from doing if you didn’t, maybe fifty percent of the time you would you know – probably probably not but yeah, but at least you know at least you’d think about it.
So that’s it! That’s it. That’s interesting. It is, and I think what you’re hitting on here is that difference between the action you want to take in the benefit, that’s very easy to confuse those or conflate them right. So in in the last few minutes we have Steve what else? What other quick piece of advice would you give to people to improve their to improve their speaking and then tell us a little bit more about yourself and how people can learn more about you and you know, come to some of your classes? Well, here’s the thing! So a lot of people, you know they say well, I don’t have any problems with public speaking at a girl one time one of my classes say yeah.
I was in the debate team and everything showing up for the major of her presentation. She just folded. Mm-Hmm one thing you need to be modest and true yourself seriously: mm-hmm, sometimes the quietest, people, the people on the lowest rung of the ladder, usually turn out to be the best speakers in the class say this. I’ve seen a lot of people speed. So one thing never put your hands in front of you because you’re creating a barrier to the audience.
Oh, I see a lot of people. I see me doing that infomercials on TV and things or what have you Insurance commercials? They do the finger thing or what you know. The other thing is I’ve. Seen a lot of speakers do that they paced back and forth in front. They didn’t prove you know, and people think you know that you’re not Tony Robbins, okay, but you’re, not the eye clinic where they’re going to find you everywhere when you do that people are twisting their neck back and forth and they start not to get it all.
Because you’re going all over the place, that’s one of my pet peeves, I would suggest not to do the other thing too, is a lot of people think that if they memorize a presentation and try to restate it word for word they’re going to make, they have A perfect presentation – and that’s not – I need to be tempted – everybody’s tempted to do that and when you do what happens is you’re going to lose your spot you’re, inevitably going to lose your spot you’re going to have the back for a? Can it’s going to bite you it’s going to bind your speech online so that that’s pretty important! You know if you have to keep no cards, that’s fine! But typically, when you’re doing a presentation, you’re going to have those three bullet points, something yep title out there.
So you don’t mind, we’ll remember, looks behind those points. You’ll have the story behind them. So, yes, I said: yeah yeah, it’s Riley, hopefully there’s nothing worse than you know, bringing up your third bullet point and then going huh, I’m not magic on any base theories and you can improve somebody’s mind seriously a good percentage of doing these in the class. It’s really interesting because people think in pictures, so how this thing is oriented, but can I talk about my classes? Yes, please, to tell us a little bit more about yourself in your chances.
Samsung Toshiba places like that, and I do I guess what you want to call home speaking class where I advertise and then I can do in different cities, mostly around here, northern South Carolina and Virginia and Georgia, and things like that DC. There are two day classes and we cover everything under the Sun. You make one investment. I mean seriously that two-day class should last you the rest of your life mm-hmm because, like I said, you’ll learn a spot.
You’ll learn a portion, a section, then you practice it and then you perform by here for two days. If you don’t know it then there’s something wrong because you’re a birthday well next thing, but listen them thanks Steve. This is Steve’s stage Zack. My name is John golden pipeliner CRM and says pop online sales magazine spin grades been fun talking with you and look forward to another expert interviews really soon.
Guys have been asking for this, so I figured. I would just show you around a little bit in the office. Give you a little bit of a detailed look of what I need on a day-to-day basis to do my job. My actual job title is a process engineer and what that means is I interpret drawings from design engineers and calculate out material for it to be fabricated.
That’s kind of the easiest way to describe it. So basically I look at prints and drawings all day as well as I do a lot of math. So that’s kind of what I do and it’s all not all of its data entry, but a majority of it is data entry and entering it properly into our systems to make everything work. So this is my second bedroom, and this is now an office I used to have it as a guest room, but I converted it into an office quite a while ago, as you enter we’re going to look down right now.
Cuz Doyle is there sleeping doing his due diligence as the coworker, and let me give you like a little desk to her right now, since we’re dealing with kovat and all of that stuff. I have like a little heart thing. I actually got this on Amazon yesterday. This came in it’s like a little rope rainbow and I thought that was really cute. So you know I have my little my cute little valence here so yeah, I’m going to link as many things as I can find it down below for you guys over here.
Actually, let’s start with this wall, so clearly this is not required, but I have these prints on the wall. I got them from home goods, I believe, like home goods, our Marshalls. I can never remember which one, but I got them at the same time, they’re beautiful they’ve got like some sparkles on them and I just love like the gilded frame. I think that’s so so sweet so pretty anyway. Over here I have a little envelope opening thing.
I have right now just a little book in there, but I actually do keep like my paper bills in there. Anything that gets mailed to me that I have to like financially take care. I will put in there as a reminder and then, when I deal with it, then it goes in the file cabinet, which I will show you in just a moment. I have two of these lamps, which are on both sides flanking got those from Ikea. I also have this little funny-looking thing um, that is a tripod like.
I can actually put my camera right here. It’s like a little mount. I will link it is actually already linked below, but it works really well for my set up when I you know, do planning articles and such over the corner. Here are my planners that I got in PR that I have some things I need to do with or like deal with with them. I also have some stickers and I’m going to be doing a haul with I have more stickers coming, so I’m just kind of stacking them there for the moment over here I have this really cool, washi, cart and a bunch of simply gilded washi.
You got ta have hand cream, especially now, when we’re all washing our hands like crazy and then over here I’ve got some calendar set ups, so this is a firm Erin Condren. Those planners are from Erin Condren as well, but this is from Erin Condren. This was just kind of keeping track of my vlogging, and things like that and like what I needed to film so today is actually the 28th. I did a little bit of decorating, but not not too much so yeah, today’s the 28th and then I’ll be posting.
This, I don’t know at some point I actually got this acrylic easel, like a critics, stand on Amazon the other day, and I really like this a lot. I like that that just like sits there and I can see it cuz. I’ve got a lot of things going on so yeah like that. This is today and I’m down here, filming filming things, I’m filming things so yeah, but that’s that over here just some stuff. I need to deal with there’s some ups returning labels that I still need to hold onto until amazon credits.
My account I have like a little. I call it a washi cutter, it’s not it’s actually a bookmark, but I use it to cut washi. I just leave it right here. Then inside of here is a bunch of markers from Erin Condren, so we have that I’ve got a little coaster, because you need a coaster for all your good stuff. I also have some just random sticky notes. I was writing some sticky notes. I got ta put away whatever and then I have a new pad of sticky notes, so I just always have a fresh pad of sticky notes already and then I have a bunch of pens.
I just kind of put them in there. It’s easy, I’m right-handed, so it makes sense when I’m at my all my monitors that I have it on the right side. I also have my phone and it’s on a little stand right now, it’s being charged. That’s really easy to like you know, do this or have it sit like that, like for article calls or what have you and then I also have a wireless, keypad and mouse that all gets connected into this bad boy over here, which is my laptop and then Over on the side, here I have like a big pen holder, but um.
You know this doesn’t really fit anywhere else on the desk, so I just put it over there and then, when I need pens, I just throw them in there cuz it works, so they usually just use the same two or three over and over again, and if You guys are wondering I got my desk at IKEA. I can’t remember the name of it but um I had to you know everything was separate, so you got the file cabinets and then the top and the one-leg all separately, so yeah and then the chair.
I actually got on Amazon. I will link that below and then I think I got like everything on Amazon for the most part, and then I’ve got this, which I actually got the other day there I’ll make it look pretty for you. You can kind of make it look funny here, but this is supposed to help with, like I don’t know your nerves or something. But anyway I did read on the Amazon reviews that this can kind of stain your chair.
So I put a your encountering Sherpa throw down, so it didn’t stay in the white anyway, but it seems to be working just fine and I really like it and then underneath my chair. I actually have a foot roller because I have plantar fasciitis in my feet and that helps moving over here. I have all my chords just like a hot mess, but they are it’s a labeled hot mess. You guys and then I have my paper shredder.
I’ve got my printer, which I really don’t need to use to be honest for the most part, but every once in a while. I do need to physically sign something and then scan it. So it’s nice to have this, and this is a LaserJet printer and I absolutely love it and I’ve had it for a few years now and I really really like it. As for the file cabinet, it’s a three-tiered file cabinet also from Ikea, had it for several years now.
This tiered cart is from Ikea everything’s for making you guys – and this is my planner cart – that has all my stickers and all my washi and sticky notes and all my little doodads to decorate my planner, which is right over here. So you know I needed to put something in my planner or whatever I can just wheel. The cart over and plan and then over here is nothing really interesting. I have these two bookcases there, the billy bookcase – and this is what the inside looks like.
I really don’t have much going on in either of them. This used to be storage for my Etsy shop, which is no longer in business because it was just too much. I didn’t need to do that anymore, so I just said sayonara, and this is all the extras and then on top here I just have a little bit of tissue, another little organizer. This one is from home goods and then I’ve actually got some like these. Are these two are like work notebooks and then I have another work thing here.
This is a medical binder and then this is also a medical like binder slash tracker. So that’s basically it for my at-home work set up. I try not to up here, but it’s really, I feel like it’s super difficult right now, just with everything going on what I’d like to do is work when I’m working from home there’s a dog right there is I like to take him on a nice long, Walk usually about like 10:00 10:30 somewhere in there.
That kind of just helps my brain. Like I, you know in the morning I check my email. I get all my emails out do all of that good stuff and then once it kind of dies down just a little bit I’ll, take him out for just a little bit of a mental break. You know, like a 15-minute, walk, something like that. He’s getting really excited when I’m saying anyways and then yeah, I grab some water or whatever take my coffee or tea or whatever I’m drinking for the morning and oh, don’t worry your curse, um and then take that downstairs and then you know bring up bring up.
Some water or juice or whatever I want to drink, and you know kind of reinvigorate a little bit so yeah. But let me back up a little bit here: I’m going to back that train up here, come on Doyle, so yeah. That is it for my working at home office a set up. I hope you guys enjoyed the article and enjoyed just a little look at the office. I you know don’t use too much pen to paper, except for my little notes.
I do have to write myself little notes once in a while, but that’s about it. Everything is digitized. I send over all my completed work actually to my boss. He goes from there because he’s actually in the office right now. I think he’s he is the actually. The only person in the office, everyone else is working in production and they’re, taking all their precautions and things like that, and they actually all work more than six feet away from each other, so not sure when I’m actually going back into the office.
That has not been announced yet, but um yeah I’ll try to get this article up for you guys and then I will, like I said before. I will link as many products as I can find down below and then, if you have a home office set up, do you have any like tips or tricks or little things that really help you? You know, like the dog, helps me because kind of breaks up the day and things like that, but yeah right Doyle.
Do you help me? Do you like all of his bones by the way they’re just sitting? There excited he’s just an excited guy, but yeah he’s got he’s, got several bones just hanging out over here, just just waiting for him anyway. Okay, this is getting long-winded. Sorry about that guys, all right, I’m going to go! Thank you guys so much for reading. If you liked the article make sure to give it a thumbs up feel free to subscribe, and I will be back for more content very, very soon, bye guys, you want to say bye, no okay, talk to you later guys.
So as a beginner, then it can be quite overwhelming. Coming into a new ad manager account seeing all these different numbers, not knowing what they mean and not really having a clue what to do so. The idea of this article, then, is to show you the kind of things you need to be looking for what numbers to focus on, and, ultimately, what kind of patterns that essentially, you need to be looking for, for a couple of reasons really number one.
It’s going to make sure that you don’t switch off of that ad set that potentially could go on to make you lots of money, but then, on the flip side of that, to make sure you do switch off that ad set. There’s only going to drain your money now Before we jump into the point number one then I just want to quickly mention, as always, in every single article. I always give away a free one to one consultation.
Call with me. If that’s something you think they might help you that you want a chance to win, all you have to do is simply like the article and leave a comment down below and if you counted on my previous article just make sure you stay tuned to the end Of this one where the winner will be announced and with that being said, then let’s jump straight into it with point number one so point number one, then guys is spotting patterns and just kind of illustrate what I mean by this we’re going to jump into an Ad manager account of mine, and I’m just going to show you the kind of things you can be looking at to decipher them.
Whether an ad set is going to be perform or not. Going back to the original point I made in the intro to make sure that you don’t switch off that ad set too early and to make sure you don’t switch off that ad set too late, so I drained your bank can so what I’ve got here then, Is essentially every single ad set in this ad manager account they’re all purchase ad sets, which is another point I’m going to touch on later on in the article.
So we compare an ad sets that I’ve got the same objective, they’re all interest tags in ad sets as well, so that way we’re making fair comparisons and again that’s another point later in the article. But what I want to show you there to illustrate this point. We’ll just refresh the table, in fact, just to make sure I’ve got all the latest data. So what we’re looking at here then we’re looking at the amount spin and we’re going to be comparing this to the purchase REO asset.
So the return on adspend and we’re looking for a correlation between the two to give us an idea, then of whether an ad set is then going to go on and be successful or not. Because that’s one of the number one questions I get asked is that when how long should you run an ad set for how much should you spend how many days so on and so on? So this is a custom column. I’ve created myself, you can see.
It’s called Rho s, comparison, I’ve got the amount spent here and then on the far right. I’ve got the return on adspend and the reason I’ve structured like this. It’s just so it’s easy to compare the numbers if it was one column over here versus one column over here. It just makes it a lot more difficult, going back and forth. So again, we’re going to cover that later on in the article, so anyway we’re working from top to bottom.
I filtered it so the amounts been the maximum is at the top with the lowest at the bottom and we’re going to work our way through and just try and see at what point the the corner of life. At what point a kind of pattern presents itself. So, on average in this account the row s was one point: seven, seven, so that’s kind of be kind of like our base standard so start from the top. Then we can see where there are there.
Abouts. 1.56. 2.06. One point: seven, one point: seven, seven, the exact same again: it’s pretty much there and there abouts, which is pretty consistent with how I’ve seen things perform in the past, with all my different ad manager accounts and we’re just looking at to see basically where it starts To drop off and if there’s a correlation between ad spend and the purchase real-ass so go and further down, we’ve got a couple of kind of like really low ones here, but then it jumps straight back up to be fairly consistent.
But then again it drops down again. So this is where kind of like that inconsistencies are starting to come in, and this is kind of like at 1600 pounds and above it’s fairly consistent. But then once there’s a big drop in the spend, so you can see there 653 pounds. You’ve got a pretty good roll s and again for that, but then again spending the exact same amount. Almost it’s almost 50 % of that rower.
So you can see. This is where the inconsistencies are starting to come in, which is something that we can learn from carrying on. Then we can see that then again it jumps back up which is again more more inconsistencies and then, as we get a bit further down, we can see that down here where we’ve spent a hundred and twenty pounds. This is actually the first time in which it drops below a one-point iOS and if we just carry on down to see, if that stays consistent again, we’ve got a really low row out there and then we’ve got a hundred pound, spend one point one three and Then it jumps back up dangerous back down into us back up.
Then it jumps back down. So what this is telling me, then, is that until I’ve spent approximately what point is it come all consistent as until have spent approximately over say four hundred pounds, then the results are always going to be inconsistent. Now the profits will grow. As for this store is about one point four, so if we just include that in when we’re looking for the pants a spot, if that makes sense, then we’re looking at what point is consistently above that and we – and it’s approximately at this mark here anything kind Of under one hundred and twenty pounds we can see, then we kind of get lucky spending seventy pounds, but that could just peel that could be pure look, but on average below 120 pounds spend is below or one point zero s and therefore and profitable.
So what that tells me, then, is that I have to spend approximately 120 pound on an ad set before Facebook status to optimize. Learn who my customers are and therefore give me the results that actually make an ad set profitable and in there guys then lies the key and the success to Facebook. Ads in that, if you don’t give your ad set enough of a chance to optimize, get a push enough data through then you’ll never give an answer chance to make you money essentially now.
Obviously, this is going to vary from audience to audience, as some audiences are more competitive than others, but for this specific audience, then, as we’ve just know as we’ve just highlighted, that seems to be the sweet spot in that I have to spend approximately 120 pounds and Above on an ad set for it to actually start to optimize and bring in decent results for me and if you’re reading this article, then I want you to consider this against what your past experiences are and think about it.
Go into your ad manager. Account now pause the article going to our manage your account. Look at the ad sets. You’ve been running, look at the ones that switched on look at the ones that are switched off and all the ones that I haven’t performed then look at how much you’ve spent on them before you’ve started to switch them off, because it could be a case in Which, like literally 50 % of them, if not more, could be really good audiences.
It’s just a case that you haven’t. Let them run enough. You haven’t spent enough for Facebook to be able to optimize efficiently, actually start bringing you the sales and the rows that you want to see. So that’s point number one thing guys. I spent quite time actually trying to explain this. That’s because it’s a really important point. So if there’s anything at all in there that I haven’t covered that didn’t cook that doesn’t quite make sense to you.
Please please, please make sure you leave a comment down below. I always get back to every single person. So moving on to number two, then this is the structure and organization of your Facebook ad account, and this is more important than you can ever imagine because, as point number one point one of one’s kind of like the key point. But in order to do that correctly, then you must do these following three points as well.
So number it’s a number two, the instructor and organization. This will help you with spotting power spotting patterns, but those patterns have to be fair comparisons, so you can’t go and compete a look-alike audience against an interest targeted audience or you can’t go and compete an interest targeting audience against a retargeting ads, because it’s not a Fair comparison, so when it comes to spotting patterns, then the patterns won’t be fair patterns.
If that makes sense, because the numbers will always perform different. So when you go out there and name your campaigns name your ad sets, then this is the structure. I want you guys to follow so that when you do filter that ad sets and when you are looking at the names of the ad sets versus the numbers, then you’re making fair comparisons. Because if you don’t spot a pattern within a fair comparison, then the numbers are going to be skewed and it’s going to give you a false representation of whether you need to switch that ad set off or keep it running.
Hopefully that makes sense but, like I said, any questions at all, just make sure you leave a comment below so this is how I want you to name your ad sets. Then. First of all, I want you to call it by the name of traffic, because you have different levels. You can have Col traffic, which is essentially when the audience you’re targeting is their first encounter versus hot traffic, which is re tags and add somebody who’s seen your product before.
If they’ve seen you for the second third fourth time, then obviously they’re going to convert at a different rate, so somebody who’s seen it the first time, so you can’t make those comparisons against each other. So this is why you need to call it what kind of traffic is it then, is it cold traffic? Is it warm traffic? Is it hot traffic, then I want you to call it by the actual product itself. If you’re advertising and low two different products at a time, then you’ve got again, you’ve got to make sure that you’re comparing the same product against the same products in two different audiences.
They don’t want you to name it by the actual objective. Because again, you can’t compare a traffic campaign against the purchase campaign. The numbers are just going to be they’re not going to correlate whatsoever. So it’s going to give you a false reading and then, finally, what the actual audience is so is it look-alike? Is it interest targeting is a retargeting ad? Is it everybody who’s been to your site, but didn’t make a purchase? Is it everybody, who’s made a purchase and so on? Just so that when you ask but in the patterns then you are comparing like for like ad says, moving on to point number three, then guys, which is breakdowns.
So if you want to scale a particular ad set or make it more profitable by spending more money on the brackets that are profitable, then this is essentially where the breakdowns tab comes into play. Many many many of you probably have already used it and seen it, but there’s still some beginners out there. I feel like there’s a lot of beginners that read this blog. That won’t have seen it before and it’s if you’ve never seen it before.
Then this is going to be a complete game-changer for you, so I just want to draw your attention over to the right where you can see the breakdown tab. I just minimize this, so this is how it will open up for you in fact I’ll clear. All the breakdowns, so this is for select ad sets that have spent the majority of the money for me and what I’m going to do then, is pretty much just find out where that money is coming from.
So I can then narrow it further down and you spend all of that ad spend all of that budget, sorry on the most profitable brackets, so I want to go by delivery and then most commonly is the gender, which is the first one. Now this is not the greatest example in fact, because the first three ad sets are female. Only. However, if we have a look at the bottom one we can see, we’ve got male and female, and if we just look at the two row asses, you can see that male is performing at one point.
Five six, but then female is completely trumping. That at two point, six two now this is where the Facebook algorithm doesn’t always work efficiently, because you would think that it would be based on the ROE s and whichever gender would be, bringing you the best Roe us, that’s the one it would put most of The money into, but, as you can see in this case, well that just isn’t the case. So what I would do here, then, is actually think about either duplicating this into another campaign and tags in female.
Only with the same interests – or I might experiment with just simply removing mail from this ad set and let it carry on runnin, I know the breakdown you can do. Then I’m not going to show you every single one, because you guys can go and have a play around I’ll. Just show you kind of like the main to gender, and then, of course, the other one is age range, because this is one way you’ll soon start to spot.
Different patterns especially depend on what Anisha in there’s definitely going to be certain age ranges that are going to be forming better than others. So, just looking at the top, then we can see that kind of like if you look at. If we see where the best row s is, I’ve got one point. Five, five one point: three, eight one point two to one point six, so we can see that it’s kind of like the older generation, anything above 30 for age range, is performing at a better row.
S than one point, two two. So if I shut off those other two, that’s going to increase the profitability of this ad sir moving down to the second one, then it’s pretty much a reverse. I think if I’m just comparing numbers correctly and if you know the 65 plus is one point, four one which is the which is kind of like the row with lowest row s. But then we’ve got thirty five to forty four, which is obviously pretty good.
So what I would do here, then, is simply just cap, this ad set at 64 to make sure that I’m not tagging people over 65 plus because, as you can see for this particular audience, they’re performing at the worst row s. So that’s as simple as it is, but it can trust me go out. Experiment have looking within your ad cess, see where the data is coming from, because it can make a huge difference to your profitability.
Moving on to the fourth and final point: nine guys is the numbers, so you need to make sure you’re looking at the right numbers, otherwise again you’re going to get false representation and if you’re not only focusing on the correct numbers, then it’s going to be very Overwhelming you might be looking at one column thinking it’s another one. So a way to do this, then, is just customize your columns to make sure you only include these five, and these are kind of like the main five and I’m going to take you through one by one, then of why I actually include every single one.
First of all, though, I want to show you how I go about creating these so simply go across new columns, customize columns or X off all of these to star again. So the first one I want you guys to add is the amount of spent now. The reason you need to add this is purely because of what I showed you earlier on in the article is that the amount spent versus at what point your ads start to perform. Better is kind of like a key correlation and pattern that you need to be.
Focusing on because that’s going to be the key indicator, then of when you need to shut an ad off or when or when you need to keep it running, so it mounts Ben. We also want our CPM. We also want our click-through rate make sure it’s the link, you click through rate as well. We also want our cost per link, click and then, finally, the very last one was our purchase row s. Where are we purchased row s and will acts off that as we only need it once so, these the main comes in or want you guys to have in your screen, and then these are the numbers.
I want you to look at for every single ad set when you’re making those comparisons. So here we Alan goes back in kind of the overview of this ad account. You can see. Every single ad set here is listed and I’ve renamed the column. Then stop a /keep and this is going to be then the column that I use when I’m deciphering, whether to keep an ad set running or whether I’m going to shut it off or not. So I always feel to buy ad spend first.
So you can see the most at the top and least at the bottom, and then this is essentially where the work begins. It can be a bit kind of tiresome and a bit. I don’t know what the word is still don’t know where the word is, but just it’s something you’re just going to have to do. If you want to be successful with Facebook has, if you think that you can just keep pulling out random ads and hoping for the best, then, unless you’ve got really deep pockets, I don’t think you’re going to get where you want to be.
If you want to spend your money conservatively and make sure that every pound or penny you spend ghost’s is useful and used properly, then I truly believe this is going to be the best way so start scrolling through the numbers. Slowly and just literally trying to take in as much as possible and just see what kind of spaten patterns what kind of patterns start to present themselves so always keep. In the back of your mind, then, you’ve got the largest amount spent at the top and we’re just going to start going through the numbers and one by one until we find a pattern just to kind of illustrate them to you guys what kind of work I’m Trying to do when I’m looking at my Facebook Ads so looking at the CPM Zen, they all seem fairly consistent, ish.
You can see in fact, not really at all. Actually you’ve got kind of luck around the five pound mark and then they tend to jump up. I’ve got a click-through rate again that kinda tends to go up and down and up and down CPC. In fact that looks pretty consistent. So when you find one, that’s consistent, that’s kind of like what you want to kind of like base your overview of, and then when that starts to change, start looking at all the other numbers and then find that correlation in and between.
So we can see it’s kind of luck around the 70p mark a bit above bang on pretty much bang on bit below, so you can see it’s pretty consistent and then here start to actually drop down, which is interesting. So from that amount spins you can see. We’ve had 1,600 here when it drops down the actual cost per link. Click actually gets a lot cheaper, which is interesting, and this actually continues on. As you can see, we’ve got like a freak one here, which is quite expensive again, it’s kind of similar to a top, but you can see here, actually carries on dropping down and actually gets pretty cheap soar.
What that tells me, then, is that, in the initial stages of an and set, Facebook is essentially just trying to drive the cheapest traffic as possible, but once you start to spend a bit more, then it’s telling me that I can actually I’m actually starting to compete With the other kind of lot of big spenders within an audience – and that is when I’m actually tagged in the highest quality audience within the audience, I’ve selected, if that makes sense, so kind of a better way to explain it, is that when I’ve got a small Budget Facebook is showing my ad to a lower quality audience within the audience that are selected, but once I’ve started spending a bit more than Facebook stats to show my ad to am higher quality audience and even though the link licks are costing more.
That’s probably because there’s a higher competition they’re actually converting at a better rate, and that is actually where the majority of my purchase and revenue is actually coming from. If that makes sense. So hopefully I’ve explained that well enough, hopefully, I’ve given you some ideas, or at least Conflux some guidance towards analyzing, your own Facebook Ads. So from what I’ve just seen, then my understanding is that once I start to spend a bit more money, Facebook starts to show my ads to a higher quality audience, and I need kind of like more clarification or more confirmation, and that is true.
So one thing I would then now go on to compare that against is the CPM, so the CPM is the cost per 1000 impressions and the higher CPM then obviously the more competitive and audience is because there’s more and more people competing for those impressions. Therefore, it’s going to drive the price up. Facebook is a bidding platform. So if I compare the CPMs now as we go down that list, then if my theory is correct, then initially where the spend is higher because it’s a higher quality audience, the CPM should be a lot higher versus the lower spend ones where the audience and the Quality is a lot lower, therefore, so cheap you sue p.
M. If that makes sense. So would you scroll through then I’ve got five, sixty nine fifteen seventy, so you can see on average. Is it’s pretty much above ten pounds on average, especially from this point upwards and then, as we start to get below this point so again, it’s always around this kind of mark. So that’s kind of like a sweet spot for this niche. Then, as we get below that, then you can see it’s pretty fairly consistently a lot cheaper.
So that kind of confirmed my suspicions in that, once you spend kind of around this sweet spot, then you start the Facebook start showing your ads to a higher quality audience and therefore you start to get better results. So with that, basically guys. I think I pretty much wraps up the article. That’s all four points covered make sure you leave a comment down below and let me know what you think.
Hopefully, if you guys have found some value in this article, if you have all I ask, is that you leave a like on the article and if you want to be entered into the one to one draw, just make sure you leave a comment down below so That been something guys thanks for, went thanks for reading and let’s get to announcing the win over the previous article. So here we are then guys on my previous article, if you haven’t seen it yet, please do go and make sure you check out had lots of good feedback.
So thank you very much to everybody who did like the article and leave a comment anyway. I’m going to take the URL at the top head over to our random comment: picker get the YouTube comments and go ahead and click start and see who the winner of this free consultation is going to be on this article. Then so the winner of the previous article is that person there? If that’s you, congratulations please reach out to me on Instagram and we can get that call arranged and guys if you want to stop trying your luck and you feel like you’re, never going to win.
One of these things – and you just want to get straight down to business and book a call right away. You can’t actually do so just make sure you check out the article links in the description below and that being southern guys thanks again for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the article and I see in the next one
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So let’s go ahead and get into it. I actually have two knives in here: it’s just a regular standard, flat rate priority box here and open it got my current. I wouldn’t say favorite, but I like a lot the micro tech, utx, 7000 and open this up here and see what we got inside I’ll, get some more tape on the side here and so inside of that box.
We have these two boxes um, if you’re into knives you’ve – probably heard of this brand, especially recently it’s called to son. They are Chinese brand and their knives are actually start with that I had to adjust the camera angle there um their knives are fairly popular, though I saw these two for a very good price as a bundle combo, so I picked them up, so I’m not sure Which one is which um we do have the two at TS 80 and I believe the TS one something we’ll cover that in a minute.
Let’s go and take a look at this top one first and see what we’ve got in here. Oh, so it’s a box in a box, okay and just show you, the outside packaging, Tucson Tucson, nothing special and a little almost paper, esque box here, okay, so this is the one that actually bought. The bundle for this is the I love to look at the exact number, but it’s called the stingray, I’m initial impressions, it’s very thick, it’s not as heavy as I would have thought it to be.
Um centering is really really good um. This is a front flipper. As you can tell very stylish looking knife as well, I really like the clip a lot, so I’m curious to see how that functions. The one thing I will say if you’ll notice there’s not much ramp there, so I’m a bit worried about how that’s going to function in the pocket. It’s going to see if I need this open a bit of a Miss flip, so really cool.
Almost a tanto style compound grind up there on the blade, very big blade compared to the handle. I really really like that look. It feels really really good in the hand on some slides right in here, and this out almost acts like a finger choil to a degree. I really like this actually and one thing these knives are really known for is their low price point too high value. So let me see if it kind of drops shut a little bit a little bit of coaxing, let’s see if in Spidey Flicka here tight, not really, let me try to do it off camera.
I would so yeah. I can get it there. I’m! Let me try to front flip it again, so yeah I can get it I’ll, probably disassemble this and riilu brocaded here with some kpl in just a moment. I really like the feel this carbon fiber. It’s really really nice as well. If you can kind of see that there we’re the really nice carbon fiber – and this is pretty good overall – I paid, after all of a sudden done like $ 50 for this on.
It is d2 steel, titanium liners carbon, fiber overlay, titanium, clip and stainless steel hardware. So not that bad and the action off-camera I can drop it. I can drop it shut. If I try so we’ll keep that one in mind, that is the hug one open it back up here. If you guess you don’t want to look at that, is the tucson stingray i’ll have the exact model number in the article, i’m also putting down the description? If I remember, if I don’t remember, leave me a comment so next up we have TS 80.
This is codenamed a Jaeger. I really like the guy. Who does this design you can find them on instagram. I believe it’s under vin test design be int, esse um, this knife, I actually for some reason. I thought it would be. I thought it would be thinner or thicker than the stingray here, but they look like they’re about the same. The stingray, maybe a little bit with thicker honestly, lay that back down for y’all, so the Jaeger here same thing: d2, carbon, fiber and titanium.
This one does weigh a bit more. I really your stylings of this. I don’t like the how high the clip is going to set like that much of your of the knife’s going to be sticking out, but the clip is very, very stylish. It goes with it very, very well and let’s check the action on this. Oh that’s really good holy crap, that’s it so I picked these up in as a bundle, and I was honestly intending on selling this one, but I make you both.
These are just really really good. An initial impressions, of course, so take that. Take that for what you will, but right out, the box. These are looking good. This is a lot more of a tanto style, grind, um in hand. This one actually feels better it does. I do feel a little bit of a hollow down here. Um, I have somewhat large hands, but this this is really real nice. I do wish there were some jimping.
I’m right here like there is on the Stingray, because if you sit them side-by-side, I would consider this one to probably be the more hard used knife just looking at them straight on, but this one’s more comfortable, ergonomic Lee and there’s no jumping on this one. So, let’s check the action here: oh the action is much much smoother on this one. Let’s see if it’s going to be very difficult to get in camera, I’m working on getting some new lenses guys to apologize, but that is smooth see if we can spot a flick it it’s very difficult to do under camera kind of.
I will work on the action here in just a bit. I don’t think I’m going to do a disassembly. I’m try to keep my articles a little bit shorter, but my initial impressions of both of these knives fantastic there will be reviews in the coming weeks. These are may featured in my knife collection, article which may air before this – I don’t know not there yet, but I really really impressed these I’m going to go in and play with these expensive fidget toys and I’ll see all you guys later.
Thanks bye,
Knives and daggers are awesome! Plain and simple, right? Let me say, I enjoy my dagger collection with a little music playing in the background.
In this four-part series, I will cover all the fundamental free and paid tools that I use to drive traffic to my website and as well as my customers websites. I will avoid using technical terms and make this series easy to follow, so that a complete beginner will be able to follow along and by the end of the four steps series here will have a good grasp of how to actually promote your website.
Your small business website, so starting out module number one. Will you will cover Google Analytics now? What is google analytics? Google analytics is a free tool that shows you who, what where, when who is on your website and very important first thing in order for you to get better with driving traffic and knowing exactly what’s what’s working? What’s not working is having a full set of metrics available to show you the traffic on your website.
You need to be able to measure that, in order to know what works and what does not. Secondly, we will cover keyword, research. I will show you another free tool. What is a keyword, keywords or key phrases are very important for a couple of reasons when you’re targeting customers in the search engines, search engines need to know certain keywords or key terms to know exactly what your website is related to vote and also when you’re targeting Customers, when you’re using pay-per-click advertising, you need keywords and certain keywords will perform better than other.
Certain keywords will be used to, for example, somebody in the market looking to buy landscaping would be you know your cities, let’s say New York’s best landscaping company there in the market to buy some services landscaping services. So you want to target those keywords. That’s a keyword! So I’ll show you exactly how to find those keyword, how to know what kind of volume is available in those keywords in your particular market and moving on from there with keywords, the third module is pay-per-click advertising now pay per click.
Advertising to me is is the way to go. It’s paid targeted traffic to your website, targeted, meaning people in the market. Looking for your services, that you provide your your business you’re, an auto dealer and you’re trying to sell cars, trucks whatever, and you can target and you’re in this city of, say, 30,000 people. You can narrow it down to just people in your city and target people that are doing searches for used vehicles set and bang right at the top of the search results.
A ad for your company will appear and a good chance of beings that set up at the top of the search results that they will click on, and now you only pay if people actually click on your ad. So, for example, of a landscaping company that I do pay per click, advertising for was able to land a multi, ten thousand dollar annual contract from the Civil three-dollar at. So not all out some some ads – or you know, 30 40, 50 Cent’s.
Some ads can be as high as per click could be very high if you’re a lawyer, for example, but in general, most ads pay-per-click ads if they’re clicked on you know one or two dollars and I great lead somebody’s in the market. Looking for your services in your city, it’s a small investment to make to possibly gain a new customer, so I will cover pay-per-click advertising all the best practices, things to avoid things that I’ve learned, spending, tens and thousands, tens and tens of thousands of dollars in pay-per-click Advertising made tons of mistakes along the way and I’ll pass on my my learning curve on to you and a whole bunch of resources for pay-per-click advertising, to promote your small business in your local market and, last but not least, the fourth module will cover.
What’s called Google my business now, Google, my business if you’ve ever seen, you’ve done a search in for a local service, let’s say a painting company, so yeah. I live in New York and I’m looking for New York painting company, I type in all of a sudden. You see this map up here and all of these different businesses are listed in a few businesses are plotted out on the map. How do you get your business on that now? That’s called Google, my business so we’ll review Google, my business, how it works, how to get set up and again some fundamental points: do’s and don’ts with Google, my business.
So those are. The four modules will cover to get your small business up and going so people can actually find you in these search engines. Now. One thing I do want to disclose: I’m not affiliated with Google, I love google. They have fantastic tools. I just want to disclose that. I am not affiliated. I am in this article promoting a lot of their free tools. They’re pay-per-click advertising also Bing also has a similar suite of tools.
If you’re, if you prefer to use Bing you, you can follow this tutorial and apply it a lot of these tools at tipping as well. You can research and look for those, but for the purpose of this tutorial I will be using the google tools beings. They do dominate the market share, so just fall along. I’m ready if you’re ready. Let’s get down to business.
You would think Layne Becker would be excited about this, but he literally vomited when this occurred. Why is that? He made no money and when I say he made no money, I’m talking about zero him and his early investors. How did this happen? We will get into that, but that’s the premise of this article, the fact that artists and founders are so much alike. A lot of times we actually over demonize the music industry, not realizing that this is just how business goals.
If you don’t handle your business, and I want to contrast the differences between the two actually more of the similarities between the two, hopefully you’ll be able to transfer the knowledge, see how it applies and, at the end of the day, become a better business person. In your own particular area, so starting with the artist and the founder right, those are the same person in this example and similar to the artist right.
Their first round of funding where they get their first money is either themselves when they’re starting their company. Maybe they might be hitting up friends and family, there’s literally a friends and family around that people use colloquially a lot because they’re kidding up calling everybody in the family asking for money trying to save money for the business or angel investors, which is kind of a Somewhat of a next level, these are people who will invest, they have money but they’re, not truly those venture capitalists, which is the next level.
It’s the same thing for an artist right, you’re, either funding it yourself or you’re, scraping around asking people. You know the next level is when things really starts to get tricky, though all right, the venture capitalists and the record labels, so the venture capitalist, obviously the founder side, we’re thinking about tech and a lot of the other industries and then the record label side, because Both of these people can be helpful all right, but at the same time, these people are no one to play with.
So leverage is important for both companies on both sides. We hear so much about artists needing to build leverage if they really want to get a deal where they’re not screwed with a label, but the same thing goes when it comes to business in general, if you’ve readed any episodes of Shark Tank. What do you see? What are yourselves that’s one of the main things they’re going to add. They might entertain all the other stuff, but before they start investing they’re like yo, what are the sales – and it might have been this great pitch to where they were so bought in, but once they hear they’re in zero sales, they’re like whoa same thing, for an Artist right, why does that make sense? Because if anybody is investing in you, they’re investing to get a return and their return has to answer to what actually happens with the investment right? Do you have fans? Can you make the money back? Is your product sellable? Do people actually want your product? Can you make the money back? That’s the end question, and that doesn’t mean that nobody appreciates art.
That doesn’t mean that nobody appreciates somebody meeting a chance and all that stuff. It just means if you were an investor, you expect your money back, so you have to analyze not based on the heart and what I believe is awesome, music and all that stuff you have to analyze on. Will this vehicle bring me back my money, you put yourself in a better position to have some sort of leverage Point Blank period and if we look at Shark Tank again is another example.
You’ll see right that people get some pretty bad deals at times or offers write. Some pretty aggressive offers some of the investors to take a lot of control from the people if they don’t believe that the person is right, so you’ll see a situation where literally Mark Cuban – or somebody will say, hey, I’m going to just give you this much money. But I want the whole business cuz. I don’t think you’re the right person to run it, the less sales you have, the less likely people will want it at all or the more they’ll want to control your situation.
Point Blake, so leverage. Now, on the founder side, you might have customers or users and on the artist side, of course, you have fans and in the same way as an artist you’re looking for your first fans right and you’re, getting your early product out there, the early version of yourself Out there, businesses are doing the same right. They have a a minimal, Viable Product right, the product that can find and connect with the fans who need it, the most or the users who need it, the most and they’re trying to connect with those people.
So they can get some feedback and some money that gives them a tomorrow, so they can build and continue to get another tomorrow and another tomorrow until they get to a point where they’re a full-blown business that can is truly self sustained. That’s the same thing that you’re trying to do as an artist right, you’re, trying to build fans and build fans until they can start to fund tomorrow and then fund another tomorrow.
Until you have a lot of tomorrow’s and your tomorrows become weeks months and years, you have a full-on career, it’s the same path, business in so many ways it’s sex, especially principally, is business so that core product and your core fan base. Those are the things that start to relate right: the core product with the core customers and then the core music, like that initial, that niche type music, not just your commercial stuff, and then the core fan base around that and both of these.
This is when it gets more interesting and something that has to be readed out for, and that is the fact that there is core product on both ends. You have the type of music of yours that your core fanbase loves and a company has its core product right. That thing that solves the initial need, but both have a tendency to get caught up in features so for a product in a company features, are something that are additional to the main thing that matters, and sometimes the features are so shiny that we’re like yo.
I’m going to chase this, and this is going to change the world, and this is what they’re going to want they’re going to love me. But the thing fails in the same way the iPad, it’s kind of a feature of a product right when we’re thinking about a bigger company. It’s an extended brand line that doesn’t necessarily have the need of the phone and it doesn’t have the need of the Mac. In itself, it’s that middle ground, but you can do the same thing with a specific product.
Let’s say my Mac, all of a sudden had a heat pad. That was warm because it would be cold outside right at the mouse. Like I touched it and all of a sudden the computer got warm. I could put my hand on it. Yeah, that’s nice, but I can’t put my entire direction of my company on that, because it’s not the core product, even though it’s cool companies get lost on that. That sounds like an obvious example, but companies get lost on that all the time and artists do something similar when they try to get caught up in this whole diversity thing – and I want to do all this stuff, but forget what my core fanbase loves me for And it’s nice, you are a person, you should be able to express yourself and get all these other things out, but you also when we’re talking about it from a business and have to be able to answer to who your core fan base is and what’s going To keep you in there and then last but not least, this is where we get back to get satisfaction that acquisition, how to founder, had zero dollars, losing control alright and there’s two ways to look at it.
First, you have to lose control that happens with a lot of founders and the business starts to go down. We can even look at Steve Jobs, even though you know, arguably, he wasn’t completely ready to even take it to the space that it eventually became, but the whole idea of losing the DNA of your company losing the DNA of your company, those founders losing control, because You decide I’m going to put a CEO in this place – a seasoned CEO in this place, because the founder doesn’t have that experience and I, as an investor, want to make sure that my investment is protected.
I don’t want to trust this newbie with it. That happens to a lot of founders. They literally get booted just for a seasoned. Ceo now same thing happens with artists as well, though, when you get in labeled situations, and you get all these, you know mines in the pot. In that situation, the artist is losing creative control, so you’ll hear a lot of artists, say man, I listen to too many people, or I allowed other people to really take on my project when it wasn’t coming for me and now, because I lost that creative control.
My product became something that it shouldn’t have and the companies get affected the same way they go down because the consumers they feel it, but in the last level of losing control that I’m referring to is obviously the fact that this founder lost control of their business And how did they lose control of their business? They lost control of their business through investments all right, because these people start to own more and more of your business.
In the same way, your masters might be owned if you’re, an artist right or whatever your IP right, your your image can literally be owned as an artist. This same thing essentially happened to this man in Layne Becker story. You can actually see a combination of all the things that went wrong because in 2010, three years after I’m founding the company, he got pushed out three years after the company sold five years later.
But it didn’t just sell because it was doing well it’s sold because it was either going out of business or it was going to be acquired. There was something called a fire sale which means look week. Somebody buyers over out of here. We don’t really have a choice, and why was it in that position? Maybe some of that could be contributed to not having that initial creative energy that person that was supposed to be there in the same way, the artist should be involved in their project in that creative process, they lost that DNA when they lost the founder.
That can play a large part into that situation and then, last but not least, though Becker actually admitted to not being honest with himself and that being a large portion of why he lost control. And what I mean by that is think about as an artist when an artist wants to hop into a deal knowing they’re, not in a position to be in control of their career, knowing that they don’t have a true fan base that reality is not there.
However, they allow themselves to think and feel that they’re bigger than they are, or they allow other people to pump themselves up to feel that way, because the label or whoever you’re, trying to sign to it’s going to pump you up and make you feel that way. They allow that to happen, and then you put yourself in a aggressive financial situation that you can’t account for right. You take a bigger investment that you’re not going to be able to pay back.
It’s an artist taking a huge advance when they know that their fan base isn’t in place or just taking more money that you need in general, where you can one operate by yourself or maybe you just need a little bit to get you by, but instead you Want to go for the big pot when you’re not ready to even take that bike. It’s something to consider, because, again, all these problems exist in all types of business.
The principles are always there is just if you notice them or not and again, no matter what type of business you’re not going to win doing bad business. That just is how the game is going to be set up. You can’t expect anybody there’s going to be putting money into you to look at you purely for who you are and and the amazingness of the product. At the end of the day, they have to make their money back that’s their goal, and then you have your particular goals, but once you take their money, you also have to answer to their goals as well, because you have a fiduciary responsibility.
That’s just something to consider. Please please of course, start to look at other forms of business to really inform how you can look at music and and move throughout your music career and people outside of you know: music, look at music because music is helpful. There’s situations and analogies are all there. I would like to know what you guys think. Do you guys see similarity between tech founders and artists? Do you guys see any other business celebrities or have any other stories? Anything that’s interesting to tell and other than that.
This is yet another episode of culture shock where we talk music business in pop culture from a different perspective, you know what to do. He dares subscribe.
If you want to do this most of the time, because you can always find exceptions so to just about any of these guidelines that they’re going to be exceptions right, if you’re doing a standard website for standard business or organization, these are good rules of thumb. To follow so kind of summarize, some of the ones that we talked about so far, we talked about a website being, first of all, content having good content and by good, accurate, updated and what the visitors of the site need and again a lot of times when People talk about web design, they focus on sort of the surface of it.
The superficial aspects of it, the color, the fonts and all that and that’s an important part of web design. But just important in my mind, is making sure you have the right content. Then doesn’t happen by accident all right. It doesn’t happen by accident that you have the right content for a website. Everything you do about a website ought to be thought through and planned all right and um sites.
You know you may look at this and say well it’s obvious and all that, but I guess I don’t know. I guess obvious to who the whole point of web design is that you’re going to have a whole bunch of decisions to make, starting with what content you’re going to have on the site. How you’re going to organize the site on what the site is going to? Look like what the pages are going to look like and all these ought to be deliberate decisions all right and they ought to be deliberate decisions guided by the goals of your organization and just, as importantly, the girls of the people that are visiting the site.
All right, so content is a design principle. Choosing the correct content. The site that is well organized is something that we talked about and more organized. We talked about a couple different ways that it could be well organized one is we can talk about the overall site being well organized another? Is the information is categorized in such a way that is clear to the user, where to find everything it doesn’t do any good to have a website that has tons of great information if no one can ever find anything on it all right.
It’s amazing, when I have talked to people that have developed web sites that aren’t particularly good on the most common compare their users is that they can’t find the information that they’re looking for and sometimes what managers or web ball masters or whatever you want to call Them get defensive and say well that content is there, but if people can find it, it doesn’t do any good if it’s there.
So, therefore, the host site ought to be organized and it ought to be organized in a way that makes sense to the users or the site visitors. It doesn’t do any good. If I, as the web developer, understand the way the site is organized and it makes perfect sense to me, it needs to make sense to people outside of the organization. It may need to make sense to the users, so the sight of all ought to be organized and individual pages ought to be organized, and this is why we use things like color and borders and putting space between things and different fonts and so on.
We don’t just do it to make the pages look nice. Obviously we do want the pages to look good. No one wants the development of the website, but we do it in a purposeful way to sort of help guide the user through the way that our pages are organized. So it becomes obvious that that green column on the left side of the pages of navigation, all right and the contact informations in a blue strip on the bottom of the page or whatever.
Alright. So our pages are organized and we use these things visually. To help emphasize the stuff that needs emphasis alright, so that would be a second guideline or web development. A third guideline is consistency, and that also can mean several different things. Consistency in terms of how pages are laid out now that doesn’t mean that every page needs to be laid out in an identical fashion, all right, but there should be some sort of consistency to it.
You don’t want to make it look like. You are visiting two different sites as you navigate around your website, so stuff should appear in a consistent place, and usually that means having a banner on the top of the page having a navigation somewhere either along top along the left or along the right. Maybe having a footer with additional information and then having an error area for content information.
Now we can go to different sites and see that not every page is organized identically, but there is some sort of consistency. All right. Consistency also relates to the terminology that we use within our website and I’ll give you an example of how that could be very confusing years ago. I work for a software company that dealt with people in the food business all right now in the vocabulary of that business principle, manufacture and maybe even one other word principal manufacturer now, maybe even been another word all meant the same thing.
Alright, so we’re developing a website, we will want to keep the use of the term consistent. If they’re calling those people principles, we would want to call them principles on every page. We wouldn’t want to call them manufacturers on one page and principles on the other, because that would be confusing to people all right, so you want to be consistent with the way that you phrase things so, for example, on the site for colleges, maybe for college.
Maybe we would have a page for prospective students and we call it prospective students. We wouldn’t want to call that something else on another page call it future students or something like that, because people love to see that and think that that means something different so be consistent in the terminology that you use call things the same way all right. That’s a guideline. Another guideline is sort of a consistency between the appearance should singer to match the content.
Does anyone know what I mean by that that your parents should match the content? Yes, okay, if your page is about space, you don’t want to put unicorns and ponies about on it. That’s probably a good idea. Does anyone else have another example? The example I always give is, I think, of two examples on you know how many of you have been on the barbie website within the past month or okay. Well, that’s fine! You’re not allowed to answer this question.
Only the people that have not been on the barbie site. What color do you think is the Barbie website pink, let’s see if you’re right, you don’t have to justify or explain. That’s: okay, no, no judgments. Okay, I’m pulling up the site for Barbie and looky here sure enough. The main colors is pink all right. Okay! Does someone named a heavy metal band? How do you spell that august burns red? This is a slightly surprising others, guys what color their site is going to be and what would you have guessed black and that’s what what I would have guessed to it’s, not black, but it does have a certain look for it.
Let’s go my old school. Let’s try Ozzie yeah well, Black Sabbath would be cheating but Ozzie. I think it’s fair game all right and again Wow lookie. Here, it’s mostly black all right. So the point is: is that could you imagine both ends might be very well designed sites? You know we didn’t spend a lot of time looking at them, but I’m going to say yeah both of my well design sites, but they look totally different.
Well, why is that? Well, they have different audiences in mind and they have different sorts of content and the appears that they picked match the content that they had now. These are very obvious choices, but you could have less obvious choices as well. What sort of look would you want from a bank? You may look very professional, you wouldn’t want unicorn gifts on the side or you wouldn’t want pastel colors or something like that on again.
The other word that a lot of people – and I think it’s this a dumb word, but but people use it all the time is branding right. You want to get across your brand’s. Look, you know Apple. I think we looked at them the other day. We could almost guess what their site is going to. Look like the whole idea of Apple computers is meant to be they’re, very sophisticated and designed and sleek and simple to use, and all that and the website matches that corporate image alright um.
On the other hand, the kids website, if it was done up in a very serious manner, like a new site. Well, you know everyone have any appeal to the audience, so I think the good way to summarize that would be to say that the appearance of the site should match the content in tone. Now, here’s where we might point out that there could be exceptions to this. There might be an exception to this, where you don’t want the appearance of the site to match the tone.
There’s one website that I’m thinking there’s a classic example of this. I’m thinking of the website the onion, the look of the onion is a satirical newspaper, so it’s meant to be fun. It’s meant to be humorous, I’m not going to pull it up because who knows what’s going to be on their page today? I don’t. I don’t want to have to explain to my Dean why I brought something up on the screen, but the onion is meant to be humorous.
It’s meant to be a fun site, yet it looks like a new site. It’s done in a very professional looking new site. Look well, that’s like part of the joke. It’s like pretending that this is a real real life newspaper and hear some humorous stories that came up with so that’s the case where they did. They broke this guideline that they did it deliberately, because that sort of adds to the appeal of it so again getting back to these.
These are pretty solid guidelines and, most of the time you should follow them. But if you think hard enough, you can find exceptions to all of these um one other good. Well designed a guideline is be sure. Your purpose is clearly stated and again you go to the website. You should know immediately what the websites for you shouldn’t have to guess that G, what is this organization again that can be done or that could not be followed and it can be effectively done.
For example, there was a 44 either halo, a halo, 2 microsoft created a site called. I love bees and it looked like it was a sight for a beekeeper when you first went to it looked like it was just a hobbyist website, but then, when you got into the site it became clear that something else is going on. They they made. It look like something had infiltrated the system and blah blah blah blah blah, and it was like some backstory information for the game halo now, in that case, they intentionally didn’t make the site match the content of the appearances like match the content and they didn’t.
They hid their purpose why the thought was is to make it viral where people would be talking about it. Look I found this site in G. Isn’t this weird and it got people talking about that site and it was a very effective ad campaign form. Let me see if I can put it on, I am going to i’m going to use a site called the Wayback Machine. The wayback machine allows you to go and see what websites look like years ago.
There’s wan na see if I love, peas, bees as long as live it. It isn’t the original one. So I’m going to go and pull up the wayback machine. I think we use this in what I want to show leo burnett last time, because, unfortunately, they made their website a little better. So I couldn’t use it as a good example. So let’s go in and pour it out from december of 2004 and notice. How, in the background, it looks like a nice little site about bees, but you get this sort of fake error message and you can read the mission log and there’s bill audio clips and so on and so forth.
So this is a way. This is an advertising campaign and array for for them to go interest in it forget people to say gee. I wonder what this site is about all right and it went viral and people passed it on and it was part of a good marketing campaign. So all of us any of these guidelines that we have you could think of cases where you can serve baked the guidelines. Do keep in mind, though, that you better be clever if you’re going to try something like that right, because otherwise people are just going to look at and say this is dumb all right and and ignore it all right.
So um sort of the default is to go by the book and do these things but um, especially for websites that are safe for the entertainment business or for creative field. Then it’s okay, probably to think a little bit outside the box, because people expect that from creative sort of organizations. Well, as you know, if you’re a CPA, firm or something people aren’t going to expect your website to look like a game or look like it’s a children site or something like that all right.
So we could probably talk about more of these, but um in some respects. Well, one thing I hear from students. Sometimes when I teach the section of the course is there, like all these things are common sense. You know who would make a site for Barbie that looked like a site for a heavy metal band. You know who would make a site where pages were inconsistent and didn’t look like each other. Well, my point of all this is: is whatever we do in creating our site ought to be done as a set of conscious decisions, we’ll just throw things together.
We think about them in advance and plan that we’re going to do and in that way that’s going to give us the best results. So it’s like writing. A term paper is just like planning a cross-country Drive. You could shoot by the hip and say I want to go to California, so i’m going to get my car and drive rest all right. You’d probably end up at keller in california, eventually, but you wouldn’t necessarily take the best or most efficient route, all right, so playing and deliberately thinking about each of these steps is armed what we want to do in terms of developing a site so for your project.
There’s a procedure that I want you to follow and it starts off thinking very general and then it narrows down to more and more and more specifics all right. The basis of this is number one starting off by thinking about the content of the site. What are we going to put on the site? Remember, we said last time that content is king or content is queen. It rules. People don’t come to the site to your site to admire the beautiful design.
People come to it to get some information or to do something that they need to do so thinking about in deciding what your customers need to do, or what information they need is sort of the first job all right and to actually probably the first two jobs. All right, we think in general terms, and we think in more specific terms, then we start thinking about some of these other things. How are we going to organize the information? What is the appearance going to look like and so on? So, let’s pull up in canvas the description of what I want you to do and we’ll go through as much as this as we can today and we’ll finish this up on Tuesday.
These kinds of things, in my mind, are reading the heart of web design. Not what colors you’re going to use or what fonts are going to use that comes later. It’s just like designing an automobile yeah, making the interior look nice or making the outside look nice! That’s important that as an appeal to people all right, not the designing! The car to be safe, designing the card to be a fuel-efficient, designing the car.
So it’s easy to repair. Those are all things that are probably more important than that. It looks nice all right. So here’s an overview of the project somewhere over here. All right you get to pick whatever topic you like, I suggest you pick something. That’s fun all right pick something that you’re interested in you’re, going to probably work harder. If you develop something that, if you develop a site for something that you’re interested in then, if you just randomly picked a topic all right, I the student, it did a website about his motorcycles.
Well, he loved his motorcycles he’s not about to put pictures of his motorcycle on a bad website all right, so he worked hard to make sure that website looked good to do his motorcycles, proud all right and I would suggest you do the same approach now pick A topic that’s enjoy that you enjoy pick a topic, that’s neither too narrow or two brow broad okay, and this is where I can help all right. Neither to know or to broad is a good idea.
Um to know would be under arms are too broad would be something like I’m going to do a website about sports. Well, you can’t possibly cover everything about sports in six to eight pages. All right I mean how many sports are there. You know you can barely scratch the surface. On the other hand, you know if you picked a topic of the history of the Cleveland, Indians, mascot slider, there might be a little too narrow.
I don’t think you could get six to eight pages out of that. So the idea is, is you want to pick a topic? That’s like right there in the middle, where you can get six to eight pages, with the content and you’re doing a good job covering it, and it’s neither to broaden or too narrow, and this is where I can help almost any topic that you pick um can Be either expanded or contracted to be the right size? So if you have an idea about this um, you know we can talk about it.
Um a lot of people pick article games, something related to article games. The article games itself would be a big topic right. So you can know that down by saying I’m going to do about mobile article games. Maybe article games from your phone or puzzle, article games, rpgs or whatever it’ll pick a particular game or game series. I’m going to do about the final fantasy series or something like that.
Another way you could either expand or contract that on to to meet the requirements of six to eight eight pages. Each page should contain a reasonable amount of content. There’s some judgment in there right. What is a reasonable amount? I guess useful guide, what you see, typically on their own pages on the web. You know a page with one sentence on. It is probably not enough content, a page that has 15 paragraphs on it, there’s probably too much content on it.
So think, in terms of what you normally see on a website for appropriate amount of content, we want the site to be technically sound, well designed and to effectively communicate the intended message. All right. The site is done. This project consists of two parts: a design document which is sort of your plan and then the final deliverable, which is the finished website, all right, I’m going to talk about the plan.
First, the plan consists of five sections and just as a memory aid you can get, you can use words that all start with s for each of these sections. The approach that I’m taking here was in a book that used to be a required textbook for this class and you can still find copies in our library or probably even through safari books online, and that is the elements of the user experience. Yes, no, no! No! Technically sound, technically solid, alright think a sound like not not like audio sound but sound, meaning like in other words like will be you know, the the foundation of that house is sound.
It means it is solid, alright, so, in other words, you use the proper HTML and CSS your links work. Your images work you’ve coded in a way that technically is correct and solid. All right strategy section relates to the goals of the site. Scope relates to the requirements of the site. Structure relates to sort of the sitemap. Skeleton relates to the page layout or sometimes called a wireframe and finally, surface relates to a prototype.
Think of a prototype is sort of being a rough draft of your website again. Any task that you do is better is going to be better. Typically, if you think about it before you do it all right. Does it matter if you’re writing a term paper or planning a trip or planning repairs in your house or anything like that? Any project that you’re going to do, if you’re flying by the seat of your pants and you’re just winging it as you go along you’re not going to get as good results is.
If you step back and think systematically of the approach that you’re going to take. All right, the first section is strategy, and that’s where you you do a couple things in the strategy sections. First of all, you come up with a high-level description of the site. Maybe I’m going to do a website about the article game, tetris all right now that by itself is not probably sufficient, the more specific you can define your purpose, the more or the better that you can actually go and achieve it.
So maybe I’m going to develop a a website about the game tetris and it’s meant for students that are learning how to develop article games or is meant for gamers or is meant for the general public, or maybe this meant for all three groups is meant for Everyone, maybe is meant for kids, you know: hey kids, you know you like playing your fancy new fangled article games. Here’s one of the early article games that started the ball rolling all right.
Maybe it’s meant for old-timers, who haven’t played a article game in years, but finally remember playing tetris all right, the better that you can define your purpose and define your audience the better job you can do creating your website another example. Let’s say I was going to do a website about classical music. All right, I could go so many different directions. With that right, I could define a website.
I could create a website about classical music for the general public people. That really don’t necessarily know a lot about classical music. Maybe they played in the band in school, but they don’t really know a lot about it and have thought about it. Since a music appreciation class I had – or maybe I can develop it – for people who are fans of classical music who want to know about new releases and concerts in the area and so on and so forth.
Maybe I want to develop it for adults. Maybe I want to develop it for high school kids. Maybe I want to develop it for children, the more clear that I can describe what I want the better off i’m going to be, because then I can really target the needs of those particular groups. You know the first rule of any sort of communication is to know your audience all right. So it’s not enough to say this is a topic.
You focus on the topic that you’re going to have and you think about who the audience is going to be all right, so you can imagine a site about classical music. If my audience was musicians, let’s say it’s going to have a lot different stuff than if my site was for listeners right. My site was for musicians. I might have information or articles about where to get your musical instrument repaired if it’s broken, all right or advice on buying a used musical instrument or what are some local community groups that you can join if you want to play in an ensemble or something like That, if I was developing it for high school kids, maybe I include a page about what concert.
Etiquette is ok, because you know people at classical music concerts can get really fussy all right. You don’t walk in in the middle of a piece. You wait until the pieces over and then walk in after that. So if you’re late you stand outside for a few minutes till it’s done, you actually don’t applaud in the gaps. You wait until the entire piece is done so for peace has three parts: there might be a slight pause between the first and second part.
You don’t applaud there. I think it’s silly, but that’s the way. It is right. You should probably one applaud right. I mean come on. You know, but again that’s sort of the expectations that people have so maybe for younger people. That don’t know that you might have a page about that. Oh page, about what are the main instruments of the orchestra. Now, musicians going to know that right, they’ve been playing in an orchestra, since they were ten years old, probably but a high school kid or someone hasn’t been exposed to classical music might not have any idea what that is.
Maybe examples of different eras of classical music. Again, a musician might know that you know very well, but a lay person wouldn’t necessarily know that. So when you develop your strategy, you don’t just pick your topic, but you think a little bit about the audience that you’re going to be reaching now. This is where, when you identify your audience, really, you may have multiple audiences is going to visit your site depending on again how big or specialized the site is all right.
For example, we have a school, you know with learning community college who are some of the different audiences that could be visiting Elsie’s, page or different groups of people that would be visiting Elsie’s site right, graduating seniors from high school, so graduating high school students were thinking About where to go to next year, that’s one group of people and for me, the parents of graduating seniors, all right.
That’s another group people in the workforce that maybe they’re working at a job that they don’t really like, and they want to upgrade their skills. All right would another group be traits people that already in a trade or people that are looking to get in a trade yep, people are looking to get into a trade all right again, maybe they’re working in a job that they’re not really crazy about, and they Might look to see you know: are there classes on welding or welding programs, or you know, nursing or culinary or things like that, other groups of people, instructors, faculty and staff all right? We would go on that site to look for certain things when our meetings are when grades are due.
Don’t read anything into this because I love my job, but when is spring break his class kids is, you know, do we have a snow day today? You know all these things are things like faculty and staff might visit, and we can probably think of others to just off the top of my head community members right. You may not be interested in getting a degree in graduating from LC, but maybe you want to participate in some of the cultural events at LC.
Has you know, there’s all sorts of different performances at the stocker Center there’s also our non-credit classes, where you can come and take a class in this that or the other that isn’t necessarily like four degree. But you can pick up your skills. I know they have for people that have no computer skills. They have like non-credit classes just to like to teach people how to use the mouse and how to move around and stuff like that or they might have a class in photography.
You know that’s non-credit, it’s not a first semester, but maybe it meets four or five sessions and teaches you the basics of a topic, just a personal growth or whatever lifelong learning, um people that I want to use a fitness center. All right. Fitness centers a great facility and as a student I think you get to use it for free. You just have to go and sit through one of their our. What would you call it orientation sessions and then you can use that for free.
I mean great facility in there. The plane is. Is that, especially when you’re talking about bigger projects, there isn’t one group of people called the user? There are multiple groups of users alright, and you want to do your best to hit the most important needs of all those different user groups. Now there might be some overlapping right. Parents of a high school senior probably have some of the same goals as graduating.
Seniors people in the community that are looking to maybe change careers might have some of the same girls as people that are brand-new out of high school that are looking at starting their academic career, but there are going to be differences as well right, someone who is You know in their mid-30s might be interested G. Will the college courses that I took 15 years ago transfer, whereas a high school student probably doesn’t have that question alright? So the first of all communication is to know your audience on websites.
You don’t just have one audience and a mistake that a lot of web developers use is they talk about the user as though there’s one kind of user that’s visiting their site or in reality, there’s several different kinds. So what you do so you develop a high level description, you identify the audience groups and you create what are called personas now. This might sound hokey, but what you actually do is you make up a fictional person that represents a group of people.
James is an 18 year old, high school senior at Olivia hi, who is interested in what you know, who loves computers and wants to do wants to work with computers? Lisa is a 28 year old person who is working in retail, who does not want to work in retail anymore? Who wants to who is interested in healthcare careers? You actually make up fictional people and little back stories about them now. Why do you do that? Will you do that for a couple reasons you do that, first of all, to show that hey my website isn’t just appealing one group of people, but I have identified two different groups of people and then, when you’re going through and making decisions about what content.
That’s on the site and how to organize it. You try to look through those people’s eyes. What’s going to help James find information about computer careers, what’s going to help Lisa find information about health care, careers and so on and so forth. Alright, that’s what I mean by creating these user groups and identifying these user groups and creating personas, then. Finally, you come up with goals for these grooves.
Alright, you actually, I think I just said you have three goals for each for the user of prioritize list of three user goals and our that your project will address and three of your goals, in other words, three goals of the organization that you’re doing this. For all right, but really you could define goals for each of the personas. You know a high school kid. One of their goals might be to find out.
Does LC offer the program that I’m interested in all right go for a parent of a high school senior? Might be, how much is it going to cost what financial aid is available for students going to LC? What are the rules about financial aid? What do I need to do to make sure my student gets financial aid and so on? So that is the strategy section right up top. We don’t think about how the site is going to look or what colors were going to use or what fonts we’re going to use or anything like that.
We start at the goals of the user identifying who the users are identifying, what the goals are for the user and identifying the different users that are going to be visiting the site and again there could be goals for each user group different goals, goals for a Community member might be what are the non-credit classes available for someone with my interests, what culture events are going on at LC this weekend and so on.
Alright, this becomes very challenging when you’re dealing with large websites all right, because there’s so many different groups of people and they all have different goals, but for the kind of websites that you’re doing is going to be a little easier. For example, let’s talk about my classical music site. Let’s say I’ve narrowed it down and say that I want to do a classical music site for high school students.
All right. Welcome by three different user groups be among high school students visiting my classical music site. Those who play an instrument, those who want to play an instrument third, might be high school music teacher all right. So if you are offering the course in music, you know you could use this site as a resource, so it may be geared towards high school students, but another kind of visitor to it might be a high school teacher that is going to try to incorporate your Site into their plans, article games, you know if I did a article game on tetris who could the groups of users be people that have never played tetris people who have played tetris? Who the third group be that’s a good question, but i’m sure we could think of something people that play the original tetris but haven’t played it since then, alright, so no matter what your topic is, we want to be in this section.
We want to be very specific and narrow down the specific audience and narrow down our to not just one audience, but several different groups that compose our entire audience and when we want to identify what the girls are. The goal should be simple sentences, for example, or goal for people high school students that run a play. An instrument might be what instrument is right for me right. What instrument is right for me, you know, maybe they would involve having audio clips so it’d, be they could listen to them and say: oh, that one sounds pretty good or all that one doesn’t sound so good.
Alright, what you don’t want to do in your goals? Section is talk about general web design. You don’t want to say a goal of my sight is to have a clear navigation. Of course you want to clear navigation right. That’s not really a goal of why someone is visiting your site to go and see how good your navigation is. This is content-based, in other words, what content people are expecting to get out of your sight.
That’s what the goals represent. All right. We spent the longest time talking about this one. The next four parts of this actually go fairly quickly. The second one takes a little bit of time. The third fourth and fifth, one will breeze by so we should wrap this up on Tuesday of next week. Any questions at this point, if you have not already read through the documentation about the project and will finish up that part on Tuesday
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