(Transcript continued from the Episode 135 show notes and audio podcast)
One of the cool things about having your own digital product for sale online is that this is a low cost, high margin thing that you can do, a revenue stream that you can add to your business. Once you have a product for sale online you can sell that product forever, for as long as the information in the product is valid, as long as people are interested in it. You can spend the effort to create this product – and these things usually are very inexpensive to create – and that can provide a passive revenue stream in your business for years and years.
In fact, most people know, that’s the way that Pat Flynn got started. Last month Pat Flynn made $250,000 in a single month. He had some product launches in that. He got started way back in the beginning selling an ebook and was making a few thousand dollars a month at that time.
That can be you. There’s no reason that you can’t start a digital empire or grow your current digital empire with the creation of products. To be honest, product creation often seems pretty overwhelming to most people.
The ConvertKit team’s stated goal is to teach everyone everything that they know, which is pretty cool, I love that and that’s kind of the way I roll around here. They’re having a four week masterclass that is completely free. Obviously, it’s ConvertKit, so they’re hoping that at the end of that masterclass you will want to get an account with ConvertKit. That’s their angle on this, because you are going to need an email auto responder. But, there’s no reason that you can’t use your existing auto responder or some other auto responder for the kinds of things that they’re going to teach in this class.
So if you’re interested in product creation, I encourage you to do two things in order to take advantage of this. One is to go sign for the course at LateNightIM.com/pcm. That’s going to get you access to the course, which is going to cover product planning in week one, product creation in week two, product testing in week three, and product launch in week four.
Depending on how long it takes for you to create your content and how big of a course you’re going to create, I think it’s entirely possible that at the end of that four weeks you could have a course for sale.
In the first week they’re going to help you decide what to create. I know that is a stumbling block for so many of us, understanding exactly what product you should be creating. Then in the second week you’ll create a content outline, lead magnet ideas, and other things that you can create to make a complete product – not just the product itself, but the marketing collateral that you’re going to need to sell the thing.
In week three there will be some product testing and validation to make sure that you really have a product that is viable and is positioned well in the marketplace. Then in week four you’ll actually launch the product. They talk about sales page creation and the launch funnel that you can use to help convert people to buy this course that you’ve just created. That is super exciting and jam packed.
Now, there are courses out there for sale that do this, in fact courses that I’ve taken that cost thousands of dollars. This is a real opportunity if you’d like to create a product, maybe it’s your first product, and you just haven’t been sure how to get started or what to do, this looks like a really good opportunity.
Here’s the cool kicker. This is super cool. I’ve decided that I’m going to go through this course and do it with you. We’ll be talking about it in the Late Night Internet Marketing community every day. The training comes out daily for four weeks. Every day I’ll start a little post in the community and if you have questions about the training we’ll all be working through that together so we can discuss it on a daily basis. That’s at LateNightIM.com/fbgroup.
So there are two things to do if you’re interested in this.
2) Go join the Facebook group.
I’ll see you there. That’s going to be super fun and exciting.
This Week in Internet Marketing News
I just had to share with you this kind of amazing TV commercial from Burger King where they actually hijack one of these devices in your home that talks back to you. In this case, it was Google Home. I want to warn you that I’m going to play the ad here and it’s going to set off your device. It’s nothing terrible, but if you have one of these automated home devices from Google, the Google Home, I’m going to make it talk. Here’s the ad.
[You’re watching a 15 second Burger King ad, which is unfortunately not enough time to explain all of the fresh ingredients in the Whopper sandwich. But I have an idea. Google, what is the Whopper burger?]
That is so absolutely cool. I thought this is kind of a neat marketing thing that you can apply in your business and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that as a marketing tip based on what’s going on in the news.
Obviously what Burger King has done here is they have tried to leverage the excitement around these devices like Google Home and they’ve done something funny which is normally considered pretty annoying, they’ve set off a bunch of these devices to advertise their product for free. Basically what happened in homes all across the United States is that people with the Google Home device their device activated and the device read the Wikipedia page about the Burger King Whopper.
As you may have imagined, the objective of this marketing campaign is probably not just to turn on a bunch of Google Home devices, but really what they’re trying to do is get media coverage from the stunt. And that absolutely happened, there’s no question about that. I’m talking about it on my podcast, there are over 100,000 views of the 15-second YouTube video that I just played, people are talking about this on social media websites and search engine marketing websites, so it’s a very effective marketing campaign.
The thing that they did was they found one thing that was going on in the world and they leveraged it so they could talk about their brand. Their brand is about hamburgers, but most people in the world aren’t talking about hamburgers. They are talking about these devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo. This kind of idea of leveraging one thing to cause buzz about something else that you’re doing is a very powerful idea in marketing and it’s definitely something that you should always be thinking about, almost no matter what kind of website that you have.
I’ll give you a couple of examples.
A buddy of mine has a pharmacy website, we’ve talked about this before, it’s called HelpfulPharmacist.com. Over at Helpful Pharmacist every year there is an event in the pharmaceutical space where the FDA (or the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration) encourages people to turn in their expired prescriptions.
Expired prescriptions create a problem for people in two ways. One, you don’t want to have extra medicine laying around the house that people can get into, children or whatever. Two, as chemical expire they change; best case, those drugs may no longer be effective, worst case, there might be some other side effect. The FDA wants you to get rid of that.
Every year when that event is happening and the FDA is encouraging people to take their drugs into the drugstore or to special places where they can be disposed of, HelpfulPharmacist.com will run an article about that, promote it on social media, and leverage that media event. That’s a very direct example.
Another really direct example is what I just did earlier in the podcast with the free training from ConvertKit. They’re doing the training, I’m hopping on board, people are talking about it, and I’m being part of what is going on in the broader sense. In my case, also, if there are some people that sign up for ConvertKit that’s an affiliate opportunity for me. That’s win-win and that’s pretty cool.
I think a third really obvious example that you see all the time is people with holiday promotions. If there is a big holiday going on you can take advantage of that holiday by tying that into your brand, having a Valentine’s Day list or whatever. We could write an article for Valentine’s Day that was the Top 7 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Taking Advantage of Valentine’s Day, or The 7 Funniest Gifts that Affiliate Marketers Give Their Spouses on Valentine’s Day. We could come up with something to take advantage of the holiday to increase the chance that something will go viral, something will get noticed, and just leverage the buzz around what’s going on out there in the world.
Another good example is you can take advantage of popular products. The Nintendo Switch is very popular. I could write an article about 7 Ways That Affiliates Can Promote the Nintendo Switch, and because there is so much buzz around the Switch there is an opportunity for you to get more shares and more recognition when you’re talking about something that is also popular in the media for some other reason.
That’s something that I want you to consider. Kind of go away this week and take a look at what is going on in the news. Maybe you have some way to tie in the thing that happened on United Airlines Flight 3411 into your brand.
You want to be a little bit careful with these things that are super controversial, but find a way to tie in what’s going on in the real big news media and you may find a surprising bump in traffic either at your affiliate sites, on your blog, or wherever you’re doing this from by using that strategy.
Shopify SEO Tips
My main topic this week is one that was suggested to me by one you inside of the Late Night Internet Marketing Facebook group. I told the people that are hanging out with me there in the group that I was working on the content calendar for the podcast and I asked, “What do you guys want to hear about?”
Jose Maldonado came back and said, “I’d love to know more about SEO for Shopify stores.” I thought that was an absolutely fantastic podcast for a podcast because that’s something that I know a bit about and I’m currently building a Shopify store. All of that work is going swimmingly well and I’ll have a nice update for you in a couple of weeks on what’s going on with my ecommerce activities.
There are four really strong solid tips that I can offer you for SEO for your Shopify store that I think will help you quite a bit as you try and get some more traffic to your Shopify store for free. The first two tips are content related.
The first tip is to make sure that you have a really strong listing. A lot of times what I see in Shopify stores, especially for people that are drop-shipping, is they’ll copy over the few pieces of product information that are available to them from the drop-shipper, which is usually very terse. Things like the weight and the size of the product. There’s no real descriptive content in the listing that helps people understand the product and gives Google something to chew on.
In an ideal world you’re going to want your product listing to be on the order of 1,000 words. I know you’re all thinking, “Oh my god, I have 500 products on my Shopify store. How am I going to do that?” Start with your most popular products, or the ones that you’re most interested in seeing listed in search, and start writing copy for those.
The question I always get is, “What do I write?” The answer to that question is to use the PASTOR method.
You talk about the pain that people who need the product are experiencing, the reason why they would want it. You amplify that a little bit, you talk about the problem that your product solves and why someone should want to have that product, why they want to own it.
Allude to stories that support that narrative. Pull them through the copy with some reference to someone who has had the product before, or a possible scenario where the product could be good, or a time when you used the product. Pull them through the copy and talk about testimonials or ways that the product has been used, how it helped you, or how it helped someone, or pull some information from reviews that you may have on the product in the review section of your Shopify listing.
Then make sure that the benefits of the offer, the benefits of the product, what you’re offering and why it’s great are listed there. Make sure inside of the copy you’re talking about taking the product home today, order the thing today.
Go through the PASTOR method and you’ll get to 1,000 words really quickly.
You want to be a little careful. Don’t put just any old 1,000 words in there and don’t push the sales button so far down the page that adding the copy actually decreases your conversions because the buy button is way far down the page. Many Shopify themes are well designed to handle plenty of copy while still staying optimized for conversions, so make sure you do pay attention to that. You may want to test the effective copy on your product conversions, but for the purpose of search engine optimization you definitely want more copy on your listing.
A second content tip is to take advantage of the blog feature of Shopify. Some people don’t even realize it, but Shopify has the ability to create blog posts just like WordPress.
The thing that I would target for Shopify are keywords that have high commercial intent but aren’t directly related to your product. Let’s say you have a product in your store that solves a particular problem, let’s say you’re selling an eye cream that reduces wrinkles and it’s a product. You’re selling Jill’s Eye Cream Goo and you’ve got 1,000 words of copy on there about that.
What questions are people that need to buy eye cream goo asking about in Google? They’re typing things like, “How do I prevent wrinkles?” and, “What’s the best wrinkle cream?” and, “How do I pick a wrinkle cream?” There’s all this opportunity to answer helpful content questions and you can create that content on your Shopify blog.
Then at the end of the article you can say, “We have exactly the cream that you need right here in our store,” and provide an internal link from that article to the sales page inside your Shopify store. That does two things. One is it increases the authority of your blog. As people link to that helpful informative content that linking inside your blog will help your entire domain perform better. You’ll also pass link juice to your Shopify listing when you make that internal link. The second thing that it does is it actually attracts visitors from Google to that page and drives traffic over to your Shopify sales page.
So recommendation number two is definitely to take advantage of the blog feature in Shopify and create great content. This is something that can be easily outsourced in Upwork. You can go over to Upwork.com and post a listing that says, “I need five 1,000 word blog posts on wrinkle cream. Here are the five topics and the five main keywords. Please native English speakers only, grammar must be perfect. Go.” You’ll get an enormous number of bids and you’ll be able to get that content created for a very reasonable price. You can do that over and over again and build an authority site around your Shopify store and that will dramatically help your SEO.
The third recommendation for Shopify store SEO is a little bit along the lines of the technical things that we’ve talked in the past. Shopify has some built-in SEO gadgetry that allows you to the critical thing of specifying the title tag, which is the title of your product, and the SEO description, which is what helps people that find your listing in search decide to click on, and the URL.
You want to make sure those three things are optimized for search; the page slug for your product, the page title for your product page, and the description. In the case of the product page title, the listing title that shows up in search, you’re going to want to make sure that contains the keywords that you’re trying to rank for with your product. For the URL, same thing, you’re going to want to make sure that’s in there.
For the description you’re going to want to use copywriting techniques to make that compelling. Give a people a reason to click on that. People that are searching for your product are having to choose between a page full of listings on Google, that description is your chance to entice them to click even if you’re not the very top listing on the page, which with paid ads you never will be, so you need to write a good description that helps people decide to click.
Just straight out of the box Shopify pulls out the first few hundred characters of your listing. That may not be what you want at all, that may be the weight of the product or the fact that you’re temporarily out of stock. You don’t want that. What you want is some carefully crafted words that help people click and go to your store.
I think the fourth thing that you want for Shopify SEO are links back to your site, particularly back to your products. I think one of the more effective things you can do to get a handle on this and how much it will help is to use a tool like Ahrefs to understand what your competition is doing.
A lot of times what you’ll find, particularly for ecommerce, is that if you look at who is ranking – your ranking competition for the search term that you’re trying to win – what you’ll find is those product pages that you’re competing with don’t have a lot of links back to their pages either. This is great news for you in this day and age of Google search, because a few quality links back to your product page will go a long way.
Typically there are two really good places that you can get links. One is links that you leave around the internet in response to a question about your product area. If there is a blog post somewhere about the thing that you care about (about eye cream) and you can tell the story about how this eye cream that you happen to be selling is the best one and share a link to the page in a way that doesn’t offend the owner of the blog post, that’s great.
You can do the same kind of things in forums and to some extent places like Reddit. Although, be really careful about that, because in every case you want to be leaving a ton of value behind prior to leaving your link. In places where that is allowed, those contextual links are really powerful.
The other place of course is you can have blog posts that reference your product page inside the post with a link to your product page. Those are going to be harder to come by, but they’re easily bought from reputable sources like The Hoth or Posirank.
I definitely recommend if you’re wanting to improve your SEO, take a look at building a few backlinks. Understand where your competition is getting their links and check out those sources, leave comments in posts and forums, and go buy a few links if that makes sense for you. From reputable sources only, no blog networks, none of that kind of stuff, but people who are actually doing outreach like Posirank and The Hoth. That can make a super huge difference in your ranking results.
Wrapping Things Up…
That’s it for this week. I hope that you are having big plans for how you’re going to take advantage of something that is going on in the media this week or this month, maybe create a piece of content. Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and it will go super viral. If you have a Shopify store or you’re thinking about creating one, I hope these SEO tips were super helpful for you.
If that’s not exactly you, pass this podcast along to someone who can use it. I really appreciate that, sharing is caring, and I love all of the love you guys give me.
Don’t forget about the Product Creation Masterclass that ConvertKit is teaching for free. It’s a four week class. I think even if you don’t create a product right now it is going to be super helpful for you to go through.
Until next time, I hope you have an awesome week.
