Welcome to another week of our Friday Jam session. This is always one of the highlights of my week. I love spending some time with some awesome people and answering some great questions. If you want to be a part of our Take Action Crew, we go live every single Friday where you can ask me any questions you have about starting your business. To join us, head over to takeactioncrew.com to sign up for free. Let’s dive right into today’s session.
Valuable Advertising and Affiliate Info
This week I had a bunch of questions related to ads and affiliate links and when is the best time to use them. I'm excited to answer a few of those today, and hopefully, you'll find my answers helpful.
When to Apply for Affiliate or Ad Programs
Don't apply too early. You need to focus on getting traffic before you can even consider monetizing your site. Once you get there, you'll have plenty of options. We didn't turn on ads until we had 18,000 visitors to our site for one of the brands we're working on.
We do have a few affiliates but no ad networks. You'll need at least 10,000 visitors to your site to qualify for an ad network.
Don’t talk about monetization until you have traffic.
Start out by writing a few pieces of content, including reviews or comparisons, where you can go back in later and add affiliate links when you're ready. Just get the content written now, and you can do the rest in the future.
Should I Consider Advertising on My Website
Yes, advertising is great. Over on brandcreators.com, I'm currency only offering private offerings. Our playbook, checklist, and sign ups for Brand Creators when registration is open again in July. I'm not selling anything else on my site.
We do have a resources page with all the products that we use that link to affiliate programs. If you're driving traffic to your site to sell your own stuff, I recommend limiting your advertising to other companies. You'll just need to pick and choose what to include. On a side note, I do run ads on a couple of our other sites.
Just be sure that any ads you include on your site are of interest to your visitors.
In regards to affiliate links, you can have a few on your site, and once the traffic is there, people will see them. Keep in mind that the benefits of affiliate links just aren't there when you only have a few thousand-page views. Instead, focus on creating content and wait to get steady traffic to worry about affiliates.
How to Get The Most Out of Your Blog
When you’re getting ready to start a new website or blog, it can be overwhelming. This week I answered a few questions that I hope will help make it easier to get started.
What Elements to Include on Your Homepage
Let people know immediately that they’ve come to the right place. Answer the questions they’re looking to have answered. Always have a lead magnet front and center but also make sure they know they are in the right place and not just in an eCommerce store, so it’s not a turn-off.
Ask yourself what your visitors are trying to achieve and tell them right up front how you can help. Keep your messaging on brand which will help detract people who aren’t ready to hear your message or not a part of our target market.
Why You Should Integrate Your Online Store to Your New Blog
Include a tab on your blog that includes access to your shop. Integrate the two as soon as possible, especially if they are in the same niche and go hand in hand. You can always have a separate Shopify store and use a subdomain, so it still looks like it’s all a part of the same website.
Post Blog Content As Soon As Your Website is Up and Running
Who is seeing your unpolished blog if you don’t feel like it’s ready?
Just start publishing blog posts, and you can make changes to your site later. There will always be things you want to change and fix. But to an average person, they’re going to look past those things. Just start getting it running so you can monetize sooner. You won’t get any traffic if you don’t publish any content. There’s no better time like the present to get started.
How To Come Up With New Blog Content
What are the five questions your market is asking right now? Write “how to” articles that answer these common questions. They are easy to answer and are asked often.
Create a content tree where you have the main content topic you’ll focus on and branch off from there.
Head over to Google and use the autofill feature to see what is being searched for often in your niche and what keywords people are using.
Best Ways to Sell Digital Courses or E-books on your site.
You’ll need to create a sales funnel on your site. It can be as simple as creating a landing page in Convertkit or Gumroad. Keep it simple.
Build an email list and hop on social to bring people to your website where they can view your digital course or e-book.

The Simple 5-Step Process We Used To Generate $64,000 In 12 Months Working Part Time On Etsy.
Yes, Send Me The Roadmap!How to Structure an Interview
I start by asking questions that you, as the listener, will benefit from. Know your audience and what they would want to know.
Make sure the person you’re interviewing feels comfortable.
When I interview, I only have a couple of points, including their back store.
I also ask a few of the questions, like what did they do when they had a business venture fail.
So many people don’t typically share their failures, and I think it’s so important for my listeners to hear about how successful people overcame rejection and discouragement.
When I interview, I want to know what people do on the days that are bad. And how they kept pushing through. Get really raw and real. Get questions answered that they aren’t usually asked.
Live Streaming & Video Editing Tips
I’ve had a lot of questions about live streaming during the past few weeks and am excited to touch on a few of those today.
Live Streaming Videos on Multiple Platforms
In the beginning, you need to get comfortable and make it easy. Start broadcasting to one platform. You can always add another platform at a later date. The goal is to get a few people watching who you can engage with. Even if you don’t have anyone watching in the beginning, still get started and don’t overthink think it.
Live streams are not easily searchable on Facebook. Consider streaming to YouTube because it’s saved on the site and makes it super easy for people to search for those videos at a later date. You can always take your YouTube video and upload it to Facebook. It’ll perform better when you upload it directly to Facebook.
Should I Go Live & Stick With The Same Time Every Week
When you do something live there is less structure and it becomes more natural. Just get started and know what you’re going to do upfront.
Commit to yourself and show up the same time every week. This will help people look forward to joining and know when to expect they’ll hear from you. Consider answering questions that show you are an authority in your market.
How to Crop Videos for YouTube
ScreenFlow is great for Mac users. You can zoom in and even slow zoom on different parts of your video.
If you’re just starting out consider going to Fiveer and hiring out someone to edit your videos for you! It’s pretty cheap to find someone and will save you lots of time from having to do it yourself if you have a lot going on.
Too Many Plugins Will Slow Down Your Site
Keep your website very light so it runs faster. You don’t need a bunch of plugins to get started. If your site is slow people won’t stick around. I recommend starting out with just a couple of plugins like Yoast and an optimization plugin that compresses images.
Always check to see how your site works on mobile.
Why I Don’t Charge More for My Products
I’ve had a lot of questions about why my products are so affordable. In particular, my Brand Creators Playbook. I use this all the time within Brand Creators. I only charge $4.99 for the playbook. If you buy my book, it shows that you are interested in my content and is a great lead magnet. I also want to help you succeed, and I can reach more people if I charge less.
If you purchase the playbook, I do off a market selection class, but I don’t advertise to anyone else. I actually go in and show you how to go through the process to find if a market is good and show some examples of some that should be avoided.
My goal is to give people enough content and information to get them started. And if they’re interested they can join Brand Creators when it opens again in July.
Always give people as much value as you can and don’t be afraid of giving too much.
The goal is to attract the right people.
Thanks For Tuning In!
I hope you enjoyed this week’s Friday jam session. Head over to takeactioncrew.com to join for free. We go live every Friday at 10 am when I answer all your questions. Thanks for being here.
Remember, I’m here for you, I believe in you and am rooting for you!
It’s time for you to take action and go rock your brand!
Take-Aways From Today’s Episode
- Valuable Advertising and Affiliate Info (3:50)
- How to Get The Most Out of Your Blog (7:13)
- How to Structure an Interview (15:40)
- Live Streaming & Video Editing Tips (9:20)
- Why I Don’t Charge More for My Products (41:45)
Quotes:
“You won’t get traffic if you don’t publish content. There’s no better time like the present to get started”.
“Always give people as much value as you can and don’t be afraid of giving too much”.
00:00 Yes. What time it is. Friday jams. Hey, Hey. Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to the Rocky brand podcast. I'm your host, Scott Voelker, a serial entrepreneur on a mission to help you.
00:14 This show is designed to teach you to inspire you, to motivate you to take massive action and build a future proof business, so whether you're just starting out or taking your existing business to the next level, this is your home now. If you're ready, I'm ready. Let's rock your brand. What's up?
00:37 One, welcome to this Friday jam session. Super excited. You're here and if you haven't heard me say it before, I'm going to say it right now. This is probably one of the highlights of my week because I get to hang out with some cool people every single Friday and answer some really awesome questions. Now you might be asking Scott, how do I get my question answered? Well, all you need to do is become part of our take action crew. How do you do that? Very easy. Head on over to take action crew.com it's totally free and we do it every single Friday and it is a blast. So what you're about to listen to is one that we did last week. So this way here, even if you can't attend, you can always show up here to the rock your brand podcast and listen to our live jam session.
01:24 All right guys. So sit back, relax and let's jam. I'm wanting, we'll learn how to crop videos. I'm wanting to zoom in on certain parts so people can see my fingers better. I don't believe the editor in YouTube does this. Can you suggest the video editor that allows us or allows for this? Okay, great question. Okay. And for anyone that's listening, James is going into the guitar teaching lessons niche, right? And some people would say like, Scott, isn't that already over saturated? No, because there's not another James, right? James is going to be able to put his own unique spin on how to teach, right? And uh, and I think he's going to do very, very well, right? So anybody that has their own expertise, their own passion, and they have their own spin on it, there's no one that can replace you. So I know myself, I've looked at guitar tutorials and there's some people, they're just too technical and some people are more like, like, just, here's, here's a, here's where you put your fingers, right?
02:18 Like here's how you do it, right? It's not like talking theory and scales and all of that stuff. That stuff is where I start to tune out. Okay, so all right, so how do you zoom in? Okay, so there's a couple of different, now, I don't know, James, if you are on a windows machine or if you're on a Mac, if you're on a Mac, what I really like is ScreenFlow. It's about a hundred dollars somewhere in that range, maybe $120 but it works really good. And you can literally zoom in. You can even slows zoom in on different parts of your, of your video. So what you want to do here is you want to get a tool that allows you to do that. Now should you be editing your videos right now? Maybe just because you're starting out, but I'm a big fan of also going to a place like Fiverr and having someone do the work for you, right?
03:03 Like why not do that? Okay? So here's what, here's what I want you to do. If you think that is something that you're, you're going to be doing yourself and editing, then yes. Get something like either ScreenFlow or Camtasia, one of those that will allow you to do that. All right? So make sure that you don't overcomplicate it. And if you want, you can have someone on fiber, do it for probably 10 bucks. All right? So make sure that you do that. All right? Or make sure you consider that. Alright, let me go down here, Ashley. How many blog posts, followers would you recommend before applying to be an affiliate? All right, so, okay, so I think it matters on the traffic. It doesn't matter necessarily on how many followers or it's, it's how many people are visiting the site. Okay. How many people are visiting the site.
03:51 That's going to determine when I'm going to be, um, applying to be an affiliate. Because if you're applying for Amazon associates, you need to have a certain number of sales in a 30 day window or they'll stop, they'll actually pause or even terminate your prep, your privileges to sell. So make sure that you're not putting it on too early. Now, here's the deal though. There's other affiliate programs other than just Amazon. There's ClickBank products, okay? And that doesn't have anything there that you have to have a certain number of those. And there's also private ones that you can use. My biggest thing is in the beginning, we don't want to monetize too early, right? We want to focus on getting the traffic rate. Now we have, I'm the one brand, we just hit 25,000 I believe last month. We turned it on the month before when we had about 18,000 okay.
04:40 The other brand is now getting around. It's going to have around twenty three thousand twenty five thousand somewhere in that range. Maybe even 30. We're going to turn it on now, right? But we have some affiliate stuff that's in there but no ad networks. Okay. So the ad networks are a little bit different and you have to have at least 10,000 anywhere anyways before you turn that on for ease. Zohak media vine is 25,000 page views and then uh, add thrive as a hundred thousand. Um, so again, I would focus right now on getting, getting the eyeballs, getting the traffic. Yes, you want to do some posts that talk about products. You want to do some comparisons, you want to do this versus this five best router bits for dovetail joints, like certain things like that. And then you can always take those links and you can always switch them out with affiliate links later.
05:28 Okay. So just understand that you don't have to be committed to the post as the way it is today and what you can do later. So just understand, you can always go back and change that. Hey Kate, good morning. Happy Friday to you as well. Thanks for stopping in. Derek, what do you think about advertising from your website? I love it. I was just talking about that. I think advertising from your website is great. Now. It depends, right? So for me on brand creators.com I'm not running ads from egoic or uh, AdThrive or media vine. And the reason is is because I want to control the offers that I am making, right? So the only offers right now on brain creators.com is our playbook, is our free checklist. And then also when we open brand creators Academy and now it's not even on the website, but now our workshop for Pinterest, right?
06:19 So I'm not offering any other things. The only thing that we are putting on there, and actually it's not even built right now, we haven't, we haven't converted it over from the rebrand is a resources page which will have other products that we promote that we use like convert kit example. Um, but I, I, I'm a fan of it, but I'm not a fan of it. If you're trying to drive sales to a lot of your own stuff because that could detract, but you gotta you gotta kind of pick and choose. I'm not on the other brand that I talk a lot about. That's about three years old now. And we do, uh, over 150,000 pages a month. We are running ads and we have our own physical products and we have our own digital products. So it just depends on the brand and on the market.
06:59 Okay. Uh, or you know, and, and really your preference. Um, Kevin Wang, what's up? What should my homepage look like? Two terms of or in terms of content on my e-commerce page should almost be like a lead page. Uh, okay. So the homepage I think should let people know immediately that they're in the right place. So if you help people catch more bass than I would say on the first on the home page, um, uh, are, you know, are you trying to catch more bass or do you want to catch more bass? Question Mark? Well, you're in the right place. Download our five step checklist to the ultimate bass fishing guide. Right? That would be your lead magnet. I do like a lead magnet there, but I also want them to know that they're in the right place. If all you do is put a product up in front of them, they're going to think they're in an eCommerce store.
07:49 Um, when people are on an eCommerce store, unless they're there to buy, that could be a turnoff. So I would not have my homepage to be all of that. Now you might have a little spot. I'm homepage that says featured products. That's fine. But I think it's always about them. What are they trying to achieve if they're trying to catch more bass than you want to let them know you're at the right place. This is where we help you catch more bass, right? Uh, or if you're doing woodworking, uh, are you interested in building a piece of furniture that will be, uh, handed down for generations to come? You are, Oh, good. You're in the right place. That's what we focus on, right? So you want to make sure that your messaging is right on point. So, so that way they're, when they get there, they know exactly that they're in the right place.
08:30 And also it takes the people that aren't the right people and it repels them. Right. So, um, I do like having some type of lead capture on the homepage somewhere, even if it's a popup that comes on after they've been there for five seconds, but a very, very subtle one, uh, like something in hello bar would be a good choice for that. Uh, good morning Mike smiley, who always makes me smile. Good morning, Scott and fellow action takers. Love it. Uh, Derek, how many videos or links to other content should I have on page one? So I think what you're, you're meaning on page one, you mean page one of your website, how many videos or links to other content? Uh, so maybe you can clarify that for me, but if it's, uh, if it's, the homepage is many as, as needed, I don't think there's a rule on that that you have to stick to whatever.
09:20 Makes sense. Alright. Uh, let's see here. Salamone. When starting, would you recommend to go live on two to three platforms? Oh, this is a great question. So what Salma is asking is about live streaming video. Kind of like I'm doing right now and I'm broadcasting to YouTube and Facebook. Well an Instagram, if you count the phone, hi Instagram off to the side. Um, but I'm really streaming through these two through the camera over here. And if you're listening to the podcast, you can't actually see me right now doing that. But I'm looking at the camera, which is about four feet in front of me. So, uh, I think in the beginning we just need to get you comfortable. So I would say to make it super easy, that way we don't have a lot of connection things, right? We can just broadcast to one right broadcast to the one that you feel can get you one or two people watching.
10:09 That way there you have a live person or people that you can engage with kind of like I'm doing right here. Right. So, even if you don't have anyone watching, it's still is a great thing to get you in the rhythm and give you reps. Right. We're practicing, but yet we can practice in front of a few people. The other cool thing with doing live is we don't have to start and stop or we won't be able to start and stop because we start live when we gotta finish. Right. You can't start and stop and overthink things too much. So I'm a big fan of doing it. I would pick one right now and then I would go with that and then I would add later. Okay. I wouldn't say you got to do two or three at once. Um, alright. Uh, Rebecca, is it wise, excuse me, to integrate my physical products shop in my new block site.
10:56 Wait for enough traffic to keep them completely separate. Is integration of a shop hurtful for future affiliate marketing? No, I don't believe so. I think you should have, if you have a shop right now, then you should have a button in the menu that says our shop or our products or products or something like that. Why not let people know that you have them. There's nothing we're hiding here. There's no secret. Right. So I would say put it there. Right. And I don't think it's going to hurt anything. Um, so I would say you want to incorporate them as soon as possible. If the new blog or website is for the physical product stuff that you're selling. Right? So if you're bringing those two together, why not bring them together? Now it doesn't mean that they both have to be hosted. Actually, we've done it where you have a Shopify store and then that is separate.
11:43 We just do a sub domain off of the main domain. Right. But it's still looks like when you're on the site, it's all hosted there because it's connected. All right. So I know, I don't think it's hurtful at all. I think it's helpful. All right. I think it's helpful. Um, Derek, what do you think about all these video tools to send traffic to your website syndication? Is it worth the time to invest in such a strategy? No, I've played with that in the past and no, I do not believe that it's a good use of your time or money right now. Uh, so what you're talking about is something like repurpose. Uh, there's one out there which is a good, it's a good tool. Um, it does what it says, but whenever you're using a repurpose tool of some kind to try to, um, to try to get your content out there baster, um, it is going to hurt, um, the algorithm inside of each platform because they are smart enough.
12:36 I'll give you an example. So tailwind, it will allow you to post on Pinterest. It'll allow you to post on Instagram and Facebook and all of those. And I just started using it, but the only reason I'm using it is to kind of backfill, right? So I'm going to be doing my own stuff manually and then I'm going to be filling these hoppers so I have a steady flow of content being published on a regular basis. I'm not a fan of making that your only strategy so you can syndicate. Right. And I also think that you got to get yourself dialed in with your content before you start thinking about syndication, right? So think about the content you're going to create. Start creating it, get into a rhythm, and then we can start talking about repurposing it or cutting it up and then sending it out to different platforms. All right, so, um, all right. Let me take a quick little break here to take a sip of hot Bulletproof coffee. If you guys are listening, you, you don't see me, but you can hear me and I'll tell you what, it's really good. Really good. Bulletproof coffee.
13:40 I'm sorry for slurping if I did. Anyway, let's get back to jamming. What do you say again? Let me take a pause here for a minute just to say if you're listening to this, uh, on the podcast, um, we're doing this live, uh, every Friday. This is what we call our Friday jam session and you can head over to take action crew.com and you can be part of our crew where you can ask a question. So if you have a question you want me to answer live, this is where you would do it and then we're going to air it on an upcoming podcast episode. All right, so moving on. Alright. Salamone how do live streams do in terms of getting traffic as opposed to videos? Are they're searchable? Are they searchable to like other videos? Well, yes they are in a sense, but on Facebook, not so searchable.
14:25 Right? How many times have you went to Facebook and searched for content? Right? You probably haven't. I know I haven't. I don't go there and go, Oh, how to catch more bass. I'm going to go to Facebook. Where do you go? You go to YouTube usually, right? Or you might go to Pinterest or you might do a Google search, right? But you're not going to Facebook. So if I had a choice, I would probably say I would stream to YouTube because YouTube then becomes a video asset that people are searching for. So we have Facebook, which is not really a search engine, although you can search in it, but people don't use it for that purpose. And you do. But what is it? It's a search engine for video. And a lot of times it's how to stuff. So that just makes the most sense to me, right?
15:10 So I would start there and then use Facebook as well. Now the other thing you can do is you can take your YouTube video and then you can download it, uh, or even not even download it. If you, if you stream there, you'd have to download it. If you upload it there, you can just take that same upload and then just upload it natively to Facebook. It's going to also perform better if you natively upload or stream from the channel itself. So just a little bit of food for thought there. Alright, Michael, would you consider doing a copy talk on how to best structure and interview. Ooh, I like this, Michael. I am sure you have learned a lot interviewing people for the podcast and I believe we would all benefit from your experience. I would love to do that. And let me, let me kinda break off here for a second.
15:58 The reason why I love this is because you guys know if you're listening to this or watching this, you know that I recently did a rebrand on what used to be the amazing seller podcast, which had over 820 some episodes and I decided to change the name to the rock, your brand podcast, right? And one of the reasons is because I want to talk about live streaming, I want to talk about podcasting, I want to talk about how to create a great interview, right? Those are things I do want to talk about because I've done it and I'm doing it and it's what I, it's what I enjoy doing. I don't want to just talk about physical products anymore, right? So the way for me to do that is to create this. So yes, I would love to help with that. And I'll be 100% completely transparent here with all of you.
16:46 I am probably not the best interviewer, but I do think I have a good way of asking questions that not only I will benefit from, but also you, the listener. And that's the big thing for me because I'm always thinking to myself, this is what I'm curious about. And the people that are following what I'm doing probably think a lot like me. So they probably want to know this too. So I think it's knowing your audience really. And I also think making the person that you're interviewing really feel comfortable and at home. Right? And so I am not very strict. I have a couple of points and then I'll start riffing on those points. Right? I know that I want to know their backstory, but I know that everyone kind of digs into someone's backstory. Then I'm going to get to the meat of it.
17:34 And so for me, a lot of times what I'm doing is I'm looking for what did you do when things didn't work? Because a lot of people aren't sharing that, aren't talking about that. So the interviews that I'm doing here moving forward, um, and even the, I just aired with Collin, uh, Castella, uh, from shop mechanics who has over 900,000 YouTube subscribers. But you would think he's got a video, you know, some videos that have millions of views. He had a video that had had over a million views and you would think that if he put an offer that was in that video, that he would be just selling tons. Well, no, he launched a product and sold seven products from a million views on YouTube. Didn't really understand marketing. Right. So the reason why I'm sharing that with you is because I want to hear about that.
18:19 Right? I want to hear about how did you get through 30 nos. Like John Gordon, who wrote the carpenter and the energy bus and so many other great books, he shares that it took 30 nos before he got a yes for the energy bus. If he never kept going, the energy bus never would have reached 2 million people and it never would have propelled him to the, uh, you know, the book author that he is in or that he is known for now. And all of the, you know, all of the different coaching that he's doing never would have happened. Right? So when I interview, I want to know, I want to know the dirt. I want to know like what, what do you do? I'm one of those days that's bad, right? Because everyone talks about the good, which is great. I want to talk about some of that bad stuff, right?
19:01 Like the stuff that, how did you keep pushing through? Right. So I think one small tip here for you, Michael, it's probably a big tip really, is just try to get really raw, right? And get, get things out to them that normally other people won't ask because they're just always like, well, how did you get 900,000 subscribers? We can talk about that. I want to talk about the struggle before you ever had a hundred views on your videos. Right. Those are the important ones to me. So anyway, yes, I would love to do that. Lydia, can you explain a little bit about how the ads work? At what point do we put ads on the site? Slash? Blog? Okay. I'll give you a great example. Um, so the way that it works is typically when you have traffic, your site has to get approved by these networks, by the way.
19:48 So they're not just letting anyone start putting ads on their website. Okay? So they want to approve your account and your website. So that's why you gotta have a certain number of page views. Then once you get approved, they're going to start displaying not just ads around your content, they're going to target the people that are visiting. So they know just from different IP stuff and just different tracking. They know that there is a lot of people searching for certain or different things and they're going to resonate with them more. So if I go on to a fishing site, I will probably see an ad for Bulletproof coffee. That is probably what I will see. Okay. Because I drink Bulletproof coffee, I buy Bulletproof copy and it's in my shopping cart a lot of times. So I do that. Right? So here's the deal. When you're, when you're creating your, uh, your website, you don't have to say, well I have to talk about these certain things in order for the ads to pull it in.
20:45 That's not how it works. Now you can say, I only want ads to display about my, you know, my gardening shop, but I wouldn't do that cause I want it to really resonate to the people that are showing up individually. So, um, the way that it works is, like I said, create some really good content. Keep people in your site, by the way. So if one visitor visits five different pages, that counts as five pages. Okay? So I'm going to get paid more because of that. So the idea is to keep people in the site longer and by doing inner linking and things that we talk about inside of the Academy and things that I've talked about even on here, you want to interlink to other useful content. So this way here, people can get more of what they're looking for, right? And there's ways that you can do that.
21:29 And again, we don't have a lot of time here today. Maybe we'll do a coffee talk on that. Right. So just understand. We want to try to give them a really good user experience and then the ads are going to be supportive to them. Okay. So just understand that a Winston, good morning. Welcome back my friend. Good morning, Scott. Just joined. Do you think it's a good idea to post a podcast pins on Pinterest? Well, I think it is in the right market and I'll be quite honest with you, Winston, I'm just starting this now. So I'm actually my daughter who's also going to be running the training for our workshop is actually setting us up and we're going to do a test. So I don't know. Um, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you know in the future, but I'm doing it right now because it's pretty simple.
22:12 Once you have the strategy down, then it's just a matter of creating your boards, filling your boards and creating new pins for your content. And then you just get into a flow and kind of get into a, a rhythm if you will, just like you would if you're posting content. So I do think it's a good idea depending on the market. Okay. Depending on the market, but it can be, it totally can be. Uh, let's see here. Okay, we just answered that Salma is majority of your income still selling on Amazon? At what point would you recommend pivoting to Shopify? Um, okay. So yes, in the brand that worked that you're referring to? I would say still there's probably, it's probably 70%, maybe 65 ish. Okay. Um, but I'm okay with that because we have the traffic. Right. And so, and actually it might not even be that much anymore.
23:05 It might be, it might only be 60%. Um, cause we have a lot of ad revenue coming in now. We have a lot of, um, we have, we still have affiliate stuff coming in. We have digital guides, so we have all that stuff. We even have Etsy going on. We have, uh, some eBay, but not much. We have more on Etsy now. Um, so, um, I would say yes it is. But as far as like, here's the deal though, when people ask me, they're like, Scott, when should I start sending my own traffic over to Shopify? At the end of the day, we all know that people feel more trusted going on Amazon. Right? So as long as, and here's a Ninja tip for you guys, by the way, is inside of your posts that you're referring to your product. I don't care if it goes to Shopify, I don't care if it goes to Etsy, I don't care if it goes to Amazon, right?
23:54 I mean I want it to go to Amazon right now cause I'm going to feed that thing, right? You want to use a pretty link. And the reason is is because at any point in time, if I have 10 or 15 or 20 mentions of that product, I can change where it's pointing with one single edit. So I can go into the back end of a pretty link, I can edit where it's going, change the URL, hit save, and instantly all of those links are changed immediately. All right. So, um, I would say always, always, always use a pretty link. Now a pretty link is a link or it's a WordPress plugin. It's, they have a free version. We use a free version a lot of times. Um, but you can also, there's other ones out there I would not use like a Bitly link or a short Google link.
24:40 I wouldn't do that. It looks spammy. It's not good. Um, you want to do is use something that has your branding in it, kind of like brain creators.com forward slash workshop that is going to take you to a workshop page, a landing page that tells all about the workshop. Now guess what, in a month from now, if I decide to do one on email list building, I can change that link to the email list building workshop, right? So it's always there for when I need it and I can just change in the backend of where that's pointing. So that's a, that's an important one guys. That's a big nugget right there. All right. Um, so again, I wouldn't direct my traffic off of Amazon. If you're selling on Amazon right now, I personally wouldn't go down that route until you have some really solid sales and you want to test it.
25:25 But I would probably surmise that your, your conversions are going to go down. Okay. Um, so if you're okay with that, but I would say, why are you going to take it off of Amazon right now? If you're feeding Amazon and helping you rank for other keywords and all of that stuff, if you're in good standing with Amazon, why not just push them there? Right? So I think unless you have a funnel that is built where you buy one thing and then you get upsold on the second thing, and the third thing it's designed to do that, that would just be a single funnel. It wouldn't be a Shopify store necessarily. Um, so anyway, hopefully that helps. Alamo. Uh, let's see. Another one. Um, Selma, thoughts on Joe Rogan leaving YouTube and going to Shopify. Um, I don't know. Uh, I haven't really paid attention to be honest with you.
26:13 Uh, let's see here, Ashley. Oh, we got along when you're, I really wanted to get my blog posts up in live, but there were so many, there's some things I was struggling with finishing off on my website to give it a more polished look. Okay. I'm gonna stop you right there. Who's seeing it? Who is seeing the unpolished Venus, right? Ashley? Who seeing it? Is it your mom seeing it? Is Cindy seeing it? Uh, you know, is, is your, uh, you know, your friends seeing it? Who cares? Right? There's no traffic yet, right? Publish it and then start polishing, right? Like, yeah, I stopped right there because so many people do that. They're like, well, I still got to tweak things, right? I still got to turn a little bit of dials here. I still got to tighten that up. I still got to do that.
26:57 No, we want to get the thing done right. I just left my Lake house. It's rented right now. Right. And it's renting really, really great. There's things there that I want to fix, right? I mean, to anyone else, you're gonna walk in and be like, this is amazing. This is awesome. There's things that I want to tighten up. There's things that I want to change or fix, but you know what? To the normal person, the average person that's going in there, they're going to just look right past that stuff, right? But to me, I know it's there. You know, I want it done. I want it polished, but I need to get that money coming in, right? So get that thing rented. It's not perfect. It's okay, right? There's a little, there's a little chunk out of the bottom of my, uh, of the baseboard.
27:39 You know where the, uh, where the refrigerator is and someone hit it. It's okay. Let it fly right now. I'm going to touch it up. Right? Go. Let's, let's get that thing rented. Right? We can't get traffic if we don't publish, right? So we got to get it published. No one's seeing it. So I'm just gonna finish your after spending hours and struggling. I am brand new to WordPress and don't understand most of it. I decided to hire someone to help me with my website. Yesterday afternoon, the guy offered an additional monthly service to help with any updates. The problem is that he changed the password to my website and locked me out. Oh boy. Okay. I do not like anyone that is holding someone hostage in a sense to their own website to make edits and then they charge you per edit. I would find a new person, Ashley.
28:22 I wouldn't go down that road. If anything, I would go to like Upwork and I would find someone. I would hire someone on a job to job basis. That's it. Um, anytime someone says, Oh, I can do this for you monthly, then you got to reach out to them and go, I want to make this change. I'm telling you right now, you can figure it out. There's enough YouTube videos out there to help you do an edit on a post. All right, so not that hard. Plenty of information out there. You can do it yourself if you don't want to do it yourself, pay someone on Upwork or free up or even fiber to make those edits. There's a lot of places out there that'll do it for you and they're not going to hold you hostage in a sense. Um, so yeah, that's my recommendation on that one.
29:02 Uh, all right, let's see here. Uh, Derek, do you recommend sign up or membership on your website and also a shop on your website? Okay. I kind of went down this, um, we might be trying to do too much. Derrick, the first question is do you have traffic, right? If we have traffic then we can start talking about monetization or whatever. Right. Do you recommend sign up, uh, sign up for an email capture? Yes. Adding a membership right up front. Probably not. It's a whole nother animal. Okay. Um, and having a shop on your site. If you have stuff to offer, yes. Offer. Put the shop there. Let people know you have a shop. I'm OK with that. Um, but I wouldn't do things too early and get anxious. Right. Just build the thing and then we'll rent it out later. Okay. Karen? Alright. Uh, okay.
29:51 I know you were saying to wait to become affiliate, we have over 200 subscribers, almost 2000 page views and a good number going to the shop. But we have nothing there. We are on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook advertising numbers really look good. And yes, our open rate is 30% and click a click through rate is 22 to 24%. That's high. That's great. The reason why click is so high is because they are giving them value each time. That will, I just want to warn you though, that will go down. Um, I will promise you that as your list grows, that will go down 200 on a list is small, which is good and you're getting some good engagement, but that will go down. Um, so just be prepared for that. Don't expect 20 to 24% click through. Um, I'm happy with like two to four.
30:37 Um, so, okay. Um, with activity ideas and worksheets, should I start becoming an affiliate with Amazon? We qualify. Um, okay. So, yeah, I would probably, I mean, the worst that's going to happen is they're going to either suspend your privileges and basically say, come back to us in 30 days or 60 days. Um, now there has been people that have said that they can't get an account anymore, but there's ways around that. So I wouldn't worry about that. The best thing you can do right now though is if you're going to do that is put some affiliate links throughout your blog posts, um, and then drive some traffic there with the email list. But don't push anything to go by. Okay. Don't push in your email. You cannot do that in email. You can't push affiliate links in emails. You need to drive them to your blog and your website so you can try it.
31:27 Um, but again, the, the benefits of having affiliate stuff on your site right now, it isn't really, I guess the benefits aren't there yet because you have 2000 page views. Right? It sounds good, but you need more really in order to, to see, uh, any type of, uh, of sales on a regular basis. Um, so I would personally just hold off a little bit and then I would just keep, you know, putting out the content. I would also, yes, I would build con, I would build posts that have products that you will be an affiliate for, but I would not prematurely do this because you want to make an extra hundred bucks. Right. I would wait a little bit just to get the steady traffic. Um, but again, it's going to be a hit or miss. I can't say for sure if it's a good idea or not because every market's different.
32:24 So hopefully that helped. Alright, James? Uh, let me take a sip of coffee here. James, I'm wanting to go live on YouTube. Should I simply pick a day in time and stick with that time every week? If you don't think I should start going live, just let me know. I think it should do both to be honest with you. I think doing live would be fun for you. It would allow you to absolutely put a video up guaranteed. And I think when you do something live like this, like I'm doing, there's less structure to it because you're kind of like all over the place in a sense. And I'm trying to keep this tight, but it's still, I go off a little bit because there's a lot of topics that kind of bring us into different directions. So I would say I would try to do both.
33:13 Uh, now if you can't do both, then yes, do alive, but know what you're going to do upfront and treat it as though you're teaching a lesson to a student, right? So if it's a matter of you're going to break down the intro to ACDC back in black, then that's what the Facebook lives is going to be about or the YouTube live is going to be about. Okay. Um, and yes, I would definitely 100% sign up in your own mind that you're going to publish every single week at the exact time. It does two things. One is it pushes you and makes you say, Holy crap, it's, you know, you know, here it is 10:00 AM Eastern time and I'm doing this Facebook live and I just had her drive an hour and a half to get here so I could show up and be consistent.
33:59 I did that myself because I committed to you. Right? So when you commit to other people and just commit to yourself in your mind, you're going to do it. So I would say definitely do it just for your own mental side of things. But also people will then start to look forward to, Oh, it's Friday and um, you know, James is going to come out and do a new lesson this week and then you can start doing requests. What do you guys want me to do next week? Any song requests? And then you can start working on that song and then guess what? You can come on and go, Hey, it's James today. We're going to do the solo to back in black. Uh, because, uh, you know, whatever, uh, Sam came on live last time and said he wanted me to do it, so I'm going to do it for Sam and anyone else out there that wants it.
34:43 So what does that do? It shows that you have people watching and listening and you have questions. What does that do? It puts you as an authoritative person in your market because people are asking you questions and you're the teacher now, right? So there's a lot of that that goes into it as well. So yes, I would definitely say do the live, but I would try to also add the component of another video if you can. All right. It doesn't have to be long. It could be like one little thing that I'm kinda stuck on. Right? I'm stuck on doing this one scale. You found a hack to be able to learn this scale with a really simple technique and then you just come on, you teach me in three minutes and I go work on it. And then you say, come back and let me know.
35:21 Was that helpful? If not, let me know. What were you stuck on? Alright guys, James, I'm out. Like that's it. Simple Mike. Point. As a former broadcaster, I can confirm that live is always better than tape. We were supposed to practice off air on what was referred to as the dummy load, not, not uh, to the real antenna. Um, that was always void of purpose. Uh, once the on-air light went on for real, suddenly the mind goes into a totally different gear and drives the narrative. Just try it. You'll see the difference it makes. Yeah. I love that. Mike. I love it that you were a broadcast person to uh, Debbie, I'm going to live on my website today or I'm going live. I'm sorry. I'm going live on my website today as promised with one post. I'm just not sure what to post next.
36:08 I know I need to niche down, but not sure which way to go. I believe I have many options, but I'm stuck in analysis paralysis. Any suggestions? Yes, I have one. What are five questions your market is asking right now? And one way to figure this out is just go to Google and type in how to catch more bass. Let it auto fill. It's going to say in a pond, it's going to say in a Lake, right? Or another way to do it is can you catch bass with a rubber worm? Question Mark, and then you're going to see all of these other suggestive questions you're going to write posts on those. I always tell people start with questions. Questions are easy to answer. It's what people need, it's what they're searching for and it's also easier to rank for. So I would do that.
36:54 I would fill your bucket. I usually talk about the three buckets of content and the three buckets of content is questions, how to and products, product comparisons, product reviews, you know, what your thoughts on different products, what you like, what you don't like on boxing, all of that stuff. But questions always comes first. So whenever we're building a new brand, a new website, a blog, the content starts with questions. So I will do, I will do what I call a content tree where you have one main question that could go in a hundred different directions or let's say 20 different directions and then I'll create 20 different posts off of that that go into more specifics and then I'll link everything back to the one, right? We call that content tree a content tree. So that's what I would suggest to him. And I'm sure if you just go through that one little exercise, you can be like, okay, there's five posts.
37:45 Also, Google will also tell you, um, suggested questions. Like other questions people have asked from this quarry. If you did this, uh, you know this keyword search, there's other ones that's related and it will give you that. Those are going to be good keywords. I don't even care what the numbers look like in like Uber suggest or a keyword tool. I'm just looking at, that's what Google is suggesting. People must be searching for it. So that'll get you out of that quick Salomon. Are you planning to change your Facebook group name to your new brand? Yeah, we're in the process of that. And it's a funny story. Um, the page, okay. The group, the group is larger that I'm probably not going to touch. Um, just because, uh, I may change the name, but I'm not going to change what's happening there. There's a lot of e-commerce discussion there.
38:29 I'm not really affiliated with that any more. Um, and I've got, uh, I've got some ideas on what going to do to, to make that still a very valuable resource for those people. Um, now the page, we changed the name to rock your brand podcast, but it didn't get approved inside of Facebook for whatever reason. So we're still waiting to hear back. We appeal it and all that stuff. So it's been a little bit of a nightmare, but it's okay. We'll figure out something. Um, but we change the app. So if you go to app rock, your brand podcast in Facebook, it'll take you there. But the title is still the amazing seller. It's, it's weird. Um, they won't, they won't, uh, they won't allow us to change it at this point for some reason. So we're working on it. Um, where would you go apart from answer the public to look for questions to answer in your niche for content, if you are new, again, I would go to Google, I'd go to YouTube, I'd go there, use the autosuggest portion of those search engines.
39:26 All right? I'd go there, I'd go to Pinterest to, right, I'd go to those three that give you enough right there to go and start creating content. And then you don't get overwhelmed with like, Oh, but this year has a domain score of four and this here has 19 backlinks and this has, you know, uh, you know, 50 posts and that's why they rank no, don't worry about that post, right? Create and post, create and post. That is the formula guys. And I would go to those three. I, I w I mean Uber, I mean, not Uber suggest, um, answer the public. If you go there, it's going to give you some really good ideas. But I would even go outside of that. I'd go Google, I'd go YouTube and I'd go Pinterest. That's where I'd go. Alright, Derek, can too many plugins on your website.
40:09 Slow up your site. Yes it can. Um, how to keep your site optimized. And do you recommend continuous backups? Yes, there's plugins that help with that. Um, but I would keep the site very, very, very light, meaning I would not install a bunch of plugins on the website. Um, the one that I love is Yoast. That's an optimization SEO optimization plugin. It's fairly light. Um, and then an optimization plugin I would install would be for optimizing your images to make them smaller or to compress them. You want the load time to be as fast as possible. And that's a big mistake I see a lot of people making is they try to install too many plugins cause they want all the bells and whistles. And what happens is, is people come to the site and then they jumped, they bounce. We don't want that. The other thing is is you want to see how your site works.
40:59 On mobile. We have most of our traffic, 75% of our traffic is being discovered and being used on mobile. So make sure that you're optimizing for mobile as well. But yes, too many plugins can be bad. Um, start with one or two that you need and then just build off of that. Um, you don't need to have a ton of plugins. Uh, let's see here. Uh, Derek, what tool plugged into use to put Google ads on your website? It's basically through the network. So if we're using egoic, it's going to be there plugin. If it's a media vine, it's their plugin. If it's at thrive, it's their plugin and then they can control it. We can control it. We can change placements, we can do all that stuff. And they also give you a lot of data on the backend when you're using that. All right.
41:43 Uh, let's see here. Why did you press your book so low? I have seen other guides selling for more. Yeah, well that's done by design. Here's why I want people to get this. By the way, a brand creators, the playbook, this is the playbook that we use, that we use inside a brand creators Academy. It is worth more than $4 and 99 cents. Why did I price it at that point? Well, here's why I want to get it in more people's hands. That right there is also a lead magnet for me. Let's be honest, if you buy that for $4 and 99 cents, it shows me that you're interested in building your brand and it also shows me that you're interested enough to throw $5 into the ring, right? The other thing is, is on the back end of that, there's an up sell for $9 and 99 cents and you'd say, well Scott, that's still not that much.
42:29 It's an audio book, right? And then there's one other thing that is on the back end of that. If you wanted to go through our, and I don't even have this on my website, it's only if you purchase that book, it's um, it's our market selection masterclass. So I go through five different examples. I drill down into these markets showing you a good market, a bad market, what I look for, what I like, what I don't like. So it's basically going through the playbook, but showing how I'm going through that process. And that's over like three hours long. And that's 99 bucks. So basically that book could earn more money, but that's not my goal. My goal is to give people enough resources to get going. And then if they're interested in joining brand creators Academy when we opened in July, then I, I know that they're possibly ready.
43:14 Right? So I've gotten them up to speed. That's why I have learned a long time ago to give as much value as you can at an affordable price. And not saying that you shouldn't charge, let's face it, I'll throw it right out there guys. I have a Lake shop or at a Lake house master shop that I've done this past year and it was $4,500 for one business to come in. Okay? And we did that for two full days. Okay. It's only for people that are doing anywhere from 500,000 a year to a million plus. Okay. So there's other ways that you can earn money and you want those people to be qualified. Not everyone's qualified. So my goal, my goal is to get you your brand bill off of this and the Academy. And then hopefully one day you might be hanging out with me at the Lake house, right?
44:04 So there's always tears that you can work people up towards when they're ready. Okay. I mean, heck, I've gone an inner circle where people will pay $25,000 for the year to be a part of that where I worked with them for 12 months. Right? So there's ways that you can, you can charge more, but when people are in the right place to where it would make sense for their business. But I want to give as much free value. And even, you know, just like this workshop we're doing for Pinterest, I could honestly probably charge three times, four times what we're charging. And I'm not. And the reason is, is because I want more people to get in, give them a taste of what it's like to go through one of our trainings, and then hopefully maybe they're going to want to join brand creators Academy when we opened in July.
44:48 Right? But why not take that one component and give it to them at a reasonable price so they get to kind of come in and actually see what it's like. So you just can't be afraid to give too much guys. You can't worry about that. All right. All right, few more questions then we got to jump here guys. This jam sessions going along. Okay, Laurie. Good morning Scott. Any recommendations as the best way for selling digital products such as a course or a PDF on a website, a particular plugin or some other method? Yeah, well I would say on that there it's going to come down to not just your website, you're going to build, um, more or less like a sale process or a sales process or also known as a funnel. And it can be as simple as you put up a lead page or a landing page in convert kit, whatever.
45:35 And there's even Gumroad, which is a great tool that is independent of itself. They only charge you if you sell. Um, you can, you can roll courses out. Uh, you can do all that stuff and you only pay for when the transaction is done. I think the simplify that is the key. So my biggest thing would be is get something where you can deliver it to people. You can also create a front end sales page in a sense, and it doesn't have to be necessarily your website. Now you can take like Gumroad for example. You can embed that as like an eye frame inside of your website. So it appears as though it's in your site. You can make the transaction happen in your site, all of that stuff. Um, so that's what I would recommend on that because you can deliver it digitally very easily and then you can give people access once they buy, they're going to get um, log in.
46:23 If you're a little bit more advanced, you want to use something like Kajabi. Kajabi is going to start at about a hundred bucks a month and go up to about $300 a month depending on how many members you have and all of that stuff. We use Kajabi right now. We love it. Lot of great things, but a lot of times it's a little bit more advanced for people just starting a Salomon. What would you recommend for sales page? Oh, okay. I just answered it. Um, anything that works that's easy for you right now. I don't think you need Kajabi right now. Honestly, lead pages is not going to help you deliver the product all that much. So I would say something like gum road would be a good one to try out. Um, and then the other one is Kajabi. Um, those are the ones that I like.
47:04 There's teachable. I used teachable. I'm not a fan. I gotta be honest with you guys and I want to be, I just, I'm not, it's, it's clunky. It's um, it's hard to know when you buy like where to go. It was very confusing for me. I set it up and we actually delivered our recordings for brand accelerator live on that as a test and I didn't like it. I'm Kajabi way better in my opinion. Um, Winston. Okay. The best way to drive traffic to my podcast saying I'm here. Listen to me. Um, the best way to do it is to do stuff like this right here, like what, you know, jump on live and bring attention to that episode. If you had an episode that you talked about Pinterest, like we are do a podcast episode that teaches and then mention it, right? Um, so that's what I would do.
47:49 Do either an episode or a, also I would build the email list if you haven't done so already. Um, but I would also try to do my best, um, to really show up on social like I'm doing right here and uh, and just try to bring awareness to it. It's a slow grind. It's not going to happen overnight. Also, try to get on some people's podcasts that's in your audience and that's a really good thing to do as well. Uh, Ashley, since I only have a few posts, should I wait on signing up for the Pinterest workshop? I really want to sign up, but I'm worried I'm doing a so prematurely, well actually, here's the deal. You have a website up and running. Correct. So it's already built. You have a post, you want traffic going to there, right? So then yes, you would be the right fit because you have that component.
48:35 If you said to me, Scott, I don't want my website up. I don't have any content written yet, I'd say do that first, then you can do that later. But you're actually in a great spot because you can be, if I'm building a brand and I'm in your place right now, the next part of that is the Pinterest side of things. So I would say yes, and I'm not just saying it because I would tell, you know, trust me, I would tell you know, um, let's see here. Debbie. Um, uh, hi Ashley. I'm in the same. Okay, so we're having a little communication going on here. Cool. Uh, Mike, as Scott advised, Ashley, the person has no right to do this and planning to extort you. Okay? So I'm not going to read this whole thing. It's already been in the comments, but Mike is basically jumping in there and saying like, how dare this guy hold you hostage to your own website?
49:17 I agree. I hate that model and I don't say hate much, but I don't like it. Uh, grace. Hey grace. Good morning. I love the always go back to keeping things simple. Yeah. That is my model. I gotta be honest. This, this year coming up that we're facing right now is all about simplicity guys. It's all about simplicity. I am not going down the road of shiny objects. It's, it's what I'm doing. Keeping it simple and even streamlining my team. Like everything that I'm doing is purposely, uh, and uh, and it's deliberate, simple. Keep it simple. Uh, yeah, no problem. Winston, thank you for showing up my man. Tristan, I'm looking, I ended up hiring a marketing company in the next few days. What are some questions that I need to ask them to make sure that my question nutrition is, is why, why are you, why are you hiring a marketing company?
50:05 Marketing companies, a lot of times to me, they don't know marketing. I'm sorry. Maybe this company that you're looking to hire does. But a lot of times marketing companies don't understand direct response marketing. Um, so I would like to know, and we can't really go into it today, but maybe drop in the comments. Maybe we can follow up on this. What are you struggling with marketing wise? What is your goal for marketing and what do you consider marketing? Um, cause I don't think that you necessarily need a marketing company, a marketing agency. Um, I don't really find that they're that useful. Um, all right, one last question. Would you sell downloadable digital product on Etsy? Yes, and I've done it. I've done it with our digital creations. We have digital, we had Photoshop templates, sold them on there. It's a great place. I know, uh, Karen is on here who sells, uh, it's kind of like, um, assignments for students or for teachers to give to students and stuff.
50:58 Anything like that. A hundred percent. I'm a fan. You can definitely, definitely use Etsy. And Etsy is a great, again, Etsy, a search engine for buyers. So why not use that? Right? So I would say yes, 100% Etsy is great for that. All right, well I hope that you enjoyed that Friday jam session and like I said in the beginning, if you want to attend one of our live Friday jam sessions, all you need to do is head on over to take action crew.com that is where we show up every Friday, 10:00 AM Eastern time and you can join us, you can ask a question and then uh, I can answer it and we can go ahead and also publish it here on the podcast. So once again, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. This is always one of the highlights of my week. And until next time, remember I'm here for you. I believe in you and I am rooting for you, but you have to, you have to come on, say it with me. Say it loud. Say it proud. Take action. Have an awesome, amazing day. And I'll see you right back here on the next episode. Now go rock your brand.
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Scott Voelker
Over the years I’ve helped thousands of people TAKE ACTION to UNLOCK their true potential on building their ultimate freedom business, by developing the skills to make them resilient, confident and FUTURE PROOF. I’ve clocked my 10,000 hours over the years working in the trenches myself and helping others build and grow their brands. I know the power in TAKING ACTION better than anyone and I’ve seen people lives changed as a result of it...including my OWN!
The Simple 5-Step Process We Used To Generate $64,000 In 12 Months Working Part Time On Etsy.
Yes, Send Me The Roadmap!