#and build a fulfilling life by creating a vision for intentional living. Let this blog inspire you with actionable tips for living with inte

[borngeniusworld]

Take Responsibility

1. “The price of greatness is responsibility.” – Winston Churchill 2. “You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.” – Jim Rohn 3. “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” – Eleanor…

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#Achieving goals #and a positive mindset. Dive into goal setting #and build a fulfilling life by creating a vision for intentional living. Let this blog inspire you with actionable tips for living with inte #and creating your dream lifestyle with vision boards and mindfulness practices. This blog is your guide to purposeful living #and embracing personal growth. Learn transformative living strategies #and empowerment. Discover the art of happiness #and fulfill your aspirations. Explore goal-oriented living #and pursuing passions through personal development and goal achievement. Manifesting dreams becomes easier with a success mindset #and success habits for a life of inspiration. Boost positivity with affirmations #and tips for life satisfaction. Overcome obstacles on your journey #aspire for greatness #Explore the secrets to a dream life #find your purpose #Lifestyle Design #living your dreams #mindset shifts #motivational quotes #self-fulfillment #turning dreams into reality

[crusherthedoctor]

When taking Lutrudis as a concept into account, it could be argued that the decision to have her live in a big, fairytale-like castle would be an unwise idea, maybe even counterintuitive, since a place so extravagant might undermine her intended loneliness and yearning for a more fulfilling life, adventure, and all that jazz before Sonic and company entered the picture. The last thing I’d want with Trudy would be to remind people of Chris “woe is me” Thorndyke and his rich kid mansion lifestyle. Not to mention that since some of the townspeople in Lime Shores can act rather ignorant (and in some cases, antagonistic) towards her, a lavish castle might also undermine the underdog nature of that particular setup.

Despite these concerns however, I felt confident with my plan, and I figured that as long as I knew what I was doing, readers would understand what I had in mind. I’ve explained in the past that a castle would better accommodate someone with her EDS, so right off the bat, you already have a practical justification for it. It also helps that whereas the accursed Thorndyke had his parents, friends, grandad, butler, etc etc etc etc... Trudy genuinely had no one to turn to before the heroes arrived for their intended vacation. So with that said, let’s examine this particular building for a bit, complete with pics for comparison’s sake, as well as a certain cavern full of Ethereal goodness that happens to be nearby...

Creating the Residence: Trudy’s Castle

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The outside environment is not too subtly inspired by Autumn Plains from Spyro 2, better known to non-Spyro fans as my blog background.

A serene yet lonely autumnal forest backdrop, with a big stone castle smack dab in the center. It’s not one-to-one the same of course - instead of a pool, the front area boasts a lovely garden full of different flowers, and there’s also a lake nearby - but the mood is more or less what you see here.

However, this partly serves to contrast with what’s behind closed doors. As acknowledged in Beyond the Stars proper, the interior of the castle instead goes for a different and grander, yet equally inviting atmosphere when you take that first step inside. Instead of stone, you see marble and wood, and instead of grey and green, you have reds, creams, maroons, and golds (with a few complimentary blues and purples thanks to the flags hovering above).

As the lady herself mentions, Trudy discovered that the interior was in a state of disarray when she obtained it, and she was of the belief that a castle as beautiful and rich in history as this one deserved better than to be forgotten and wither away in the coming generations. The least she felt she could do was give it a modern, yet respectful redecoration, and give the old building a second, loving life in the process.

Yes, that means every spot of detail inside this castle was done single-handedly. Entirely on her lonesome. It took ages to complete, especially when taking her EDS into account, but she was determined to give the place its due, and lo and behold, the effort more than paid off. (You know, such levels of determination bring a blue hedgehog to mind...)

And that’s just the intended vision for the main hallway! We haven’t touched the other rooms yet! (Since a castle would have quite a lot of rooms, it goes without saying that for the sake of keeping this post from going even longer, we won’t be covering literally every single room... just the most important and/or most noteworthy ones. :o)

The bathroom can be described as a mix between the two examples below, combining the semi-medieval build of the former with the sky blue palette and general relaxing style of the latter.

Though that said, while the bath remains there for any guests to use, Trudy personally uses a shower since it’s more convenient for someone with her condition.

The kitchen (or as Sonic likes to call it, “the palace of chili dog magic”) mostly comes in cool browns and blacks, and its intended appearance is probably one of the more obvious combinations of old-timey and modern. It also has a slightly country aesthetic compared to the other rooms, because ha ha, horses, geddit.

The greenhouse at the back brings back the heavy amounts of green (well duh, the clue’s in the name, isn’t it?), while also providing contrast with the whiteness of the structure and architecture. Complete with giant arched windows, because of course.

And the segue point between the greenhouse and the rest of the castle looks something along these lines, at least with the way the building itself connects.

Even the chambers underneath the castle manage to look classy and clean. And just as well, since it’s where Tails parks the Tornado for the remainder of his time in Viridonia, once he FINALLY remembers to get it off the Lime Shore beach...

You know another benefit of such a spacious area? You get to turn it into a makeshift workshop for all your gadget needs, Tornado-related or otherwise. I’m sure that won’t come in handy at some point...

The guest bedroom is one of the most curious rooms of the lot, because even though it’s as nice and tidy as you’d expect, it’s also rather... muted compared to everywhere else. Perhaps Trudy felt no need to modify it further in any specific way, since no one had ever bothered to stop by anyway... until you-know-who and the gang.

And we can’t forget to mention our fair equine’s OWN bedroom now, can we? Her bedroom opts for darker colours, yet no less therapeutic, which includes the canopy bed that she rests in. You can actually see the general idea with the bedroom (and the outside of the castle for that matter) for yourself, in the Dame of the Daisy mini-comic, courtesy of my awesome friend @benignmilitancy​.

Likewise, although this shot is currently incomplete (don’t worry, Benign is fine with me using it :P), meaning some details haven’t been added yet, you can also get a basic idea of how the balcony is supposed to look here, along with the complimentary view of Viridonia’s oceans.

So what kind of music would befit Trudy’s castle, you may ask? Well, taking every detail into account, we would need something that goes for that perfect mix of adventure, wonder, warmth... and a faint hint of sadness lurking beneath. Something that gets all four across, but not in a generic, run-of-the-mill orchestra sort of way. Something a little more ambient and down-to-earth, with a more unique and specific kind of intimacy. Something like...

This would apply for when you’re inside, mind you. Outside the castle, the surrounding forest would have a theme of its own, though it would share that similar combination of melancholic friendliness. So for the outside, we would go with something more like...

Overall, the idea behind Trudy’s castle - aside from being her residence and looking enviously pretty - is to add to Trudy’s own character. It’s said that one’s home can say a lot about a person, and I made sure that every room shared a consistent narrative when reading between the lines. They may differ in shape, and they may even differ in colour, but the story is kept consistent at all times. We know that our girl is elegant, we know that our girl has slightly antiquated tastes... and we know that until the arrival of Sonic and Co, our girl was extremely lonely, and isolated by her peers, to the point of staving off said loneliness and isolation by making the place as lavishly detailed as it is in the first place. And just as the stony exterior hides the more fanciful interior, so too is there more to Trudy herself than at first glance.

Besides, not counting Eggman’s endless list of tributes to himself, we don’t often see the characters’ homes in the games, do we? We’ve seen Angel Island for Knuckles, the Space Colony A.R.K. for Shadow, that shack belonging to the Chaotix in Heroes, a few pads of varying consistency depending on the game (Tails’ workship in SA1 VS his house in Battle)... but not much more than that. And what better contrast to Sonic being something of a nomad, than by Trudy living a place like this?

But we’re not done just yet. Last but not least, we can’t forget that mysterious cave hiding down below, where countless amounts of Ethereal Crystals can be found undisturbed... You can bet that such a place would be suitably attention grabbing.

Since the crystals themselves come in practically every shade of the rainbow and then some, the resulting combination - specifically their reflecting shine - ends up painting the cavern walls with just as much colour.

It may feel a tad surreal and almost alien, to the point of being a little intimidating for some, arguably. But you know in your heart of hearts that as long as Eggman isn’t in the equation, there is no need to be fearful. After all, Trudy knows it better than anyone else, and although the crystals and their properties may hail from unknown, possibly uncomfortable origins, the horse herself continues to use them for wholly benevolent purposes.

Such a cavern would deserve a theme of its own, no? We’ll need something that drives home the point that the power within has no inherent morality, and can only be as good or as evil as the person using them. So although Trudy’s own intentions are firmly on the side of good, we’ll also need an added touch of minor eeriness lingering in the background, to represent the overarching threat and subsequent implications of Eggman dipping his own hands into the metaphorical Ethereal well, on top of its already unexplained otherworldliness...

So yes, it’s quite a pleasant castle that Trudy has, eh?

But this isn’t the only castle that can be found in Viridonia...

Well, it used to be the only one of its kind on the island... until a certain doctor stopped by, decided to beat the horse at her own game, and create his own, darker counterpart in response... But we’ll get to that when we get to that, ho ho ho.

#Creating Viridonia #Sonic the Hedgehog #Fanfiction

[blogjobskar-blog]

Easiest Way To Tackle the Career Change Process in 2020

Are you looking for a professional career change? Does how you spend your waking hours in order to pay the bills not sit right? Is that lingering feeling of fear and uncertainty preventing you from taking the leap? As Tim Herrara of the Smarter Living blog wrote recently in the New York Times: “A full-time worker will spend roughly 80,000 hours at work over the course of her working life… If you’re in the wrong career, that could mean tens of thousands of hours spent devoted to something you don’t even really care about, much less feel is your passion.” And really, who has time for that? If you’re wondering how to begin tackling the process of changing careers, we have some advice for you. At Unsettled, we believe it all boils down to questions we ask ourselves, our understanding of ourselves, and how we can make more intentional choices based on what we believe in, what gives us a sense of meaning, and what gives us a sense of purpose. When setting out to answer this question, you must outline your: Values - What’s important to you? What are your non-negotiables?Skills - What are you good at? What have you learned about the value you’ve created - and how you’ve created it - in your career so far?Interests - What do you enjoy? What comes naturally to you and gives you that “state of flow”?If you boil it down to its most essential element, the “design” element of career and lifestyle comes down to aligning these elements and applying them to the choices we make, big and small, each and every day.   Each choice puts us on a certain trajectory – a path of a future vision of ourselves. If you are unintentional about these choices, then your trajectory can feel a bit like a balloon when you let out all the air – flailing all over the place. When you can be more intentional about these choices, and have a grounded reason for making them, you can surprise yourself by how much you can actually control your work and life trajectories. To us, this grounding comes from a deeper understanding of our values, our non-negotiables, what truly makes us feel alive, and how we can design around these things. In our Lifestyle Incubator - our first ever virtual retreat, we ask ourselves some fundamental questions in order to begin making these intentional career choices. These questions include: 1) Can you afford the time to make the right decision? When you look at the road ahead, do you have a personal runway - that is, 1, 3, 5 months, whatever it takes - to take an honest look and arrive at a place where you’re confident you’re making the right choice? Can you spend the time doing this while you’re working full-time, or do you need to take a sabbatical or quit your current job to give you the time and space to think about what’s next? SEBI Recuriment Pro Tip:It’s different for each of us, but first you should take a hard look at your personal finances, and explore what time, space, and environments you need that that will help you cultivate change. 2) What are your core values and non-negotiables? What are the values you are not willing to compromise on? What are the values that you stand for and build your essence? And how can knowing this help reorient yourself toward the right fit for a career? 3) Why do you work? Yes, we live in a society where work is a necessity to make enough money to survive (for most). But how can we get clear on where and why we get joy and fulfillment in our working lives? What was it about your past career paths that didn’t sit well? And in what roles did you find meaning? What is the actual daily process – not the title or role – of the work that makes you feel most alive? CBSE Results Pro Tip: Ask yourself what in your last job did you like and dislike. What was the essence of that work that made you like or dislike it? 4) What does success look like for you? Success, especially from a career standpoint, should be an individual definition, not a collective one. What does success look like for you? Can you get really honest with yourself about what a successful “future you” looks like through your own eyes? Ultimately that is all that truly matters. 5) What are the steps you will take to manifest your vision of success? At Unsettled we look at life as an evolution, a continuous process of radical self-discovery and learning through experimentation, exploration, and accountability. How can we ensure we are living each day this way? Pros of Unsettled’s Lifestyle Incubator vs. an Online Career Course It is designed as a process for self-discovery, in multiple aspects of your life. It brings together 15-20 individuals to gain fresh tools and perspectives on their lives in the company of like-minded peers who are asking themselves these same big questions. It consists of peer-to-peer dialogue, in addition to the live sessions, mentorship, and workshops.It is not meant to be an “end game” but rather supply you with the tools to help you pivot in a meaningful direction.  Key TakeawayTackling the career change process is a great time to take an inventory of yourself today, your values, and your future goals. ICCR Recruitment If you are looking for a community of like-minded individuals who are navigating the same process and choosing their next career moves with intention, check out Unsettled’s Lifestyle Incubator. We’re here to help. Source 1

[vkacerus]

Does Your Blog Have a Mission Statement? It Should You may think only big brands are in need of a mission statement to stay focused, on message and assure brand consistency. Not true. Fashion bloggers who want to grow their brand (that’s you!) will benefit from an editorial mission statement to keep focused on your goals. It’s not something you even outwardly need to share—it’s for you (or anyone that delivers content for you) to help guide your voice and content. Ultimately, it should keep your audience tuned in and growing along with you. Mission Statement vs. Vision Statement Let's start with a bit of a vocabulary lesson to differentiate between these two types of company statements. Vision Statement A vision statement describes where the company aspires to be upon achieving its mission. This statement reveals the "where" of business -- but not just where the company seeks to be. Rather, a vision statement describes where the company wants a community, or the world, to be as a result of the company's services. Below are some vision statements from well-known companies to give you a sense of how a vision represents a brand. Alzheimer's Association: A world without Alzheimer's disease. Teach for America: One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. Creative Commons: Realizing the full potential of the internet -- universal access to research and education, full participation in culture -- to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity. Microsoft (at its founding): A computer on every desk and in every home. Australia Department of Health: Better health and wellbeing for all Australians, now and for future generations. Mission Statement If the above examples are vision statements, what's a mission statement? A mission statement is, in some ways, an action-oriented vision statement, declaring the purpose an organization serves to its audience. That often includes a general description of the organization, its function, and its objectives. Ultimately, a mission statement is intended to clarify the "what," the "who," and the "why" of a company. It's the roadmap for the company's vision statement. As a company grows, its objectives and goals may be reached, and in turn, they'll change. Therefore, mission and vision statements should be revised as needed to reflect the business's new culture as previous goals are met. Both mission and vision statements are often combined into one comprehensive "mission statement" to define the organization's reason for existing and its outlook for internal and external audiences -- like employees, partners, board members, consumers, and shareholders. With that in mind, what does a good mission statement look like? Check out some of the following company mission statements for yourself -- and get inspired to write one for your brand. Mission Statement Examples Life is Good: To spread the power of optimism. sweet green: To inspire healthier communities by connecting people to real food. Patagonia: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. American Express: We work hard every day to make American Express the world's most respected service brand. Warby Parker: To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. InvisionApp: Question Assumptions. Think Deeply. Iterate as a Lifestyle. Details, Details. Design is Everywhere. Integrity. Honest Tea: To create and promote great-tasting, healthy, organic beverages. IKEA: To create a better everyday life for many people. Nordstrom: To give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible. Cradles to Crayons: Provides children from birth through age 12, living in homeless or low-income situations, with the essential items they need to thrive – at home, at school, and at play. Universal Health Services, Inc.: To provide superior quality healthcare services that: PATIENTS recommend to family and friends, PHYSICIANS prefer for their patients, PURCHASERS select for their clients, EMPLOYEES are proud of, and INVESTORS seek for long-term returns. JetBlue: To inspire humanity – both in the air and on the ground. Workday: To put people at the center of enterprise software. Prezi: To reinvent how people share knowledge, tell stories, and inspire their audiences to act. Tesla: To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Invisible Children: To end violence and exploitation facing our world's most isolated and vulnerable communities. TED: Spread ideas. A smart mission is anchored by a promise A mission statement for a blog is anchored with intentions for your brand, your business and anyone who works for it. If you’re the only one blogging, tweeting, and Snapchatting, it’s valuable to create one and stick to it. Each time you blog, tweet, go live on Facebook, etc., your voice, intention and your brand goals should be evident and consistent. This consistency will make your blog stronger and outwardly more trustworthy to an audience. Having an established, written mission behind the scenes will help you adhere to that consistency. Build that trust! To write your mission statement and make it a part of your blogging standards, ask yourself the following: Who is my site for? Who is my site for? What are my blog’s purpose and the intention for its space in the world? In what core ways will my content encourage, motivate and inspire my audience? Forbes breaks down a mission statement process even more simply: “What do we do? How do we do it? Whom do we do it for? And…what value are we bringing?” The last question—value—is so important to your blog’s long-term success. You want your audience to feel like it’s in a safe zone for straightforward, honest fashion talk and advice. You also want each piece of content—from a simple tweet to a lengthy, image-rich post—to be on message. Always. Building audience requires people to feel a unique camaraderie with your expertise, community, and everyone attached to your blog and brand. Always being true to your audience and staying on message is essential for trust. Visitors to your blog should quickly no longer feel like visitors but at home! Mission statements should promise authentic, and thoughtful content delivered with intention. If you’re delivering on your basic statement promises, your blog will experience consistent and organic growth. What Is Your Blog…NOT? Another great way to shape your blog’s mission is to point out what you are not and refuse to be—this acts a reminder for your voice, tone and content themes as to what to avoid at all costs. An example could be: We are not judgmental We are not snarky or condescending We will not make you feel bad about your appearance We do not shame people into self-improvement We are not unattainable, cliché or gimmicky We don’t expect all women to all want the same look or have the same fashion goals Just like with anything in life, if you know who you are (and are not), you’re going to live a more authentic, fulfilling life. Same is true with your fashion blog’s life! Stay true to who you are/what it is, check in with your mission statement periodically, and people will want to continue to be a part of your community. Happy blogging! https://ift.tt/2Mo45Pf

http://vkholidays.blogspot.com/2019/11/does-your-blog-have-mission-statement.html

#SEO #Local SEO training

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Tom and Alex of Saint Belford, a brand that sells lifestyle planner.Some stats:Product: Lifestyle planner.Revenue/mo: $9,100Started: October 1991Location: MelbourneFounders: 2Employees: 0Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hey, we’re Tom and Alex—Co Founders of Saint Belford.Our mission is to empower others to keep self-care on top of their to-do list so that they can design, build and live a life that genuinely fulfills them, without compromising their wellbeing in the process.We create physical diaries (called Curation) that focus on self-care and personal growth for people who want to prioritise their wellbeing and live life on their terms. We’ve incorporated over a dozen lifestyle tools into one A5 sized planner—things like goal-setting worksheets, habit intention worksheets, habit tracking tools, weekly meal planner, annual bucket list, weekly challenges, pre-week planner to properly map out your week, daily self-care planner… the list goes on—and that’s what sets us apart.imageOur customers are predominantly women like Alex who have either experienced some level of burnout or they recognise the need to slow down and recharge amid the chaos of modern society. These women are searching for more than a diary or planner. They are searching for something to keep them grounded, to help them prioritise their wellbeing and create space for the things that light them up.Much to everyone’s surprise, we turned a profit in our first year achieving a revenue of 43k. In our second year, we almost quadrupled this amount, turning over 160k in less than six months.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?There were 3 reasons that lead us down the path of running our own business.In short, it was a happy accident.1 - Experiencing burnoutMy experience with burnout and mental health issues was probably the primary catalyst for starting Saint Belford. I was taking on far too much, hustling far too aggressively and everything eventually caught up with me.I knew this was a widespread issue and I wanted to provide an alternative to the hustle hard mentality that most of us naturally learn towards. I wanted to truly empower others to put themselves first, prioritise their wellbeing and create time and space for the things were truly important to them.2 - There was nothing like it out thereI’ve always been a fan of putting pen to paper, but I couldn’t find a planner that would help me stay organised and grounded with self-care as the primary focus. We saw this as an opportunity to not only create the perfect planner for me, but also spread the message of self-care. It was Tom’s idea to launch this business.Before burning out, I had ZERO desire to start a business. Having seen the ugly side of owning your own business (my parents were small business owners), I always craved the security of a full time job.Tom: It was actually Alex’s idea. She just wasn’t serious about it and said it as a joke that she should create the perfect planner since she couldn’t find one that suited her. At the time, I was listening to loads of business podcasts and became very interested in business and marketing, but didn’t know what I wanted to do with what I had learned. After a week or so, that idea popped into my head again and that’s when I said “we should do this.”3 - We were at a career crossroadsWe were both at a crossroads in our careers. Neither of our jobs were fulfilling us. Tom was working as an Apple technician and I was an Account Manager at a digital marketing agency. We felt that at the age of 26, with no mortgage or major commitments, we had nothing much to lose. If it didn’t pan out, it would still be worth the adventure and lessons learned.Fortunately, I had a background in marketing and Tom is a fast learner, so we didn’t have to outsource a large chunk of our startup fund. We didn’t do much testing to validate the idea. The most we did was send out a survey to our network to gauge what they liked and didn’t like about their current planners, what features they wanted and what type of goals they typically pursued.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Finding a printerThe first step was finding a local printer in Australia. We reached out to 36 printers and received 6 replies. Finding a printer was A LOT harder than we anticipated because we didn’t know anything about book specs and therefore could only request a quote based on layman knowledge of notebooks. Our first quote request was something like this:1000 x A5 high end hardcover PU leather diaries ft. gold foil on the front, back and spine.I also included several photos to illustrate my vision and used the feedback from printers to refine my brief.We eventually found a local printer who could meet our requirements. Even though our print job was outsourced to Taiwan (they were quite transparent about this), choosing a local printer meant we didn’t have to deal with freight, customs and language barriers in an industry we knew nothing about.Getting schooled on book makingWe didn’t have a clue how books were made, let alone how to choose the right type of binding, grade of paper, ribbons and hardcover material. Our printer was a big help in this department because he was able to educate us on the process and guide us every step of the way.There were definitely more pros than cons to having a middle man in the first year. The only con was that our printing-related requests were filtered, which meant that our requests were passed on to the manufacturer at the discretion of our printer.In our first year, we made our decisions based on high-res photos, which is such a contrast to the way we do things now. Because we’re dealing directly with our manufacturer now, we can request physical samples of PU leather and make the decision based on touch and feel.imageBrainstorming diary featuresThe search for a printer took weeks. During that time, we brainstormed exactly what we wanted to include in our planner. We looked at what was available online and in stores. We looked at apps we used. We asked ourselves what we wanted in a diary. We surveyed our network and asked them what they wanted.At this stage, we knew we wanted to create more than a diary—something truly unique* that was centred around health and wellness. We came up with dozens of ideas. It was just a matter of figuring out the *best, most practical features to include in what we called “Curation” because it was exactly that—a curation of lifestyle planning tools.imageimageTurning our vision into a digital realityWe put together a brief detailing what we envisioned for each feature and we worked closely with our designer to bring our first edition of Curation to life.We were really blessed in the design department because when we pitched our idea to our friend (who happens to be a designer) she was 100% on board and excited to bring our vision to life (at mates rates). Even though we were living miles apart and the time difference posed a few challenges (she was in France and we were in Australia), the design process was an absolute dream, thanks to the wonders of Skype, Facebook Messenger, Google Docs and Email.imageSorting out packaging problemsOur diaries were shipped to customers in 100% recyclable cardboard book wraps (unbranded). We still use the same packaging today. In our first year, we didn’t want to use unnecessary plastic, so we didn’t bother investing in individual opp/poly bags UNTIL we learned that a few of our diaries arrived with water damage. Eager to avoid another soggy diary experience, we quickly changed our minds about the need for plastic protective material.Describe the process of launching the business.From inception to launchWe came up with the idea of Curation in late February 2017 which meant we had a deadline to meet if we wanted to launch a 2018 edition. We had about 8 months to design, produce and market the first edition before launching in October. This timeline worked in our favour because it didn’t leave room for procrastination or perfectionism.We had to “move fast and break things” and foster an attitude of “done is better than perfect.”We later learned that most diary companies launch around late August, early September, so we were actually late to the party. That was the first lesson we learned.imageCreating our websiteWe picked a theme that was roughly $100 and did everything ourselves, right down to the photos. It makes us cringe a little when we look back at them now because the photos were so amateur, but you’ve got to start somewhere!imageKeeping the costs downOur goal was to be profitable in the first year, so we were very careful about where we allocated our funds.In our first year, we relied heavily on micro influencers and SEO to put us on the map. We sent over a dozen copies to lifestyle bloggers and health coaches in the wellness space with a few thousand followers behind them. The idea was for them to share it on their story if they liked our product and/or write a review on their blog. It was a cost effective way for us to reach a larger audience, increase visibility and build brand credibility, since we were the new kids on the block.This worked quite well. The best, most profitable “shares” were from fatmumslim.com.au, afternoonpickmeup.com.au and rachaelkable.com because they included us in their “best diaries for 2018” roundup.imageWe used my background and knowledge in SEO to our advantage. Tom’s interest in marketing and his desire to self-educate also kept our marketing costs down. In total, we invested 15k of our life savings into launching this business. We didn’t want to take out any loans or get ourselves into debt because we were simply testing an idea.Launching to the publicWe didn’t build hype or a brand following before we launched, so it wasn’t some big, epic launch. We posted on our personal Facebook accounts and that got the ball rolling. Our friends and family were instrumental in spreading the word about our brand. Our first few customers were friends/family but by the 5th or 6th day, we were selling to random people, and that was when it finally felt real.imageLessons from our experienceBuild a following before you launch.Leverage your connections and don’t be afraid to ask for help. “Mates rates” can really help keep costs down in the first year. You’ll be surprised by how generous people are with their time and advice when you’re a startup.Don’t be afraid to share your product with family and friends. They will be your biggest supporters in the beginning.Have a deadline and stick to it. Having a deadline worked in our favour because it didn’t leave room for procrastination or perfectionism.Join entrepreneurial/ecommerce Facebook groups. They can be a great resource and place to ask questions.Be prepared to pivot. In our first year, SEO worked a charm. In our second year, it didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, so we had to adapt our marketing strategy and learn how to market our products on Instagram and Facebook.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?We’ve tried so many different types of marketing in a bid to attract and retain customers. These are our biggest takeaways.Instagram and Facebook ads for the winThis worked a treat for attracting new customers and increasing traffic/sales. We used professional imagery and targeted people just like Alex. We know that the majority of our customers don’t convert immediately because it’s something they’ll research for weeks.The goal of the ad is to generate awareness and either get them to sign up to our VIP list (email list) or follow us on Instagram where we can nurture them until they are ready to purchase. Once they land on our website, we can also retarget them at a later date.We also use Instagram for social proof. When customers share our products on their story or message us telling us how much they love what we’ve created, we will always repost it.imageShow that you’re humanDon’t just be a brand. Show that you’re human so that customers have someone they can connect with. We do this via Instagram stories. Customers love seeing what goes on behind the scenes. They want to put a face and a voice to the brand.imageClarify and communicate your brand message clearlyDonald Miller’s Storybrand Framework has transformed the way we communicate our brand message and market our products. I highly recommend listening to his audiobook “Building a StoryBrand” and implementing his principles. The audiobook will teach you how to write incredible website/marketing copy and nurture your email subscribers. Our YoY conversion rate increased from 3% to 3.8% thanks to these principles.Incentivise email sign upsWe decided to give away a free copy of our planner every month to someone on our email list. Once we implemented an email opt-in with “Sign up for your chance to win a FREE copy of Curation 2019”, we went from having 600 email subscribers to nearly 5000 in just a few months, and they were quality subscribers. Our email conversion rate was 7.64% last year.Collaborate with like-minded brandsWe did giveaways with brands in the health and wellness space to reach new customers. One particular giveaway with Pana Chocolate (raw organic chocolate) helped us build our Instagram following by the thousands, just in time for Black Friday/Cyber Monday. We didn’t strategically plan for this to happen, but it certainly taught us that timing the giveaway is important.Produce valuable contentThis has been a huge part of our retention strategy. We seek out people in the health and wellness space to guest post on our blog. We produce FREE eBooks in the off-season. We just spent 3 months writing our last eBook which is all about building new habits that stick.We’re not just in the business of selling planners—we’re constantly searching for new ways to empower our audience and add value.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?imageWe saw phenomenal revenue growth in our second year of business—47k to over 160k in revenue through our Shopify store.We’ve been travelling around Asia working on the 2020 diary collection which will be released in September. We’re so grateful we get to do this.In terms of the future, we’re still trying to figure out what direction we want to take the business in. There are pros and cons to having a seasonal business. The pro being that we’ve been able to travel and work remotely in the off-season. The con being that we’re only generating revenue in September-February.Tom and I have finally settled into our roles. Being life and business partners is tricky but having roles in the business has helped us navigate this territory. Tom is in charge of business/marketing strategy and the techy side of things. I’m in charge of supplier and customer relationships, product development and content creation.We do have plans to expand our range next year. There are a few ideas in the pipeline, but we want to keep it a surprise for our audience.Ultimately, our goal is to continue creating lifestyle tools that focus on self-care and personal growth, whether that’s in the form of eBooks or adding to our physical collection.We are also really passionate about mental health which is why we donate a percentage of our profits to Beyond Blue and R U OK? every year. This will always be a core part of our business.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?The biggest challenge was finding a supplier who understood our needs and could deliver on their promises. We actually flew to China to meet with our supplier this year. Sitting down face to face, explaining our concerns and visiting the factory where our diaries are currently being produced has filled us with a lot more confidence.Before manufacturing your product, figure out what a defective product looks like. For us, it’s scratches, missing pages, unseared ribbons, etc. Once you know what a defect looks like, communicate this to your supplier and agree on an accepted defect rate. Every factory will have a defect rate, so don’t be fooled by a company telling you that they don’t have one.It’s impossible to produce 100% perfect products on a mass scale. It’s good practice to establish a written agreement of the product specs and criteria. We use Alibaba to process all transactions because it protects us in the off chance the supplier doesn’t meet the agreed criteria.What platform/tools do you use for your business?We try to keep it as simple as possible. It’s easy to get bogged down with the latest apps, but one thing we’ve noticed is keeping it simple helps with our website speed and overall sanity. Sumo and Kaviyo are definitely our favourites, and when I say we, I mean Tom because he’s the tech nerd in this duo!Shopify: affordable and super easy to use.Sumo: collecting emails is a breeze with Sumo. The pop-ups are incredibly easy to design and customer support is amazing.Klaviyo: we just recently switched from MailChimp to Klaviyo and it has allowed us to step up our email marketing game. The built-in flows and email automation possibilities are truly next level.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?The Slight Edge by Jeff OlsonThis taught us the power of small habits, when compounded over time. It also helped us build the discipline we needed to create a sustainable business.Tim Ferriss podcastTom has listened to almost every episode. Tim manages to extract amazing insights from his guests which can be distilled down into principles anyone can use.Noah Kagan podcast/YouTube channelThese are all bite sized, completely actionable tips and advice for small businesses.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Make sure your preparation doesn’t turn into procrastination.Done is better than perfect. Our first year was a test. Did we produce the perfect product? Not at all. BUT we used our customer feedback and everything we had learned in our first year to create something we were genuinely proud of in the second year.Don’t be afraid to “move fast and break things.”Learn from your mistakes. When you view your mistakes as an opportunity to learn and improve, you can recover faster. Don’t dwell on it. Own it and use it to your advantage.Ask for help!!People are more than happy to help you. You’ve just got to ask.Have a strong WHY.Make sure you’re genuinely passionate about your product/service. People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.Don’t forget to look after yourself.Starting a business is exciting but it’s also overwhelming and exhausting. It’s also easy to neglect your mind and body in favour of getting that important thing done. Just remember this quote by Joyce Sunada “If you don’t take time for your wellness, you’ll be forced to make time for your illness.”Where can we go to learn more?www.saintbelford.com.auwww.instagram.com/saintbelfordwww.facebook.com/saintbelfordIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

[marcusssanderson]

4 Ways To Love Your Life

Learn how to love your life and improve your happiness even when you feel like life is too much to handle.

Most people are not happy.

It’s a powerful truth about our world that I explored in my latest motivational video Love Your Life—featuring Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Carrey, and Steve Jobs—which is a visual explanation of how to step into an incredible life full of passion that you thoroughly enjoy.

The video starts out with some hard-hitting stats: 1 in 3 Americans suffers from extreme stress, depression affects 6.7 percent of adults, and only 1 in 3 people report feeling very happy (respectively pulled from The American Institute of Stress, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, and from Harris Poll).

The point of these eye-opening stats is: most people in our country are NOT waking up to passionate lives full of joy, wonder, excitement, and fulfillment. Most people are NOT waking up to awesome lives that they LOVE.

Because to love your life is a rare phenomenon that only a few of us have achieved. It is rare. But it’s not a luxury.

Don’t get it twisted. Loving your daily existence is not reserved for the special few of us.

Loving your life is for absolutely everybody.

That’s right. With the right strategy, work, effort, and patience, you too can wake up to an epic, awesome, and phenomenal life that you LOVE with all your heart.

The following are four ways to love your life.

Here are four ways to love your life:

1) GET CLEAR On What You Want and Go After It

A passionate life is one where you wake up every single day, seven days a week, to people, places, relationships, and work that you absolutely LOVE. It’s a life that matches up with your deepest intentions and desires—a life that you live purposefully with design and intention.

The best way to describe a passionate person is: someone who wakes up everyday to a life that they have intentionally created—someone who is reaping the rewards of a life that they deliberately designed.

So in order to become one of those people, in order to love your life, you must get clear on what you want and go after it. Because the only path to living your dream life is through getting clear on your intentions!

So sit down, grab a pen, grab some paper, and get clear on absolutely everything that you want for yourself.

GET CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WANT.

As you jot down your goals, intentions, deepest wishes, and fantasies, you might discover that you want relationships, career opportunities, and lifestyles that you hadn’t even considered before.

You might discover that what you truly want is a life of service to your community as the founder of a nonprofit. Or you might find out that what you actually want is to travel to every single continent and country in the world meeting as many people as you can.

That’s why getting clear on your intentions is so important. You might discover things about yourself that don’t currently understand right now.

Writing down those wild, crazy, and ambitious life-plans will open up a pathway that leads you to a life full of passion that you LOVE.

2) TAKE ACTION Everyday Towards Creating That Life You Love

So now that you fully understand your what you truly want, it’s time to TAKE ACTION—and not just for a day, a week, a month, or a year. In order to manifest that life you LOVE, you must take action every single day for the rest of your life towards making your visions a reality.

I know that sounds intense. But that intensity is necessary. To realize that intense and passionate vision of joy in your mind, you have ATTACK your dreams and goals every single day with a hardcore tenacity.

I’m not saying that you have to spend all 7 days of your week 8 hours per day working to create your dream life. What I’m saying is, whether it’s big or small action, you MUST take steps towards creating that awesome future every single day.

If you want to be a full-time blogger, you’ve got to put in some blog-related work every single day. If you want to be a full-time chef, you better be studying up on your recipes every night. If you want to play pro ball, you need to practice or stay in the gym every day.

If you want to get into business school, you got to do some studying for your GMAT every single day. If you want to be part of an awesome relationship with your spouse, you better be spending quality time with her or him single every day or night.

Whether it’s small steps of big steps, you MUST take action every single day. That progress and momentum that you build up overtime is going to push you forward towards that phenomenal life that you can’t wait to wake up for.

3) NEVER GIVE UP On Your Passion. Work On It After Hours If Necessary

So let’s say you read step #1 up above and put every single thing that you could ever dream of down on paper. Now suppose you had this epic epiphany and realized that you want to do a complete 360 and pursue something totally different from your current fulltime job.

Well, congratulations! You have to take the first step towards loving your life. But there’s one small problem: you have bills to pay, a spouse to provide for, kids to feed, and responsibilities that have to be taken care of.

So you can’t just up and quit your 9-to-5 all of sudden. Because you have people who are depending on you.

If you are in this situation, all I can say to you is: Don’t quit! Don’t give up!

NEVER give up on your passion. Work on it after hours if necessary.

This is YOUR life. And you deserve to wake up to an awesome life full of passion, excitement, and wonder every single day just like anybody else. And you can still do that.

But because you have bills to pay, a family to feed, and responsibilities to take care of, your path is going to be a little bit more challenging than someone who is just fresh out of high school or college. But that isn’t a bad thing! You can develop a lot of character through the struggle.

So since you have this job you are working fulltime, you are going to need to work on your passion after-hours. As Gary Vaynerchuk passionately explains at the conclusion of my video Love Your Life, you are going to have to put work in on your craft after you get home from your 9-to-5.

To get yourself to that promise-land of passion, joy, and excitement, you are going to have to take full advantage of your weeknights and weekends as opportunities to make progress on creating that life that you love.

4) SHOW GRATITUDE for the Positives and for the Negatives

And lastly, in order to wake up every single day to a passionate life that you LOVE, you have to be able to show gratitude for the positives and for the negatives.

You need to be able to show gratitude and appreciation for the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the great moments, the tragedies, the awesome victories, and the unfortunate defeats.

You have to be able to show gratitude.

Because the truth is, no matter how awesome your life is, there are always going to be tragedies, misfortunes, problems, and setbacks. No matter how happy, fulfilled, joyous, and passionate you become, your life will never be pain-free.

So in order to truly love your life, you have to be able to show gratitude for the epic victories and for the disasters that come across your path.

Your journey is going to include both incredible ups and misfortunate downs. So you have to show gratitude for both.

And you can do so by starting a gratitude journal. Take 10 or 15 minutes out of every day to write down 5 things that occurred that day, or 5 situations in your life that you are currently grateful for.

Expressing gratitude everyday will allow you to enjoy your life every single day. Even when everything seems to be blowing up in your face, you’ll still love your life.

Wrapping It All Up

So to sum this up, these are four ways to love your life:

GET CLEAR on what you want and go after it

TAKE ACTION everyday towards creating that life you love

NEVER GIVE UP on your passion. work on it after hours if necessary

SHOW GRATITUDE for positives and negatives

To get a more visual explanation of why loving your life is important, make sure to check out my latest motivational video LOVE YOUR LIFE featuring audio from Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Carrey, Steve Jobs, and Bo Muchoki.

The post 4 Ways To Love Your Life appeared first on Everyday Power.

[mubal4]

Reflection

This time of year, most of us start thinking about our New Year’s Resolutions.  We begin to reflect on the past year and planning for next year.  Not a bad idea, right?  There are so many of us that look back and feel that, although we were able to make some great strides in some areas of our life, there were other areas where we fell short.  We are not able to turn back the clock and make up for lost time, so, we move passed and see what we can do next year to get better.  How often though, once we get into January, do we let life get in the way?  I know I get excited about things that I want to do next year, and I know that 30 days later I have been distracted by other things, like the dog in the movie “Up” when the squirrel runs by – I love that part 😊!  Seriously though, we get distracted, sometimes as at the point we are making great progress, and this causes us to fall short on building that new skill.

 What would happen if we reflected on our progress more often? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?  I’ve found this helpful in keeping me on track.  I still fall short in areas but that is becoming minimalized and, in most cases, I am finding that the areas where I am “falling short” it has more to do with me either losing interest or determining that it is not something that relates directly to my main mission.  Remember now, there is that 80-20% rule so there are moments, depending on that stage of life or that time of year where I may slack off a bit. Take for example now with my nutrition; let’s just say I am enjoying life right now with the holiday season when it comes to food 😊!  So, my vision of healthy, clean eating and nutrition is not on point right now and that will reset in early January.  Is it the best decision to make?  I don’t know and, actually, I don’t care but it is a good decision for me since the amount of work and effort I put into my diet and nutrition for the other 11 months of the year, 80-20 rule!  I think we all have areas like this in our lives.  Does nutrition have in impact on my overall mission? 100% - if I am not healthy it creates a challenge to fulfill that mission. That said, I do like to enjoy life and it is good to take yourself off the gas pedal sometimes.  Just my opinion and what I have used that helps me, reset, refresh, and reflect.  I am experiencing that reflection first hand now, although I might not be intentional with my nutrition now, I am attracting ideas and new ideas I will be working on come 2019.  Do I want to try all plant based, vegan, vegetarian, no sugar, no meat, no alcohol? There are a few things I have noted to try that I will start off with in January.  I haven’t made my final commitment yet, but it will be one of them that I will work on for a few weeks and see how my body reacts and how it impacts my training too.  These ideas came to me when I let my foot come off the gas pedal and let myself reflect. It just so happens to be with nutrition and this time of year is when I usually let myself do it.  It happened with my training as well after my last 100-miler in October.  I took some time away from running in November and that enabled me to come up with some new training ideas and things to work on which I’ve already began implementing.  Relationships – this one is fresh, and we experienced it this past week.  Marriage, being a parent, any type of relationship has its challenges.  We are always working to become better and we are all different.  We have different thoughts, beliefs, and ways of working through things. There are so many external dynamics that play a role in our engagement with one another.  Our family, my wife Robin, and our daughters, Isabella and Alaina, had a rough start to our week on Monday with just a disagreement, miscommunication, and misunderstanding.  It happens right, since we are all created differently.  But we talked through it, listened, asked questions, and worked to understand each person’s position and feelings.  We figured it out and by later that day we had all grown from it.  My point is that it allowed me to reflect on my relationships with my wife and kids.  How can I improve my communication?  I think about how they can improve theirs as well but that is up to them to figure out now. We’ve shared our feelings and how we want to be better and we need to work on those areas ourselves; if we so chose. There are actions I will be taking, prior to the end of this coming weekend, with them together, to learn more on what I can do better to continue to foster healthy relationships with my family. I believe each day we have experiences that can open up our minds to reflection.  Help us become aware of mistakes we may have made, and, things we have done well.  I think we tend to remember the mistakes more than the wins; conditioning and programming, right?  I know I must do better at reflecting on those things I do right, so I can replicate them.  But I also believe it is important to be aware of and acknowledge the mistakes; I just think there is more room for improvement there; but yes, celebrate those wins and share them too!  This opens others to reflect as well.  

 We run so fast so often we tend to forget to reflect on our lives, our moments, our journey.  I believe it is important for us all to step back, slow down, breathe; stop to think a bit about our lives more.  What do we really love about it? What do we want to change about it?  And not just at the end of the year but at the end of every day.  We owe it to ourselves to be aware of what progress we made each day, the good things we did, the service we provided to others! If the day wasn’t as we expected, it is good to reflect on that too, and remember, that it is behind you and, at this moment, right now, we can choose to be better.  Take time each day to think about all the great stuff you did, write it down and revisit it.  Be aware of the mistakes and failures too but don’t hold onto them.  Acknowledge them and move on.  Give yourself permission to create the life you want to live and learn from the progress you make each day.

 “Be a creator of your life not a manager of it.” – Tony Robbins

 Slight Edit – I wrote this blog on the flight over from Phoenix to Orange County, CA.  Waiting for a meeting I had some time to check my email and post this.  While checking my email I came across this article from Brendan @ Semi-Rad.com: Love when this type of shit happens 😊!!

 https://semi-rad.com/2018/12/a-simple-way-to-write-your-own-ending-to-2018/

#reflecteveryday celebrateyourwins acknowledgemistakes&moveon createyourlife youhavepermission thanksbrendan semirad

[jancynco]

A Liberated Thanksgiving

It’s been a while since I written anything. Primarily because it was a challenge to find people, with their busy lives and such, to assist me as well as just finding the courage to speak. You would think that with all that God has done that I would have absolutely no complaints, but that was far from the truth. I was ashamed at how I felt. I HATE BEING BLIND. It goes against my genetic makeup… my identity… my views. We work our entire lives to gain some sense of independence but when it is ripped from right underneath you, with no time to grieve… well, it becomes quite easy to lose yourself. I didn’t realize that I had any form of anxiety until I was 26… on the brink of a cataclysmic health down fall. But like all eager minded young people we find temporary solutions like, people, social media, sedatives, work and whatever else that would give me some sort of peace to deal. I tried it All. I was pretty good at hiding my flaws with scenic locations, a beat face and a filter until stress got the best of me. Then everything disappeared. Since then I have had to talk to professionals regularly, build the mental fortitude to function on a daily basis as well as get centered with God to get to the point where I can properly and effectively write to you right now. I still have my bad days though that emphasizes just how human we truly are. It’s so humbling. I thought I had cured my anxiety (mind you I said “I”) until about a month ago. I had spent the weekend out on dates, really challenging myself to go outside my comfort zone so that the both of us would have a great time. I freakin panicked the entire time. The Mavericks game was overwhelming if you could imagine. Random horns and buzzards and cheers from the crowd encouraging the home team… annoying little kids fighting one another for candy while their parents ignored them deciding to pay more attention to the game than the little spawns they created. I just took a deep breath, thank God that I was even there with my baby sister, brother in love, and my love. God quickly reminded me that just a couple of months ago I couldn't even walk let alone have the strength to be in public, standing with heels on. Be grateful Tiff. However, I felt no resolve. We would go out to eat and for me when it’s just us… that is literally my world. I know it sounds romantic but on the very basis of practicality… I literally have to focus on nothing but Rich in order to be engaged. I feel safe. BUT in the protection of him we still heard the murmurs, deep sighs, unsolicited whispers and everything else. I can only imagine what he saw, probably one of the few times I was glad I didn’t have my vision. God knows my heart, cause I would have cursed them all to hell and went on a about my business but this was a learning experience. I filed the moment away knowing that God would bring revelation later and just refocused on what was right in front of me. We decided to go to church, mind you I haven’t been going at all because of health reasons so my paranoia was on a thousand. The message was about anxiety. I just chuckled and shook my head while Rich whispered “I guessed he’s going to be in our business today.” Every emotion I had felt for the last two years just hit me like a ton of bricks. Now I don’t like sharing my business outside of health because everyone can visually see it and I feel like I should address any questions but there were other concerns, both past and future that I kept in my heart, deep. People feel entitled to your life when you put it out there regardless of your good intentions, but I feel... I know everyone deals with some degree of anxiety. I fear marriage… I have even more of a fear of having children, which I want both. How can I be a “good” wife? Can I be everything for my spouse? Can I have children? Will they be healthy? How can I protect them when I can’t even see them? How do I multi-task? Can I have a career and family… successfully? Will I be able to see my husband when I get married and say I do? Will I notice my freckles or their Father’s smile WHEN I HAVE KIDS? Will I be able to recognize my own Family? Anxiety is a… whatever seems applicable to you here. But there we were, in service facing our anxieties together and then something began to happen. Bishop’s words started to resonate. All I heard was “you are here.” I put my hand over my heart and realized that as long as I had a pulse that my life had to continue. The mere fact that I was in service worried even after I cheated death not once but twice was a testament within itself. I left reassured. Things changed. Whatever peace I was desperately searching for in past relationships, bottles or airplanes… came to me in the middle of a Sunday service… the last place a person like myself would ever think they would find it. Let no one shame you for seeking professional help… it can be greatly beneficial in tangent with solidifying your relationship with Christ. …and just for your information, I wrote this entire blog post by myself, with no assistance, my first time. There are absolutely no excuses to live the fulfilling life you have envisioned for yourself. NONE! Janz Lionne… the writer… is back.

[webanalytics]

What a Baby Clothes Blog Can Teach You About a 991% YoY Growth Using Paid Acquisition

Spearmint LOVE started off as a baby clothes blog less than five years ago.

Founder Shari Lott had already built up a strong online presence with her popular mommy blog of a similar name, SpearmintBaby.

The premise was simple.

She’d feature and share products she thought other moms would like.

One day, in search of the perfect Swiss Cross blanket for her daughter’s room, she was inspired to expand her vision into a little ecommerce site.

Now, just four years later, it’s the only baby and children’s clothing online store that was picked to be a part of Facebook’s 2017 U.S. Small Business Council.

Shari had an excellent eye for design.

And it didn’t hurt that she also had an excellent husband, John Lott, who just so happened to previously run a $23B dollar hedge fund.

Together, they’ve masterminded a 991% YoY growth with a 33.8x return on Instagram ad spend, 47% decrease in cost per purchase, and an incredible $0.11 average cost per conversion.

Here’s how.

1. Multi-Channel Expansion

“Marketing” used to mean something.

Before PR and prior to advertising, it also meant Product, Pricing, and… Place.

That last one, known better by Distribution today, is about making products available for people where they already shop (roughly speaking). Practically speaking, that means convenience.

Spearmint LOVE went from two SKUs to over 5,000 SKUs in just three years.

When did Spearmint start hitting the big numbers? You guessed it– when they started to give customers more ways to buy.

“We feel really good about how we’re positioned in the market,” John said. “We’ve given our customers nearly every conceivable way to buy from us. They can do Buyable pins. They can buy on a Facebook page. They can buy on their mobile phone. They can use their computer. They can buy however they want to.”

But scaling to multiple channels takes some finesse and strategy.

Getting a handle on one channel can be difficult enough. Then adding more to the mix means extreme coordination and resource management. Spearmint had to evaluate its readiness for that kind of growth and make sure it was even the right time to scale.

Here are the four biggies to consider when you want to expand to multi-channels:

1. Do you have the manpower for customer service?

More channels means more sales means more questions from more customers. And more customers might even be coming from different timezones around the world.

A retooling of current customer service practices could be in order, like adding more people to the team, switching up or extending hours, retraining on the product and businesses, and even considering outsourcing the customer service operation.

2. Do you have enough inventory?

Remember those increased sales? That means you have to have enough inventory to cover them. And you have to get the delivery time under control, too.

You can stock and/or drop ship your inventory, but you need to make sure products are getting to the customer as quickly and efficiently as possible. Management of the product means keeping accurate tabs on counts, sources, and allocation.

3. Can you fulfill the orders?

Are you currently handling all fulfillment in-house? When expanding to multi-channels working with a fulfillment house might be the way to go to handle the increased orders.

4. Is your tech ready?

You’ve now got more channels, more customers, and more staff. That means you now need better software to communicate with everyone, manage inventory, and all your outsourced operations.

Figure out what you’re gonna need here: sorting and routing orders to and from multiple suppliers? Product ID coordination on all your channels? Proper integrations? Reporting?

And what’s your budget?

With some software, the price goes up with every additional SKU or number of processed orders.

So keep in mind you’re often going to be outlaying cost — for increased labor, inventory, promotion, and technology — before ever seeing a dime on these new sales.

2. Intimately understand your cost per acquisition

John came on board to work with his wife, Shari, in 2016.

It just so happens that his hedge fund expertise complements her design eye and customer-intel.

Being a numbers guy, he went straight for the data, and immediately started focusing on their cost of acquisition as the accelerator (or roadblock) to scale.

For him, this is where to build the company’s success. Driving down the cost of customer acquisition first buys you more time to focus on the other side of the equation: Increasing the lifetime value of each customer via upsells and cross-sells.

For Spearmint, less than $10 per customer is the goal. The closer they get to $5, the happier they are (more on that below).

John refers to this as the tip of the spear in understanding business success.

“We decided very early on that we weren’t going to raise any outside money at all,” John said. “I pay very close attention to what the self-funding growth rate of the company is. If I get customer acquisition costs right, then I’m making sure I’m doing the right thing from a cash perspective.”

The $5 platform for Spearmint? Facebook.

And how does he keep costs so low? John reportedly checks this metric every.single.day.

So on a daily basis he’s scrutinizing: What’s the cost of acquisition of the active campaigns?

Then he’ll switch gears on longer intervals to ask:

What’s the audience growth across channels? (Weekly)

What’s the aggregate return rate of customer acquisitions? (Monthly)

He takes all of this data to see if they are growing… if their growth has slowed… why either is happening… what’s causing it… etc, etc, etc.

In other words, they intimately understand the math behind each and every conversion.

They know when A/B tests are lying. They know when new customer data is ‘leaking’ outside of their funnel.

And if something’s not working? They’re not afraid to pivot.

3. Be prepared to change course

“Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.”

Sage advice from a wise old man.

See, scrutinizing data and reading every blog post imaginable is nice. But things will never play out like you think they will. Like, never ever.

So you gotta adapt.

In 2016, Spearmint LOVE’s revenue grew by 1,100%. Sounds impressive now, after the fact.

But hindsight’s 20/20 they say.

The picture wasn’t so rosy in the Spring of 2016. ROI kept dropping. Nobody could figure out why.

First, John assumed that their ad wasn’t fresh any more, and that Facebook’s algorithm meant it wasn’t being shown as much. Ad fatigue is a thing.

Image Source

So they updated their ads, giving them new photos and copy. Still, the ROI didn’t budge. No sign of the up-and-to-the-right picture it is today.

About six months into freshening up the ads, the answer hit John while on a walk.

It wasn’t the ad at all. Rather, it was the audience.

They weren’t in the market for the same thing anymore.

It’s like this:

Six months after an ad goes live, Spearmint LOVE’s target audience (new moms), now have a baby/toddler/child that is six months older. They aren’t looking for that product anymore.

Babies, apparently, don’t stay babies forever.

So Spearmint LOVE now tailors its ads to the different stages of a mom shopper:

Pregnancy,

Birth,

1st birthday, etc.

At every stage, shopping habits shift. And at every stage, Spearmint LOVE now has a different ad.

So it wasn’t the ad creative after all. It was the ad targeting that was influencing their ROI.

4. Targeting Ads, Then Targeting Even More

“What was happening was the people were changing,” John said.

“The mom who was buying that product was no longer in the same life stage. I had to adjust my custom audiences to be attentive.”

The ROI dropoff was simply a reality of Spearmint LOVE’s ever-changing audience and industry. To combat the problem, John realized they needed more dynamic ads to continue attracting their evolving audience.

This is where Facebook’s Custom Audiences come into play. You can group audiences based on their levels of product awareness and intent to buy based on a number of criteria, like:

Website visits

Product views

Page engagements

Video views

Products added to cart

And more

Custom Audiences give an upclose view of customers by dividing them up into segments, and giving them the message that is right for them.

Depending on where the customer is in their buying journey (are they brand new, cold prospects? Or are they on fire and ready to buy?), you are looking at three different things here: (1) separate ads/offers for (2) separate groups of people in (3) separate groups of custom audiences.

Like this:

Image Source

Here’s how that looks as you go down the sales funnel.

Ice cold (top of the funnel)

You can’t do custom audiences for these newbies, but you can get to know them better to eventually place them into a group. And, you can’t start moving them through the funnel to get them into custom groups.

Entice them with an ad and get them to your website to learn more, for instance.

Image Source

You can even create custom audiences based on Facebook engagement (if you don’t have a site that typically generates high-traffic). If a customer likes or comments, clicks on a CTA, or saves a post, they can be added to this list.

Lukewarm (middle of the funnel)

After making people more aware of the product through web visits and Facebook engagement, you can move them down the funnel into action territory.

This means, opting-in and handing over some of their contact info. Dangle a little lead magnet, why don’t ya?

Offer a “free course.” How about some actionable items for the customer to take to let them know just how useful the product is?

Each separate opt-in option has its own custom audience. You can break these down even further by what the opt-in service offers, or by simply creating a custom audience for each lead magnet.

Fire hot lava (bottom of the funnel)

The chilly customers are getting the new lead offers like the freebies. Once you have them converted, you can continue to engage them with additional email campaigns or webinars to get them primed to buy.

Now, you can combine Dynamic Product Ads to target customers who have viewed specific site pages or products with custom event combinations.

Make rules for your custom audiences that will allow for an additional set of options. What was the dollar amount of their abandoned shopping cart, for instance? Did they select hundreds of dollars worth of goods? That might be warrant its own audience group.

During Thanksgiving, for example, Spearmint Love focused on users who had been to the website in the last two months, but hadn’t made a buy. They took the ads right from the product catalog, showing users what they had already look at on the website, and nudging them to make the purchase with Dynamic Product ads.

And this level of granularity allowed Spearmint LOVE to generate a 14.2x return on their ad spend.

5. Focus on Retaining Old Clients Rather Than Getting New Ones

Shari ran her Spearmint LOVE blog for three years to successful results, building the brand, and building her customers — before expanding into all of these multiple channels.

This blogging background also allowed Shair to connect with wholesalers and distributors to expand Spearmint’s inventory and product.

She used her photography skills to create high-quality pictures featuring her product and drawing in nearly half a million followers. Because she had been the voice behind the brand for so long, she was able to connect with customers in a way that matched what they were looking for.

“I sell a feeling in a photo –– and make it easy for every customer to make that photo her family reality,” Shari said. “I put up a photo of not just a shirt or shoes, but of an entire outfit. And moms will come back to the site and buy everything in that picture.”

Ok. Cool. But why is any of this soft, intangible crap worth mentioning?!

Because your existing customers — not your new ones — are the most profitable.

John put his previous financial expertise to good use by creating a vintage analysis of Spearmint’s customers to help the company identify any trends or potential success of additions to the brand. Spearmint uses this to evaluate their customers’ lifetime values in a fancy table like this:

Image Source

The end goal is a cohort analysis, where they’re essentially:

Tracking each customer using their order ID.

Then separating them into groups, or cohorts, based on the month of their first purchase.

From there, analyze how each cohort acts over time (i.e. What are the patterns of when they made their first purchase, and then their next purchase?).

“We know on average our typical customer will convert again in X months,” John said. “We can predict when that next order might be and we can time our marketing based upon those types of insights.”

You can use this information to target each cohort based on their buying habits and timelines. For Spearmint, this looks like a personalized shopping experience through “custom windows” that adapt based on the different behaviors of moms as they go through the stages of pregnancy through birth and beyond (see point #3 above).

Window 1 is the period of time that includes six months before the baby is born until six months after.

Then, Window 2 is for when the baby is 6-18 months old. Spending for moms remains high in this window, but not as high as in Window 1.

Window 3 captures 18-30 months, and

Window 4 is anything beyond 30 months. Each of these windows, or cohorts, gets their own engagement, ads, and interactions to match their interests at that time.

This is important because even a (relatively minor) customer retention rate bump of just 5%, you can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

By shifting focus to current customers by just a teeny bit, you’re finding a bigger payoff long term. (Which then allows you to spend less on new customer acquisition as well.)

What’s more, online companies have to spend even more (20-40%) than brick and mortar stores. What’s that mean for online stores? They have to keep a customer around for longer just to get back their original ad spend.

Image Source

For Spearmint, this means they focus on keeping ad spend as low as possible.

“If you’re selling things at 25% margins, you’re going to need a higher return to make that make sense,” John said. “For us, we’re looking at ad spends where we’re getting at least $5 of revenue or more, preferably closer to the $10 mark for every dollar of ads spent.”

They put to use all of those tips we talked about: targeting, custom audiences, etc, and then they recoup their money spent on the ad buy.

Conclusion

It’s not every day a mommy blogger can turn her site into a business and find 991% YoY growth. In 2015, sales stood at $150,000. In 2016, that number skyrocketed to $1.5M.

Combining clever distribution (i.e. multiple channels) and capitalizing on social media engagement helped Spearmint LOVE to grow (its already sizable customer base) 38% YoY conversion.

Then with uber-targeted ads and custom audiences to meet the evolving needs of their customers, they pull in 94% of their total sales from Facebook and Instagram alone.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention.

Years ago, before all of this, Shari Lott was a mother then in need a blanket. And she just so happened to have found a booming company in the process.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2tBZ1J2 #Digital #Analytics #Website

#Analytics #Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog

[samiam03x]

What a Baby Clothes Blog Can Teach You About a 991% YoY Growth Using Paid Acquisition

Spearmint LOVE started off as a baby clothes blog less than five years ago.

Founder Shari Lott had already built up a strong online presence with her popular mommy blog of a similar name, SpearmintBaby.

The premise was simple.

She’d feature and share products she thought other moms would like.

One day, in search of the perfect Swiss Cross blanket for her daughter’s room, she was inspired to expand her vision into a little ecommerce site.

Now, just four years later, it’s the only baby and children’s clothing online store that was picked to be a part of Facebook’s 2017 U.S. Small Business Council.

Shari had an excellent eye for design.

And it didn’t hurt that she also had an excellent husband, John Lott, who just so happened to previously run a $23B dollar hedge fund.

Together, they’ve masterminded a 991% YoY growth with a 33.8x return on Instagram ad spend, 47% decrease in cost per purchase, and an incredible $0.11 average cost per conversion.

Here’s how.

1. Multi-Channel Expansion

“Marketing” used to mean something.

Before PR and prior to advertising, it also meant Product, Pricing, and… Place.

That last one, known better by Distribution today, is about making products available for people where they already shop (roughly speaking). Practically speaking, that means convenience.

Spearmint LOVE went from two SKUs to over 5,000 SKUs in just three years.

When did Spearmint start hitting the big numbers? You guessed it– when they started to give customers more ways to buy.

“We feel really good about how we’re positioned in the market,” John said. “We’ve given our customers nearly every conceivable way to buy from us. They can do Buyable pins. They can buy on a Facebook page. They can buy on their mobile phone. They can use their computer. They can buy however they want to.”

But scaling to multiple channels takes some finesse and strategy.

Getting a handle on one channel can be difficult enough. Then adding more to the mix means extreme coordination and resource management. Spearmint had to evaluate its readiness for that kind of growth and make sure it was even the right time to scale.

Here are the four biggies to consider when you want to expand to multi-channels:

1. Do you have the manpower for customer service?

More channels means more sales means more questions from more customers. And more customers might even be coming from different timezones around the world.

A retooling of current customer service practices could be in order, like adding more people to the team, switching up or extending hours, retraining on the product and businesses, and even considering outsourcing the customer service operation.

2. Do you have enough inventory?

Remember those increased sales? That means you have to have enough inventory to cover them. And you have to get the delivery time under control, too.

You can stock and/or drop ship your inventory, but you need to make sure products are getting to the customer as quickly and efficiently as possible. Management of the product means keeping accurate tabs on counts, sources, and allocation.

3. Can you fulfill the orders?

Are you currently handling all fulfillment in-house? When expanding to multi-channels working with a fulfillment house might be the way to go to handle the increased orders.

4. Is your tech ready?

You’ve now got more channels, more customers, and more staff. That means you now need better software to communicate with everyone, manage inventory, and all your outsourced operations.

Figure out what you’re gonna need here: sorting and routing orders to and from multiple suppliers? Product ID coordination on all your channels? Proper integrations? Reporting?

And what’s your budget?

With some software, the price goes up with every additional SKU or number of processed orders.

So keep in mind you’re often going to be outlaying cost — for increased labor, inventory, promotion, and technology — before ever seeing a dime on these new sales.

2. Intimately understand your cost per acquisition

John came on board to work with his wife, Shari, in 2016.

It just so happens that his hedge fund expertise complements her design eye and customer-intel.

Being a numbers guy, he went straight for the data, and immediately started focusing on their cost of acquisition as the accelerator (or roadblock) to scale.

For him, this is where to build the company’s success. Driving down the cost of customer acquisition first buys you more time to focus on the other side of the equation: Increasing the lifetime value of each customer via upsells and cross-sells.

For Spearmint, less than $10 per customer is the goal. The closer they get to $5, the happier they are (more on that below).

John refers to this as the tip of the spear in understanding business success.

“We decided very early on that we weren’t going to raise any outside money at all,” John said. “I pay very close attention to what the self-funding growth rate of the company is. If I get customer acquisition costs right, then I’m making sure I’m doing the right thing from a cash perspective.”

The $5 platform for Spearmint? Facebook.

And how does he keep costs so low? John reportedly checks this metric every.single.day.

So on a daily basis he’s scrutinizing: What’s the cost of acquisition of the active campaigns?

Then he’ll switch gears on longer intervals to ask:

What’s the audience growth across channels? (Weekly)

What’s the aggregate return rate of customer acquisitions? (Monthly)

He takes all of this data to see if they are growing… if their growth has slowed… why either is happening… what’s causing it… etc, etc, etc.

In other words, they intimately understand the math behind each and every conversion.

They know when A/B tests are lying. They know when new customer data is ‘leaking’ outside of their funnel.

And if something’s not working? They’re not afraid to pivot.

3. Be prepared to change course

“Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.”

Sage advice from a wise old man.

See, scrutinizing data and reading every blog post imaginable is nice. But things will never play out like you think they will. Like, never ever.

So you gotta adapt.

In 2016, Spearmint LOVE’s revenue grew by 1,100%. Sounds impressive now, after the fact.

But hindsight’s 20/20 they say.

The picture wasn’t so rosy in the Spring of 2016. ROI kept dropping. Nobody could figure out why.

First, John assumed that their ad wasn’t fresh any more, and that Facebook’s algorithm meant it wasn’t being shown as much. Ad fatigue is a thing.

Image Source

So they updated their ads, giving them new photos and copy. Still, the ROI didn’t budge. No sign of the up-and-to-the-right picture it is today.

About six months into freshening up the ads, the answer hit John while on a walk.

It wasn’t the ad at all. Rather, it was the audience.

They weren’t in the market for the same thing anymore.

It’s like this:

Six months after an ad goes live, Spearmint LOVE’s target audience (new moms), now have a baby/toddler/child that is six months older. They aren’t looking for that product anymore.

Babies, apparently, don’t stay babies forever.

So Spearmint LOVE now tailors its ads to the different stages of a mom shopper:

Pregnancy,

Birth,

1st birthday, etc.

At every stage, shopping habits shift. And at every stage, Spearmint LOVE now has a different ad.

So it wasn’t the ad creative after all. It was the ad targeting that was influencing their ROI.

4. Targeting Ads, Then Targeting Even More

“What was happening was the people were changing,” John said.

“The mom who was buying that product was no longer in the same life stage. I had to adjust my custom audiences to be attentive.”

The ROI dropoff was simply a reality of Spearmint LOVE’s ever-changing audience and industry. To combat the problem, John realized they needed more dynamic ads to continue attracting their evolving audience.

This is where Facebook’s Custom Audiences come into play. You can group audiences based on their levels of product awareness and intent to buy based on a number of criteria, like:

Website visits

Product views

Page engagements

Video views

Products added to cart

And more

Custom Audiences give an upclose view of customers by dividing them up into segments, and giving them the message that is right for them.

Depending on where the customer is in their buying journey (are they brand new, cold prospects? Or are they on fire and ready to buy?), you are looking at three different things here: (1) separate ads/offers for (2) separate groups of people in (3) separate groups of custom audiences.

Like this:

Image Source

Here’s how that looks as you go down the sales funnel.

Ice cold (top of the funnel)

You can’t do custom audiences for these newbies, but you can get to know them better to eventually place them into a group. And, you can’t start moving them through the funnel to get them into custom groups.

Entice them with an ad and get them to your website to learn more, for instance.

Image Source

You can even create custom audiences based on Facebook engagement (if you don’t have a site that typically generates high-traffic). If a customer likes or comments, clicks on a CTA, or saves a post, they can be added to this list.

Lukewarm (middle of the funnel)

After making people more aware of the product through web visits and Facebook engagement, you can move them down the funnel into action territory.

This means, opting-in and handing over some of their contact info. Dangle a little lead magnet, why don’t ya?

Offer a “free course.” How about some actionable items for the customer to take to let them know just how useful the product is?

Each separate opt-in option has its own custom audience. You can break these down even further by what the opt-in service offers, or by simply creating a custom audience for each lead magnet.

Fire hot lava (bottom of the funnel)

The chilly customers are getting the new lead offers like the freebies. Once you have them converted, you can continue to engage them with additional email campaigns or webinars to get them primed to buy.

Now, you can combine Dynamic Product Ads to target customers who have viewed specific site pages or products with custom event combinations.

Make rules for your custom audiences that will allow for an additional set of options. What was the dollar amount of their abandoned shopping cart, for instance? Did they select hundreds of dollars worth of goods? That might be warrant its own audience group.

During Thanksgiving, for example, Spearmint Love focused on users who had been to the website in the last two months, but hadn’t made a buy. They took the ads right from the product catalog, showing users what they had already look at on the website, and nudging them to make the purchase with Dynamic Product ads.

And this level of granularity allowed Spearmint LOVE to generate a 14.2x return on their ad spend.

5. Focus on Retaining Old Clients Rather Than Getting New Ones

Shari ran her Spearmint LOVE blog for three years to successful results, building the brand, and building her customers — before expanding into all of these multiple channels.

This blogging background also allowed Shair to connect with wholesalers and distributors to expand Spearmint’s inventory and product.

She used her photography skills to create high-quality pictures featuring her product and drawing in nearly half a million followers. Because she had been the voice behind the brand for so long, she was able to connect with customers in a way that matched what they were looking for.

“I sell a feeling in a photo –– and make it easy for every customer to make that photo her family reality,” Shari said. “I put up a photo of not just a shirt or shoes, but of an entire outfit. And moms will come back to the site and buy everything in that picture.”

Ok. Cool. But why is any of this soft, intangible crap worth mentioning?!

Because your existing customers — not your new ones — are the most profitable.

John put his previous financial expertise to good use by creating a vintage analysis of Spearmint’s customers to help the company identify any trends or potential success of additions to the brand. Spearmint uses this to evaluate their customers’ lifetime values in a fancy table like this:

Image Source

The end goal is a cohort analysis, where they’re essentially:

Tracking each customer using their order ID.

Then separating them into groups, or cohorts, based on the month of their first purchase.

From there, analyze how each cohort acts over time (i.e. What are the patterns of when they made their first purchase, and then their next purchase?).

“We know on average our typical customer will convert again in X months,” John said. “We can predict when that next order might be and we can time our marketing based upon those types of insights.”

You can use this information to target each cohort based on their buying habits and timelines. For Spearmint, this looks like a personalized shopping experience through “custom windows” that adapt based on the different behaviors of moms as they go through the stages of pregnancy through birth and beyond (see point #3 above).

Window 1 is the period of time that includes six months before the baby is born until six months after.

Then, Window 2 is for when the baby is 6-18 months old. Spending for moms remains high in this window, but not as high as in Window 1.

Window 3 captures 18-30 months, and

Window 4 is anything beyond 30 months. Each of these windows, or cohorts, gets their own engagement, ads, and interactions to match their interests at that time.

This is important because even a (relatively minor) customer retention rate bump of just 5%, you can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

By shifting focus to current customers by just a teeny bit, you’re finding a bigger payoff long term. (Which then allows you to spend less on new customer acquisition as well.)

What’s more, online companies have to spend even more (20-40%) than brick and mortar stores. What’s that mean for online stores? They have to keep a customer around for longer just to get back their original ad spend.

Image Source

For Spearmint, this means they focus on keeping ad spend as low as possible.

“If you’re selling things at 25% margins, you’re going to need a higher return to make that make sense,” John said. “For us, we’re looking at ad spends where we’re getting at least $5 of revenue or more, preferably closer to the $10 mark for every dollar of ads spent.”

They put to use all of those tips we talked about: targeting, custom audiences, etc, and then they recoup their money spent on the ad buy.

Conclusion

It’s not every day a mommy blogger can turn her site into a business and find 991% YoY growth. In 2015, sales stood at $150,000. In 2016, that number skyrocketed to $1.5M.

Combining clever distribution (i.e. multiple channels) and capitalizing on social media engagement helped Spearmint LOVE to grow (its already sizable customer base) 38% YoY conversion.

Then with uber-targeted ads and custom audiences to meet the evolving needs of their customers, they pull in 94% of their total sales from Facebook and Instagram alone.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention.

Years ago, before all of this, Shari Lott was a mother then in need a blanket. And she just so happened to have found a booming company in the process.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

http://ift.tt/2uESjY1 from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2u6dVuJ via Youtube

#MarketingRSS

[marie85marketing]

What a Baby Clothes Blog Can Teach You About a 991% YoY Growth Using Paid Acquisition

Spearmint LOVE started off as a baby clothes blog less than five years ago.

Founder Shari Lott had already built up a strong online presence with her popular mommy blog of a similar name, SpearmintBaby.

The premise was simple.

She’d feature and share products she thought other moms would like.

One day, in search of the perfect Swiss Cross blanket for her daughter’s room, she was inspired to expand her vision into a little ecommerce site.

Now, just four years later, it’s the only baby and children’s clothing online store that was picked to be a part of Facebook’s 2017 U.S. Small Business Council.

Shari had an excellent eye for design.

And it didn’t hurt that she also had an excellent husband, John Lott, who just so happened to previously run a $23B dollar hedge fund.

Together, they’ve masterminded a 991% YoY growth with a 33.8x return on Instagram ad spend, 47% decrease in cost per purchase, and an incredible $0.11 average cost per conversion.

Here’s how.

1. Multi-Channel Expansion

“Marketing” used to mean something.

Before PR and prior to advertising, it also meant Product, Pricing, and… Place.

That last one, known better by Distribution today, is about making products available for people where they already shop (roughly speaking). Practically speaking, that means convenience.

Spearmint LOVE went from two SKUs to over 5,000 SKUs in just three years.

When did Spearmint start hitting the big numbers? You guessed it– when they started to give customers more ways to buy.

“We feel really good about how we’re positioned in the market,” John said. “We’ve given our customers nearly every conceivable way to buy from us. They can do Buyable pins. They can buy on a Facebook page. They can buy on their mobile phone. They can use their computer. They can buy however they want to.”

But scaling to multiple channels takes some finesse and strategy.

Getting a handle on one channel can be difficult enough. Then adding more to the mix means extreme coordination and resource management. Spearmint had to evaluate its readiness for that kind of growth and make sure it was even the right time to scale.

Here are the four biggies to consider when you want to expand to multi-channels:

1. Do you have the manpower for customer service?

More channels means more sales means more questions from more customers. And more customers might even be coming from different timezones around the world.

A retooling of current customer service practices could be in order, like adding more people to the team, switching up or extending hours, retraining on the product and businesses, and even considering outsourcing the customer service operation.

2. Do you have enough inventory?

Remember those increased sales? That means you have to have enough inventory to cover them. And you have to get the delivery time under control, too.

You can stock and/or drop ship your inventory, but you need to make sure products are getting to the customer as quickly and efficiently as possible. Management of the product means keeping accurate tabs on counts, sources, and allocation.

3. Can you fulfill the orders?

Are you currently handling all fulfillment in-house? When expanding to multi-channels working with a fulfillment house might be the way to go to handle the increased orders.

4. Is your tech ready?

You’ve now got more channels, more customers, and more staff. That means you now need better software to communicate with everyone, manage inventory, and all your outsourced operations.

Figure out what you’re gonna need here: sorting and routing orders to and from multiple suppliers? Product ID coordination on all your channels? Proper integrations? Reporting?

And what’s your budget?

With some software, the price goes up with every additional SKU or number of processed orders.

So keep in mind you’re often going to be outlaying cost — for increased labor, inventory, promotion, and technology — before ever seeing a dime on these new sales.

2. Intimately understand your cost per acquisition

John came on board to work with his wife, Shari, in 2016.

It just so happens that his hedge fund expertise complements her design eye and customer-intel.

Being a numbers guy, he went straight for the data, and immediately started focusing on their cost of acquisition as the accelerator (or roadblock) to scale.

For him, this is where to build the company’s success. Driving down the cost of customer acquisition first buys you more time to focus on the other side of the equation: Increasing the lifetime value of each customer via upsells and cross-sells.

For Spearmint, less than $10 per customer is the goal. The closer they get to $5, the happier they are (more on that below).

John refers to this as the tip of the spear in understanding business success.

“We decided very early on that we weren’t going to raise any outside money at all,” John said. “I pay very close attention to what the self-funding growth rate of the company is. If I get customer acquisition costs right, then I’m making sure I’m doing the right thing from a cash perspective.”

The $5 platform for Spearmint? Facebook.

And how does he keep costs so low? John reportedly checks this metric every.single.day.

So on a daily basis he’s scrutinizing: What’s the cost of acquisition of the active campaigns?

Then he’ll switch gears on longer intervals to ask:

What’s the audience growth across channels? (Weekly)

What’s the aggregate return rate of customer acquisitions? (Monthly)

He takes all of this data to see if they are growing… if their growth has slowed… why either is happening… what’s causing it… etc, etc, etc.

In other words, they intimately understand the math behind each and every conversion.

They know when A/B tests are lying. They know when new customer data is ‘leaking’ outside of their funnel.

And if something’s not working? They’re not afraid to pivot.

3. Be prepared to change course

“Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.”

Sage advice from a wise old man.

See, scrutinizing data and reading every blog post imaginable is nice. But things will never play out like you think they will. Like, never ever.

So you gotta adapt.

In 2016, Spearmint LOVE’s revenue grew by 1,100%. Sounds impressive now, after the fact.

But hindsight’s 20/20 they say.

The picture wasn’t so rosy in the Spring of 2016. ROI kept dropping. Nobody could figure out why.

First, John assumed that their ad wasn’t fresh any more, and that Facebook’s algorithm meant it wasn’t being shown as much. Ad fatigue is a thing.

Image Source

So they updated their ads, giving them new photos and copy. Still, the ROI didn’t budge. No sign of the up-and-to-the-right picture it is today.

About six months into freshening up the ads, the answer hit John while on a walk.

It wasn’t the ad at all. Rather, it was the audience.

They weren’t in the market for the same thing anymore.

It’s like this:

Six months after an ad goes live, Spearmint LOVE’s target audience (new moms), now have a baby/toddler/child that is six months older. They aren’t looking for that product anymore.

Babies, apparently, don’t stay babies forever.

So Spearmint LOVE now tailors its ads to the different stages of a mom shopper:

Pregnancy,

Birth,

1st birthday, etc.

At every stage, shopping habits shift. And at every stage, Spearmint LOVE now has a different ad.

So it wasn’t the ad creative after all. It was the ad targeting that was influencing their ROI.

4. Targeting Ads, Then Targeting Even More

“What was happening was the people were changing,” John said.

“The mom who was buying that product was no longer in the same life stage. I had to adjust my custom audiences to be attentive.”

The ROI dropoff was simply a reality of Spearmint LOVE’s ever-changing audience and industry. To combat the problem, John realized they needed more dynamic ads to continue attracting their evolving audience.

This is where Facebook’s Custom Audiences come into play. You can group audiences based on their levels of product awareness and intent to buy based on a number of criteria, like:

Website visits

Product views

Page engagements

Video views

Products added to cart

And more

Custom Audiences give an upclose view of customers by dividing them up into segments, and giving them the message that is right for them.

Depending on where the customer is in their buying journey (are they brand new, cold prospects? Or are they on fire and ready to buy?), you are looking at three different things here: (1) separate ads/offers for (2) separate groups of people in (3) separate groups of custom audiences.

Like this:

Image Source

Here’s how that looks as you go down the sales funnel.

Ice cold (top of the funnel)

You can’t do custom audiences for these newbies, but you can get to know them better to eventually place them into a group. And, you can’t start moving them through the funnel to get them into custom groups.

Entice them with an ad and get them to your website to learn more, for instance.

Image Source

You can even create custom audiences based on Facebook engagement (if you don’t have a site that typically generates high-traffic). If a customer likes or comments, clicks on a CTA, or saves a post, they can be added to this list.

Lukewarm (middle of the funnel)

After making people more aware of the product through web visits and Facebook engagement, you can move them down the funnel into action territory.

This means, opting-in and handing over some of their contact info. Dangle a little lead magnet, why don’t ya?

Offer a “free course.” How about some actionable items for the customer to take to let them know just how useful the product is?

Each separate opt-in option has its own custom audience. You can break these down even further by what the opt-in service offers, or by simply creating a custom audience for each lead magnet.

Fire hot lava (bottom of the funnel)

The chilly customers are getting the new lead offers like the freebies. Once you have them converted, you can continue to engage them with additional email campaigns or webinars to get them primed to buy.

Now, you can combine Dynamic Product Ads to target customers who have viewed specific site pages or products with custom event combinations.

Make rules for your custom audiences that will allow for an additional set of options. What was the dollar amount of their abandoned shopping cart, for instance? Did they select hundreds of dollars worth of goods? That might be warrant its own audience group.

During Thanksgiving, for example, Spearmint Love focused on users who had been to the website in the last two months, but hadn’t made a buy. They took the ads right from the product catalog, showing users what they had already look at on the website, and nudging them to make the purchase with Dynamic Product ads.

And this level of granularity allowed Spearmint LOVE to generate a 14.2x return on their ad spend.

5. Focus on Retaining Old Clients Rather Than Getting New Ones

Shari ran her Spearmint LOVE blog for three years to successful results, building the brand, and building her customers — before expanding into all of these multiple channels.

This blogging background also allowed Shair to connect with wholesalers and distributors to expand Spearmint’s inventory and product.

She used her photography skills to create high-quality pictures featuring her product and drawing in nearly half a million followers. Because she had been the voice behind the brand for so long, she was able to connect with customers in a way that matched what they were looking for.

“I sell a feeling in a photo –– and make it easy for every customer to make that photo her family reality,” Shari said. “I put up a photo of not just a shirt or shoes, but of an entire outfit. And moms will come back to the site and buy everything in that picture.”

Ok. Cool. But why is any of this soft, intangible crap worth mentioning?!

Because your existing customers — not your new ones — are the most profitable.

John put his previous financial expertise to good use by creating a vintage analysis of Spearmint’s customers to help the company identify any trends or potential success of additions to the brand. Spearmint uses this to evaluate their customers’ lifetime values in a fancy table like this:

Image Source

The end goal is a cohort analysis, where they’re essentially:

Tracking each customer using their order ID.

Then separating them into groups, or cohorts, based on the month of their first purchase.

From there, analyze how each cohort acts over time (i.e. What are the patterns of when they made their first purchase, and then their next purchase?).

“We know on average our typical customer will convert again in X months,” John said. “We can predict when that next order might be and we can time our marketing based upon those types of insights.”

You can use this information to target each cohort based on their buying habits and timelines. For Spearmint, this looks like a personalized shopping experience through “custom windows” that adapt based on the different behaviors of moms as they go through the stages of pregnancy through birth and beyond (see point #3 above).

Window 1 is the period of time that includes six months before the baby is born until six months after.

Then, Window 2 is for when the baby is 6-18 months old. Spending for moms remains high in this window, but not as high as in Window 1.

Window 3 captures 18-30 months, and

Window 4 is anything beyond 30 months. Each of these windows, or cohorts, gets their own engagement, ads, and interactions to match their interests at that time.

This is important because even a (relatively minor) customer retention rate bump of just 5%, you can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

By shifting focus to current customers by just a teeny bit, you’re finding a bigger payoff long term. (Which then allows you to spend less on new customer acquisition as well.)

What’s more, online companies have to spend even more (20-40%) than brick and mortar stores. What’s that mean for online stores? They have to keep a customer around for longer just to get back their original ad spend.

Image Source

For Spearmint, this means they focus on keeping ad spend as low as possible.

“If you’re selling things at 25% margins, you’re going to need a higher return to make that make sense,” John said. “For us, we’re looking at ad spends where we’re getting at least $5 of revenue or more, preferably closer to the $10 mark for every dollar of ads spent.”

They put to use all of those tips we talked about: targeting, custom audiences, etc, and then they recoup their money spent on the ad buy.

Conclusion

It’s not every day a mommy blogger can turn her site into a business and find 991% YoY growth. In 2015, sales stood at $150,000. In 2016, that number skyrocketed to $1.5M.

Combining clever distribution (i.e. multiple channels) and capitalizing on social media engagement helped Spearmint LOVE to grow (its already sizable customer base) 38% YoY conversion.

Then with uber-targeted ads and custom audiences to meet the evolving needs of their customers, they pull in 94% of their total sales from Facebook and Instagram alone.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention.

Years ago, before all of this, Shari Lott was a mother then in need a blanket. And she just so happened to have found a booming company in the process.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

[ericsburden-blog]

What a Baby Clothes Blog Can Teach You About a 991% YoY Growth Using Paid Acquisition

Spearmint LOVE started off as a baby clothes blog less than five years ago.

Founder Shari Lott had already built up a strong online presence with her popular mommy blog of a similar name, SpearmintBaby.

The premise was simple.

She’d feature and share products she thought other moms would like.

One day, in search of the perfect Swiss Cross blanket for her daughter’s room, she was inspired to expand her vision into a little ecommerce site.

Now, just four years later, it’s the only baby and children’s clothing online store that was picked to be a part of Facebook’s 2017 U.S. Small Business Council.

Shari had an excellent eye for design.

And it didn’t hurt that she also had an excellent husband, John Lott, who just so happened to previously run a $23B dollar hedge fund.

Together, they’ve masterminded a 991% YoY growth with a 33.8x return on Instagram ad spend, 47% decrease in cost per purchase, and an incredible $0.11 average cost per conversion.

Here’s how.

1. Multi-Channel Expansion

“Marketing” used to mean something.

Before PR and prior to advertising, it also meant Product, Pricing, and… Place.

That last one, known better by Distribution today, is about making products available for people where they already shop (roughly speaking). Practically speaking, that means convenience.

Spearmint LOVE went from two SKUs to over 5,000 SKUs in just three years.

When did Spearmint start hitting the big numbers? You guessed it– when they started to give customers more ways to buy.

“We feel really good about how we’re positioned in the market,” John said. “We’ve given our customers nearly every conceivable way to buy from us. They can do Buyable pins. They can buy on a Facebook page. They can buy on their mobile phone. They can use their computer. They can buy however they want to.”

But scaling to multiple channels takes some finesse and strategy.

Getting a handle on one channel can be difficult enough. Then adding more to the mix means extreme coordination and resource management. Spearmint had to evaluate its readiness for that kind of growth and make sure it was even the right time to scale.

Here are the four biggies to consider when you want to expand to multi-channels:

1. Do you have the manpower for customer service?

More channels means more sales means more questions from more customers. And more customers might even be coming from different timezones around the world.

A retooling of current customer service practices could be in order, like adding more people to the team, switching up or extending hours, retraining on the product and businesses, and even considering outsourcing the customer service operation.

2. Do you have enough inventory?

Remember those increased sales? That means you have to have enough inventory to cover them. And you have to get the delivery time under control, too.

You can stock and/or drop ship your inventory, but you need to make sure products are getting to the customer as quickly and efficiently as possible. Management of the product means keeping accurate tabs on counts, sources, and allocation.

3. Can you fulfill the orders?

Are you currently handling all fulfillment in-house? When expanding to multi-channels working with a fulfillment house might be the way to go to handle the increased orders.

4. Is your tech ready?

You’ve now got more channels, more customers, and more staff. That means you now need better software to communicate with everyone, manage inventory, and all your outsourced operations.

Figure out what you’re gonna need here: sorting and routing orders to and from multiple suppliers? Product ID coordination on all your channels? Proper integrations? Reporting?

And what’s your budget?

With some software, the price goes up with every additional SKU or number of processed orders.

So keep in mind you’re often going to be outlaying cost — for increased labor, inventory, promotion, and technology — before ever seeing a dime on these new sales.

2. Intimately understand your cost per acquisition

John came on board to work with his wife, Shari, in 2016.

It just so happens that his hedge fund expertise complements her design eye and customer-intel.

Being a numbers guy, he went straight for the data, and immediately started focusing on their cost of acquisition as the accelerator (or roadblock) to scale.

For him, this is where to build the company’s success. Driving down the cost of customer acquisition first buys you more time to focus on the other side of the equation: Increasing the lifetime value of each customer via upsells and cross-sells.

For Spearmint, less than $10 per customer is the goal. The closer they get to $5, the happier they are (more on that below).

John refers to this as the tip of the spear in understanding business success.

“We decided very early on that we weren’t going to raise any outside money at all,” John said. “I pay very close attention to what the self-funding growth rate of the company is. If I get customer acquisition costs right, then I’m making sure I’m doing the right thing from a cash perspective.”

The $5 platform for Spearmint? Facebook.

And how does he keep costs so low? John reportedly checks this metric every.single.day.

So on a daily basis he’s scrutinizing: What’s the cost of acquisition of the active campaigns?

Then he’ll switch gears on longer intervals to ask:

What’s the audience growth across channels? (Weekly)

What’s the aggregate return rate of customer acquisitions? (Monthly)

He takes all of this data to see if they are growing… if their growth has slowed… why either is happening… what’s causing it… etc, etc, etc.

In other words, they intimately understand the math behind each and every conversion.

They know when A/B tests are lying. They know when new customer data is ‘leaking’ outside of their funnel.

And if something’s not working? They’re not afraid to pivot.

3. Be prepared to change course

“Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.”

Sage advice from a wise old man.

See, scrutinizing data and reading every blog post imaginable is nice. But things will never play out like you think they will. Like, never ever.

So you gotta adapt.

In 2016, Spearmint LOVE’s revenue grew by 1,100%. Sounds impressive now, after the fact.

But hindsight’s 20/20 they say.

The picture wasn’t so rosy in the Spring of 2016. ROI kept dropping. Nobody could figure out why.

First, John assumed that their ad wasn’t fresh any more, and that Facebook’s algorithm meant it wasn’t being shown as much. Ad fatigue is a thing.

Image Source

So they updated their ads, giving them new photos and copy. Still, the ROI didn’t budge. No sign of the up-and-to-the-right picture it is today.

About six months into freshening up the ads, the answer hit John while on a walk.

It wasn’t the ad at all. Rather, it was the audience.

They weren’t in the market for the same thing anymore.

It’s like this:

Six months after an ad goes live, Spearmint LOVE’s target audience (new moms), now have a baby/toddler/child that is six months older. They aren’t looking for that product anymore.

Babies, apparently, don’t stay babies forever.

So Spearmint LOVE now tailors its ads to the different stages of a mom shopper:

Pregnancy,

Birth,

1st birthday, etc.

At every stage, shopping habits shift. And at every stage, Spearmint LOVE now has a different ad.

So it wasn’t the ad creative after all. It was the ad targeting that was influencing their ROI.

4. Targeting Ads, Then Targeting Even More

“What was happening was the people were changing,” John said.

“The mom who was buying that product was no longer in the same life stage. I had to adjust my custom audiences to be attentive.”

The ROI dropoff was simply a reality of Spearmint LOVE’s ever-changing audience and industry. To combat the problem, John realized they needed more dynamic ads to continue attracting their evolving audience.

This is where Facebook’s Custom Audiences come into play. You can group audiences based on their levels of product awareness and intent to buy based on a number of criteria, like:

Website visits

Product views

Page engagements

Video views

Products added to cart

And more

Custom Audiences give an upclose view of customers by dividing them up into segments, and giving them the message that is right for them.

Depending on where the customer is in their buying journey (are they brand new, cold prospects? Or are they on fire and ready to buy?), you are looking at three different things here: (1) separate ads/offers for (2) separate groups of people in (3) separate groups of custom audiences.

Like this:

Image Source

Here’s how that looks as you go down the sales funnel.

Ice cold (top of the funnel)

You can’t do custom audiences for these newbies, but you can get to know them better to eventually place them into a group. And, you can’t start moving them through the funnel to get them into custom groups.

Entice them with an ad and get them to your website to learn more, for instance.

Image Source

You can even create custom audiences based on Facebook engagement (if you don’t have a site that typically generates high-traffic). If a customer likes or comments, clicks on a CTA, or saves a post, they can be added to this list.

Lukewarm (middle of the funnel)

After making people more aware of the product through web visits and Facebook engagement, you can move them down the funnel into action territory.

This means, opting-in and handing over some of their contact info. Dangle a little lead magnet, why don’t ya?

Offer a “free course.” How about some actionable items for the customer to take to let them know just how useful the product is?

Each separate opt-in option has its own custom audience. You can break these down even further by what the opt-in service offers, or by simply creating a custom audience for each lead magnet.

Fire hot lava (bottom of the funnel)

The chilly customers are getting the new lead offers like the freebies. Once you have them converted, you can continue to engage them with additional email campaigns or webinars to get them primed to buy.

Now, you can combine Dynamic Product Ads to target customers who have viewed specific site pages or products with custom event combinations.

Make rules for your custom audiences that will allow for an additional set of options. What was the dollar amount of their abandoned shopping cart, for instance? Did they select hundreds of dollars worth of goods? That might be warrant its own audience group.

During Thanksgiving, for example, Spearmint Love focused on users who had been to the website in the last two months, but hadn’t made a buy. They took the ads right from the product catalog, showing users what they had already look at on the website, and nudging them to make the purchase with Dynamic Product ads.

And this level of granularity allowed Spearmint LOVE to generate a 14.2x return on their ad spend.

5. Focus on Retaining Old Clients Rather Than Getting New Ones

Shari ran her Spearmint LOVE blog for three years to successful results, building the brand, and building her customers — before expanding into all of these multiple channels.

This blogging background also allowed Shair to connect with wholesalers and distributors to expand Spearmint’s inventory and product.

She used her photography skills to create high-quality pictures featuring her product and drawing in nearly half a million followers. Because she had been the voice behind the brand for so long, she was able to connect with customers in a way that matched what they were looking for.

“I sell a feeling in a photo –– and make it easy for every customer to make that photo her family reality,” Shari said. “I put up a photo of not just a shirt or shoes, but of an entire outfit. And moms will come back to the site and buy everything in that picture.”

Ok. Cool. But why is any of this soft, intangible crap worth mentioning?!

Because your existing customers — not your new ones — are the most profitable.

John put his previous financial expertise to good use by creating a vintage analysis of Spearmint’s customers to help the company identify any trends or potential success of additions to the brand. Spearmint uses this to evaluate their customers’ lifetime values in a fancy table like this:

Image Source

The end goal is a cohort analysis, where they’re essentially:

Tracking each customer using their order ID.

Then separating them into groups, or cohorts, based on the month of their first purchase.

From there, analyze how each cohort acts over time (i.e. What are the patterns of when they made their first purchase, and then their next purchase?).

“We know on average our typical customer will convert again in X months,” John said. “We can predict when that next order might be and we can time our marketing based upon those types of insights.”

You can use this information to target each cohort based on their buying habits and timelines. For Spearmint, this looks like a personalized shopping experience through “custom windows” that adapt based on the different behaviors of moms as they go through the stages of pregnancy through birth and beyond (see point #3 above).

Window 1 is the period of time that includes six months before the baby is born until six months after.

Then, Window 2 is for when the baby is 6-18 months old. Spending for moms remains high in this window, but not as high as in Window 1.

Window 3 captures 18-30 months, and

Window 4 is anything beyond 30 months. Each of these windows, or cohorts, gets their own engagement, ads, and interactions to match their interests at that time.

This is important because even a (relatively minor) customer retention rate bump of just 5%, you can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

By shifting focus to current customers by just a teeny bit, you’re finding a bigger payoff long term. (Which then allows you to spend less on new customer acquisition as well.)

What’s more, online companies have to spend even more (20-40%) than brick and mortar stores. What’s that mean for online stores? They have to keep a customer around for longer just to get back their original ad spend.

Image Source

For Spearmint, this means they focus on keeping ad spend as low as possible.

“If you’re selling things at 25% margins, you’re going to need a higher return to make that make sense,” John said. “For us, we’re looking at ad spends where we’re getting at least $5 of revenue or more, preferably closer to the $10 mark for every dollar of ads spent.”

They put to use all of those tips we talked about: targeting, custom audiences, etc, and then they recoup their money spent on the ad buy.

Conclusion

It’s not every day a mommy blogger can turn her site into a business and find 991% YoY growth. In 2015, sales stood at $150,000. In 2016, that number skyrocketed to $1.5M.

Combining clever distribution (i.e. multiple channels) and capitalizing on social media engagement helped Spearmint LOVE to grow (its already sizable customer base) 38% YoY conversion.

Then with uber-targeted ads and custom audiences to meet the evolving needs of their customers, they pull in 94% of their total sales from Facebook and Instagram alone.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention.

Years ago, before all of this, Shari Lott was a mother then in need a blanket. And she just so happened to have found a booming company in the process.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

What a Baby Clothes Blog Can Teach You About a 991% YoY Growth Using Paid Acquisition

[filipeteimuraz]

What a Baby Clothes Blog Can Teach You About a 991% YoY Growth Using Paid Acquisition

Spearmint LOVE started off as a baby clothes blog less than five years ago.

Founder Shari Lott had already built up a strong online presence with her popular mommy blog of a similar name, SpearmintBaby.

The premise was simple.

She’d feature and share products she thought other moms would like.

One day, in search of the perfect Swiss Cross blanket for her daughter’s room, she was inspired to expand her vision into a little ecommerce site.

Now, just four years later, it’s the only baby and children’s clothing online store that was picked to be a part of Facebook’s 2017 U.S. Small Business Council.

Shari had an excellent eye for design.

And it didn’t hurt that she also had an excellent husband, John Lott, who just so happened to previously run a $23B dollar hedge fund.

Together, they’ve masterminded a 991% YoY growth with a 33.8x return on Instagram ad spend, 47% decrease in cost per purchase, and an incredible $0.11 average cost per conversion.

Here’s how.

1. Multi-Channel Expansion

“Marketing” used to mean something.

Before PR and prior to advertising, it also meant Product, Pricing, and… Place.

That last one, known better by Distribution today, is about making products available for people where they already shop (roughly speaking). Practically speaking, that means convenience.

Spearmint LOVE went from two SKUs to over 5,000 SKUs in just three years.

When did Spearmint start hitting the big numbers? You guessed it– when they started to give customers more ways to buy.

“We feel really good about how we’re positioned in the market,” John said. “We’ve given our customers nearly every conceivable way to buy from us. They can do Buyable pins. They can buy on a Facebook page. They can buy on their mobile phone. They can use their computer. They can buy however they want to.”

But scaling to multiple channels takes some finesse and strategy.

Getting a handle on one channel can be difficult enough. Then adding more to the mix means extreme coordination and resource management. Spearmint had to evaluate its readiness for that kind of growth and make sure it was even the right time to scale.

Here are the four biggies to consider when you want to expand to multi-channels:

1. Do you have the manpower for customer service?

More channels means more sales means more questions from more customers. And more customers might even be coming from different timezones around the world.

A retooling of current customer service practices could be in order, like adding more people to the team, switching up or extending hours, retraining on the product and businesses, and even considering outsourcing the customer service operation.

2. Do you have enough inventory?

Remember those increased sales? That means you have to have enough inventory to cover them. And you have to get the delivery time under control, too.

You can stock and/or drop ship your inventory, but you need to make sure products are getting to the customer as quickly and efficiently as possible. Management of the product means keeping accurate tabs on counts, sources, and allocation.

3. Can you fulfill the orders?

Are you currently handling all fulfillment in-house? When expanding to multi-channels working with a fulfillment house might be the way to go to handle the increased orders.

4. Is your tech ready?

You’ve now got more channels, more customers, and more staff. That means you now need better software to communicate with everyone, manage inventory, and all your outsourced operations.

Figure out what you’re gonna need here: sorting and routing orders to and from multiple suppliers? Product ID coordination on all your channels? Proper integrations? Reporting?

And what’s your budget?

With some software, the price goes up with every additional SKU or number of processed orders.

So keep in mind you’re often going to be outlaying cost — for increased labor, inventory, promotion, and technology — before ever seeing a dime on these new sales.

2. Intimately understand your cost per acquisition

John came on board to work with his wife, Shari, in 2016.

It just so happens that his hedge fund expertise complements her design eye and customer-intel.

Being a numbers guy, he went straight for the data, and immediately started focusing on their cost of acquisition as the accelerator (or roadblock) to scale.

For him, this is where to build the company’s success. Driving down the cost of customer acquisition first buys you more time to focus on the other side of the equation: Increasing the lifetime value of each customer via upsells and cross-sells.

For Spearmint, less than $10 per customer is the goal. The closer they get to $5, the happier they are (more on that below).

John refers to this as the tip of the spear in understanding business success.

“We decided very early on that we weren’t going to raise any outside money at all,” John said. “I pay very close attention to what the self-funding growth rate of the company is. If I get customer acquisition costs right, then I’m making sure I’m doing the right thing from a cash perspective.”

The $5 platform for Spearmint? Facebook.

And how does he keep costs so low? John reportedly checks this metric every.single.day.

So on a daily basis he’s scrutinizing: What’s the cost of acquisition of the active campaigns?

Then he’ll switch gears on longer intervals to ask:

What’s the audience growth across channels? (Weekly)

What’s the aggregate return rate of customer acquisitions? (Monthly)

He takes all of this data to see if they are growing… if their growth has slowed… why either is happening… what’s causing it… etc, etc, etc.

In other words, they intimately understand the math behind each and every conversion.

They know when A/B tests are lying. They know when new customer data is ‘leaking’ outside of their funnel.

And if something’s not working? They’re not afraid to pivot.

3. Be prepared to change course

“Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.”

Sage advice from a wise old man.

See, scrutinizing data and reading every blog post imaginable is nice. But things will never play out like you think they will. Like, never ever.

So you gotta adapt.

In 2016, Spearmint LOVE’s revenue grew by 1,100%. Sounds impressive now, after the fact.

But hindsight’s 20/20 they say.

The picture wasn’t so rosy in the Spring of 2016. ROI kept dropping. Nobody could figure out why.

First, John assumed that their ad wasn’t fresh any more, and that Facebook’s algorithm meant it wasn’t being shown as much. Ad fatigue is a thing.

Image Source

So they updated their ads, giving them new photos and copy. Still, the ROI didn’t budge. No sign of the up-and-to-the-right picture it is today.

About six months into freshening up the ads, the answer hit John while on a walk.

It wasn’t the ad at all. Rather, it was the audience.

They weren’t in the market for the same thing anymore.

It’s like this:

Six months after an ad goes live, Spearmint LOVE’s target audience (new moms), now have a baby/toddler/child that is six months older. They aren’t looking for that product anymore.

Babies, apparently, don’t stay babies forever.

So Spearmint LOVE now tailors its ads to the different stages of a mom shopper:

Pregnancy,

Birth,

1st birthday, etc.

At every stage, shopping habits shift. And at every stage, Spearmint LOVE now has a different ad.

So it wasn’t the ad creative after all. It was the ad targeting that was influencing their ROI.

4. Targeting Ads, Then Targeting Even More

“What was happening was the people were changing,” John said.

“The mom who was buying that product was no longer in the same life stage. I had to adjust my custom audiences to be attentive.”

The ROI dropoff was simply a reality of Spearmint LOVE’s ever-changing audience and industry. To combat the problem, John realized they needed more dynamic ads to continue attracting their evolving audience.

This is where Facebook’s Custom Audiences come into play. You can group audiences based on their levels of product awareness and intent to buy based on a number of criteria, like:

Website visits

Product views

Page engagements

Video views

Products added to cart

And more

Custom Audiences give an upclose view of customers by dividing them up into segments, and giving them the message that is right for them.

Depending on where the customer is in their buying journey (are they brand new, cold prospects? Or are they on fire and ready to buy?), you are looking at three different things here: (1) separate ads/offers for (2) separate groups of people in (3) separate groups of custom audiences.

Like this:

Image Source

Here’s how that looks as you go down the sales funnel.

Ice cold (top of the funnel)

You can’t do custom audiences for these newbies, but you can get to know them better to eventually place them into a group. And, you can’t start moving them through the funnel to get them into custom groups.

Entice them with an ad and get them to your website to learn more, for instance.

Image Source

You can even create custom audiences based on Facebook engagement (if you don’t have a site that typically generates high-traffic). If a customer likes or comments, clicks on a CTA, or saves a post, they can be added to this list.

Lukewarm (middle of the funnel)

After making people more aware of the product through web visits and Facebook engagement, you can move them down the funnel into action territory.

This means, opting-in and handing over some of their contact info. Dangle a little lead magnet, why don’t ya?

Offer a “free course.” How about some actionable items for the customer to take to let them know just how useful the product is?

Each separate opt-in option has its own custom audience. You can break these down even further by what the opt-in service offers, or by simply creating a custom audience for each lead magnet.

Fire hot lava (bottom of the funnel)

The chilly customers are getting the new lead offers like the freebies. Once you have them converted, you can continue to engage them with additional email campaigns or webinars to get them primed to buy.

Now, you can combine Dynamic Product Ads to target customers who have viewed specific site pages or products with custom event combinations.

Make rules for your custom audiences that will allow for an additional set of options. What was the dollar amount of their abandoned shopping cart, for instance? Did they select hundreds of dollars worth of goods? That might be warrant its own audience group.

During Thanksgiving, for example, Spearmint Love focused on users who had been to the website in the last two months, but hadn’t made a buy. They took the ads right from the product catalog, showing users what they had already look at on the website, and nudging them to make the purchase with Dynamic Product ads.

And this level of granularity allowed Spearmint LOVE to generate a 14.2x return on their ad spend.

5. Focus on Retaining Old Clients Rather Than Getting New Ones

Shari ran her Spearmint LOVE blog for three years to successful results, building the brand, and building her customers — before expanding into all of these multiple channels.

This blogging background also allowed Shair to connect with wholesalers and distributors to expand Spearmint’s inventory and product.

She used her photography skills to create high-quality pictures featuring her product and drawing in nearly half a million followers. Because she had been the voice behind the brand for so long, she was able to connect with customers in a way that matched what they were looking for.

“I sell a feeling in a photo –– and make it easy for every customer to make that photo her family reality,” Shari said. “I put up a photo of not just a shirt or shoes, but of an entire outfit. And moms will come back to the site and buy everything in that picture.”

Ok. Cool. But why is any of this soft, intangible crap worth mentioning?!

Because your existing customers — not your new ones — are the most profitable.

John put his previous financial expertise to good use by creating a vintage analysis of Spearmint’s customers to help the company identify any trends or potential success of additions to the brand. Spearmint uses this to evaluate their customers’ lifetime values in a fancy table like this:

Image Source

The end goal is a cohort analysis, where they’re essentially:

Tracking each customer using their order ID.

Then separating them into groups, or cohorts, based on the month of their first purchase.

From there, analyze how each cohort acts over time (i.e. What are the patterns of when they made their first purchase, and then their next purchase?).

“We know on average our typical customer will convert again in X months,” John said. “We can predict when that next order might be and we can time our marketing based upon those types of insights.”

You can use this information to target each cohort based on their buying habits and timelines. For Spearmint, this looks like a personalized shopping experience through “custom windows” that adapt based on the different behaviors of moms as they go through the stages of pregnancy through birth and beyond (see point #3 above).

Window 1 is the period of time that includes six months before the baby is born until six months after.

Then, Window 2 is for when the baby is 6-18 months old. Spending for moms remains high in this window, but not as high as in Window 1.

Window 3 captures 18-30 months, and

Window 4 is anything beyond 30 months. Each of these windows, or cohorts, gets their own engagement, ads, and interactions to match their interests at that time.

This is important because even a (relatively minor) customer retention rate bump of just 5%, you can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

By shifting focus to current customers by just a teeny bit, you’re finding a bigger payoff long term. (Which then allows you to spend less on new customer acquisition as well.)

What’s more, online companies have to spend even more (20-40%) than brick and mortar stores. What’s that mean for online stores? They have to keep a customer around for longer just to get back their original ad spend.

Image Source

For Spearmint, this means they focus on keeping ad spend as low as possible.

“If you’re selling things at 25% margins, you’re going to need a higher return to make that make sense,” John said. “For us, we’re looking at ad spends where we’re getting at least $5 of revenue or more, preferably closer to the $10 mark for every dollar of ads spent.”

They put to use all of those tips we talked about: targeting, custom audiences, etc, and then they recoup their money spent on the ad buy.

Conclusion

It’s not every day a mommy blogger can turn her site into a business and find 991% YoY growth. In 2015, sales stood at $150,000. In 2016, that number skyrocketed to $1.5M.

Combining clever distribution (i.e. multiple channels) and capitalizing on social media engagement helped Spearmint LOVE to grow (its already sizable customer base) 38% YoY conversion.

Then with uber-targeted ads and custom audiences to meet the evolving needs of their customers, they pull in 94% of their total sales from Facebook and Instagram alone.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention.

Years ago, before all of this, Shari Lott was a mother then in need a blanket. And she just so happened to have found a booming company in the process.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2017/07/what-baby-clothes-blog-can-teach-you.html

[massthetics-blog]

New Post has been published on MASSthetics

New Post has been published on http://massthetics.net/2016-personal-retrospective/

What I'm Doing To Learn From The Past

WHAT I’M DOING TO LEARN FROM THE PAST

  It’s anniversary week in the iron jungles of MASSthetics.

  Meaning that in two days on February 23rd 2017, MASSthetics will have been gallivanting about the internet for exactly one year. A milestone of which has caused me to pause and reflect on all that’s transpired over the past 12 months.

Because, to tell you the truth, it’s been without question the most transformative year of my life, and that’s something which I believe to be worth recapping with a blog post of it’s own.

Onward.

First of all, I cannot take credit for the inspiration of this post.

The idea to write a retrospective came from the collective blogs of my friend Jason Lengstorf, who casually swiped the thought from his childhood best friend, Nate Green.

What IS a retrospective?

A retrospective is a strategy that allows you to look back at a project, week, month or year, and assess how things went from the following angles.

1. What worked? What did I do right? What am I proud of?

2. What could have gone better? Where could I have improved? What didn’t happen?

3. Riffing off of #2, what am I going to do moving forward to improve? What steps am I going to take?

Three powerful questions, all of which filter into fostering a positive mindset, and plotting a course of action to keep marching forward.

To quote Jason:

“A retrospective creates a plan for learning from the past.”

Which is a damn good thing to get into the habit of doing.

So, let’s go.

My personal retrospective for 2016

All in all, 2016 was an incredible year for me, especially on a personal level. I was able to cross off two massive, long standing goals of mine, take trips to Austin (twice), New York City, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and I spent three months living in Greece. Being able to travel like so is something I’ve always craved, and this was finally the first year that I was able to do so with such freedom.

The writing of this marks the realization of a dream I’ve had since I was a freshly minted 19 year old. # That dream? # To travel. To experience new cultures. To dive into new environments. To taste new foods (of course). All while still earning an income and doing that which brings myself, and others value. # It hasn’t been an easy road getting here. Months of my life were spent working at Starbucks – a job that didn’t mesh with my values or goals in the slightest – and trying to figure out what the hell I was chasing. # I’ve lost friendships and turned down opportunities for new ones. And on the flip side, I've forged incredible new relationships with people dotted around the globe. # The relationship I was in for over 2 years was stretched, pushed, and tested one too many times. Because, to quote one of my favourite writers, Mark Manson: # "Love isn’t always enough." # And that's okay. Because, it was an incredible experience, and I was able to learn a thing or two about a thing or two. # Building MASSthetics has been a labour of love, a mentally exhausting passion project, and the focus of all my goddamn life-force rolled into one. # I’ve reached a point where I’m ready to take the plunge. To see if I can live up to the dream I've pictured so clearly, for so long. # I sold, passed on or parted ways with 90% of my belongings, my flights are booked and I’m en-route to stop number one. New York City. Which, seems like the most fitting city in the world in which to begin this journey. # The coming months are sure to be an adventure. I still have a business to build and take to new heights. I still have Nationals next July to improve for. I still have items to check off the list. # To those who have supported me, helped me grow, and allowed me the opportunity to chase what I’ve dreamt of, I cannot thank you enough. # You know who you are. # I cannot thank any of you enough for the support, encouragement and guidance. # If there's one if there's one thing I'd love for you to take away from this. It's that you you truly are capable of whatever you envision.

A post shared by MASSthetics (@alexmullan13) on Oct 6, 2016 at 11:41am PDT

Removed from the ability to, and joy of travel, here are the three big wins I want to focus on celebrating from 2016.

Big Win #1

After having it on my mind for a long, long time, I finally stopped “waiting for the right time,” and bit the bullet on competing in bodybuilding.

The thought of competing has been one that I’d bandied about for three, almost four years, without ever knuckling down and committing to doing so.

At the tail end of 2015, enough was enough. I stopped waffling, took a deep breath, and laid it in stone that I would compete in 2016.

Big Win #2

Expanding on the big win from above, when I was choosing my shows, I realized that I didn’t just want to compete for the sake of it. Coming from a background of competitive hockey, my fire was fuelled, and I wanted to win.

Thus, I set out with the intention to do a local show, qualify for provincials, compete at provincials, qualify for nationals, then compete at nationals.

A lofty goal considering I’d never stepped on stage before, and had only a vague idea of what I was getting myself into?

Perhaps.

Yet, all went exactly according to plan.

Well, almost. The only deviation from the above was that I passed on nationals last year, in favour of getting a solid off-season under me so that I could be more competitive on that stage. Not to mention the fact that after five and a half months of contest prep I was run into the ground, and the thought of extending that to six and a half months was not one that excited me in the slightest.

I'll have more to say when I've had a chance to catch up on some sleep, gather my thoughts and come back down to reality. But for now, the #bcchampionships we're an incredible experience, and I'm proud to say that I took 3rd in lightweight bodybuilding and 2nd in classic physique. While I may not have placed as well as I would have liked, qualifying for Nationals in both classes was my main goal – mission accomplished. After 5 months of prep, it's time to pump some life into this body and work on bringing more upper body size to Nationals.

A post shared by MASSthetics (@alexmullan13) on Jul 12, 2016 at 6:11pm PDT

Big Win #3

Truthfully, this is my largest cause for celebration from the past year.

I was able to quit a job that wasn’t serving my long term vision, failed to leave me feeling fulfilled, and brought my little joy. Thanks to running on four to five hours of sleep for months on end (while prepping), and having no social life, within months of the birth of MASSthetics, I was able to take the leap, and strike out on my own.

There will be more on this front coming on Thursday, but for context you should know that my dream of running my own business and gaining total control over my life and time has been a goal older than my designs on competing.

I’m not perfect

After reading the above, it would be easy to say that 2016 was a perfect year, nothing went wrong, and that I’m a perfect human being.

This is far from the case.

Despite the successes of above, much was sacrificed on the quest to turn those dreams into a reality.

What follows are parts of my life that I let fall to the side, and a few opportunities for growth moving forward.

Growth Opportunity #1

My relationships.

I should specify by saying intimate and familial relationships.

Thanks to the business mastermind (courtesy of John Romaniello) that I’m a member of, and the fact that I work online, I was able to connect with and foster powerful friendships with amazing people all over the world.

It’s crazy to think that people I see less than a handful of times per year are some of my closest friends, but so it is.

Building MASSthetics, and competing laid claim to the bulk of my time, energy, and attention. As a result, I rarely saw my family for months (despite living in the same town), and the relationship I was in for the bulk of the year became stretched too thin to carry on.

The painful irony of this lies in the fact that I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did without the help and constant support of both my family and then-girlfriend.

Growth Opportunity #2

Not only did I fail at devoting time to spend with those closest to me, but I threw the idea of taking time for myself out the window. Once more, the painful irony in this is that taking time for myself is something that I’ve always deeply valued.

I read fewer books “for fun.”

I watched fewer movies.

I stopped drinking wine.

I turned down a lot of invitations to do fun shit.

About the only thing I held onto was watching a couple episodes of Seinfeld two or three times per week (often when my brain became too fried to do anything else).

Growth Opportunity #3

In spite off all that I did do, I didn’t accomplish as many things as I wanted to.

There’s a sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that this will be a recurring theme from year to year, but it stings nonetheless.

From a personal standpoint, I’ve been wanting to become conversational in Spanish (beyond meals and simple greetings) for years.

Boxing is something I want to try my hand at.

I want to build the habit of reading 2 books per month, consistently.

I want to devote more time to exploring my passion for coffee, and practice cooking new meals.

While I made half-hearted attempts sporadically throughout the year, I lacked the basal level of consistency that’s necessary to ingrain the above as habits.

2016 you’ve been great, and I’m glad I let you finish, but 2017 is going to blow you away

Here’s how I’m going to do just that.

Below are the three core actions steps that I’m going to take moving forward to ensure that no stone is left unturned, and 2017 knocks 2016 out of the park.

Action Step #1

Fuck the phone.

The current landscape of our social interactions is centred around the little computers we all carry around in our back pocket. While I love technology and owe nearly everything that I do to it’s development, it’s incredibly distracting, and detracts from interpersonal interactions and relationships.

My attempt to counteract the side effects in living in a social media and technology driven world, is that when I’m spending time with people (training, going to cafes, walks, movies, out for meals), the phone stays off (or at home).

Action Step #2

I’m bringing back “me time.”

I’m going to dedicate time each day to engage in activities that bring me joy. I’ll start with 30 minutes each day, and see how things progress from there.

It could be something as small as going out for espresso and leaving my phone and laptop behind, or even taking an entire day off to train, go on a mini-road trip, watch a movie, binge on Seinfeld, or read a book.

I suppose you could say that the underlying goal here is to not to spend the entire day working. Because what’s the point of having control over your time if you don’t use it to do the things you love most (such as sipping on espresso)?

Espresso, bubbly, and jamming on #MASSthetics.

A post shared by MASSthetics (@alexmullan13) on May 4, 2016 at 2:28pm PDT

Action Step #3

I want need to travel more.

Despite the many amazing places I was able to visit this year, doing so only made me want to see more.

I’d be lying if I said that one of the largest motivators for building my own business wasn’t to be able travel wherever I want, whenever I want. Truthfully, that’s been a driving factor for me for years.

Freedom and control of my time is something I place an immense amount of value on, and being able to travel on a whim is the ultimate manifestation of making that a reality.

As it stands, I have short trips forthcoming to San Diego, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Edmonton (for nationals). On a longer timeline, similar to spending three months in Greece, I want to move abroad once more (but somewhere sunny this time around, like South America).

Every time I travel somewhere new, I learn more about myself. My perspective shifts, and I see things in a new light.

Travelling also represents an opportunity to create more time for myself, to do things that I enjoy. With so many new sights and experiences dotted around the world, it would be a shame to travel, but remain glued to my laptop.

What exactly am I going to do about it?

Thoughts, ideas, and grand plans are one thing (even when written for the whole internet to see).

But actions trump words, time and time again.

So, here’s what I’m going to do to ensure that I improve the quality of my relationships, spend more time with myself (heh), and travel more.

1. A la Nate Green, I’m going to go Nuclear Mode with my phone and laptop. No distractions, enforced restrictions, and a focus on productivity.

2. Each evening when I fill out a sticky note of what needs doing the following day, I’m going to include one to two things that are solely for me. Whether it’s watching a movie, going for a walk, or pushing the limits of my caffeine tolerance, there will be at least one thing that’s just for me.

3. For once, I’m going to be proactive about the trips I plan on taking (I usually leave booking flights until the 11th hour). Not only will this save me money by not waiting until the last minute to book flights, but having travel plans set months in advance will help guide my year, and ensure that I end up where I want to go.

And so it is.

PS. 4 out of 5 lifters will let their rationalization hamster run wild. Building no muscle, burning no fat. The 5th lifter joined the MASSthetics Clan and put the information within the (free) Hypertrophy Handbook to good use. Problem solved. Click here to become the 5th lifter, and let me know where to send the prestigious Hypertrophy Handbook.

#Lifestyle #MASSthetics #Retrospective #Travel

[marcusssanderson]

4 Ways To Love Your Life

Most people are not happy.

It’s a powerful truth about our world that I explored in my latest motivational video Love Your Life—featuring Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Carrey, and Steve Jobs—which is a visual explanation of how to step into an incredible life full of passion that you thoroughly enjoy.

The video starts out with some hard-hitting stats: 1 in 3 Americans suffers from extreme stress, depression affects 6.7 percent of adults, and only 1 in 3 people report feeling very happy (respectively pulled from The American Institute of Stress, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, and from Harris Poll).

The point of these eye-opening stats is: most people in our country are NOT waking up to passionate lives full of joy, wonder, excitement, and fulfillment. Most people are NOT waking up to awesome lives that they LOVE.

Because to love your life is a rare phenomenon that only a few of us have achieved. It is rare. But it’s not a luxury.

Don’t get it twisted. Loving your daily existence is not reserved for the special few of us.

Loving your life is for absolutely everybody.

That’s right. With the right strategy, work, effort, and patience, you too can wake up to an epic, awesome, and phenomenal life that you LOVE with all your heart.

The following are four ways to do that.

  Here are four ways to love your life:

1) GET CLEAR On What You Want and Go After It

A passionate life is one where you wake up every single day, seven days a week, to people, places, relationships, and work that you absolutely LOVE. It’s a life that matches up with your deepest intentions and desires—a life that you live purposefully with design and intention.

The best way to describe a passionate person is: someone who wakes up everyday to a life that they have intentionally created—someone who is reaping the rewards of a life that they deliberately designed.

So in order to become one of those people, in order to love your life, you must get clear on what you want and go after it. Because the only path to living your dream life is through getting clear on your intentions!

So sit down, grab a pen, grab some paper, and get clear on absolutely everything that you want for yourself.

GET CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WANT.

As you jot down your goals, intentions, deepest wishes, and fantasies, you might discover that you want relationships, career opportunities, and lifestyles that you hadn’t even considered before.

You might discover that what you truly want is a life of service to your community as the founder of a nonprofit. Or you might find out that what you actually want is to travel to every single continent and country in the world meeting as many people as you can.

That’s why getting clear on your intentions is so important. You might discover things about yourself that don’t currently understand right now.

Writing down those wild, crazy, and ambitious life-plans will open up a pathway that leads you to a life full of passion that you LOVE.

  2) TAKE ACTION Everyday Towards Creating That Life You Love

So now that you fully understand your what you truly want, it’s time to TAKE ACTION—and not just for a day, a week, a month, or a year. In order to manifest that life you LOVE, you must take action every single day for the rest of your life towards making your visions a reality.

I know that sounds intense. But that intensity is necessary. To realize that intense and passionate vision of joy in your mind, you have ATTACK your dreams and goals every single day with a hardcore tenacity.

I’m not saying that you have to spend all 7 days of your week 8 hours per day working to create your dream life. What I’m saying is, whether it’s big or small action, you MUST take steps towards creating that awesome future every single day.

If you want to be a full-time blogger, you’ve got to put in some blog-related work every single day. If you want to be a full-time chef, you better be studying up on your recipes every night. If you want to play pro ball, you need to practice or stay in the gym every day.

If you want to get into business school, you got to do some studying for your GMAT every single day. If you want to be part of an awesome relationship with your spouse, you better be spending quality time with her or him single every day or night.

Whether it’s small steps of big steps, you MUST take action every single day. That progress and momentum that you build up overtime is going to push you forward towards that phenomenal life that you can’t wait to wake up for.

  3) NEVER GIVE UP On Your Passion. Work On It After Hours If Necessary

So let’s say you read step #1 up above and put every single thing that you could ever dream of down on paper. Now suppose you had this epic epiphany and realized that you want to do a complete 360 and pursue something totally different from your current fulltime job.

Well, congratulations! You have to take the first step towards loving your life. But there’s one small problem: you have bills to pay, a spouse to provide for, kids to feed, and responsibilities that have to be taken care of.

So you can’t just up and quit your 9-to-5 all of sudden. Because you have people who are depending on you.

If you are in this situation, all I can say to you is: Don’t quit! Don’t give up!

NEVER give up on your passion. Work on it after hours if necessary.

This is YOUR life. And you deserve to wake up to an awesome life full of passion, excitement, and wonder every single day just like anybody else. And you can still do that.

But because you have bills to pay, a family to feed, and responsibilities to take care of, your path is going to be a little bit more challenging than someone who is just fresh out of high school or college. But that isn’t a bad thing! You can develop a lot of character through the struggle.

So since you have this job you are working fulltime, you are going to need to work on your passion after-hours. As Gary Vaynerchuk passionately explains at the conclusion of my video Love Your Life, you are going to have to put work in on your craft after you get home from your 9-to-5.

To get yourself to that promise-land of passion, joy, and excitement, you are going to have to take full advantage of your weeknights and weekends as opportunities to make progress on creating that life that you love.

  4) SHOW GRATITUDE for the Positives and for the Negatives

And lastly, in order to wake up every single day to a passionate life that you LOVE, you have to be able to show gratitude for the positives and for the negatives.

You need to be able to show gratitude and appreciation for the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the great moments, the tragedies, the awesome victories, and the unfortunate defeats.

You have to be able to show gratitude.

Because the truth is, no matter how awesome your life is, there are always going to be tragedies, misfortunes, problems, and setbacks. No matter how happy, fulfilled, joyous, and passionate you become, your life will never be pain-free.

So in order to truly love your life, you have to be able to show gratitude for the epic victories and for the disasters that come across your path.

Your journey is going to include both incredible ups and misfortunate downs. So you have to show gratitude for both.

And you can do so by starting a gratitude journal. Take 10 or 15 minutes out of every day to write down 5 things that occurred that day, or 5 situations in your life that you are currently grateful for.

Expressing gratitude everyday will allow you to enjoy your life every single day – even when everything seems to be blowing up in your face.

  Wrapping It All Up

So to sum this up, these are four ways to love your life:

GET CLEAR on what you want and go after it

TAKE ACTION everyday towards creating that life you love

NEVER GIVE UP on your passion. work on it after hours if necessary

SHOW GRATITUDE for positives and negatives

To get a more visual explanation of why loving your life is important, make sure to check out my latest motivational video LOVE YOUR LIFE featuring audio from Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Carrey, Steve Jobs, and Bo Muchoki.

The post 4 Ways To Love Your Life appeared first on Everyday Power Blog.