IntegratePro Show: Justin Meadows

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:47 — 14.4MB)

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Here are the episode’s highlights:

00:00:03 – Introduction of Justin Meadows from Evergreen Profits
00:00:21 – Talk about things do after the word site, and the WordPress site is built
00:01:53 – Automatic updates of WordPress core and Plugins
00:02:35 – Comparison of WP Curve to what Justin do
00:04:08 – What is CDN
00:05:22 – Taking care of malicious software and preventing infection
00:06:53 – Backing-up websites
00:08:03 – Interaction with customers
00:12:22 – Dealing with SSL encryption
00:13:10 – Improving page speed load
00:15:11 – Wrap up and Justin’s support plans EvergreenSupport.co

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Transcript:

Dave: OK. Three, two, one! Hey it’s Dave from IntegratePro. We’re doing a podcast today with Justin Meadows from Evergreen Profits. Justin, how are you doing today?

Justin: Yeah pretty good Dave, how are you?

Dave: I’m doing well! It’s evening here, I’m guessing it’s morning for you?

Justin: It is yeah, morning down here on Australia.

Dave: Cool!! I was hoping we could you know continue our conversation we just had offline a little bit. I know you and I do a lot of the same things around WordPress especially developing sites, but one thing from our discussion is that you’ve got things that you do after the word site, and the WordPress site is built. And I was hoping you could dive into that a little more. So that sounds good?

Justin: Yeah absolutely. So it’s something that probably isn’t talked about a lot of thought from business owners when they’re thinking of getting a new website. I often think about what happens once the new website is built but it is pretty important with WordPress websites in particular, there’s a lot of moving parts and that the software needs to be updated on a regular basis so it is important to make sure that it gets that ongoing care and attention.

You do need to make sure that the bits of software, the plugins, the themes, the WordPress core files are all updated and they will work together. There’s no conflicts when they do update because that’s a pretty common thing that does come up.

So we make sure that that’s done on a regular basis, it gonna helps the stats more secure. That’s one of the reasons why software updates needs to be done. So the software is keeping ahead of the malware and the viruses out there chunked into the websites.

Dave: Yeah. So let me play devil’s advocate here a little bit. Don’t these updates occur automatically. Is there anything that needs to be done or what’s going on there?

Justin: The WordPress core and the plugin files updated automatically but the theme files are not. Because a lot of people have you know, it’s bad practices but a lot of people do get in and customize the thing directly instead of making a child theme over. And so it’s a way to get updates automatically to the things then it would break a website so they can’t do that.

Dave: Ok cool. And again now that you’ve jogged my memory a little bit, how does what you do compared to like WP curve?

Justin: It’s pretty similar, in that we have the unlimited support aspect where it’s unlimited minor changes to the website, if you send through a bunch of things and it’s going to take us less than an hour to do, we just do it as part of the monthly retainer.

However I think what’s different is I don’t think W.P. curve include the hosting in their service. So we also look off to the hosting we setup and cloud hosting, we set up the CloudFlare CDN and that does the DNS hosting and then we also run monthly maintenance checks which relates to the process that are taken care by mulberry maids official website which I think is something that is the same as the WP curve. They just do the maintenance and the support but we go little bit further and we look after the hosting.

And there is also a way we do find that we’re often helping people with things around their website as well so not just the website so. We also help people with publishing that their e-mail broadcast so syndicating their post, once they create post publishing to the social media channels and that sort of thing.

Dave: OK so definitely a lot more comprehensive as soon as you said. Email autoresponder. That’s yeah that’s not really covered by the WP curve or similar services. Okay. Hey Justin just backing up for people who may not know CDN, what the heck is that?

Justin: So it’s a content delivery network. So basically what that means in layman’s terms is that there’s data centers all over the world in every major city that hires these warehouses of service. And so there will be a little a data center in a city near you that has a copy of your of the website that’s on that network.

So even though you might have your website hosted in the U.S., if someone sees it in London or down here even in Perth Australia. There will be a copy of the the website down a data center which we will just make it load a lot faster for that person even though they are on the other side of the world to the original setup.

Dave: Okay so a much better experience for users regardless of where they are in the world.

Justin: Yeah.

Dave: Nice!

Justin: Exactly.

Dave: And I think I heard you mentioned earlier like malicious. Do you take care of any hacking type stuff? I mean not that does happen, and I think a lot of people don’t think it is something you have to worry about. But until it happens it’s like everything’s good it seems that happens like “Dang I wish I would have done something like that”. So how do you deal with that?

Justin: Well, we actually prefer to….. if we come across a site that has been infected, we prefer to actually use Sucuri to get that cleaned up because they’re really good at that sort of thing. However yeah we have not had anyone on our service get infected.

So that’s, our goal is mainly prevention. But every now and again like when we have people that want to come into our service we always check the sites first and if we do find that it’s got malware in there we make sure it gets cleaned up before comes onto service and make sure that all sorts of services are secure.

But we do a number of things to prevent them getting hacked. The first one is those regular updates, so just by having a software up to date that’s the first line of defense I guess. Then we also, you know making encouraging people to use strong passwords and making sure that we go no go out you know we are not using shared hosting where you have hundreds of websites planted on the one server and that sort of thing. And there are secure passwords not being looked after. We’ve got apps of clients that we’re looking after on the server. And we do have the firewall plugin. We run monthly malware scans over the website. And did that sort of thing to make sure that they don’t get infected.

Dave: Ok, So I’m also assuming you do backups on a regular basis?

Justin: Yeah absolutely yeah.

Dave: And so in case somebody says case something breaks or somebody breaks something on their own site, it could get restored during previous known good set up. Right?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah exactly. Yes. So we always have we always have at least seven days of service level backup so we can always go back at Day or two. And then we also take database and WordPress backups on or on a weekly or monthly basis so we’ve got stored in different locations so we’ve always got plenty of options if something disastrous does happen. We can always just restore the site very quickly.

Dave: Yeah that’s going to be my next question is where do you do backups. It sounds like you probably do it locally on your server but maybe somewhere else like Amazon server or something?

Justin: Yeah yeah. So there’s a separate set of server level ones done to an external server. And then also the WordPress ones we do the database backups goes to Google hosting and the full WordPress backups go to Amazon hosting.

Dave: Nice! So how do your customers interact with you? I think I’m making this up so you tell me if falling track. I think the ideal scenario be as somebody says “Hey Justin I want to pay some money to take care of my site.” What’s the procedure they go through? I heard you say that you know you first like scan this site to make sure nothing’s wrong. But what is the process look like when somebody comes on board to your services?

Justin: Yeah. So when someone signs up first, first thing we need to do is obviously get access to their website to take a look at it. Make sure that it’s going to be suitable. We check through the site we log in, just run a malware scan of it make sure it’s safe.

And also another thing that we check out for is how e-mails are being handled for that website because that’s something to find. Yeah we ran into this quite a lot where people are using the web server to handle their e-mail hosting. And it’s really not it’s not an ideal scenario. It means that you run into a lot of issues that you just don’t need but also it either although it’s cheaper than going with Google Apps or something. Oh wait it is now. That’s still 95 dollars a month, that’s really not much.

And the thing is you getting a whole lot more spam and yet end up getting problems with connecting to the server and getting tripped up in the firewall. And that sort of thing and problems connecting to different devices.

We just run into a lot of hassles when we when we used to let people have the e-mails going through the Web server. So now we just set people off with the g-suite. And that gets rid of all those problems. It also makes it if we need to upgrade the server this week we can do that without having to worry about what’s going on with the emails we can just quickly upgrade your website to so has more resources or what have you need to.

Dave: Sounds smart using outside resources firm for their expertise I heard you mentioned Sucuri for scanning and then g-suit or whatever it’s called now for e-mail I totally agree on the e-mail thing sending from your own server. Man you’ve got to tweak it and dial it in, there is no issues. You know, deliverability is the big thing I’m thinking about if you just tell Google to take care of it is like, they’re gonna trust those e-mails versus if it’s coming from like your server if your servers ever been spammed and might be difficult to do.

Cool. So on a monthly basis would you know. Or does a customer typically hear from you frequently or unless there’s a problem or how often when they expect to hear from you?

Justin: Yes. Once a month just send through a report just letting them know how we went with the monthly update. But generally I find that most of our clients do tend to get in touch with us once or twice a month at least with small changes to the site.

We have a few different levels of service that we provide. Some just want the hosting but don’t really want any further support than that. We still do. I quarterly maintenance check which really is not as good as monthly. There is a bit more risk there in doing it quarterly but it’s sort of at least we’re doing it quarterly. You know that’s sort of the bare minimum I think.

Yes but most most people are on a higher level plan that includes some support as well. So we’re helping them with publishing globe personnel changing product pages so doing bits and pieces just a sort of small things that a growing business needs to be updating on their website. They just have to shoot us an email and we get back to them quickly and get make things happen for them.

Dave: Cool cool. So it sounds like your services both kind of proactive I heard like you know publishing blog post but also preventative in terms of keeping problems at bay. You know keep things away fixing them if they do occur. One thing I was going to curious about what about SSL stuff do you deal with that?

Justin: Yeah we do. However these days we mainly just do the less encrypted SSL it’s a lot easier, cheaper. Yeah. No reason Why. Well yes. Once you get to logic, logic websites then you probably make it to is it called thing excel or SSL something we have a little gray bar. It was very fun and it really really does something. And, if I may, just offer you, maybe a challenge or something. Is do it more. You know if you go to the gym and best palm desert chiropractors and you hit the weights one day you’re going to walk away like oh you’re sore. Oh its creeky that kind of hurt. That was really awkward. But if you go every day for 30 days if you go every day for 90 days you strengthen those muscles you get more comfortable. It becomes a habit.

Yeah the extended ones right. So but for most most business websites all they need is the less encrypted SSL and yeah we certainly set up all our websites to have that. Because that’s that’s important now for your SEO rankings as well because it was Google’s made it clear that that’s what they want all the websites in the internet be like.

Dave: OK here’s one for you too. This one’s kind of get near and dear to my heart. What about your mentioned CDNs page loads speed stuff? So I’m assuming you’re doing whatever you can to make things load quickly. Because you know some in some sites are just horrible with regards to load times and when you’re when you’re designing it looking at on this big screen not a big deal but man put that on a small TV screen device that might be on a 3G network and it just becomes a disaster soon. Do you guys also do stuff along those lines where you’re working to improve page speed time?

Justin: Yeah absolutely. That’s that’s become a big thing because once again Google has made it very clear that they want to all the websites on the Internet to be fast and so now it affects not just your rankings in Google but also if you’re running Google ads that you’ll be paying more for your ad clicks.

If you got a slow website, so it really is important to speed up the site. It creates a much better user experience as well. People expect sites to load faster these days. Yes so we certainly take a look at this when it comes to speed though, there’s a lot of moving parts to it some different factors that influence how website loads as is usually no silver bullet but it takes a number of small tweaks of things things like optimizing the images also.

Yeah like having having that CDN and having fast hosting with gould caching and yeah there’s a lot of different things could be done even clearing out the database of the website helps. Yeah there’s a lot of things. That we sort of look out and usually we find that we can we can show a couple of seconds off on page load. Yeah.

Dave: Cool! So Justin where do people find out more. I know you’re at Evergreen profit dot Co is there a specific page or is it pretty obvious if somebody goes there?

Justin: Yeah!! we’ll actually got a separate page evergreen support dot Co just for just for our support plans. So if people are interested in checking out our maintenance and support services. Yeah Evergreen support dot com.

Dave: Okay. Perfect. So evergreen support dot Co. Is there anything I should have been asking that I wasn’t?

Justin: I don’t think so. No, aren’t we?

Dave: Oh I got one question one last question. How was the whether?

Justin: It’s actually not too bad it’s March today. It’s still a warm up. Do you still have snow up there?

Dave: No it’s springtime but it could snow, but where I’m going with this is. Are you wearing flip flops today?

Justin: No, not even wearing shoes.

Dave: Alright!! Awesome!!

Justin: I’ll still get another month or so before it gets too cold outside.

Dave: Sorry, this is kind of an inside joke. I know but I just want to kind of bring it up. Anyway, Justin thank you very much. Appreciate hearing about what you’re doing. And for anybody that is interested. evergreen support dot co. Thanks Justin.

Justin: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure to speak to you.

Dave: Likewise.

IntegratePro Show: James Schramko

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:43 — 21.8MB)

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Here are the episode’s highlights:

00:00:04 – Introduction of James Schramko from JamesSchramko.com
00:00:35 – The Book: Work Less, Make More
00:01:10 – What is the book all about
00:02:15 – Importance of making a decision and actually putting it into action
00:04:00 – Learn the vital parts of your business (in life as well) and focus on that
00:04:30 – Accept the fact that things will always change
00:08:25 – How hard is it to write a book
00:11:17 – Down the memory lane
00:13:18 – How important self-confidence is
00:14:52 – Second book?
00:18:46 – Helping other people solve “Problems”
00:20:57 – How effective personalization and commitment can be
00:23:58 – Nothing beats Face-to-Face communication
00:24:40 – Mailing List contacts vs Aquantances and Travel Parties

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Transcript:

DAVE: Hey Dave Wooding here from IntegratePro and today I’ve got my friend James Schramko here. James how are you doing?

JAMES: I’m doing very well thanks Dave.

DAVE: Excellent. And you know like I mentioned before the call I’m really excited for the book that you’ve put out recently and I want to give the chance for people who read my emails and listen to what I say and hear about you know the book you produced in so far as I can tell it’s kind of a culmination of what you’ve been doing. Not necessarily just online for the last 10 plus years probably a lot of business experiences you’ve had. So can you tell me the name of the book and what it’s about?

JAMES: So this book is called Work Less Make More: The counter-intuitive approach to building a profitable business and a life you actually love. The thing that’s really interesting for us Dave is that you and I have been friends since we both had a job. So that’s given us a long relationship that spans more than a decade. But really this book is a summary, a collection of my ideas or thoughts or turning points that have helped me take that journey and have also helped you take that journey. And you’ve been such a huge part of that. So right at the start of this I want to acknowledge how much you’ve contributed to everything that’s going on in my life and especially around all the help you’ve given me with putting together my memberships and website building tools and concatenation software. Just the whole journey you’ve been there helping out being that amazing support person which is you know it’s in Chapter 4 building a team. It’s important to know you shouldn’t expect to be able to go on a journey like this by yourself and you’ve been a part of that and I suspect that you are that team member for a lot of people who are listening to your material and involved in your world.

DAVE: Yeah, thank you very much James. I Appreciate that. One observation I’ve had like you know dealing with a lot of people that are coming online doing stuff. One thing I see you do is you know you make a decision and you move forward. For instance, you don’t get things perfect right? You don’t wait until a 100 percent, everything’s lined up and ready to go. It’s like OK I know what I want to have let’s make it happen. On the other hand I see a lot of people you know kind of get down into the weeds when they want to get things going. I remember the membership site, you know back in 2000 whatever it was. You basically said “All right let’s turn on”.

I suspect that’s been kind of a good reason for your success. Being able to move quickly on ideas that you want to implement.

JAMES: Some of that actually goes back. I found a presentation that I watched with fantastic Peter Drucker when he was still alive and it was beamed via satellite. I went out to this auditorium in Sydney. I thought he was gonna be live actually. He was live but he was in another country. So disappointed about the medium. I was excited about his ideas and one of the notes that I took down about decision making was that it’s not so much in whether you make a fast or slow decision. It’s not taking into account all the factors at the time the real power of decision making is usually in hindsight. And that really struck a chord with me because as you mentioned I think people do deliberate a lot on things and it slows them down. So I’ve focused in my business and in life in general is to identify what are the actual vital things what are the things that are really really important. I Talk about that being the focus and the power of 64:4 which is a really weird name for chapter. It’s about just figuring out what’s actually important here then rolling forward and without being a perfectionist. You can let go of all the baggage that comes with being a perfectionist because for one thing you’re chasing an illusion. There is no environment where everything is absolutely perfect because of the element of change.

If you can accept that things will change then basically whatever you sign off on wherever you’re at, say the membership example you raised, I knew when I signed off on the membership that that’s not going to be the end to membership. It’s just the starting point. That’s what we should remember in business.

DAVE: One observation, I see you James as you tend to iterate on you know like the membership and you have a stats program that identifies (how many people are sticking around) and I know I’ve seen you iterate you know make small subtle changes constantly improved the experience for your customers and the result is it shows up as people stick around a lot longer. Remember I had a lot of insight into different memberships and the length that people stay with you tends to be kind of out of the norm you know it’s not one or two or three months it’s it’s kind of measured in years. I think a lot of it has to do with you iterating on what you set up and just constantly improving it. You know what, I haven’t quite finished the book but I wonder if that’s something you’ve covered in there or something similar to that?

JAMES: Perhaps. Like innovation interestingly enough I also learnt that from Peter Drucker who is an absolute genius. By the way I recommend his material. He predicted what we’re doing now in the 60s. He talked about people being valued for their knowledge and the demise of traditional education institutions like he was way ahead of his time. But he talked about marketing and innovation being the important things to know and business. So innovation is a key part of it and so going back to this idea that if you accept that things will always change then you only need to start because you will not end up with whatever you start with. So you know you try to get all your ducks in a row, you want things to be all perfect when you start but if you can’t accept that’s not where you end up. Like in the last decade how many different versions of my membership have we built? When I say we I mean you (laughs). You know we’ve done the odd update here or there haven’t we Dave?

DAVE: Yeah, that’s true.

JAMES: You know what we have now is not what we started with but we just got started and I’m so thankful that back in 2009 I believe it was that we turned on that first version of the membership because that was a transformation. So I do think that I cover some of those elements in chapter 1 about personal effectiveness and also chapter 2 about planning and goal setting. I don’t have super super long goals or plans. I definitely think about where I want to go. So it’s like a visualization exercise and I anticipate what’s going to be along the way but I’m still open minded. In much the same way if you wanted to travel to Sydney right now then maybe things that you hadn’t quite planned along the way like you may have to get an online visa or something so you say ‘Oh I remember I have to do that’. You might have ticked all the boxes straight away or you might go to pack your bag and find out that someone borrowed it and never gave it back to you or that you packed the clothes to come here and you didn’t remember, it’s the opposite season so you have to get some new clothes when you arrive. So if we accept that there will be little things along the way it gives us such a good resource to be able to deal with it when they happen.

DAVE:Yeah, Interesting. So James, let me ask this.

JAMES: You know was it a challenge to write a book for you. Or was it just naturally come out of it. How was that for you?

JAMES: I’d love to say it was easy and I’m a natural book writer but I can tell you it was one of the most challenging things that I’ve done so far evidenced by the fact that it’s taken me around about 8 years since since I wrote down book on my my sort of map which I called the Mafi plan.

JAMES: The book was there, I have only now produced it many many years later. There’s been a few iterations of it. This is my first published book. However it’s the second attempt because the first time just didn’t work out properly. The real obstacle for me was just the sitting down and having to read my own notes research my own story. You know checking with my parents about things like dates and look at my diaries and go down to my garage and dig through a few boxes of stuff to remember. You know i’ve forgotten more of my journey than I can remember.

JAMES: Because I’ve really crammed a lot into my life already and there is nothing more boring in the world to me than reading my own material because zero new information there is you know it’s it’s just work. Each chapter even by the time I’d gotten the words out of my head into audio. For the most part but some of them are transcripts some of them were emails some of them are blog posts. I had a lot of help from Kelly Exeter who gave me the structure and asked me a zillion questions and pruned it down into just typed material and then pretty much ghost wrote the entire book from my own transcripts and words. And then I went through each chapter and rewrote her ghostwriting back to the words that I say and the phrases that I believe. So it was this weird process. Her structure my material her writing my writing her final edit and then we went off to professional editors and proofreaders and then a couple of customers and we only had one typos. By the end of that phase that we’re aware of. So it was it was just a big process and it took about 18 months. I’m just it’s one of those things it’s like having a kid that you look back on it and think gosh I don’t know how I did it or you know I’m just so glad it’s done now because that first phase was difficult.

DAVE: So having done that is there anything that you look back like did the book bring up something my boy I wish I would have done something totally different in my life. Like did you get any insights and I know you mentioned that you know nothing was new to you because you’ve already done it there. But did it give you a chance to reflect on maybe you know doing something different or doing more of what you’ve done or you would’ve cut out this type of stuff in your life earlier.

JAMES: Actually almost the opposite. I have a lot of gratitude for everything that I’ve done in my journey. I don’t think I would change anything because I’m very happy with where I’m at right now in life. Im at the perfect place for me at my stage in life in the areas that count so I wouldn’t want to go and mess with it. You know if there was a time machine available I think i’ve just destroy it because I’m OK.

JAMES: I think even the difficult things and I talk in the book you know had everything from debt collecting through to working very difficult jobs to sum up some of the challenges that happened my parents having a financial situation. These things all shaped me you know having a child when I was young and newly married forced me into a sales role like oh I was 23 and found out we know that my wife’s pregnant and I was only earning thirty five thousand dollars a year. I could categorically say that I would not have gone on to make millions and millions of dollars online.

If that hadn’t have happened because it just put a fire into me and you know it was an external motivator but somewhere just after that I found my internal motivator because I actually went really well in the sales role and I learnt to have a little confidence bank you know I could actually look at a statement that someone else had prepared in this case it was BMW showing my name at the top of the list for all the sales people in the whole of Australia and that that just gave me some confidence that you know what maybe maybe I’m actually ok at this and then I believed in myself.

And I mean that in a nice way not in a silly ego way but I think in life it’s easy to feel that imposter syndrome or to lack the confidence to put yourself out there. And so to have some validation and I actually experienced that again later with SEO, with search engine optimization. I found that I could do things to a website and have Google give me praise and say “Hey well done. We’re going to give your Website a priority over other Web sites because you’ve done all the things we want you to do.” I built an entire business around that. So I think it’s important to find your confidence and to have other people saying nice things or validating what you’re doing is something you should bank into your self-esteem and use that as fuel for the next mission.

DAVE: Excellent. So is there a second book on the horizon or is it way too early to even bring that up.

JAMES: It’s not too early and definitely already thinking about you know people are asking me questions because I’ve published this book. I’ve had a lot of emails I’ve had hundreds of emails actually which is mind blowing telling me what they liked about the book and it’s different for each person and some people are asking me you know could I go deeper on this or that and that’s providing me ideas even chatting to you now Dave I’m thinking about notes, you know, I’m a note taker down the conference bank and an external validation because maybe I can go deeper on that in another book. So I’ve actually opened a tab called Book 2 on what I call the life sheet and my life sheet is a spreadsheet.

That is where I have tabs that cover everything that’s important in one place so I have a surfboard register of what surfboards that I own and what their measurements are and how much I paid for them and what the best conditions i’ve surf them in are. That might sound super geeky but then I’ve also got things like checklists and frameworks and ideas that all go into this one spreadsheet. So I’ve already written down a few notes and I think I could make a book from the follow on questions. The first book was really just to be an introduction it’s to say hey this is who I am. This is my philosophy. I think there could be some ideas in here that could help most business owners even employés wanting a business because I’ve done that journey as you have Dave and it’s a collection of my ideas in one place that’s a pretty short rate. They say it takes about two hours to read from cover to cover. And I wrote this book for my kids to say look “here’s what dad’s figure it out so far” and it’s gotta be easy enough to read that they understand it and that they’re interested in it. And I’ve been field testing it on them. They range in age from 15 to 22 and so far three of them have had a good read of it so that’s been good validation for me because that’s what that’s the goal. That’s what I wanted a simple, easy to understand book.

DAVE: What I hear from you and I recognize cause you know as we’ve known each other while you’re really leveraging your experiences and right now you’re taking notes you probably share lessons learned in your membership community because I know from observing in your membership you know a lot of times people have private conversations just with you. But you end up sharing not personal details but the common themes that people are going through and also the solutions that might occur. So I can see where you’re kind of queuing up for the next book based on people’s feedback. What do they want. What do they want more of, that type stuff so I can definitely see I guess a second book forthcoming.

JAMES: I think this goes under the category of problem solving.

DAVE: Right.

JAMES: I’ve got this unique scenario where I have pretty big dark attachment. I mean I’m coaching 500 people. So if you add up over time I think there’s a couple of thousand people in the last almost decade who I’ve been helping. I like these sort of help because I think that’s the most appropriate. I’m just helping them solve problems and because they keep coming to me with problems I’ve built up a database. I’m like a business where you can tell me your problem and I’ll probably already know some of the answers because I’ve already seen it before and I like sharing ideas I actually do like nurturing.

I do like seeing people get results whether that’s this guy. T.J. comes to mind. He found out that I used to be a top sales performer and he got a job selling Toyotas in Canada I think and I actually got on Skype with him and I chatted to him for an hour or two and just told him my top tips and he went away and he became the top salesperson in his dealership doing things that nobody teaches and that they weren’t doing. Even though they were counter-intuitive and unusual. Like one of the things I told him was to send a handwritten note to every prospect. It’s a very simple thing.

If someone comes in to look at a Toyota and then they leave the dealership you just pop a little handwritten note and put a stamp on the envelope and send it to them saying hi Dave. It was lovely meeting you and Betty today. Hope you enjoyed the Toyota Camry. Let me know if you would like to take it further or you know I’ll let you know about new colors when they come in etc.. Nobody does that. Nobody in the car industry. It will be so rare that you instantly stand out. I mean how often do you get a handwritten note from a salesperson when your prospect.

DAVE: You don’t.

JAMES: Especially now with online. So having that sort of cut through helped. So I like seeing those results when he posted to me you know how well he went. I thought this is this is great I love to see people take this information and do something with it because you’re only as unemployed as you want to be today because there’s so much opportunity out there. There’s so many problems to solve.

DAVE: And you know that’s interesting that you mentioned your personalized message because as far as I can tell you’re effectively doing the same thing online right. When you get new members often times you will send them a personal message which is you know kind of retro in the way things go. Everything’s automatic you send out emails. If I’m not mistaken you’ve taken the time to make personalized videos. But also you figured out how to do it in time-effective way. Is that true.

JAMES: It’s definitely true for one of my memberships. Every single member get a personal video from me. Usually within minutes of joining. But definitely within hours and absolutely the same day. Second part of that is the high level program they actually get a physical pack arrives with three items in it in a handwritten note. And that really shows personalization and commitment and care because for that to happen there is some automation. I’ve got my CRM system actually sends a task when someone joins that sends the name in the address and a shirt size is a bit of a hint there.

And it just sends the email and that is pretty much if you go back old school that’s like a printing or packing slip that you know at one point. If we go back 20 years. One of my jobs was to dispatch telephones for a digital telephone company and we had printing and packing slips. We’re using this clunky system called Oracle which was designed for shipping barrels of oil and we were using it for funds. I have to run these processing batch tasks on the computer to be able to actually reach into the cupboard next to my desk and get a phone out of it and give it to someone. So yeah it’s like a packing slip and you get the three items.

There are already pre assembled into post-tax and I address the package and I’ll take it down to the post office and I’ll pay the usually 30 to 50 dollars in postage to send it off to wherever it’s going or if it’s in Australia it’s only about 15 dollars 12 or 15 dollars and the next day or the next week wherever they are it arrives and it’s like wow you know this is rare it’s rare to get physical packages these days so that’s one tip I’d say no matter how automated or electronic you want to get. Remember the high touch model is still the future. There might be a day where someone brings milk and bread to your front door again maybe that day when we’re sick of all the automation and the fridge that pops itself up and stuff that’ll have real impact.

DAVE: Interesting..

JAMES: And for people who want to get on the telephone they’ll still, the only higher level of personal communication is face to face. So that’s why I still hop on an airplane and fly over there and you still hop on an airplane and fly over here because that face to face interaction is level number one. But the telephone or Skype is level number two. And then the you know hiding behind the e-mail or the social media account that’s like level number three. If you want to go up a few levels you’ll get really amazing results and you can still use automation to provide that pathway with total customization.

DAVE: Yeah and now you know my personal observation with you know the traveling parties is it’s actually very leveraged in hindsight. Sure you might need a few people but oftentimes that leads into acquaintances or relationships with a whole bunch of other people versus for instance just say having a mailing list you know you might have you might build thousands and thousands of people on your mailing list. You may have some personal contacts for instance going to your superfast business life that result in you know business relationships and introductions to other people. So it definitely does have a big impact in my opinion in kind of a leveraged way.

JAMES: It’s it is unbelievable. I mean the Maldives boat trip two years ago and there was a really nice guy on that boat trip called Mel and I didn’t hear anything from him since. And then about a month ago Mel’s new girlfriend rang me up. And said hey my friend Mel my boyfriend Mel said that you do business coaching. Could you help me. And I said I can. That’s what I do. And this lady came on board to my highest level program and she’s lovely and amazing performing her field.

I won’t mention her name because probably what she does is quite confidential. However I said you know what. I’ve got a book coming out and I really need a pro photographer. Could Mel come around and take some pictures and she said sure. So Mel took the picture for my book and he gets the cover photo credit in the book. And Mel and his girlfriend who is also my customer also booked for the next Melbourne’s trip. So that’s an example of a face to face meeting a few years ago two strangers and then turning into incredible business synergy. I don’t like the word synergy or let’s just say a great collaboration. But the other thing is if I hadn’t have hopped on an airplane in 2008 and gone over to America to a conference there’s no way that i’d be on this situation I’m in now.

It just opened up massive doors for me and I’ve got you know I’m blessed to have people like John Race and Perry Marshall have given me words of praise for my book which if you go back a decade these people are absolute cult heroes online. And now they’re peers. It’s just it is amazing to think of that. You know what can be done in a decade.

DAVE: Right. And you know a decade it first seems like a long time but it’s going to happen regardless. So you know might as well start what it is.

JAMES: Let’s hope so.

DAVE: So James normally I like, I’m sure I’m forgetting something I should be asking. So I’ll just ask you is there anything I should be asking.

JAMES: That is a really good question Dave. Yeah it’s showing that you’re open to what you don’t know. And I think it’s an interesting one for us because we we have so much context. I mean I literally have your surfboard sitting in my storage. You know on standby for the next visit. So that’s how well we know each other. I think the the main point that we’ve talked about here is that the book would be a great introduction to some ideas or concepts that would help a business. That’s the short.

The book is no longer than it needs to be as is you know this discussion let’s keep it punchy. And I think you’ve covered the things that someone would want to know to start with. Yeah I invite, everyone listen to this please read the book. Labor of you if you liked it on Amazon and I just want to say you know just a huge thank you Dave. Without your help there’s no way I’ll be in this situation in my life so I’ve wholeheartedly endorse and to this day use your services. So it doesn’t get any better.

DAVE: Thank you very much. So James where can somebody go to find your book?

JAMES: Head over to JamesSchramko.com. That’s S C H R A M K O. And you’ll find all the information you need.

DAVE: JamesSchramko.com they can find out all the information about your new book which is titled please tell me again.

JAMES: Work Less Make More. You can find it on Amazon. You’ll be able to get the Kindle or the paperback version.

IntegratePro Show: Miles Beckler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:47 — 20.7MB)

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Here are the episode’s highlights:

00:00:02 – Introduction of Miles Beckler from Ask-Angels.com and TheAngelSolution.com
00:01:06 – Talk about the business and how it works
00:03:21 – Talk about the initial setup of the business
00:04:07 – The non-technical side of the business
00:04:48 – Decision making and realization
00:06:31 – Email marketing technique and how it helped the business
00:08:47 – Connecting with your Audience
00:13:00 – The challenge
00:13:47 – Working with IntegratePro
00:17:20 – Filtering through audience for a more targeted email
00:19:00 – The challenges facing system migration
00:22:45 – The Kolbe Test
00:23:54 – Fun Fact from Miles
00:25:05 – Wrap up and Miles’ Youtube channel

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Transcript:

Dave: So it’s a go. Hey it’s Dave Wooding from the IntegratePro show and I’ve got Miles Beckler on the line with me today. Miles, how are you doing?

Miles: I’m wonderful Dave, how you doing?

Dave: I’m doing great. We’re here having winter in Boise, Idaho.

Miles: It is summer here in New Zealand, also as on Thailand, where I have stayed in gorgeous property of YourKohSamuiVillas.

Dave: (laughs) That too shall pass.

Miles: (laughs)

Dave: We are kind of in the midst of our, I guess, biggest winter ever here at Boise. Just the amount of snow and cold weather and I know you’re on the opposite side of the earth. Probably pretty close to the ocean if I am not mistaken.

Miles: Yeah we’re on the beach I’ve been chasing summer for about four years now. I’ve had about five or six days of winter in the last four year.

Dave: Excellent! Nice. This year’s been quite the one for us though . It’s interesting. So Miles, I want to get you on the show because we’ve known each other for a bit and we’ve also done some work recently. But, you know, let’s talk about you. What do you do? What’s your business? And then what kind of move on to the work we’ve done together. So fire away. Let’s hear your story.

Miles: Awesome man. Thank you very much for the time and for all your help. You do wonderful service. So as of this recording it was January 2017. My wife and I started an information based business in the meditation and spirituality niche in about 2009-2010. We started doing all content marketing all organic search engine type of marketing as well as organic social media marketing, for example visit our lawyer site. And we ran with that for several years and we never really kind of crossed that threshold. You know there’s that like six figures a year five figures a month. They’re really targets.

And we had good months and we had bad months, we weren’t in control. In about 2013, I took a course with Mike Dillard, and he taught me how to create my first funnel and then he taught me how to run Facebook pay per click to that funnel. And it was a very simple funnel. It was opt in for a free thing. The next page after they opt in it says “hey, great you’re free things on the way, by the way, do you want to buy this” which was the upgrade version if you will. And at that point with running the traffic, our business really changed and everything got consistent.

Our numbers got consistent and that’s when we built the kind of, I would say, business and lifestyle income that give gave us this kind of location independence which we’ve been taking full advantage of since 2013- 2014. Until now we’ve been consistently focused on growing our audience, growing our lists. We still do the organic side of marketing.

Miles: We also do a lot more paid and I’m always playing with the funnels. My wife’s kind of the face and voice of the brand, I’m kind of behind the scenes pulling strings and conversion rate optimization and a lot of the geekier, nerdier stuff, and we love what we do and we’re helping people. We’re getting meditation’s out there we get somewhere around 650000 visits a month to our website got 90-ish thousand people on our email list something like 10 – 12 – 15000 customers and we now have a membership program where people can kind of get everything we’ve done and we do for one monthly price and that’s what we worked on together.

Dave: Cool! Thanks to the explanation. I know you talked a little bit about this already. One thing I’d like to know more is, you know, when you got that funnel or that initial set up, there was a bunch of work involved with that. True?

Miles: Yeah. So you get the first funnel going. It’s a little abstract to think about. There was a series of pages that needed to be linked together in the right way and then the check out and get that e-mail follow up sequence to pause for a moment to give them the opportunity to purchase. I wouldn’t say it was it was terribly technically challenging. We did it on WordPress ourselves. I like being in kind of like the nuts and bolts of it a bit but the words were significant.

Dave: OK so what about the non technical stuff for saying you know, kind of understanding your customer?

Miles: That said, to me that’s the more difficult side and going one step beyond that to the sales copy is what are the words that you can put on a page. They’re going to compel a human being to take action. And this has been a life study of mine and my wife as we go to a lot of events around the world and we’re always just really reverse engineering what all the smartest people and smartest marketers in the world are doing. That’s the trick. And that’s really the 20 percent that gets you the 80 percent results.

Dave: So going back I think we said 2013 you kind of like, “alright, I’m doing this”. So what was the impetus. I know there was you know maybe looking for some more consistency in your earnings and or lifestyle. But was there like one little thing that’s like I’m doing this and I’m all in.

Miles: Yeah, you know, it was the realization that our email list is really a distribution system. You know if you think about like what is Starbucks right when we think of Starbucks is it a coffee brand. Is it pastries Starbucks. Is it a distribution system that has the ability to distribute tons and tons and tons of coffee beans and other products through its distribution system.
So it was that realization that my email list is my distribution system for my digital products that got me to realize the importance and the downright necessity of growing that list and not just growing a list based on numbers but also strengthening and nurturing the relationship with every single person on that list.I’ve forgot the time to service heaters. Sometimes we can get caught up in it all. I’ve got 70000 people I got this many subscribers and like their numbers but they’re not they’re humans they’re real people they have needs they have wants they have desires they have challenges and really kind of honoring that and actually truthfully trying to help them. And that was that was a big shift. And there was a real correlation to consistent email open numbers and monthly income. And as you get both of those going up and up and up it’s you’re doing the same amount of work and you can be making two three five ten times what you were before.

Dave: But I think, we, you, also highlight, it’s not just the fact that you’re sending out e-mails. It’s that you care about those people, you know about them, you understand their wants, needs, desires and you are serving them. True?

Miles: Serving, that is, literally, you’ve got it, it’s to be of service and so I’m putting out some YouTube videos now, recently; personal challenge on how to do marketing and I get these comments from people and I can usually tell in the comment if someone’s going to make it or not because some people are chasing money and they’re like I got to make the money I got to make the money and other people are coming from this point of I have this message inside of me or I have this thing that I’m like blessed with. And I have to get this out to the world. How do I get this out to the world. And it’s such a stark contrast and approach and the people who are trying to get something out of the world or give to the world those are the people who create true long term success.

Dave: Yeah, that’s true.

Miles: It’s a it’s a real philosophical difference and you know I think we all kind of approach the internet game from like, “Ah! I want to make some money” right out of some freedom, some time freedom but it’s that shift to “OK let me be of service to an audience” that really it’s a powerful shift. It’s subtle but it’s very powerful.

Dave: Yeah. And then I think that makes it so much easier just to be congruent with yourself. You know there’s no question you don’t have to remember why you’re doing something. That’s why, this might sound kind of silly, but I don’t lie because then I have to remember what I said but if I just, you know, do what I’m supposed to do. It’s like, it’s easy.

Miles: It is.

Dave: But if I have to keep track of oh this is why I’m doing it or this is what I said. It’s more I can think of oh this is what I probably would have said. So, I’m just going to continue to act that way because that’s who I am. It’s not inconsistent with who I am.

Miles: And it’s almost like running everything through a filter. The idea of a vision statement or a mission statement is what I’m going to mail my list today going through my filter of offering service to them. Is this going to be of service to them or is this really for me to get something from them? if it’s for me to get from them, it doesn’t pass my filter, it doesn’t get mailed. if it’s for me to be of service for them? Boom. it goes out and it gets mailed and it gets sent off.

Dave: Interesting. So with that said I guess you know how do you know or I guess what does the type of stuff that your audience is more responsive to I guess than something else you might say. Is there something specifically that you know works very well with your audience when you send information out?

Miles: Yeah and you know about a little over a year ago following a guy named Ben Settle who he’s like that e-mail every day. Russell Brunson talks about the daily Seinfeld e-mails. That’s Ben Settles idea. We decided to start e-mailing our list more often we were e-mailing maybe once a week once every two weeks and it was pretty much only e-mailing when we had offers. And it worked. We would make cash flow but yet it just it was difficult to e-mail. So we started just mailing more. And this forced us to look for things in our daily life and come up with these things to share. And we started sharing more about our life more about where we’re at with things and just kind of like where our hearts on our sleeves a little bit more.

The result has been astounding. It people feel like we’re friends. We get thank you emails from our marketing e-mails. People are saying wow thanks for sending this to me and we’re drawing this picture up. It’s a new year and all this scary stuff going on here is a meditation to help you with that. Good. Thank you so much I needed to hear this message from you. And it was like that was a marketing offer. Like I just think it’s easy for marketing to you that’s amazing. But it’s habit because we try to appear as a friend. We send plain text e-mails. We don’t. No banners no H.T. mail it just looks like an email I’d send you Dave, you know, like just a friend sending a friend an email.

Miles: It bypasses those filters and everyone in our world is like people are bored. People are. They commute every day. They live monotonous lives they drown out hours of their day on average in front of the television like they want something exciting or entertaining in their inbox and if you can be that spark of positivity or something different and uplifting in their inbox you really can kind of nurture that relationship quickly and get that no light trust meter to kind of go in your favor relatively quickly.

Dave: Excellent! That’s good to hear Miles.

Miles: It’s fun.

Dave: Yeah. you know one thing I’m doing in this for me is going to be a little difficult is actually getting in front of the video more than I have in the past. It just it is a little difficult we’ll just be straight up in saying that. But I think people, and I know people appreciate it because I’ve got the same type of emails you know when I hear stuff like that but kind of wearing your heart on your sleeve does make a difference and it does show that you care.

Miles: And you’re real you’re not you know especially in our niche in the spirituality niche there’s a lot of quote unquote gurus on the mountain I’m up here I’ve reached enlightenment. This is what you need to do. You’re down there and I’m up here. And for us to send e-mails of like OK I was getting out of bed this morning that I stubbed my toe and then I tripped and fell and all of a sudden crying oh my life is a mess. And what is it all about. And then I remembered I’m in control and I can shift my energy and here’s how I did that.

People were like oh my gosh you’re a real person. Like, wow I can relate to you. And on yours Dave, I saw your video. It was great. Like I watched I know you I’ve hung out with you in Boise and in Australia and like I watched the whole thing and I’m like, “woah! this Dave!” like “he’s got a beard now. How cool. Look at that.” It’s like Old Man Winter coming up here. (both laughs)

It was very fun and it really really does something. And, if I may, just offer you, maybe a challenge or something. Is do it more. You know if you go to the gym and you hit the weights one day you’re going to walk away like oh you’re sore. Oh its creeky that kind of hurt. That was really awkward. But if you go every day for 30 days if you go every day for 90 days you strengthen those muscles you get more comfortable. It becomes a habit.

Miles: And at the end of it you’re not only putting out better content but it becomes this thing that you need to do. And that’s, we did a 30 day – mail everyday challenge that’s how we shift at that. I’ve done a 120 day video challenge that now has a budding little platform for me on YouTube. And it was awkward at first and it got a lot easier as I did it more and it’s just condensing that learning curve and that kind of like discomfort curve.

Dave: Well ironically enough, I was at the gym the other day and I lifted weights for the first time in a long time, when I was, actually there to go use the rowing machine but it was busy, so man you’re right, I totally ached the next day and today which is two days later. But you know hitting that consistency definitely makes a difference. So yes, I’m going to do that.

Miles: Cool!

Dave: It’s a constant reminder. So, yeah, cool!

Miles: So why don’t we fast forward a little bit and get into what you and I worked on here.

Dave: Yeah. So Miles you reached out to me and what I got was kind of funny was you know, you were describing what you wanted to accomplish and the fact that I have the word integrate pro as my domain is like well of course Dave can do it. You know. So I thought that was kind of funny. And of course that was you know the appropriate name that’s why I came up with it because that’s the kind of stuff I and my team do and we love to do so.

Miles: Right. You know for a lot of people like me moving systems is incredibly difficult. I would even say like for us to move our membership site eight hundred active members, we are running probably like 10-ish new members coming in a day. So it’s like a complex machine that’s running.

And the thought of me moving it from one system to another is beyond overwhelming. I reached out to two people before you and they literally wanted hundreds of dollars to talk to me. Not. Not alone. Like give me an idea of what it was. And then I just had an idea like oh my gosh Dave. Like that’s what he does. I googled you, found you. You were willing to get on Skype for 15 minutes and chat and you’re kind of think about it and like I was just oh my gosh and that that feeling of having a team behind me as like the marketer in charge.

Miles: Priceless.

Dave: Well you know I’ve heard from people like you before so a lot of times when you tell me what you want my head is kind of churning and I am thinking a lot of times out loud with you on the phone like OK here’s what he wants to do. Here are the concerns we should have here is probably the time line just kind of seen how it’s gonna work and the fact that you know we’ve done a lot of that type of work before.

So it’s more than likely possible it just to matter understanding your needs. What are your priorities? What’s important to you? And then kind of mapping out the plan and as you saw I’d like to put Google’s spreadsheets out there and keep track of what we’re doing so in case something messes up we’ve got a back-up plan.

Miles: Right. For our move it was not just a content management system it was not just a new membership plug in. It was not just a new email service provider system it was all of them at the same time.

Dave: Right.

Miles: Right. Like, let’s add some insult to injury here so it was important and like we went from so all of my funnel marketing and then my first membership marketing was on Aweber which is literally just a linear follow up sequence and you helped me see the value of getting on to something that’s tagged based and has automations to be able to really step into the 21st century of digital marketing.

Dave: Yeah welcome to the 21st century. You know we’ve talked about this too is I think you’ve got the ability especially with the list you have of really getting personal or
really addressing as many people’s wants, needs, desires, the way they want. You know if you find out you’ve got people on your list that really want to hear from you once a month you can do that. That’s not difficult. There’s other people that are very responsive. You can up the volume you can send to them every day and they will be super happy but you can keep all those people happy and on your list. But separate. So you definitely have a lot of upside.

Miles: We do and the idea for us is instead of like “OK here’s a new subscriber Let’s take them down our one and only follow up sequence”. Now we get to turn it into a choose your own adventure.

Dave: Yes.

Miles: People can base on our actions within and I don’t have to do anything other than set it up. They can lead themselves down a unique follow up sequence based on their likes and interests based on what actions they take or don’t take. Mind blown.

Dave: Yeah.

Miles: So that’s like customizing Starbucks. Knowing when someone enters your distribution network like oh this person is a latte with two pumps before they walk in the door. Wow you make that feel when a local walked into the coffee shop got like hey the same thing for you get today like yeah buddy I’ll have it again. Boom and it’s out. They love that place even more and we get to give that kind of experience.

Dave: Right. It can be creepy if you’re not careful. Be careful but you don’t wanna let people know that you’re stalking them effectively but you want to anticipate you know what they want based on their actions. It’s one thing for them to tell you, you know, you might give somebody a survey and collect that information. Additionally you’ve got the capability now of observing behavior and then acting on it based on what they do for you. So you know it’s in you the world’s your oyster here now I guess is really what I am getting at.

Miles: It is really exciting. It’s really exciting.

Dave: Yes, So you know the process went through, any major concerns you had like “oh God this is going to fall off” or fall apart or I know you expressed concern about this seems overwhelming. But we obviously got through it.

Miles: We did. And honestly I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would have been able to make it through myself. I consider myself an intelligent person. I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for years and I don’t think I would have actually made this transition. The biggest thing for me and my wife we’ve been doing what we call adaptability training for several years now and we do this with our lifestyle.

We’re in New Zealand now we were in Thailand before we sometimes get to an area that doesn’t have internet and we like everything’s an adaptation and just approaching this kind of a transition or a migration from that mindset of here’s our ultimate goal. We think that’s where we want to go. But yet we’re willing to adapt because sometimes articles don’t fit within the framework of the software that we have to use etc. I thought at first we were going to migrate to different systems together. It turned out that we had some billing things that were unforeseen at first that didn’t work.

So the idea then shifted over to let’s just go all in on this new system. If I was rigid in that process that might have become difficult but since we were flexible. Now that I’m here I’m like I see the light. This is actually far superior than duct taping two systems that were ok together where we’ve ended up here and its flexibility throughout the process was just massive.

Dave: Yeah, that’s good to hear because you know there they are. There was some pretty significant changes for you. You know kind of like the landing page, your billing system, your e-mail, your course protection, if you will, all that changed in you know when I look at it from my perspective it’s like OK what is the worst thing that could possibly happen when this transition occurs. OK. Now we know what is. No what can we do. If it does happen so that if something blows up, and Miles, remember, I blew a couple of things up in your database a few times, remember? At least twice.

Miles: (laughs) Yes, at least twice. Well it felt like some inopportune moment. But anyone who’s been building a business online and gone through that, that’s kind of the norm. Right? Like that’s why we do daily backups that’s why we do hourly backups sometimes on demand. What we’re going to try something new. And that’s why we work in development environments.

Dave: And that’s why I think it worked out because we know we knew we could blow something up. And I said All right. I’m just going to back up right now so in case it does. And I also knew that your hosting provider was doing daily backups so we had a contingency plan in case something did go south, it did a few times but nothing that we didn’t get out of and that’s awesome. So I’m curious, go ahead.

Miles: Well, it is. And the other thing that was awesome was when we set our timeline or timeframe of you committed to our timeline you were all in for us. I mean you were like I think there were times I was on the phone with you at about 10:00 or later and I was getting up at 5:00 AM my time which is like eight nine o’clock your time and you put in some like full days for us.

And I’m like, I’ve worked with other kinds of service providers who are quote gurus and it seems when things get close they start to shift their attention towards that next client because they see that this gig is about to end and they’ve got to get that next client. And the follow through is where you get all the power and everything and you were there for the long haul and you follow through with excellence and like, that was just… (does a holy blessed sound effect and both laughs)

Dave: All right thanks Miles. Appreciate that.

Miles: Totally.

Dave: You know like I said I enjoy doing this stuff. So to me it’s not necessarily work. It’s kind of like play.

Miles: We talked in an earlier conversation you said that in the Kolbe test you know a lot of entrepreneurs like myself were the fast start kind of people and my attention to detail and wrapping up projects. Numbers are pretty low. And you’re the exact opposite. Right. Like you’re kind of the slow methodical test everything track every test every time meticulously. We’re going to spend the time we need to get it right so boring like I think every entrepreneur who one of those like let’s go get them, and who cares if it blows up we’ll figured it out along the way, needs someone like you in their back pocket because it’s just such a powerful compliment.

Dave: And likewise I need a little motivation to get my ass in gear sometimes or else you know I won’t release something for four years type of thing and that’s not good either. But I said, you know, what I do it’s going to be pretty darn solid. And it’s good to be around people like yourself that have that energy like just raid and make changes get going. And then I’m kind of looking at like “OK what can blow up. OK it’s safe. Let’s go forward.” and definitely get things done. So yeah you’re, there is really some compliments there.

Miles: Fun fact this membership we migrated it started with zero content in the members area and a sales letter. And we sold the idea of a delivery schedule and we said we’re going to write it we’re going to throw it out the list if people buy it we’ll do it, if nobody buys it we won’t.

People bought it and we had to figure it out and that was like 2014 we did that and we’ve been growing this membership ever since and now it’s like 300 different things. They get over the course of a 24 month trip sequence. It’s insane. And we literally sold something we had not actually created yet it worked. And we’re like cool the market wants this let’s go in that direction.

Dave: Awesome. And you know, that’s a question that people ask me sometimes how much content Do I need to have to get started. As you just proved you actually don’t really need…

Miles: A really good sales letter is the one thing you actually need.

Dave: And then after that if you’ve got demand you’ve got to hustle. So yeah it can be done.

Miles: And we did and we went straight in and we actually created the first month I think we created it essentially like three or four months worth of content that first month just to kind of like that initial urge to respond to the demand.

Dave: Cool! Awesome, Miles anything else we should know about you or your wife before we call it a day here?

Miles: If I may plug my YouTube channel. OK that it be happening from that. So we talked about the challenge right? The 30 day challenge, the 90 day challenge.

We started our blog, our WordPress blog initially with a 30 day blogging challenge and I did a Youtube challenge where I’m teaching funnels and Facebook Pay per click in a very granular, hands on, over my shoulder, nuts and bolts, kind of way. It’s at youtube.com/milesb and I mentioned that like if you want more help on the funnels or in the Facebook Pay per click like the information is out there for free. You don’t need a higher guru or you don’t need it buy a thousand dollar product.

But also if you’re wanting to take your business to the next level committing to doing a 30 day, 90 day, 120 day challenge is powerful and you can see what it did on my channel. I’ve got analytic reports at the 30 90 and 120 day 150 day mark showing how I’ve gotten like some like a hundred thousand views over the course of a few months from just pushing these out.

Dave: Wow. Amazing. And then if you don’t mind finally, What is the name the website you and your wife have?

Miles: Yeah. The main website is ask-angels.com. It’s the Intersect of angels and meditation’s and our membership site lives at theangelsolution.com. If anybody wants to check those out.

Dave: Ok. Cool, Miles thank you very much.

Miles: Dave, Thank you it’s been a pleasure and thanks just for all your help you’re doing a great service my friend.

Dave: My pleasure. All right. Thanks!

IntegratePro Show: Robin Heppell

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:59 — 19.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Here are the episode’s highlights:

00:00:08 – Introduction of Robin Heppell from Funeral Results Marketing
00:01:23 – Talk about the business and how it works
00:02:18 – The humble beginnings of the business
00:03:54 – How easy WordPress is
00:05:23 – Talking to business leaders
00:07:30 – Talk about WordPress management
00:09:37 – Gravity Forms and data gathering
00:11:25 – Customizations for needed features
00:13:13 – Rob’s target client and the business market
00:15:58 – Data gathering suggestion
00:18:58 – Services offered

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Transcript:

DAVE: This is Dave Wooding from the integratepro show and I’ve got Rob Heppell. He’s from Canada and he runs funeral results marketing. Rob how are you doing?

ROB: Great Dave. How are you doing?

DAVE: Good! Enjoying winter time down here we’re finally getting some snow. So I’m looking outside I see the FedEx guy delivering packages. It’s snowing and it’s white and I can hear the Dog (both laughs). I imagine you’re probably getting the same type of weather now?

ROB: Well, just, you know, we’re, we live on the West Coast and I live in Victoria B.C (British Columbia). So this is the first time in three years that we’ve had snow and we only got a dusting. So right now I can still see the grass. Little bit of ice on the grass but I think, I think our first storm is coming tomorrow night. So, although, stay off the roads in Victoria because it gets, it gets freezing.

DAVE: So it’s kind of like rookie night when you get a bunch of snow on the road.

ROB: Yeah. Well and to, just in the Pacific Northwest it, it’s damp right so the the snow turns to ice pretty quick it’s not that nice kind of dry crunchy snow that you get. And you actually get a little traction on.

DAVE: Right.

ROB: So it can be, it can be a little crazy.

DAVE: OK. So Rob you know the reason I think would be great for you to kind of explain what you do. Mainly, I think so people can see what you’re doing, you know, in your business that you run, and how it ties to the online world because just based on the name, you know funeral. I don’t think of that as online but what are, what exactly are you doing?

ROB: Sure. Well I have a marketing agency and we provide funeral homes through North America with, mainly, with website development and Google Adwords. We also, well, look after SEO, social media marketing. But the main focus is web development and then coupled with Google Adwords management and since, well, like 2005, I kind of branched out on my own working as a funeral director, started my own consultancy called Funeral Futurist, and to kind of get my name up there.

ROB: I got a WordPress blog and started with, you know, all the social media and really push the limits on some things to the point where when Facebook was starting, I was really pushing it. And you know my, my buddies who I play hockey with, I get into the dressing room like, “dude you know on Facebook you got to laid off all the funeral stuff man”. So anyway over time I’ve really kind of, you know, I found the the right mix of, you know, sort of the social side with a slight promotion here and there, but not to, not as crazy as it was.

ROB: And what I found as I was doing the consulting was the, a lot of, a lot of funeral home owners didn’t, you know, paying for consulting services was tough and yet, you know, great proposals and stuff and I had a look.

ROB: Some were quite a bit of background with websites that we created a website for the funeral home I was working for in 1996 and was kind of self-taught on like the old SEO and like the, even pre-Google like AltaVista and that stuff.

ROB: And then when I, when I went off on my own with Funeral Futurist built on WordPress, you know, I was noticing how easy it was compared to all these other funeral home websites that I had experience with and I thought you know this platform would be great for a funeral home because one unique thing Dave about funeral home website is they get, like crazy amounts of traffic, because people go there to read the obituaries and leave condolences. And so, you know, I’ve got clients that have, you know, and these are small businesses.

ROB: And they get, five hundred thousand, a million visitors per year.

DAVE: Wow.

ROB: So, it’s just, it’s crazy. And so, you know, we’ve seen some of the, you know, breaking things at the seams just because of, like, having sitemaps, like sitemap plug-ins, start to like you know rerun and they’re trying to index twenty thousand pages and it’s just, you know, it freezes up the whole server. So yeah lots of nightmare stories of all of that. But, so basically, what we do, what we did, and this was right about the time that folks were taking WordPress and kind of using it more as this Content Management System. So you’re starting to see more sites that look more like websites than just like a blog roll. And at that time too, I was, you know, in communications with some of the leaders at that time, like Cory Miller from iThemes, and he was working, kind of, with Brian Gardner. And at that time Brian had his company which became StudioPress and then, you know, Genesis. And, you know, now he’s with Copyblogger, and I think, Rainmaker Digital, they call it now, but, Yeah. You know, it used to be where I could, you know, I could actually talk to these guys on the phone, right? And they look, they really liked it, because, they, like, I said “hey”, like, “I want to you like editing the menu and changing like instead of just having these obituaries under like, blog, you know, I wanted to call them, you know, different things, and I wanted it to say, you know, send condolence instead of leave a comment and little things like that. So they really helped me with that. And so it was kind of like custom post types before, that was even before custom post types. So, you know, then over time the whole CMS. And you know things like you know StudioPress and we still use Genesis on all of our, all of our websites.

ROB: And so that’s really helped out from the, from the CMS model and our clients love it because they can, you know, there’s some things that they can easily update and then we, you know, we do have some, some customized customization in there and, you know, we host all of our client sites on WPEngine just because of the, you know, we need high performance and, you know, people that we can talk to when, you know, because again these, these sites are busy and they’re busy 24 hours a day. Not constant, but, you know, people are, you know, reading obituaries and leaving condolences throughout the, you know, throughout the day and even into the evening and so.

DAVE: Wow.

ROB: Yeah so it’s been a pretty neat journey.

DAVE: So, you’ve seen a lot of history. Let’s call it WordPress history for now, where they, you know, it worked but they didn’t have really all the functionality you needed but you tweaked it and you made it fit to your needs. Would you agree that WordPress has evolved and become easier to use or is it kind of stayed stagnant. I’m going to say it’s not going backwards but is it still suiting your needs. And is it easier to use than it was before?

ROB: Oh yeah. Like before. You know, like the whole menu thing you’d have to create a tree, like a page tree, to kind of set your menu. Now you have this, you know, so I, and I forget the company that kind of had a menu plug-in and then it was absorbed by or by automatic or WordPress. And so those things just have made life so much easier because, you know, that was difficult. There’s also times where you know it would break often and. And that was you know because I think the plug-ins weren’t as sophisticated. So, you know, the, you know, the typical thing you do is go into your FTP account, move all of your plug-ins into like create a new directory, drag them over until like…

DAVE: A temporary directory, yeah.

ROB: We used to call it the infirmary (both laughs) and then slowly drag one back, one after you use the site when you come back up again.

DAVE: Oh gosh.

ROB: Oh yeah. So, yeah, and then, yeah I think, you know, I think they’re continually making it better. Now, where, you know, where we see our opportunities is more with where some of them are core plug-ins that we use just keep getting better and better. And I, you know, I love it. I can wake up in the morning, my team doesn’t have to develop new code. That’s being done all the time. We just kind of connect the dots and say, “hey can’t, how can this stuff apply to, you know, to clientèle?”

DAVE: Right.

ROB: So we’re, you know, now we’re heavy users of Gravity Forms, like we’ve, some of the stuff that we can do with gravity forms is amazing.

DAVE: Right.

ROB: And in, so we have one type of site that we create is a, for people who, you know, maybe they just want a simple cremation, and, so someone can go online, go to one of our websites, pick the types of, you know, the different nuances for that. And these are like limited services that a funeral would provide, they’re basic services. And then we take them through a process of making their selections kind of in a multi-step process. And instead of like just the basic e-commerce like shopping cart, we’ve, we take Gravity forms and I, like, my guys do this. I don’t know how to do this. We merge gravity forms and WooCommerce together. And so as they go through they’re kind of adding to their cart and then they end up at the checkout page. And then we take them through the, after that, then they fill out kind of the statistical information that we would need for death certificates. And what my clients think it’s great like, hey, you know, they, all of a sudden, you know, their e-mail goes off, there’s an e-mail from Pay-Pal you just received two thousand dollars.

DAVE: Right!

ROB: Everything’s done now they just have to kind of oversee make sure that all the information is correct and they’ve got the appropriate forms signed. But yeah, the power of those two systems for our application is just amazing.

DAVE: So you’re taking something that’s now off the shelf and tweaking it to get the results where previously, you’d probably have to bill almost all of that or most of it custom, right?

ROB: Yeah, exactly, or it would look really clunky. You know, it would kind of look like a shopping cart but you’re kind of trying to explain to people, you know, maybe in a description of another product with a square image.

DAVE: Got it.

ROB: You know, how to take the next step, right? So. And now it’s, yeah, it just looks like it kind of follows the, how they would be doing that if they were talking to the funeral director at the funeral home.

DAVE: Oh, cool. So it’s basically prompting with questions and getting some kind of conditional logic if they answer one way or the other it sends them down maybe a different path.

ROB: Exactly. People choose if they want, you know, if they want cremation or burial or if this is for if the death has occurred or is this preplanning like for the future. And then even little things like we’re tweaking at now where, you know, what are you going to do with the cremated remains or are you going to like bury them or keep them or scattering them when, in whatever one they choose then they choose that, then the next page will show kind of specific appropriate urns. So scattering there are going to be like a scattering tube or other scattering receptacles or if it was for a permanent burial then they would see, they wouldn’t see those, they would see other ones, so yeah, it’s great to, you know, where it can go and we can and we still haven’t pushed it to its limits yet, we’re using all of that it can do for us.

DAVE: Interesting. So Rob, I’m kind of curious about your market, the funeral market. And I say this respectfully. You know, to me it’s not necessarily a repeat business but do your clients use any type of like e-mail marketing? Do they have a list of, I guess, this is horrible, clients so to speak? You know what I mean?

ROB: Yeah. And you’re right it, they are. It is very kind of sensitive how we kind of dance around that because you could you know, and just imagine, they’re getting thousands and thousands of people coming to their websites all the time, so that you could be, you know, hammering them with remarketing you could be, you know, offering to do, you know, different offers which is not appropriate because, the bulk of the traffic, the obituary traffic, is not business traffic, right? They’re not looking to do business with funeral home, they’re just looking to find out when their friends service is. So yeah. So we need to kind of be careful with that. The other thing that we’re currently working on and we’re looking to integrate through WordPress itself and probably, maybe, using gravity forms or through, like, ActiveCampaign, is giving people like, so, they can have up to you know 20 or 40 or even 100 condolences per obituary and your, and so the funeral homes actually receiving the name and the e-mail address from these people and, you know, as of right now, they don’t have permission to use it.

DAVE: Right.

ROB: But you know we’re going to we want to integrate something where they can maybe check a box off and say hey sign up for, you know, if you want to sign up for the funeral homes newsletter. You know check the box off and then that will actually, we could pull that information into a, into ActiveCampaign and slowly build that because they’re, they’ve been really slow to adopt online marketing.

ROB: And then now that they see especially like big Facebook’s, like, oh we’re going to be on Facebook and, as you know, with what James Schramko has talked to us about the, Own The Racecourse, you know, I’m letting you know, hey don’t, you know, sure, be up there, be there, build your network, but, what you want to do is, let’s try to get people back onto you know saving their information and then using that information legitimately and ethically to nurture that communication.

DAVE: Interesting. I just came to me and I don’t know if this is something you know for a funeral home director. I can think of a real legit reason to maybe get somebody’s e-mail address is then just to educate them on about “indiv” (individual) life subjects, you know, how to prepare well or if you’ve got a parent that’s sick and, you know, to me that seems like that would be a really useful reason to sign up for funeral homes newsletter to get that kind of information, because…

ROB: Absolutely!

DAVE: We have parents and they’re all going to die and so are we. But you know there’s a lot of questions, I didn’t go to school and learn, what I have to do with my parents as they get older and older, you know, that kind of stuff gets passed down or you figure out as you go along. But man it would be nice to have something that educates me on you know what’s involved. So I can see that being useful.

ROB: It is. And we, so, we do when we’re setting up like a newsletter campaign and they’re looking for. What kind of content or what kind of content should they be sharing in social media. And that’s exactly right, Dave. Things that can be, you know, we try to, you know, kind of the target range would be. And because it is somewhat predictable, you know, almost like pre-retirement to retirement, your retirement years, and then, you know, once they’re, Once the individual is like looking towards like a nursing home or hospice, you know, now it’s almost too late for that, you know, to kind of foster that.

DAVE: Sure.

ROB: Because we’re not going to say if you’re going into hospice your next steps of the funeral were you know obviously…

DAVE: Right.

ROB: We’re not going to work like that, but then we then focus it on the children or the people who would be looking after those people so, you know, we’ve shared like that is a great topic the, how to have a conversation with your parents before putting them into a nursing home, like we, is, you know, is a good way to build goodwill and you’re building that connection and that rapport with people who are going to need your services in, you know, couple of years or five years or whenever. So yeah, that’s, and the thing is, it just, you can kind of share that stuff almost on an annual basis. Like I find similar content and, you know, make sure that it’s fresh but that can be done kind of over and over again.

DAVE: So Rob, so are those the type of service you offer or does that include, I know you mentioned you doing web development, pay per click and do you do stuff like the email management, content? Do you provide that also? Or is it everything inclusive with funerals?

ROB: Yeah it will. We would, we strictly deal with funeral homes and funeral related companies but mainly funeral homes, you know, I ventured into other local businesses because you know when learning about marketing these local businesses you know use, “oh I know that you know that could work for a restaurant or that could work for a storage facility”, but you know what, I really lose my competitive advantage when I add a step, like, sure there’s lots of opportunity…

DAVE: Yup.

ROB: But, there’s, I could go way deeper in my small niche. But, yeah, we were expanding too. Right? So it, and it’s just funny how it’s like even in this past year, things have flipped from trying to convince them that they should look at SEO or they should look at Adwords or look at social media management not just like, you know, building likes and stuff like that. And now, they’re kind of like, hey, you know, we’ve been spending $800 a month with this company and we’re not doing them like, woah, we could, you know, sure, we could do lots of things for you, for that, and actually get your return. And that’s why we’ve actually changed the name from Funeral Futurists, which was my consultancy helping people kind of see the future of funeral service, to Funeral Results Marketing, I think it kind of says what it is, we’re going to get, if you’re in the funeral industry, we’re going to get the results through your marketing.

ROB: So we’re, you know, we’re, we want to be a, you know, digital marketing agency that looks after their, you know, for them to build their list and their platform which is their website and then different things that they can add-on as needed for their social media, for their SEO, for their pay per click, or, you know, even Facebook Ads and…

DAVE: Excellent. Okay. And then, the name your, or you the URL for your website is what?

ROB: It is Funeral Results Marketing.

DAVE: Excellent. OK. Hey Rob thank you very much for this call today, I appreciate it. Definitely a unique perspective and it sounds like you’ve got some history with using WordPress and going forward with that and it looks like it’s becoming easier and you’ve also got a very comprehensive business wrapped around the funeral markets so thanks a lot Rob!

ROB: You’re welcome Dave thanks for the opportunity.

DAVE: Yeah my pleasure. OK!

IntegratePro Show: Ilana Wechsler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:29 — 19.4MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Highlights for the episode’s show:

00:20 – Introduction of Ilana Wechsler, a Pay-Per-Click Expert
01:10 – PPC Platform: Difference between Facebook and Google
04:20 – The Background Story
10:07 – The Tie-End and Starting with the Successful Business
11:30 – Great Tips for Starters
15:25 – Talking about the Cost and More Tips
19:02 – Differences and Rewards
23:02 – Using Pixel and Press Recording

 

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Transcript:

Dave: Hey! This is Dave Wooding from the IntegratePro Show and I have Ilana Wechsler today from GreenArrowDigital.com on the show. So, Ilana, thanks for being here. Can you give us a very short introduction about who you are and what you’re doing?

Ilanna: Yeah! Sure! Thanks for having me on the show, Dave!

Dave: My pleasure!

Ilana: I am from Sydney and I run a PPC Agency. So, for those of you who aren’t acquainted with PPC – it’s Pay Per Click. And we run an agency just specializing in Google AdWords and Facebook Ads and sort of Pay Per Click Marketing. Plus we also train businesses how to run PPC campaigns themselves. So that’s what I do.

Dave: Excellent! You know I don’t know much about PPC. I’ll be honest. I am getting into a little bit more into promote my business. But you mentioned both Google and Facebook. Are they very similar? Or is there a big difference in what you do with those two?

Ilana: You know there are a lot of similarities but there are also a lot of differences. In terms of like, the marketing approach, outside, there’s only commonality, between them is that they are both Pay per Click platform. So, if you can pair Pay per click marketing to traditional advertising like putting an Admin like a PayPal and pay for a flat fee for example. PPC is all about paying per click or paying for an impression on Facebook for example.
So you aren’t really paying for the people who you hand-select based on your targeting. And the google platform is actually vastly different to the Facebook platform. I like to think of it as.. Google will really go in after people based on their behavior online. What they’ve typed into Google? Where they’ve gone? What websites they’re interested in? Whereas Facebook; what or who you are as a person. You know… What your interests are? Perhaps your in age bracket. There’s a lot more interest-based marketing. So, that’s kind of how high level the big difference is in between the two.

Dave: Okay. So do you have a favorite? Is one more productive I guess than the other, that works well for what you do?

Ilana: A lot of business owners asked me. you know… What should I do? Google or Facebook? And obviously, it depends on your business goals. It ultimately depends on where your target audience is hanging out online. And that’s just 2:40. But, I would say that they would work in harmony together. I wouldn’t treat them as silos. A lot of the campaigns that we are integrated. And that’s where advertising is really going these days. There are lots of touch points. And you can’t look at things through the lens of just one channel. There are multi channels. It’s just like people are multi-devices. So, we might have a campaign. Like Facebook is basically a mobile thing. It’s like we have a campaign targeting more guys on Facebook but then we do a holistic re-marketing campaign which is showing ads to people who’d been to your website before across both those platforms. So we’re leveraging a reach of Facebook and then really complimenting it on Google for example.

Dave: So, as an example you might first connect with people on Facebook. Drop some kind of pixed or some kind of tracking mechanism. That both Google and Facebook can use again and again. Is that true?

Ilana: That’s exactly right. I failed to mention that special piece of information. That’s right. So, you would either promote a piece of content or just show someone an ad on Facebook and then they say, “Go to your website. Don’t do whatever you want to do. What 4:01. That’s fine. You have the ability to show them ads after the information. Obviously after some period of time. Has lapse as well.

Dave: Yeah! Right! Cool! One of the reason I want to have the call is I kinda want to find out about you. I know what you do and I’d like to get more of what you do. But what else I’d like to figure out is how you got here. Because not everybody has the disposition for what you are doing. So is there something in your background that explains how you got where you are at now.

Ilana: Yeah! I guess so. It’s one of those things that… you know… you start on a journey with no real sense of the destination. You have to start because unless you start you don’t do anything. So, my background is in actually on IT and Finances. Boring as that sounds. I work in a corporate sector for 10 years. I do really like working in a corporate but actually, really enjoyed the work, so I stayed in it. And I worked a bunch of firms – some good ones some bad ones. Let’s just leave it at that. Yeah! Here in this space as a whole, I was dying to get into entrepreneur road and I messed my job that I absolutely hated then. I don’t really have that story. I actually really enjoyed my work. And I enjoyed kinda working every day and the people I work with. Some of them are the smartest people I’ve ever met. The decision, I guess that was made for me was when I had my first child. And basically I have every intention to go back to my job. But circumstances happened and I couldn’t adapt and I decided and have to make a choice between family or career. It was an obvious decision. So, that what prompted the late to go out on my own. But it was a really long journey actually. Probably the one that’s not really told very often by people. You know.

Dave: So Ilana, what exactly did you do? I heard IT and what else?

Ilana: So essentially I worked in what’s called Data Analytics. That works for a big US Financial Fund Manager. There were Quant manager.

Dave: Quantitative Analysis?

Ilana: Yeah! That’s right. So they were Quantitative Fund Manager. They analyze the stock market based on quantitative factors. And I was the Data Analytics person which is basically I was the bridge between the Quant guys and the Account Manager. So the account Manager would come to me and say “Hey!” and they had a lot of institutional clients. So they have people who would spend billions of dollars. Our client needs to get information about their aspects of their account. And it was my job to calculate all those metrics. So, I had to understand the Quant side but translate those numbers and present them in a way in such that it would make sense to the client.

Dave: So, it is more than just putting something on a spreadsheet and having a PowerPoint display. True?

Ilana: Yeah so I spent all day all week on spreadsheets. They were my friend. Building macros and stuff like that. It’s complicated. And integrating databases and that kind of stuff. Because you can imagine as an account manager that have literally tens of thousands of spreadsheets of holdings and lots of different proposals stuff. Its data manage. But essentially so being with Data Analytics was having to. It kinda comes after attribution. You know. What are the driving performances with, you know, the funds? And calculating that information so that it would correlates to the account performance for their investors essentially. But ___ 8:17 it is actually really interesting and there were a lot of sort of complicated models that we came up with and every month there was kinda like different stuff that clients would ask for information and global funds or what the global factors that came into it in currency. So yes, A lot of data crunching.

Dave: I guess part of my interest is that I have a similar background. I used to work in semi-conductor business, making memory chips and a lot of my focus was on solving problems. Like how come we are not ___ 8:50 as much as we expect we should. And, there’s two parts. You actually kinda have to physically investigate basically, characterize the parts that are having problems electrically. But we also had tons and tons and tons of data. That we could parse through. So, the skill of being able to parse through data summarizes really made a paid off dividends. You might find a correlation to a machine and fabrication area that was causing the problem. You know, just by going through all that data. I recognize in what you are doing but it is totally different industry. Because there is a lot of data and making sense of it. It takes some time and it is kinda like a puzzle. You know that’s why I kinda enjoyed that too. It’s like Okay! I’m going on a hunt. I’m trying to figure out what are these and look oh what I just found out!

Ilana: You’re right! Absolutely a puzzle. Once you solve that puzzle it’s a great feeling!

Dave: So those 9:51. How does that transfer to what you are doing now? You are kinda looking for a correlation? Or you’re seeking out audiences that respond well to your advertisements. Is that what it comes down to you to what you were doing previously or what’s the tie-end?

Ilana: Yeah! There is a tie end actually but only when I reflect back. I can see that relationship along my journey though starting my business and everything, I don’t see the link. It’s interesting you see that’s just how you by default. Follow your strings, what you enjoy, what you know. So, there is absolutely a link because a lot of what I do now, a lot of PPC is about data. But it is not 100% data it’s probably a really elegant split between data and psychology and creativity. It’s a lovely ___ 10:48. And once we get the data component called the dialing. We can still equally have success. With PPC and with great Ad copy and with great creative. Its just enhance significantly with that data or aspect.

Dave: Can you kinda fail a way to success, just start off with. Let’s say the worst Ad possible and it just keep ___ 11:13. Or does it truly help to have a great copy. I’m sure if you have great copy and you continually split test, you are going to where you want quicker, but could you be a success of what does you want of what does the other. Strictly a great copy and not worry about results or not split test. Or could you just split test your way to infinity?

Ilana: I’d say it depends. It depends on our targeting. I think of it like links in a chain. Success with this stuff, bind traffic which is somewhat limitless if you think about how connected we are online. The first step is your targeting. You have got to identify who your target person is. If you are on google, you need to know what word they are typing into google. If they are on Facebook, it might be who they are as a person or if they are interested in a specific product or whatever. So you have to get that targeting right before you even start showing that person the ad. You can have the best ad copy in the world but you showing that ad to the wrong person, it’s not going to work. So that’s why it depends. If you get your targeting right, then there is more forgiveness in your ad copy. You keep split testing different ad copy probably to infinity. Your work is never done. But if you message to the person, it does not resonate with him, well then no amount of good copy could be the best ad copy in the world.

Dave: Right.

Ilana: I was trying to sell to the ___ 13:06. Better want the Ads but then they don’t need it. So it’s the same kind of thing. And it think that was the kind of mistake that a lot of people fall down. Have these conversations with business owners all the time and they say, “OK great! You know you want to do this. Who is your target audience?” And I was like, “Oh! Everyone!”. “No! We need to identify people. You may eventually want everyone, but let’s start with one particular type of person”. But first, determine the characteristics about them. Are they typing something special in to Google that identifies them as being effectively putting their hand up and say “Yup! I’m your person”. I mean you get my point.

Dave: Yup!

Ilana: So, that’s the mistake I think that a lot of business owners do. They just go way way too broad.
Dave: So the first thing that you want to do is to identify that one customer that you want to target. And assuming it goes well and you become successful and you start to branch out to maybe a different or related market or prospects. Does that sound right?

Ilana: Yeah! So exactly, I asked businesses often, “What’s your best selling product?” Let’s start with something that’s already working really really well in your business. And identify the characteristics of those people. I stop by trying to sell that one. Or Identify the product that returns the highest amount of money. Because most people don’t realize that my traffic is not cheap. Once you start factoring in the cost to show that person the ad coming to your website. Then what’s call the conversion rate. The amount of people who come to your website. It’s often not a very high number. You might get lucky and get a very high number. So, you need to make your money back somehow. So, another mistake that people make is that it might come to me and say, “Alright, I have to sell this product. I like only had been selling it for like $8.” You know it’s gonna cost you more than $8 to acquire that customer. They don’t factor in the cost of the traffic in any kind of advertising really.

Dave: So, they could cover that cost by having a higher price or having something per say on the back end.
Ilana: What exactly sort of actually a continuity aspect or I often suggest we’d like to bundle things up like it’s a product like $8. Like a hamper or something that’s forcing people to buy a whole bunch of products together so that increases your margins where it allows you to buy traffic.

Dave: So, you are saying they might show you any dollar product person, buys it but there is an upsell. Or do you suggest maybe to bundle everything at once right upfront?

Ilana: Either, I guess. And it obviously depends. I guess I do not want to discourage people from doing it. But there are many many different options. You can create a hamper and bundle products together or if you have an existing what it’s called the back end, where either an up-sell or in a month time, I would say there is a discount coupon for their next purchase there is a high lifetime value that’s maybe even justified let’s say to even more. To acquire that initial customer, and if they stay off a while longer then it is worth it.

Dave: So, I guess what I’m hearing so far about this is that you want to focus first like on one product or something 16:47 to start with. Get your targeting right on as much as possible so that when you do have good copy and you split testing you are gonna accelerate your results. And you gotta make sure that you can afford to buy traffic. So, you can’t sell these dirt-cheap products and expect to break even. Or even make money. Maybe bundle with other products and perhaps some kind of continuity after the initial purchase.

Ilana: Yeah! That’s right. And I guess you also have to look at another aspect. Perhaps it’s a well-established business. Let’s say they get a lot of traffic coming to their website without even buying SEO they rank really well in searching terms or something. They could really leverage that existing traffic that you’ve got and you’ve got to touch them before with re-marketing. Much as showing ads to people who had been into the website before. And so, I guess, getting the most out of that existing asset you’ve got of your SEO traffic and you’ve just spent money on re-marketing. Many businesses often just do this. And then they don’t have to spend a lot of money ‘cause it is very targeted campaign and there’s a good return in investment and they might be profitable for them to buy a new traffic. They are leveraging their existing traffic.

Dave: So, I hear this re-marketing traffic if you will, is it cheaper than let’s say called paid traffic? Is that what I hear?

Ilana: Generally, it is cheaper. And it’s generally and more significantly more profitable. And that’s generally understandable because someone’s been into your website before and they’ve known you and maybe even get familiar and maybe even have purchased from your before.

Dave: Okay. I’m trying to understand why would it be cheaper? You know I can understand that it’s probably more profitable because they already know you. They like you. And like you said they probably buy your product. But is it just a fact that your… I guess I don’t understand the difference why it is potentially called a paid traffic is more expensive if you will? Is it because you kinda have your targeting dialed in as well?

Ilana: Alright! So, this is where it comes in to difference between the platform. So, Google is a Pay Per Click Platform. So, they don’t charge you for an impression. So, somebody who sees your ad and does not click, you don’t get charged for it. And generally, people do remarketing on the Google platform with banners on an other people’s website which is significantly cheaper.

Dave: OK, I got it now.

Ilana: Ok. Yeah. And if we are remarketing on Facebook, Facebook is kinda like has a make rate system so you can sit into. And google does too. But that does not affect ___ 19:54 where they reward you for engagement. And they reward you by lower charges. And remarketing campaign, people are likely to be more engaged. They likely to share it and Facebook will reward you with it.

Dave: OK so here’s my thinking. Basically, they want X amount of money out of you so to speak, so if you’re not generating very many clicks they are gonna make up for it by raising the click prices. On the other hand, if you are getting a lot of clicks, well, they are not gonna charge as much but they still get the money they were planning on getting. Does that sound right?

Ilana: Sort of. Essentially, I like to think of it like, Facebook and Google they want to pay for them to advertise obviously. And their over-___20:43 goal, they want to keep it user based. So, google want to keep it cool using search engines and stuff like that and Facebook what they use to stay on their platform. So, they reward their advertisers for providing a good experience for their users and they reward them. So technically very clever, and they sync devices, advertisers, to really think about what would be a good experience that they use are. But they will penalize you for what it’s called bait and switch. Your ad says something, and then you click on the add it’s something completely different. People are gonna get really upset about it and they’re gonna complain about your ad and they probably gonna report it. People on Facebook are acting negatively on something they don’t like because you are upsetting people and they are gonna penalize you for charging you more. So, where you win with Facebook ads is when you get engagements. That’s what they want. They want people to engage with ads and people to share with their friends and they want people to like it and comment. That’s the game on Facebook. If you could win engagement war. Then you win really really cheap traffic. And we have saying, difference is in results when both “Seens” versus dollars in terms of performance.

Dave: Wow!

Ilana: Yeah! It is actually quite interesting. Because if you think about it, when somebody sees on it, and still astounds me when people will share ads on Facebook. That can’t happen on Google. But you can’t share an ad on Google. And then they will share it and then they will tag their friend who they think it’s appropriate for. Then that person who then engages with that is free. It’s further search engine ___ 22:36. To provide a good experience for the user.

Dave: OK. Interesting! Yeah there are very much into making a very positive experience for their users.
Ilana: So, and then they use what they use on the platform. ___ 22:23.
Dave: Right. Right. So, somebody who hasn’t started to use Facebook or Google AdWord, is there anything they could do ahead of time. Set up a pixel or some kind of tracking even before they are starting to use advertising like that.

Ilana: 100%! I urge all business owners especially the ___ 23:13 stuff buying traffic. Even if you are not ready to buy traffic, you definitely should install the pixel. So, Google have their own pixel. Which so you have to sign up for Google AdWords account and then get your little bit of code you can put on your website. And Facebook have their own separate remarketing code as well. So, you have two different codes that you have to put on your own website. And that enables you to do that cross-platform advertising for all your traffic sources. SEO traffic, Direct traffic, email traffic, whatever.

Dave: Ok. So, do you have any resources that explain how to do all that?

Ilana: I do. Actually, I’ve got a video on my website. So, if you go to GreenArrowDigital.com/Pixel there is a video that will show you how to find your Facebook pixel to put on your website and how to find your Google Pixel, the one in the video. ‘cause it’s a little bit confusing if you haven’t done that before. But this video is a step by step way of how to find it and then give it to your web developer to put on the back end of your website.
Dave: Excellent! So, this I even before deciding to use Google AdWords or Facebook just so that you are kinda priming the pump. So, that when you do start advertising, you’ve got people that are pixeled if you will so that you can target them if you want. True?

Ilana: Yeah! Exactly! I think that might be the biggest mistake that people make. People who start sending traffic is that they don’t have this pixel. And If you think of it like olden days of tape recorders, a pixel is essentially a crushing record. And recording the people so that in six months’ time, when you are wanting to start doing paid traffic, you’ve got all the people that it’s been recording from when you hit press record. If you don’t install the pixel, you have to press record.

Dave: OK Got it! Ilana, that’s what I kinda want to find out from you. I appreciate your time. Is there anything I should’ve asked you but I didn’t? That’s a trick question. But go for it.

Ilana: What I do is so vast. You know that’s probably the best starting point I usually you start as business owners. Get that pixel on. Maybe start a remarketing campaign. It’s the kind of thing that once you start, the point of starting with remarketing campaign is to get the low hanging fruit. Get that working and you can start building on a building but really your paid traffic can be as small as you want. It can be $5 a day. There’s a lot of people don’t actually realize… People think we have spent thousands and thousands of dollars. You definitely don’t. You can have a whole campaign for $5 a day.

Dave: Wow! So, get that pixel on there. And then you can start on a very low budget campaign almost right away. Cool! Well, that’s it for me. I appreciate you being in the call today. Thanks!

Ilana: No Worries! Thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s been a blast!

Dave: Yup! My Pleasure!

 

Get to know more experts in e-commerce business world at https://integratepro.com/blog/how-important-is-shopify-in-ecommerce-business-platform/

IntegratePro Show: Shaun Latham

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:13 — 24.1MB)

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Here are this episode’s highlights:

00:10 – Introduction of Shaun Latham, a Shopify Expert
02:46 – Talk about Business and How it works
06:25 – Shopify is the Best
09:06 – WooCommerce VS Shopify
12:15 – A Short Discussion of a Typical Client
15:15 – Challenges and Surprises that comes along the way
18:45 – The Importance of Giving an Update to Client
20:09 – Handling Failures and Working around it
22:48 – Off-Work Related Talk

 

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Transcript:

Dave: Hey! Welcome! This is Dave Wooding from the Integratepro Show. And today, I have here Shaun Latham as a guest. So, Shaun, would you say hello and introduce yourself?

Shaun: Hi Dave! Thanks for having on the podcast.

Dave: My pleasure.

Shaun: I’m looking forward to meeting you.

Dave: Likewise. So, tell me something I don’t know about you already.

Shaun: Okay. Well, I guess.. First of all, I’m based in Northern Australia which is a big island. I’m sure you are all familiar with it. And I’m very passionate about swimming. In fact, swimming is compulsory in my family. We all swim. In fact, we all went into a race altogether once a year. I’m kind of born to swim. So, that’s a bit of fun. And yeah, so that is probably something you don’t know.

Dave: No, I didn’t. Tell me a little more. Are we talking….

Shaun: Yeah. It sort of happened by accident.. The swimming thing. I’m up and always counseling. But My wife is a very ____ of swim at stake in UK years ago. We actually live next door to a tennis court here. And when we first got married we were sort of quite keen on sports. But anything that I do that I could beat her, I should never ____ on tennis again. I could never beat her to swimming so I decided I give a go on swimming. And that is something we do together. You know, we swim a few times a week. ___ outside. You know that’s kind of our “switching off from the technology” which is funny.

Dave: Does that mean you are near the water, the Ocean ?

Shaun: Yeah. Im in a two-minute walk from an Olympic size pool in Goulburn, Australia. Im very fortunate that we got a beach house in the morning to drench yourself down here which is a beautiful spot. We decided to spend a couple of months down there. I decided myself so I have a swim everyday in the ocean. It’s lovely

Dave: Excellent! So, you may know this already. I’ve been to Sydney before Manly, Australia. One thing that I find really interesting is those pools that are right by the ocean that just pick up the ocean water.

Shaun: Oh yeah! They are magic! I would kill to swim in one of those. You know, we have to swim in chlorine, the outdoor pools here. There is something special about the salt water. It really makes you feel alive. You got that fresh feeling when you get out of that fresh chilling water.

Dave: Right. Okay. Cool. So, Shaun, we kind of have a mutual (kind of) understanding but (little bit) business (kind of technology ____). And if I am not mistaken, your website is InfoBytesmedia.com.au. What exactly are you doing?

Shaun: Basically, we are very shopify-centric. We have a very similar service to what in terms of (we rolled about automatic prices ranges). And I know you’ve got a big range of platforms to deal with but we are a lot narrower. We basically help drop off shippers, automate the inventory side of their business. You probably might have a lot of three thousand products. So that’s a big job importing items and categorising them. We’ll just setting them and store them up and get those products synced with those supplies. So that is also a big time saving. So basically, it’s an end to end shipping price. Everything is set up. Everything is required to (what we used to call) term-case solution.
That (kind of) evolve. I didn’t start of doing that. I’ve started probably similar a lot of work to you back in 10 years ago. Still sort of selling peer to peer. (sort of) WordPress type, small business website but working with digital agency om a wholesale basis. So I provide hostile service to digital agencies. That was a good little business model. I had a business partner that was in ___ Seattle and he had a few credit things that we use to term him. And one time we hurd on a bunch of stores. And we would normally, back on the days in Seattle with a few colleagues. In 2008, I stumbled upon across particularly onto shopify and I want to build half a dozen of sites in this shopping network and what not. I was used to presses in building site of WordPress that could take month or two with complicated works. I used to build 10 sites in one week. It was a real game changer for me. And immediately, that was pretty basic, just copy and pasting. But there were a thousand of products but we were just using things and changing logo. But that was ____5:19 for me. I had a lot of clients that had e-commerce stores and all the issues that go with ____ source platforms. I, very quickly, changed direction.
I can’t influence all my clients as not all my clients have all my platforms but certainly my clients are educated with B to B custom. And guide your customers to shopify platform. It sound easier for the clients and it is easier for me. Im sure you are familiar with some of the issues that come along with the ____5:53 world particularly the plug-in model. You build the site, you do the thing right, the top thing, you don’t touch the color, and the things that you might want to pull back, the things that might explode. Im just trying up with some plug-in and the plug-in number 20 is something that went what. That is your fault. I haven’t had to do that for several years now. So that is a beautiful thing.

Dave: Have you obviously used all the other shopping systems if you will? And come up with a conclusion? That sounds shopify is the best.

Shaun: The big thing for us is the support factor. The platforms like Majento which is so popular a few years ago. And you jumped into the backend and without spending a lot of time training the clients. And feels like a hundred, ____6:58 in there. There is about 64 ways of building a product that comes in complex, simple panel and too many to mention. And I think I ended up buying it and hosted a platform and then went broke after several months. It was not a good solution. But there’s been a real trend. You look into the new platforms and I think there are two things that really have changed the game now.
The successful platforms like Shopify or Accounting Wise 7:32 Zero and these new ones, they are very simple. They do one thing really well they don’t try and try to cater to every need of the costumer. But they have API. And that’s the thing you love.

Dave: That’s beautiful.

Shaun: Then it allowed us to do so much. I had to jump into WordPress the other day for a client. I’ve been wondering if wordpress is going to jump on board with these API and they’ve been trying to do it for years and because no one owns it. It’s an open source code. They’ve got a plugin that is kind of beta or something. And someone mentioned the other day that WordPress is 20% websites. But they still don’t have the proper API. For me, one of the criteria I need to work with a platform that has the right prospect. I see Shopify ticks that box. But other platforms like Zapier, I’ve noticed when I logged into that shopify site. It kept on popping up. Set up some integration with woocommerce or whatever it is. So that’s if think the way the things are hitting and the big change and the probability if ______8:55.

Dave: Shaun, what about woocommerce vs. shopify. I’ll be honest. Im kind of ignorant. I did set up a shopify site for my wife and get used of the API. And I totally agree it’s a great thing. But is the woocommerce all the same plain field or are we comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges.

Shaun: Yeah. Look. They’ve got to be following for them, theres one that is called WPCommerce. And they sort of came along and simplify things a lot. So they’ve been into market for a few good years now. I don’t want to look geeky but if you look at the architecture of WordPress, it’s a blogging in general. So if you have a website that has a really thousand of products, behind those things, all the woocommerce is doing is basically creating a custom post type. And everything in meta, what we call a meta field. So we are stuffing, raising a different field. Unless you have a serious caching going on and really have a descent APS or a server. This is the issue. Most of the people save money with WordPress and woocommerce because it is free. And they skip on the hosting and I come along and I’ve got to do integration and vie made to run some __con 10:89 job. That’s got to time it up in 60 seconds because they are on shared web hosting.
Or maybe they’ve got permissions and that is something silly because they do not even have a control panel with some godaddy cheap platform. People think it is cheap. But you know the most valuable resource we’ve got in life is time. And we’ve all got the same amount time in a day and time is money. With wordpress and woocommerce, we are still paying a hosting fee probably paying for some training in setting up word and commerce product.
Whereas Shopify, we get everything. Products with $29 a month. You get 24/7 service. If your WordPress site explodes, you can’t call anyone. You are on your own. Whereas Shopify, you’ve got a friendly Canadian that’s gonna be on the end on the phone. And He’s going to help you out. And that means they call me as much. I don’t really have wasteful issues these days because of the fact that it’s just so robust. And it is very easy to use. They’ve got training. Usually for the session, I’ve been training them up online. Because we are automating the import of the products and they order the process they can just focus on marketing their business which is sort out.

Dave: So if somebody comes to you and you’re going to do business with them, you are going to set up a shopify store and do all the integrations. What would a typical client look like to you, somebody who has thousand of products?

Shaun: Absolutely, most of my referrals come from wholesale companies. So they come from big catalogues, maybe 5 thousand products. I don’t have any specific arrangement with them. I kind of fell in to this business by accident. I have a drop shipping site and I did it. And the supply said, “Oh! OK! You do another one.” And it just felt like a snowball from there.
So, 80% of my business comes from the a little bit of single point dependency there. And most of those supplies actually is kind of old school like I said probably half of them have two more businesses from retail shops. So, the prices would be that I would have an existing website and often it is on shopify now. And if it on WordPress I try and convert them to the bright side. I’m going to be careful here because I know you have some WordPress shop. So, I can’t diss it too much.
From there we basically hold their hand for the whole process because as I was listening to a podcast last night one of James’, and he was talking about “Don’t worry about the how, worry about the who” and some people believe in that. So the customers, they just give it to us. We don’t need some to explain the technical stuff. We just get the brief. Say, what do you want? What kind of risk you want? We just hold the hand you whole way through. Set it up for them and then try them.
And I should end up with a finished site. And we’ll do everything and it depends on the level of the expertise. But often,you know, meta domain and pretty much everything that is required to do. Setting up emails, and Google apps. I do provide full service and that’s it. Because we are dealing with drop ships at the end of the day. And they all just want a turn case solution that worked. We’ll not just have to find the API. We will manage the whole process.
And we have a support plan with them. So, there is another reasonable plan people can rely on. We are setting up a product-izer. Depending on what solution I’ve got for the reasonable support plan.
It’s about some of the customers we never hear from. That works hard well fir about 15:25..

Dave: What are some of the big challenges that show up with regards to what you do? Where you on the point where you do typically a lot of the same thing over and over? And you figured out all the nuances is and occasionally you got this big surprises.

Shaun: Look, I tried to and its one of the reasons that I focus on shopify. Any business if you can __ 15:44 that’s a beautiful thing because you become a subject expert but obviously from the shopify side of things, I’m a little ___15:53 in its two sides of equation. There’s a shopify side and supply side. ___ 15:59 supplies have existing cards. So, we have a very good understanding on how they worked. ___ 16:07._______ 16:16 So, thank you for that.

Dave: You’re welcome.

Shaun: So, I guess the only time that we really need probably look in and knocked things out are two issues. One, a different platform that we used to in terms of the supply rate and we also have different solutions that we’ve got. So, that’s probably where we put the effort in. And sometimes, we could even get the information. Because one of the problems, one of the supplies they will have their own API’s. Maybe, deal with the IT guy. But sometimes get in the documentation. And then you get the documentation, maybe it’s wrong. You will just know that, I can tell you shopify some of their documentation. This documentation features you get to know it but it is not the issue. That’s probably the biggest challenge. It always depends on third parties is your biggest challenge.

Dave: Sure.

Shaun: Occasionally, design can get us. We don’t do a lot of design, we usually work on things and we’ve got some designers that we worked with. Beyond time, designs are subjective. We do like API stuff because it works and it doesn’t. We haven’t had any issues for a while. But I did have with one client ages ago. It took like a month just to approve the logo. That stuff.

Dave: That happens. That’s for sure. People get hang up on or life just happens. Some things important to them initially like getting these designs ___ 18:08. Something else in their life happened. We get that all the time, it’s just the same thing. The biggest challenge we often have is getting the requirements from the customers. So, I can feel your pain because I know exactly what you are talking about.

Shaun: It’s a fact to doing business. You’re going to be patient. Most people are really understanding and I think in business you should really be honest. And as long as you communicate the issues you having, most people are really understanding. You really have your __18:44 on.

Dave: Here’s one thing we’ve done. We do no update updates with our customers. In other words, even if we don’t have an update. We say, hey, we are still here, we’re alive. We are working on your project but we have no update. If nothing____19:00. Is that ____that you are out in the open, and we also have our regular schedule, we know that once a week or reach out to customers and at least let them know that we are still alive in this side of the world. And we do have your project going on.

Shaun: That’s a great idea. Actually, I was thinking about that today. I have no update for client. You just prodded me on how I’m going to do that. I just am going to do that after this podcast.

Dave: Part of it because some people really want to stay up to date. So, I don’t have to keep track. Okay, this person wants to know very frequent. This person wants to be updated once there are some changes. So, instead compromise. At least once a week, and then when things happened as they happened. But that way, we’ve covered our basis.

Shaun: And I think that’s really a good strategy. Because I think when people hear nothing, they think the worst.

Dave: Why not?

Shaun: I’m an optimist at heart. But there is an expression, no news is good news. And I think the opposite is true when it comes to customers.

Dave: So, I was just going to ask you a little bit about getting into the techie stuff. How do you handle failures? Like you are already ____ 20:13 to supplier’s API goes down. Did you handle that gracefully? Do you have your system checked again for another update? How do you do that?

Shaun: We, do. So, we do simple log-in essentially. A little bit of old school stuff going on. I try to catch shoots me an email. It’s really time stuff. And then we also, we just got traditional log-in for everything we do to basically text file on the server and so we can anytime go and check what’s happening. That essentially if there’s any ______ 21:03. Orders we could____ 21:08 a little bit old school. We put orders would get drop to certain folder and its prices correctly moved to another folder. And some of these things a little bit old school, a few difference and checks and balances. We can catch a few something. If that happens, we could go back and it is kind an old school way moving one folder to another we can actually drop it in another folder. And push it through again.

Dave: I was gonna mention, there is an app, at least on the iphone. I think that it is a pushover.net, probably a website. It basically catches whatever you send to it.

Shaun: Okay, great!

Dave: So, you can send data to it. Your friends can make a sale or your customer makes a sale. And when they have this app they can be notified or if the service goes down they can have it notified it. It’s annoying. I usually set it up whenever the web server goes down I need to ping the host team to bring it back up. You can use it a web hook to catch whenever information you want.

Shaun: I definitely check that. I think the other thing is, we are always ___ 22:25. We haven’t touch ____. We haven’t called on that yet. Yes, indeed.

Dave: Shaun, stepping away from work a little bit. Besides swimming, I’m guessing there is a family there too. What else do you do? What keeps you busy?

Shaun: I guess it’s probably a midlife crises. I joined a rock band a few years ago.

Dave: Excellent!

Shaun: We played a gig last weekend which is a little bit of fun. Getting back to the family. Local primary school, I attended an elementary school in America. Young kids basically went to local primary school. We always go camping and stuff. And around a campfire, we played various musical instruments. So, we formed a band. Our first gig a few years ago, we played under tens basketball. And the party there was huge. So, we progressed it ___ 23:43 clubs. We are doing the odds in a local and pub gigs. That’s a bit of fun, a good relay actually. In fact, that’s how I left. I used to be in a corporate world. I worked for Telco’s and stuff like that. I got off a job that builds a music website for client. And that’s when I had my resignation. That was something I was ____24:08 about. That’s a music sharing site back in 2006. Luckier, I was looking at your website. That’s a great line and I’ve used it a couple of times that I probably owe you a loyalty award there. You’ve been in IT since the last century.

Dave: I love that! I was going to mention that.

Shaun: Yeah, both are at that camp actually. That’s a great line! The young kids these days, they think this internet is going to be forever but it’s pretty new, isn’t it? It is still in its infancy.

Dave: Yes, I agree. It is just amazing how much things got so much easier. Especially like regards to web development like Zappier is a great example.

Shaun: I’ve seen that everywhere. I used to turn in the internet. Like a string __ 25:10. Sometimes, when I see the kids on facebook. I wish that annoying noise would come. It’s too easy now to spend time online. Yes, it’s everywhere. It’s a good fun. But if your family was got a family of five and all great, good kids, so healthy. We lived in a beautiful power__25:37. And like yourself, I went on with my own __25:41 because of the lifestyle. Do the school run with the kids and all that sort of stuff. Walk the dog during the day. It’s a great life.

Dave: It’s great talking to you Shaun. I appreciate you taking the time. Like I said, part of the reason of having this phone call is just to get to know you a little bit better. And also introduce you to people so that they know that you have expertise in shopify. And your site is infobytesmedia.com. That is bytesmedia.com

Shaun: That’s right! Correct!

Dave: All the techies know what the bytes mean. But that’s the name of your site. Appreciate it very much having the conversation today. Thank you, Shaun.

Shaun: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a joy. Thanks guys!

Dave: You bet.

 

 

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