Episode 276,.

Late Night Internet Marketing.

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast, we answer a question about online business from listener Sarah, who's just starting her brand new e-com business and needs a little help getting started. I think this is going to help you too. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason.

Hey, hey, hey. How is everyone doing? You know I have been converting my whole business over to Go High Level, which is a software platform that you can check out over at markmasoncom, slash G-H-L, and I have been moving my email over there, my landing pages, my websites, lots of work going on. As part of that process, I sent a message out to my email list and I said hey, if you've got any questions, just hit reply and ask me your question. I'll be happy to answer it. And I got such a great question from Sarah that I thought I would answer it first. She writes that she loves getting my emails, which is great. And if you'd love getting my emails too, you can go to newsmarkmasoncom and sign up. You'll get my weekly newsletter. Sarah loves it. I bet you will too. And she says here's my question.

I'm setting up an online business for the very first time and I'm not sure I'm nervous about the launch. I've only got personal followers at this time. How do you go about getting followers prior to a launch? Is it just friends and family initially? And she tells me what her niche is, and I'm not going to reveal that here because I want to respect Sarah's privacy, but we'll talk all about this and we'll pick another niche that's really similar to what Sarah's working on, and that way, the answer will help Sarah and it will help you as well.

So let's break it down and talk a little bit about what we do when we're trying to start with zero and I will tell you that everybody starts with zero. I mean, occasionally, maybe you're a TV personality and you decide to start an online business and that's fine, but that's not most people. Most people are doing something completely different and they have no visitors, no following, no social media presence, and they need to figure out how to start, build momentum and launch, and I think that is a big challenge. And it's not only a challenge because it's an actual challenge. It's a challenge because it's a mindset challenge. You're talking to no one. Your product may not even be selling at first.

You will have days where no one buys anything and that can be intimidating for lots of reasons. I think you know we have people talk about feeling nervous. Sarah mentions this in her email. She's uncertain even about where to begin and you can tell or imagine even she's probably worried about launching to nobody and fearing the silence of all of that. What will people think if her venture isn't successful, she's probably got some people. I mean, most entrepreneurs have this problem where they have naysayers in their life that are telling them you know, that's probably not going to work. So it feels hard. These things feel hard because of this fear of failure or the fear of being embarrassed or, even worse, rejected. You know people that don't want the product. I mean, after all, when someone says no to your product, aren't they saying no to you? It turns out that's not what they're saying at all. But the important thing is to remember that everybody starts here. This is how it starts, and the people that are successful like Sarah is going to be successful are the people that push through this fear of failure and rejection and embarrassment to get it done. Now you know the good thing about Sarah and we won't talk about her specific product, which is way better than the example that I'm about to make up. But Sarah's product is great because it actually solves a place that Sarah knows about she has personal experience in, she's probably passionate about the topic, and it has another advantage too it has a very specific application in audience.

You've heard this phrase forever the riches are in the niches. So I made up something simpler. Let's say that Sarah is selling an eco-friendly water bottle that's specifically targeted at elderly people, because elderly people they can't use these big clunky what do you call those things? Stanleys and Yetis? They usually can't grip them. They're slippery. Elderly people are concerned about forever chemicals like PFAS, and so we want let's say we want something that elderly people can easily use Maybe it has some kind of hand strap or some other kind of thing and that it is good for their health in their particular time of life, has the extra benefit as a water bottle. It tends to increase water consumption for elderly people and that's great, because one of the big problems is that elderly people don't drink enough water. And you know we're making all this up.

Sarah's product is a lot better. I wish I could tell you about it. Maybe we'll have Sarah on to talk about the product at some later time. But it's a purpose driven product with a clear target customer that solves a very specific pain point for the target audience. So that's a great place to start with a product. So big check mark for Sarah on that part of it.

But the question Sarah's asking is how do I launch with no followers? And I think the first thing is the assumption in the question Launch doesn't mean that you have to. It's not the latest product from Red Bull, right? I mean this expectation that there needs to be a launch and a launch party and the local news media is coming to your house and talking about your launch and you have to have this big, overwhelming success right out of the gate. I think that's an assumption that you need to unpack and try to understand. Is that really true for you? Is that really a necessary constraint?

I mean, if you sold one tomorrow and then two the next day, and then three, three days after that, and then by next week you were selling five a day and then a month later you were selling 20 a day and then in six months you were selling 100 of these a day, wouldn't you be happy? I mean, isn't steady growth good enough? Do you have to have a launch? I think you can launch it and say that you're launching and do marketing things that sound like launch, but I don't think you need to have a launch. I think you can launch it and say that you're launching and do marketing things that sound like launch, but I don't think you need to have your self-esteem or measure of success tied up in the numbers around the launch.

Now, when you do launch, how do you launch? The question Sarah asks is how do you launch when you don't have an audience? Well, you have friends, family, peers, colleagues that you can lean on. You want to absolutely make sure that you're unabashedly starting with what you have and being direct and asking for support. People want to help you. They want to tell their friends that need your product about your product. They want to be involved product about your product. They want to be involved. A lot of times they just don't know how to be involved. They want to help you get the word out there, especially when it's the kind of thing like a product where they're not asking for someone's investment in your business or something weird like that. They're just saying, hey, you've got an elderly parent and they should be drinking more water, and my friend's got this cool water bottle. You should check it out. It's the same thing you knew about a product that would help someone. You would tell them about it. So ask your friends to do that for you and make it easy for them to do that by creating Facebook collateral that they can share by sending them emails that they can forward to people and directly ask for what you want. And if they don't want to do it, they won't, and that's fine. That's not personal either. They'll just ignore it and it'll be fine and you'll never need to talk about it again. But just remember, you only need a few sales, a few customers, to really start getting momentum. And then from those few customers you'll get reviews and we'll share those reviews and you'll start building that momentum. So this idea of launch I don't think it's nearly as important as steady and consistent growth.

The second thing I would say make lots of stuff shareable. So obviously, if you've got a product, you're going to want to have a product website. You're going to want to have a product website. You're going to want to have great visuals. I think that's pretty easy to do these days. The combination of an iPhone which is amazing, and you can take amazing pictures with that and AI and other tools that you have available to enhance photographs, do product shots, build quick websites Either. For an e-commerce platform, probably the right thing to use is Shopify, although you can look at the cost of that and decide what you think. But you want to make sure that your stuff looks great, and not just looks great on your desktop computer. Make sure it looks great on your cell phone. The stuff is easy to share. When you share links, those images come up and start sharing that stuff as much as you possibly can. Go into mom groups and other. Go into groups where your target audience lives, like in the case of this water bottle that we have for older generation people, the caretakers of those people. They're likely on Facebook and Instagram.

Let's make sure that we're creating content on this platform so people know about your product. What are we talking about? Well, obviously we're talking about the product, but that only goes so far. I mean, how many pictures of a water bottle are you going to post, right? So we need to talk about the people that are getting benefits from the product. We need to think about the thought that went into the product and why it is the way it is and why that's important, how we got the product to market. Some behind the scenes content, unboxing content, user generated content from happy customers. Make it shareable, get it out there and build momentum that way and this is not something you do prior to launch. I wouldn't worry about waiting to launch to do this, but these are good organic marketing tactics that you need to be doing. That will help you build momentum either immediately before, during or right after the launch.

And another big piece of advice and we'll call this thing three you need to make sure you're building your list and thinking about the lifetime value of these customers, so you need to be collecting emails immediately. If you're using a platform like Shopify, it'll be easy to collect the emails. You need to be doing something with those emails to keep those people engaged, even if you're only emailing them once a month with a success story or a testimonial or some new news about why some medical study that makes your water bottle even more important than you thought it was. You need to be staying in contact and keeping those leads warm, and you can use Shopify to collect those emails. But you probably also want to be offering some sort of content or other thing that helps collect emails. The thing you see in e-commerce all the time is offering new customers a discount for joining your list, but the other thing that you can do is maybe you can create a simple report about the three or four or five ways that you can help your elder person drink more water or help them around the house, and one of the things that they can do to do that is buy your water bottle in this super helpful report so you can get the email with the lead magnet. But you also can have sales on the back end of the lead magnet and make sure that, as you have this list and you're thinking about the lifetime value of these customers, that you're sending valuable content to them that really helps people, not just promotions. So you notice, I do this with this podcast. I hope you guys feel that way. It's mostly valuable content, and then occasionally I tell you hey, go buy a copy of this and it helps the show. That's how this show works.

One thing that I talked about in my episode about social media marketing world is consider a tiny offer in e-commerce. These are known as self-liquidating offers. It's something with great value, something that's really pretty hard to refuse. In the case of a launch, you might think of something like a founder's bundle, which could involve special pricing for early adopters or something like that, and the goal of this offer is not to make money. The goal of this offer is to collect leads. Now, this works best when you've got a business plan where you're not planning on selling someone just one of something.

Now, in Sarah's case, sarah does have the opportunity for customers to buy from her over and over and over again, because the needs of our customer base are changing as time moves on. They're going to need different products, in some cases, larger products, maybe more products for more people, and so this could work really well for Sarah. But you need to understand at least imagine or actually understand from data what you expect the lifetime value of your customer to be. And if the lifetime value of your customer is going to be more than just one sale, then you can probably afford to sell that first item at break even or a loss, and when you're doing that, you can afford to have some ad costs. So I definitely recommend you find some way for an e-commerce product, especially the one like Sarah is talking about, but also something like this geriatric water bottle that we're talking about.

Start by running some tiny ads, and I know this feels intimidating, but you're probably on Facebook and Instagram all the time. You know what these ads look like. There are plenty of tools like Canva and other tools that can create these ads for you, or you can go on Fiverr and just start and create maybe a $5 ad budget and see if you can figure out how to get it to work. The thing that's interesting about this right now is Facebook and Meta in general are moving more and more towards a fully automated ad strategy, where e-commerce people need to do less and less to actually figure out how to make the ads work. It's really more and more about Facebook and Meta reading the content on your website and in your ad creatives and figuring out how to get your ad in front of people that will buy. And yeah, there's a lot of technical stuff like you've got to put the pixel on the Shopify website and you know the first time you do it it's going to feel painful.

But let's say it takes a week of evenings to figure this out, to get your first $5 or $10 ad budget running and you start to make sales that way. That's way better than a launch. So launches are great, but being able to sell profitably or even break even with an ad budget is amazing because that means that you can scale that. Launches in general are one and done, but if you can find a way to generate new traffic reliably that results in sales. That's really the key to unlocking business. So that's the fifth thing I would recommend is go ahead and get started running a small ad budget. Don't wait, just use a small budget so it doesn't break the bank.

So you know, one way to think about this thing that's antithetical to this big idea of a launch is to think of your marketing as a discovery process. Right, a launch is all about this big, huge success that ends up in Inc Magazine or on the local news about how, when you launch this thing, you sold 100 or 1,000 or 2,000 of these things on the first day. That'd be great, and I hope that happens for you and I hope it happens for Sarah. But, more realistically, marketing is a discovery process. It's not about perfection, it's about learning. It's about seeking traction. It's about identifying signals. It's about people asking questions and you answering them. It's about clicks and signups and making adjustments as you go along the way and figure out what works, because you're going to find out that, oh boy, on Father's Day, when people don't know what to buy their elderly parent, we can run a Father's Day promotion and we can sell a lot of these to people that just don't know what to buy their dad who's in a nursing home, they can buy them this cup. There's things like that that you're going to discover about your marketing along the way, and what you do is you launch to learn. So we're going to do this launch to get started learning not to be perfect right out of the gate, and so I think that's a really important mindset to have as Sarah goes forward and as you go forward launching products now and in the future.

Of course, there are a lot of tools you can use to make this amazing. Chat GPT will help you, so you can ask Chat GP now any question and if you don't like the answer, hit the deep research button and it will give you an even better answer. If you need ideas about your marketing, about how to increase the lifetime value of your product, just tell it everything you know and you can do that using your voice, by the way and it will give you ideas and some of them will be great and some of them you may not like, and that's fine. And you tell it that and it'll adjust its thinking to focus more on the stuff that you do think makes sense. For graphics, there are tools like Canva.

For online business, there are amazing tools like Shopify. I just recently stood up a new drop shipping store. I was working on a separate project. Shopify is 10 times easier to use today than it was four or five years ago. It's really fantastic. Even all the way down to logo generation, I mean it's really great. So there are lots of tech and tools out there. Lots of easy tools for mail list management, like MailChimp, for example, is not my personal favorite, but it's super easy for beginners to use, and so I recommend that you look at stuff like that to simplify your journey and just remember you don't need a giant launch. You don't need a big audience. You don't need a big audience. What you need is a real product that solves the problems.

Sarah's product is real and pretty exciting. It needs to be a real solution that delivers real value, and you know we didn't talk about this much, but I think the best brands speak with a real, authentic voice and they communicate authentically about the product, about why the product was created, about the pain points that customers without the product feel, about the transformation that happens when people have the product and they're no longer worried about whatever that pain or problem was that they had before they bought it and the tremendous value that that creates in their life, that they had before they bought it, and the tremendous value that that creates in their life. And you build that momentum and you read those referrals and you show customers using the product on Instagram and that builds momentum and that audience grows and grows over time. And so what if it takes you a year or two to get this thing to a point where it's what you consider a true success, whatever that means to you? How happy will you be when that happens? You won't care that it took a year or two. That's way better than never, and so I'm excited for Sarah getting started on this project. I think it's going to be really great.

The other thing that I can recommend to you is I think some of the most fun solo entrepreneur businesses are the ones that are built in public. So to Sarah, I recommend share your process. Give a lot of behind the scenes information about your business, celebrate your wins publicly and let people know you've made your first sale, you've gotten your first review, you made your first shipment, you made your 10th shipment, your 100th shipment. Feature the reviews. Like I featured Sarah's email, you can feature client reviews and be transparent and let people see inside and admire your business. I'm not saying you need to show your P&L on Instagram, but let people in on the inside, because this builds trust. It causes people to like you and people buy things from people that they know, like and trust. So I'm super excited for Sarah and all of those of you that finally now are going to get off of pause and launch that product you've been thinking about.

Remember, it's okay to start small. One customer leads to the second customer. You cannot have a second customer without a first customer and you cannot have a 10th customer without a second customer. So you've got to start at the beginning. Stay consistent, show up every day, push forward every day, learn every day and track your progress, and be sure to celebrate your milestones along the way. Hey, I want to thank Sarah for a question. Maybe you have a question. If you have a question, I'd encourage you to email me at feedback at latenightimcom. Let me know what you're working on. I'd love to hear from you. Or you can hop into the VIP community at vipmarkmasoncom. It's free and we can talk about your business there. You know, you can be generic or specific, depending on how secretive you want to be, and I'll respond right in there to any questions that you might have. So until next week, I am Mark Mason. This is the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. See you soon.

Ciao, you've been listening to the late night internet marketing podcast. Be sure to visit l-n-i-m podcastcom today to leave feedback for mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.