Four things you need to know about Landing Pages

Four things you need to know about Landing Pages

by | 6 Nov, 2019 | Podcast, Season 1

Listen to "10 - Four things you need to know about Landing Pages" on Spreaker.

Are you struggling to turn your social media followers into real customers? Today we’re going to talk about Landing Pages – what are they and what are they for? Social media is a great tool for building relationships, but not so great at converting people into customers.

Over the next few episodes I’ll be laying out how you can use landing pages and email lists to capture your social media following and reliably turn that attention into income. There’s work involved, and results take time to come through, but I promise you we are going to put together a strategy that will get you results.

Why you need a landing page

On social media, you don’t own your audience, you’re at the mercy of algorithms and tools that you have no control over. So you need to make sure at least part of your social media strategy involves getting people off social media and onto a website, and ideally an email list – this is where you build your business. 

Landing pages are designed to get people to take one specific action

Everything on the landing page aims to persuade the person to do one specific thing. This action might be registering for a course, joining a mailing list, downloading a freebie, using a discount code, requesting a discovery call, booking an event or a stay, etc etc etc. But you need just one action for the page – and to be clear yourself what the customer gets out of it AND what you get out of it.

Landing pages should stand up on their own.

They can be a part of your website, and look the same as your website, or not. Either way, they should still have your branding, but most importantly should stand alone. Scrolling down is great, clicking to other pages is not the goal. If you don’t know how to add a landing page to your website, you might try tools like Mailchimp or LeadPages, which are designed to be very user friendly

Landing pages need to be measured

You need a way to measure the success of your landing page, so make sure, if it’s on your website, that you have Google Analytics installed to track page views and length of visits. You also need to make sure Analytics can tell when someone has successfully completed the call to action – so you need to be sending them to a Thank You page or something which can be tracked too.

Landing pages need to be shared in the right context

The way you share your landing page is important too. You need to give people a little context before the arrive so they know what they’re about to look at. It’s not like with your website where people can come with a multitude of purposes and find answers. Your landing page is designed only to do the one thing. So, in your social media posts where you share or reference the link, you should be setting the context for whatever offer is on the landing page.

If you’re promoting a page through an advert or through search engine optimisation, it still needs to be in context – set the right expectations with the ad or excerpt copy.

Landing pages and Pay-Per-Click advertising

This week, we have a listener question! Julie asked me about an offer she’d received from a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads agency, offering to manage their ads for £250 a month, plus a £250 set up fee. She wanted to know if this kind of service was worth the money, and how she should approach it. Here’s four questions you can ask yourself when your considering a similar question.

  1. Can the business afford the first two months’ costs?
  2. How much do you need to make in sales to make it worth paying for the advert?
  3. Do you have the capacity to deliver on all those sales?
  4. Do you have an offer and landing page that are tried and tested? Or can you afford to do the testing on a live advert?

Get your Landing Page questions answered

I’d love to feature more listener questions in the podcast. Drop me an email! I’d love to hear from you if you have any feedback. And of course you can subscribe to Whin Big on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a review.

Mentoring, Community and Facebook Groups, with Allison Harrison

Mentoring, Community and Facebook Groups, with Allison Harrison

by | 30 Oct, 2019 | Podcast, Season 1

Listen to "9 - Mentoring, Community and Facebook Groups, with Alison Harrison" on Spreaker.

Allison Harrison is a yoga teacher, and the owner and manager of Hot Yoga Edinburgh. On today’s episode, we talked about Allison’s 18-month journey to opening her own studio space, and how she found mentors and supporters along the way. We also talked about using a Facebook Group, and Instagram, to grow a community around your business, and how to tell if it’s all working.

Hot Yoga Edinburgh is about 8 years old, and Allison has owned it for the last five of those years. Allison bought the business from a Finnish couple who were yoga teachers, and ran it as a side hustle for about a year and a half before realising she was ready to expand. Because she was still working full-time, Allison recruited another teacher, Heini, to run most of the classes while Allison ran the business itself. Five years later the two are still working together! 

Taking on the business felt like a huge leap for Allison, and opening a studio was another leap too. Allison and her business mentor are both very cautious people, so it felt to her like a real vote of confidence when he encouraged her to go ahead and expand, quite dramatically, with the studio. It took a long time to find the right space, and even then it was 15 months before they signed the lease! After signing, Allison managed a 3 month project to have the space fitted out exactly the way they needed. It was a very stressful time, running the project, and the rest of the business, whilst still full-time employed and travelling all over the place. But although it was very scary, Allison left her job over Christmas of that year, and opened the studio on 6 January 2017.

How to find a business mentor

Allison and I would both really recommend finding mentors and supporters to help you, particularly in the early stages of starting a business, or during any kind of transition. I found my first business mentor through the Princes Trust – and if you’re under the age of 30 and in the UK, you may be able to get support from them too. Allison found hers a different way though. The first step was to have a look at her own skills and where the gaps were, to figure out what support would be most helpful. Recognising she needed help with finance and understanding her numbers, Allison approached someone she knew and  respected who was an accountant and had run businesses and even mentored other people. 

Throughout the last five years, Allison’s had support from others as well. When planning to leave her corporate job, she asked her boss to continue mentoring her as he knew what her strengths were and she knew she liked to work with him. At one point, Allison also invested in professional coaching services. Jenn Fenwick, of Rebel Road coaching, is a transitional coach. She worked with Allison through the last three months of lease negotiations and fit out project. They met once a month, and worked on the transition from Allison’s current situation of ‘full-time job with side hustle’ to her new focus on the studio. She helped Allison to really believe in herself all the way through the process. 

Friends and family can also provide support and mentorship in a less formal way. Allison’s sister and husband are mentors, as the members of our mastermind group. Having a mentor is great, of course, but you as the business owner still have to do the work and make the decision, but it’s so helpful to have a village of people who are willing to help out, and are willing to pay it forward.

Marketing a yoga business on Instagram

The Hot Yoga Edinburgh Instagram page is full of pictures and videos from around the studio. Allison tries to post on the feed is 2-3 times a week, and on the stories she’ll post every day. The regularity has paid off as the number of people who watch the stories has increased dramatically over the last year. The main thing to share are all the the times and titles of the next day’s classes – because a lot of students have memberships, or can come to a variety of classes, this helps them to work out what fits into their day and when they can make time to practise. After that, they also like to share behind the scenes snippets of life in the studio, working, cleaning, and yoga practise.

Allison found it was quite scary to let people in behind the scenes initially, especially with videos. She found it all to easy to get hung up on her own mistakes and flaws. Over time, and with support, she was able to really hold on to the idea that other people aren’t paying that much attention. People ultimately are looking for insight or information – it’s not about Allison herself. 

“Don’t forget to drink water and get some sun. You’re basically a houseplant with more complicated emotions.”

Facebook Groups for a yoga business

The Hot Yoga Edinburgh Facebook page was part of the business that Allison bought over. It’s very useful as a broadcast tool, but engagement is not nearly as good as it used to be 2-3 years ago. So in the last year, Allison and Heini have been working on a group for students, or potential students. From a practical perspective, people engage far more with group posts than with anything from the page. Some of this is because Facebook’s algorithm now shows people more community and group-based content.

Customers love the group because it’s a key part of the community at the studio. They create specific content for the group like Q and A videos that helps people to get to know them. As well as that members can post with questions, issues and ideas, and chat there with other students. Because there’s no there’s not a coffee lounge or social space at the studio, the Facebook group kind of works to fill that gap for helping people make friends in their community. 

How to know if your social media marketing is really working

Allison does look at her Insights on both Facebook and Instagram, but it’s hard to know exactly what’s working, so we talked through a few ideas to get started. For some business you can see very quickly and simply – do you make more money when you do more social media? For other business you need to think a bit harder. You have to work out what behaviour you want to see from your customers – what has a tangible benefit to the business and is leading towards more or bigger sales? Once you know that, you can figure out what you want to measure. Then, and only then, should you go into Insights to see the numbers for what you’ve decided to track. If you have some ideas, you can treat these like little science experiments. Test out your ideas or “hypotheses” about relationships between behaviours and income. For more on this, check out Episode 8 on Instagram Insights. 

Thanks for joining us today on the Whin Big podcast. Make sure you head over to the Hot Yoga Edinburgh Instagram and Facebook Group to say hello!

Use Insights to level up your Instagram content

Use Insights to level up your Instagram content

by | 23 Oct, 2019 | Podcast, Season 1

Listen to "8 - Use Insights to level up your Instagram content" on Spreaker.

Do you know how to measure exactly what’s working on your Instagram profile? Today, you and I are going on an adventure. We’re going to explore the murky depths of your Instagram Insights, and bring to the surface the information that will help you make decisions about your Instagram content.

To help you imagine this, we’re going to use a concrete example. Here’s a question I had in from a listener, Jeni.

 “I’ve used an app called Buffer which uploads multiple social media posts to the various platforms at once to try and save time, however I noticed that the buffer uploads don’t seem to get as many “likes” as previous posts. Do you know if this is just a coincidence, or if there’s some kind of algorithm blocking the visibility of an app like this?”

In an earlier episode we talked about cross-posting content from Instagram to Facebook, and Buffer is one of the tools I suggested you could use. So this is a really important question to answer for those of you still considering your options.

How does Buffer affect your reach on Instagram

I looked in a few places online to see if there were any reliable stats on this. The first thing to say is there’s no official statement from Instagram saying how they handle third party posts in the algorithm. Facebook, the parent company, did release a statement but it only referred specifically to the Facebook platform, and it said that third party and native posts are treated the same.

Second, the research that has been done was all done by companies who own third party apps for posting to social media, so they have a vested interest in proving to you that you can safely use their services. Their research should be taken with a pinch of salt. Across thousands of posts from a variety of third-party tools onto different platforms, Falcon.io couldn’t find any statistically significant difference in performance between native posts and third party tools.

Best content to post on your Instagram Feed 

Since the research doesn’t seem to match with Jeni’s experience, the next thing to do is measure if there’s really a difference. Even if you don’t care about Buffer, you can use this exact process to compare any two types of post on your Instagram feed. You could see if selfies perform better on your Instagram. You can find out if adding text to your pictures will harm the reach of your posts. The limit to what you can measure here is your imagination!

In Instagram app, go to your own profile, open the menu and tap on Insights to find all your data. On the Content page, tap See All to show the grid of all your feed posts. 

Filter your posts by engagement, then sort your top 20 into Buffer vs Not Buffer, or whatever your categories are. Then do the same with reach, likes, and other important stats. 

Insights for your Instagram Stories

When you go to the Content section of your Insights, you can scroll down to see a few recent stories, and click See All.

This will show you all your Stories for the last two weeks. As with the Feed posts, there’s lots of filters you can use. 

The main things to look for are

  1. How many people look at your Stories compared to your total number of followers?
  2. When you post a series of clips to Stories what is the typical drop of in reach between the first clip and the last?
  3. What types of Stories content shows the least drop off? And the most?

How to measure your Instagram growth

If growth is a key goal for your Instagram account, you need to know what kind of posts reach the most people beyond your current followers.

Under each individual post you can find detail insights – look for the percentage of people not following you. In my experience, the two main factors here are the quality of your hashtags, and whether or not there’s a person in the photo.

How to get website visitors from Instagram

We’re going to talk about this lots more in a couple of weeks time, but for now, start by looking at profile views for the week. This is a pretty reliable measure of how interested in your company people are at any given moment. Your only website link is in your profile, so people have to go to the profile if they want to click it. Combine your weekly profile views with website analytics to see what kind of click through rate that is turning into for your business. On weeks when you have high Instagram profile views, does that affect your website traffic?

Your questions

I love featuring listener questions in podcast episodes! You can submit a question through our contact form, or you can send me a message @thewhinco on Instagram – I’d love to hear from you!

On Instagram “I don’t think, I just do,” with Marc Keys

On Instagram “I don’t think, I just do,” with Marc Keys

by | 16 Oct, 2019 | Podcast, Season 1

Listen to "7 - On Instagram, "I don't think, I just do," with Marc Keys" on Spreaker.

Marc Keys is a strength and conditioning coach with his own gym in Leith, Cast Iron Strength. On the podcast today, we talked about the good old days of blogging and Facebook, and how Marc has now moved to Instagram as a key way to promote his business. Marc has read so much about business and marketing that he has some really interesting insights to share. 

As well as the in-person coaching and the gym, a big part of Marc’s business is his online coaching, which started on the back of a blog he wrote for fun. “Anti-Bullshit Training” was founded on Blogger in 2008. In 2013 Marc decided he needed to monetise that audience and so moved the blog to his current brand name Cast Iron Strength, and started accepting online coaching clients. In the early days, he managed those relationships through email, and now he’s graduated to WhatsApp. It’s a great place to keep in touch with clients, and really easy to share video clips, which is perfect for coaching athletes from afar.

In Marc’s business, the measure of a good coach is always clear. The numbers an athlete can lift are the whole point of the sport. In rugby, for example, it doesn’t matter what a player can lift if they aren’t smart enough on the pitch. But in strength sports, you put the effort in and you get the results out. It’s a very direct relationship. Sometimes I wish marketing worked the same way! He references this famous (in the strength community) quote from Henry Rollins,

“The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.” – Henry Rollins

Whenever I run an Instagram training workshop, I always reference the Cast Iron Strength Instagram feed as an example of great marketing. Unlike a lot of my other examples, it’s not at all manicured. A week in the life of Marc’s Instagram, he tells me, is not at all planned or strategic. But it’s brilliant!

There’s a few reasons why this works so well. First, Marc’s success is very easy to see in videos of his clients lifting, and he has a lot of that material to share. Second, his feed, and his Instagram Stories, give a really honest picture of what it’s like to work with him, witty banter and all. When you’re in a crowded market, your personality and presence form a big part of the reason people will choose you over a competitor. Third, he has a really cute dog. Which always helps.

Because he’s read so extensively, Marc’s in-grained knowledge of good marketing really comes across in his posts. He references the book Building a Story Brand* by Donald Miller. Miller’s approach is that your marketing should tell a story that puts the customer at the centre. They, and not the service provider, should be the hero.

Gary Vaynerchuck and Grant Cardone* are two other great business writers who Marc recommends. As he notes, they put themselves out there, so that people can get to know them. Marc tries to do the same.

Then I brought up Facebook. Marc’s reaction was probably my favourite from a guest yet! We talked about his first foray into Facebook Ads, with some impressive numbers! But things are very different now – so if you’ve been struggling with them too this may reassure you. At least his ads aren’t losing money, so I asked what kind of ads he runs. Images with lead capture forms seem to be the most useful, as long as the images are of lifters doing a good job!

In the future, Marc is hoping to improve his online offering with some group coaching and self-paced training courses. The typical model for an online business is to have a pyramid, with plenty of free content, some low-cost one-off products, an affordable group programme, and then more expensive one-to-one services. At the moment Cast Iron Strength’s online branch only has the free stuff, and the one-to-one coaching. So we talked about platforms to use for training. I’ve used a Facebook Group, with a small group where we all went at the same pace through a structured course, for the All-in-Whin Marketing Method. Then for lifetime access I also have the course set up in a membership area on this site too. However, that feels like a difficult model to scale yet, so my future plans are to investigate course delivery through Kajabi as I’ve enjoyed using that as a student in the past.

Before we finished up, I asked Marc for his best piece of advice for other business owners. Stay within your means. He encourages all aspiring entrepreneurs to keep their overheads low, and only take educated risks. Develop a minimum viable product, and crystalise what you’re offering and who it works for. Then customise your products towards your specific customers. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s a good idea, or even if people say it’s a good idea. Don’t believe anyone until they give you money.

“The first rule of business club is Make Money.”

Get connected

To find Marc’s Minute of Bullshit and other classic content (including the occasional rude meme…) find Marc on Instagram @castironstrength or on the Cast Iron Strength website.

* Links marked with a star are affliate links to Bookshop.org. When you buy through these links, a small portion of the cost of the book goes to supporting your local bookshop, and a small portion comes to The Whin. The books won’t cost you any extra!

Give your Instagram an MOT

Give your Instagram an MOT

by | 9 Oct, 2019 | Podcast, Season 1

When was the last time you reviewed your own Instagram profile to make sure everything is in good order?

Today, I’m going to take you step-by-step through an Instagram MOT. It will help you look at each element of your Instagram profile in turn, to make sure it’s working properly. 

I’ve highlighted some of the key takeaways for you in today’s show notes, but make sure you listen to the podcast and download the checklist to squeeze out every last wee bit of value.

Listen to "Whin Big Podcast - Episode 6 - Instagram MOT" on Spreaker.

Everyone loves a template – to get yours, hit the button below, and pop in your email address so I can send it right to your inbox.

You’re welcome!

Start your Instagram MOT

What to say in your Instagram bio

We start by looking at the most basic elements of your Instagram profile. Remember when you first created your account you spent about a minute on your bio? Now’s the time go back and review it and make sure you’ve included all the right info. Is there something in your bio to let people know what you get really excited about? Use your passion for your business to help you connect with potential customers.

What is an Instagram theme, and do you need one?

If you’re a regular on Instagram you may have spotted some accounts using an Instagram theme. This is a short hand way of describing a consistent visual style for all your Instagram posts. It’s not like a WordPress theme though, you can’t just download it and be done!

Here’s some examples of feeds that use a consistent visual style. When you look at your profiles, what do you see that makes some or all of their posts easy to recognise?

First there’s @beingbossclub To create posts like these you need to use a separate image editor that lets you add layers and different effects. Not for the faint hearted!

Next is me! Come and say hello @thewhinco Although I’ve tried to make my feed look consistent, I’ve picked two very straightforward things to make it recogniseable and pretty. I don’t have to agonise over what to post each time, and I don’t need to clog up my phone with fancy apps for creating my pictures.

Lastly we have @castironstrength, who we’re having on as a guest next week! Marc’s attitude comes across perfectly in his Instagram feed, but you can also spot some consistent elements, because many of the videos he posts are filmed in the same location. Also his cute dog is there. Love a cute dog.

How to use Instagram to grow your business

Whatever your business, the three most important parts of your Instagram strategy should be the captions, the hashtags and the comments. Make sure you’re using each of these thoughtfully and strategically. 

How can you use captions to start conversations and help people get to know you? How can you use hashtags to grow your audience and connect with potential customers? How can you use comments to share your knowledge and help out others using the platform?

There are so many ways to do each of these things right – make sure you download the checklist and listen to the podcast where I really get into the details.

Time to make sure your Instagram is really working

Get your Instagram questions answered

I’d love to feature more listener questions in the podcast. Drop me a DM over on Instagram, or send me an email! I’d love to hear from you if you have any feedback. And of course you can subscribe to Whin Big on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a review

Virtual assistants and Instagram, with Louise Oliver and Rachel Anderson

Virtual assistants and Instagram, with Louise Oliver and Rachel Anderson

by | 2 Oct, 2019 | Podcast, Season 1

Listen to "Whin Big Podcast - 5 - Rachel and Louise" on Spreaker.

Rachel and Louise are virtual assistants who work together under the banner of SmartPA. They’re also sisters, who have been business partners and collaborators for many years! In this episode, they talked me through all of what a virtual assistant actually does, and dished the dirt on what it’s like to have your sister as a business partner. Rachel and Louise are just starting to use Instagram, alongside LinkedIn, Facebook Groups, and in-person networking. So we spent some time talking about my best advice for business owners hoping to get the most out of Instagram from the very beginning. We also talked about their amazing networking calendar – visit the Calendar Girl website to see all the events coming up in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Louise bought into the SmartPA franchise a few years ago, right after she had her son. The company she’d been running before had closed, and she needed to find work that was flexible enough to handle with a new baby. She had plenty of the skills and experience needed to run a company, and found an advert for SmartPA by pure co-incidence whilst trawling job posts at 2 in the morning. Rachel trained to join her shortly afterwards, and so far they seem to be loving it!

What does a virtual assistant actually do?

One way to describe a “VA” is a freelance personal assistant. The term virtual implies Louise and Rachel always work remotely from their clients but that doesn’t have to be the case. They can also show up in person at events or in offices to help out where needed.

The work they do is quite varied, and so far they’ve yet to answer phones for a single client. Instead the spend their time writing blog posts, helping with social media, organising receipts and planning events. Many of these are things a business owner could do for themselves, but as Rachel says, “why would you?”

Because of the variety of their work and their clients, there’s not an online tool around they haven’t used or investigated. Whether it’s an email service, a CRM, accounting software, or even design tools, it seems like Rachel and Louise have looked at just about everything – so they’re great people to ask for recommendations!

Running a business with your sister

Before they started with SmartPA, Louise and Rachel each ran their own company – something to do with pensions – but the two companies worked very closely together, due to the nature of their business. So they have many years of practise working together, and a great sense of humour about it. 

They both have very different skills and preferences, which means they make an excellent buy-one-get-one-free pairing. Louise is good with reports and figures and spreadsheets, whilst Rachel is a people person and loves to organise events. When pressed, neither of them could come up with a favourite project because they each enjoy so much of what they do. I think the lesson here is to find a business partner, sister or not, who has the right set of skills to complement your own. Where you can share the work in a way that suits everyone, it’s much more enjoyable.

Focus on relationships over pitching

Even though they’re great at keeping on top of content for their clients, Rachel and Louise find it difficult to keep on top of their own digital marketing efforts. They do a lot of in-person networking, and find that their clients come through referrals, and getting to know people. Business owners need to trust their VAs to hand over tasks to them effectively, so that process of building relationships is key. When they do use social media, they focus on connections with people rather than broadcasting a sales pitch or showing off what they can do.

LinkedIn is a great place to do that, but they actually get more traction in Facebook Groups. Over time they’ve found a few groups that have a great community and allow them to build on in-person relationships and to offer help and support to new people too. Again, they use the groups as a way to connect with people personally, instead of posting offers or pitches about their services. It took a bit of trial and error to find the right ones, and found over time it was better to stick with a few that really worked than to expand too far. Engagement from group members was the most important thing to look out for.

Your Calendar Girl – the networking website

One of my favourite things that Louise and Rachel work on is their Edinburgh and Glasgow networking calendar. This is a fantastic resource for local business owners who need to spend more time meeting other business owners in person. When Louise started working as a SmartPA, she trawled through Eventbrite to find events. However, a lot of the best ones she only found through word of mouth, and were hard to discover online. After putting all of these into a shared calendar and using it between the two of them, Louise then responded to requests from other people to share the calendar more widely, and eventually found a website creator who suggested putting together the site as it is now. There were some fun ideas of how to “jazz up” the site a little, although in the end they didn’t quite come to fruition. Maybe their Instagram account would benefit from re-purposing some of the pictures!

“Multitasking is the worst thing… it’s actually really detrimental.”

Focus on one task at a time

Louise suggested the most important thing for business owners to master is just to do one thing at a time. If you do more than one thing at a time you won’t give your best to either task.

Sometimes that might mean using a VA, an accountant, a subject expert of some kind. Where you’re not amazing at something, or you don’t like it, or even if it just takes up too much time, outsourcing is a great way to give yourself some breathing space to focus your efforts where you can make the most impact.

Rachel and Louise do some outsourcing themselves – as well as having an accountant, they are able to connect with others in the SmartPA network to get expert help for clients who need some really specific support. At the moment they work alongside a consultant in America who does just that.

How to get started using Instagram for business

Rachel has already set up an Instagram profile for their business – her handle is @RachelA_SmartPA so go and say hello. Because she’s just getting started, I shared some tips and ideas for how they might get off to a great start.

1. Seek out the accounts you want to do business with.

2. Communities build up around specific hashtags – work in those communities like you might in a Facebook Group.

3. Lastly, when it comes to your early posts – don’t overthink them. 

If you’re looking for more guidance on great strategies for Instagram, check out episode 2 of the podcast, where we covered an amazing Instagram growth strategy in five easy steps.