Posted on by Charles

Strategies on Driving Traffic Through Content (E126)

  • Christina Scalera
  • Founder of The Contract Shop

Show Notes:

Bio:

Christina Scalera is the attorney and founder of the seven-figure, award-winning legal template store for creative entrepreneurs called The Contract Shop®. She lives in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, surrounded by a fortress of 14,000 ft. mountains in every direction that is not only beautiful but fun to hike after big eCommerce shop sales days.

Sponsors:

Links:

  • http://thecontractshop.com
  • http://christinascalera.com
  • http://instagram.com/thecontractshop
  • http://instagram.com/christinascalera
  • https://www.facebook.com/TheContractShop
  • https://www.facebook.com/christinascalerallc/

Transcript:

Charles (00:00):

In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Christina Scalera about driving traffic through content. This is a business e-commerce episode 126

Charles (00:16):

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Charles (01:06):

Welcome to the Business eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I’m your host, Charles Palleschi, and I’m here today with Christina Scalera. Christina is the founder of the contract shop, a legal template store for busy entrepreneurs by building content. Christina has grown the contract shop to over seven figures in revenue. I started the show today talking about you can drive traffic to your eCommerce store by using content. I urge you to listen to the very end of the episode because she gives some very good hints on how you can build funnels to your eCommerce store. So let’s go into the show. Hey Christina, how are you doing today?

Christina (01:41):

Great. Thanks for having me, Charles.

Charles (01:43):

Yeah, awesome to chat. I love I love the topic of kind of using content. I know this is kind of the tried and true, but I feel like it, like if he goes out of fashion every couple of years and then comes back in. How long have you been doing it for first all

Christina (02:02):

So I started my, I guess you can call it e-commerce. You know, the shippers might have a little bit of qualms with that, but my, I started my store on Shopify. Well it, it didn’t start out on Shopify, but it started in November of 2015 so almost five years now. And we moved to Shopify in October of 2017. So I’ve been on Shopify for almost three years. So I’ve been doing this for a decent amount of time. I feel like in internet land, that’s a long time.

Charles (02:32):

That’s a very long time in internet land. It so it’s all digital products, right? You guys sell and promote, so it’s all there’s a digital contracts, like it must have been like a download sort of thing.

Christina (02:44):

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s all digital. You go to the online store, you search by your niche, or maybe by the type of thing that you’re looking for. Obviously we specialize in a certain correct of the creative wedding kind of freelancer type world. That’s just where I started out. I actually kind of, so I went to law school, I took a turn. I had like a quarter life crisis. I thought I might do something in the wedding industry. You know, it was a lot of 25 year olds do. And I thought I might be a calligrapher graphic designers, something, you know, wedding planning ish. And it turns out that I didn’t really, I didn’t really fall well into those little niches, but I learned a lot about them and I learned that they had these huge, I guess administrative gaps in their business where they either weren’t starting a legitimate business or they didn’t know how, or they were constantly anxious and stressed out because they didn’t have a client contract with their, their wedding clients.

Christina (03:50):

And they didn’t know what to do in the event of a cancellation, which clearly has become a very important topic in today’s world. So I had this legal background. I had this like very niche knowledge wedding industry and I combine those two things to create my digital products. So, for example, if you’re a wedding planner and you want to work with a client, but you don’t want to go to law school or learn how to write a contract, you don’t have to, you just go to my website at the contract shop and you download the wedding planner template, fill in the blanks, send it off to a client. And the client, you know, is, is no, no more privy to anything then than you were you, you just look like a hero there with a great contract that supports both of you and your both of your interests.

Christina (04:33):

So then we, we really shifted to focusing in the past year or so on other digital businesses. So not just like online courses or people that are doing something similar to me. But actually, you know, like anybody that has a website, because as you have probably seen in the last two years, online privacy has become a huge thing. So our best selling product is actually our privacy policy that we’re constantly updating to reflect things like the GDPR that happened on, I think it was May 25th, 2018 or the California privacy act that went into effect on January 1st of this year 2020. So yeah, we’re just really trying to support other types of online businesses so that they can have the, like a legitimate privacy policy that they know they’re protected, but they also don’t have to spend an arm and a leg on an attorney to write who may or may not know what they’re talking about. Internet law changes a lot, and if you’re not paying very close attention to it, it’s not like the focus of your practice. You’re probably not gonna know what those changes are for a couple of years until they do a training at your local state about it. But yeah, so

Charles (05:49):

I probably don’t know all the ins and outs, I’m guessing. Right. It’s like a small attorney. So it’s probably, it’s probably better for everyone for, and attorneys probably don’t love doing either cause it’s just kinda like Boral boilerplate contract work. So they basically just cranking out a template. It’s not great for them. It’s not great for the entrepreneur. It’s really like a, it’s a lose lose. So going with just like, Hey, we’ve kind of built this over time, it’s just a lot better for everyone.

Christina (06:13):

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s, that’s what I tell everybody is like if you go to a local attorney, they’re going to be reinventing the wheel. If you use one of our templates, we’ve had over 6,000 people buy our products in the last five years. So you’re going to have something that has been, I mean depending on the template, you’re going to have something that thousands of people have or at least hundreds of people have seen given us feedback on. And we’ve improved that. I mean you just can’t do that on a one to one basis. So it’s, it’s a really cool, almost like crowdsourced effective product, if that makes sense.

Charles (06:45):

Yeah. Very cool. So you’ve run this for five years now and has content been kind of the main driver to help you grow the business? Or, and when you say content, are we talking like blogs? Like what, let’s describe the actual content and then how have you kind of used that to grow the business?

Christina (07:03):

Yeah, and the great thing about this is, I mean there’s, it’s, it’s not like I’ve, I’ve, I’m not like Neil Patel or something where I’m like super consistent with my content. I try out different mediums. So right now, or I guess what, what has worked best for us consistently is blog posts with a lot of Pinterest traction or Facebook traction. We’re just really in the last year starting to get into advertising. So this has all been like mostly organic growth and a lot of content for other people’s platforms. So doing webinars that are maybe not like a huge pitch at the end or no pitch at the end. Just really educational webinars that put us in front of a couple thousand people that you know, in front of like some kind of like wedding industry, which is obviously our target demographic are people in the creative freelance wedding industries. So just really providing a lot of valuable content, mostly through blogging. And then I would say also through guest blogging and then through guest webinars and presentations is how we’ve grown our audience and it’s happened really nicely and organically. So that’s, that’s the content that we’re working with. And then we’re moving into like video, trying to repurpose that into more like blog posts, things like that. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a great organic driver of traffic to this day.

Charles (08:26):

How do you feel about, because you hear this from people at first can start, it’s always kind of a recommendation. Like you choose content, it’s, you know, it’s free. And it’s always like, well, is it free? Right? Cause you could actually do a lot of work to generate content like we’re doing now. But what when you kind of start, it feels like this like snowball but not talk so slow. You publish that first blog post and you have to like email like your mother and be like, Hey, can you go read this? And like I got a hit. And you see a lot of people kind of just, I dunno, a little unhappy about it. I don’t know the right word at the very beginning. Just cause you look and you’re like, this blog has had like 10 hits. I spent five hours in this post. And until you really have that following, it’s just such a slow uphill slog. What do you say to people kind of getting started and how to kind of get over that hump where you actually start to say, this is worth this.

Christina (09:15):

I was encouraged people to reach out to someone who’s a little bit further along than you in the industry. Or you know, I mean obviously someone who also markets to the same demographic as you or provides content to the same demographic that you’re trying to reach with your products. Anytime you can offer content to those platforms, especially if it’s like really, really dense juicy content that’s going to be super helpful for their audience. And it just has maybe a couple of links back to like a, a content upgrade or a funnel or something like that for you. So they’re getting content, which as you know, it can be kind of like a pain in the butt to think of content topics or to produce content. You know, like sometimes you just want to break and so if you’re showing up and you’re ready to give a lot to their audience, provide a really good piece of content or a good content video, like whatever your preferred medium is, if you’re willing to do that for them, take that little bit of content off their plate for that week.

Christina (10:17):

You know, now they have a newsletter, they have a blog post, they have a video, whatever written for that week done for them and it just has a little plug back to yourself. A lot of people are very willing to feature that I’ve found. So I would, I would not try to build it on. I like the fact that you’re continuing to create content for your own platform one so that you can see what people like and create more of that and do less of what they don’t like and too, so that you’re creating that organic search traffic. But if you want to maybe feel less overwhelmed, maybe feel a little more motivated, a little more encouraged, it definitely is a good idea to get out in front of someone else’s audience. Someone who’s already built an audience that reaches the same people that you’re trying to sell to.

Charles (11:01):

Yeah. And I think having your own site kind of acts as a almost a resume of sorts, right, of saying, because you get these emails all the time. Once you kind of have a blog or any sort of platform people want to promote on your platform and you go and look at those, look at those people pretty quickly and you’ll see their blog and kind of use that as look at the quality. So, even if no one’s even, if not that many people are reading us, those people that y’all contacting, they’re the ones going to be looking at Yar content just to see the quality of it, the structure. It doesn’t even match the voice. And I’ve noticed that’s kind of a bigger deal than people give a credit for on just, it’s almost there. Your resume at that point.

Christina (11:43):

Yeah. And for me, what I’ve done with the contract shop too is I’ve created a lot of like FAQ posts that are you know, helpful for us because we can hand them out and our customer support when someone’s like, Oh, is this right for me? Should I do this? What comes with this? Right? We have like blog posts about all that now instead of just having like a boring FAQ that they don’t want to read, it’s actually, you know, like the five things you need to know about blah, blah, blah. And number four is their question that they need answered. So in our customer support, we can write back and say, you know, this is the answer to your question. And by the way, here’s a blog post that talks more about this check out, you know, number four on this blog post. And then the rest of the blog post obviously is also helpful for them. So then they’re like, wow, like what a great value. Like, thanks so much for helping me out. You really give, you know, you really cared.

Christina (12:35):

So that also is a helpful way. You’re trying to give away something for free. Yeah. I think if you can make a, you know, if you can make your FAQ is a little more fun. Like if you always get a question like, you know, is free shipping included, right? Like instead of just always writing back like, yes, we include free shipping for orders over $50. You know, you could talk about like the benefits of getting your product today and then, you know, like talk about the different shipping speeds for your show, your store or something. And like I said, like number three is like free shipping is always included on orders at our store, over $50. Like click here to make your order today. So yeah, you can, you can just really help yourself. I feel like a lot by making the FAQ and the questions that you get a little bit more fun and engaging for people to read about and then they’re, they’re like excited to buy your product and they’re excited about your brand instead of, you know, just writing another blog post about like, why your product is so great, you know, they don’t care about that.

Christina (13:44):

They care about like, how does it compare to this? Or how does it you know, like how fast can they get it? What are the benefits of your product versus your competitors? So if you can just create that juicy content that they’re looking for, kind of the same content that you, you probably would have created, but just like spice it up a little bit, it becomes a select secondary FAQ that also is like a front end FAQ. So you’re already kind of training people as they get into your funnel and as they purchase your products.

Charles (14:17):

Yeah, and that’s one of those things. So I’ve had Lianna patch on air from punchline copy and they, they have that, she has that voice, right. It’s witty and funny and creative and just, it’s very, and you know, it’s her voice when you’re reading it. So then also you kind of mentioned Neil Patel have him on a tow. If you look at his content, it’s very different, very prescriptive, right? Like here are the steps, here’s what you must do. Very different. But they’ll both have their voice and I feel like they stay consistent and that’s what works for them. It’s kind of one of the biggest things. Yeah.

Christina (14:50):

Yeah. And I, it’s

Charles (14:52):

Funny, I’ve worked a lot with Leanna at punchline. She’s written quite a few of our product descriptions and sales pages and things like that. Yeah. Yeah, it is a small world. She’s awesome. But yeah, so I, I just, I, I like what you’re saying about the consistency here. And I think a lot of people are afraid to get into content cause they’re like, Oh, I don’t have that voice, or I’m not a good writer. I’m not good on video or whatever, but like do you think anybody is when they get started? No. Like you should see that. Well you shouldn’t see the first blog post that I wrote back when I had a Squarespace shop. It was, they were terrible. I mean they were boring. They were short. They I, I’m a big fan of like longer form content. They were just really kind of all over the place.

Charles (15:39):

You know, they were really emotional and like feely and you know, like this is how I felt and kind of journalists like a journal type thing. And you know, if you look at my post today we have pretty much the same formula for every single blog post that I write, which is like some kind of catchy headline usually with an odd number or a how to in it. And then a little tiny story like two to three sentences is what kicks the blog post off. And then like you said, we have that prescriptive formula. So it’s like the three things are the five things, the 11 ways you never expected whatever. And then we wrap it up with a little review. And then throughout the blog posts, there’s at least three calls to action, usually some kind of graphic. I usually include just like plain hyper like text, but we at least have like three calls to action to get into one of our funnels.

Charles (16:27):

And it’s like the same funnel throughout usually wrap it up with the review a question at the end, maybe, you know, asking for comments. Blog comments aren’t really super popular anymore. I think most peak people are on Instagram and Facebook for that kind of stuff. But we still ask the question regardless and then we can copy and paste that whole thing, put it into a newsletter, send it out. And we’ve created, you know, two things that are promoting the store right there. And then, you know, if I were more consistent and better about it, I would probably just copy and paste it into Instagram. Actually. I should, you’re making me want to do this today. I would just copy and paste different, yeah. Copy and paste different like paragraphs or you know, prescriptions, the, the steps or whatever that I’m giving away in the blog posts, connect that to a picture.

Charles (17:08):

And now we have Instagram content for a week. So it, I think it’s really easy to repurpose if you have that foundational piece. But like right now, like you don’t even have to be perfect at it. I mean, right now I’m only using a blog post in a newsletter every week. I could be doing so much more as far as the marketing goes and you know, retargeting people to the blog posts and things like that. And we’re not, and we’re still getting a decent amount of traffic and new people subscribing, things like that. So, so actually I have a tip before I asked you the question. I do have a tip on the Instagram. What we do is a M was listening. We build a quote cards on a quote. Someone said from somewhere posted on Instagram. The issue Instagram is you can’t post a link straight back to that article. So you have to do it up in the profile to the main blog. But if you just added a quote cards, it definitely drives a lot of traffic, which has been kind of a, a little side note tip there that I found

Christina (18:04):

That that’s great.

Charles (18:05):

Yeah. Well it, it helps. And that’s kind of, so going right to the next question, right? How do you promote the content, cause you mentioned a newsletter, but is that, is that all you do or are you trying to put it in a different social channels? Are you running paid, like how you actually getting eyeballs to this other than the organic?

Christina (18:24):

Yeah, so what we’ll usually do, so we have like cold traffic funnels that are happening all the time. So we’re constantly getting new traffic in to those funnels. And so what we’ll do is we’ll put the blog posts, like send it out to the newsletter, see, you know what people are interested in. And the blog posts that do really well. We will give them to our, we have an affiliate program at the contract shop. So we’ll give them to our affiliates and say, Hey, this is doing really well. Why don’t you share this on, you know, like copy and paste this into your Instagram, your feed, whatever. Because you know, as soon as someone lands on our blog, they’re cookied with that affiliates link. So then the affiliate gets commissioned. So our affiliates are helpful there. And then the other thing that’s helpful is the one, the blog posts that do really well.

Christina (19:09):

I mean, you can, there’s no reason why you have to have like a whole funnel and you know, like webinar or presentation or whatever for Facebook ads, like you can, you can run Facebook ads right to those, those well-performing blog posts and, you know, just pop up in people’s feeds or, you know, show up on LinkedIn, like wherever you think your people might be. And so you can promote that as if it’s like a landing page for a webinar or something. Especially when it has the calls to action. So, yeah, that’s, that’s basically what we’re doing to get new people onto those blog posts, onto those pages. And then because we honestly, we haven’t even touched Pinterest in about a year, but because we set Pinterest up so well and did it for so long, we still have a decent amount of traffic that’s coming from Pinterest.

Christina (19:52):

So we might just throw a couple of pins up or something and start seeing a lot of traffic there to the new posts that we’re putting up. Again, like I run a really, really lean team, so we just try to focus on the blog posts that do well. The ones that don’t do as well, we don’t put all our resources and focus and energy behind those because we just don’t have the capacity to do that. So again, like I, I feel like the whole, my whole like encouragement to everybody is you don’t have to have this perfect system. You don’t have to have like this, this whole thing set up. It can just, you can just do what you can with what you have and you’re still gonna see increased results. And the great thing about content is you can always come back to it too.

Christina (20:35):

Like you can always do like a Roundup newsletter later. That’s what we did with a lot of our popular content is we add it. So we have a welcome sequence that kind of invites them to learn more about the contract shop, learn more about the, that kind of thing. So after they’re through their initial like funnel with us as a, as a cold subscriber or you know, say someone that came over from an affiliate or something, then they go through this welcome sequence. And so what we’ve done with our well-performing posts is we’ve added those as like a, here’s the top five posts that you want to see into the welcome sequence. So you can always repurpose the content in that way. Sometimes, you know, I’m like, I don’t want to write a newsletter this week, so I just go back through the blog posts and I pull something that, that did decently well, a copy and paste that, and I send it out to all my subscribers again. And then they clicked through to the links to the blog post. They share those, they, you know, engage with those. So it, it really is something that you don’t have to create a lot of content for and you can repurpose over and over. And that’s, that’s what I would encourage more people to do instead of like constantly creating content. Actually.

Charles (21:40):

Yeah. I think a lot of people start off and think they have to be this content generation machine and it sounds, it sounds good for both, like two to three weeks and then you just get tired or run out of ideas. Life gets in the way [inaudible] then it just kind of all falls off the bandwagon. So I liked the idea of the more you can repurpose and just having that, having that backlog helps cause then you can always look back, pull something out. Or like you said, every article you’re probably referring to past articles and that’s a great way of using the new content to promote the old. So I like that

Christina (22:13):

You mentioned Shopify does a good job of this cause they’ll tell you, Oh sorry. Yeah. Shopify tells us like, Hey, everybody that read this article reads this article too. So then we link to those within each other.

Charles (22:24):

Yeah, that’s a good, yeah, kind of that cross from basically. So you’re using the new articles to promote the old ones. You’re basically cross the same way you do it a product but with the content, right?

Christina (22:37):

Yes. Yeah.

Charles (22:38):

When you said you had a very lean team what is the team structure? Cause I think a lot of people. All right, are you trying to do it all yourself? Do you have someone helping on the promotion side, on the, you know, technical side? Like what do you do and what do you have help with?

Christina (22:54):

Yeah, sure. So I have four contractors, so it’s myself and four contractors. I’ve had up to 18, I’m down to four now. So we have one of my, one of my gals is in charge of marketing, so she does all our Facebook ads and she kind of looks at what’s performing well you know, what we could possibly do as a launch, that kind of thing. She supports me through that. The other gal is in charge of all my operations. So she does a really great job just keeping us on track with projects, not letting me get too far ahead of myself by like getting new things in the pipeline, like really focusing on what is working and doing more of that. And then we have our customer support so she helps out in the inbox as we get customer support emails.

Christina (23:40):

And then when we do our big sales twice a year she also supports a little bit through there helps out with the chat. Any, any inquiries coming through there. And then the last person is my graphic designer. So the graphic designer is obviously she does all the design. She helps out with the product description pages. We hire other people like on an as needed basis. I work with Kurt Elster a lot on product or it’s not, sorry, I’m on my website development. So but yeah, so I work with a pretty lean team and most people are, are on demand. Like, if we need extra help during a launch or something like that, then we’ll go out and hire specifically for that need. But you know, on, on payroll like every single month are those four people. And it seems to work really well. And then obviously we have our affiliates, so I would, you know, they don’t, they don’t work for me. They’re just

Charles (24:42):

Kurta made it to the Shopify investor newsletter this month. I just yeah. Yeah. He’s also been a guest on the show as well. I started Shopify. They were doing the the conference in his face. Isn’t that SL? Pretty cool.

Christina (24:57):

Yes. Yeah, they had to move it all virtual.

Charles (25:00):

Yeah. I, I think a lot of us have. So then are you primarily the chief kind of content creator, writer kind of doing the idea creation or everyone else kind of just supporting you in that process?

Christina (25:12):

Yeah, I create all of our content, whether it’s in a product or you know, like sometimes we will bring in contractors to help us develop things further. Like we brought in punchline copy to help us, you know, punch up our sales pages and things like that. But but yeah, so for the most part, I’m the one who’s writing the sales pages. I’m the one who’s writing the blog posts. I’m the one who’s writing the, the content that goes inside the courses or the products or whatever it might be. So kind of three very distinct areas of content creation. You have to put on like little different hats for each of those. Cause conversion copy is very different than say, you know, like educational content that you’re trying to teach someone how to do something. So yeah, that’s, that is what I do in my company is a lot of figuring out what, where we’re headed and then also creating those products and then letting everybody else support me once those ideas are a little bit more solid.

Charles (26:10):

Gotcha. So you mentioned a funnel a lot and kind of the whole marketing funnel and the general right top of the funnel, middle bottom. People get introduced you to content and then they check out at some point, how do you link up that top of the funnel content to actually get them into the rest as buyers? So, you know, they come in there and the list of 10 best ways to do X, but now how do you actually kind of nudge them over to say, Oh, by the way, we have X over here. What’s kind of, is there any sort of tricks to doing that piece of it?

Christina (26:42):

I mean, it’s to be so different for every single business. It’s honestly, funnels are like something that are, I don’t wanna say they’re new because I’ve known about funnels and, you know, the whole funnel sphere for a long time. We, we basically try to give people the, the encouragement and the permission that they would need prior to purchasing the product. So like what, what is blocking their mindset? Or you know, like what, what are they telling themselves that is creating some kind of fear or a lack of permission in their mind or something like that before they get to our product. And clearing those out of the way with the free products or like the low trip wire type, you know, $7 products, something like that. So we try to give them, it’s almost like permission based marketing. Like we’re, we’re trying to give them permission to do something and then once they have that permission, now they need our product.

Christina (27:35):

So then they’re making the purchase. So that’s what I would say. Like for example, we have our rock solid contract checklist. This is pretty basic. You know, this is like our, our oldest funnel. Basically they, they go to rock solid contract.com. They download the checklist, they get to go through and they can compare their current client contract against our checklist and they’re likely to see gaps or you know, like things that are missing. Or you know, they download our checklist and they’re like, Oh, Hey I actually really don’t know anything about, I call it Frankensteining your contract together. Like, I really don’t know anything about piecing a contract together from all over. Well, so I’m just going to go through this, this funnel and you know, we have a couple like offers in there for them that help them help to push them over the edge because it’s like, Oh, I need this thing now I realize how much I need it.

Christina (28:29):

Cause I went through the checklist and then you know, the next day like, wow, okay, there’s this extra offer in here for the exact product. I need it. How convenient. So I think it’s just a matter of doing a lot of experimentation. I think that’s where people, including myself, get really discouraged using funnels and content to generate leads to those funnels is because like there’s things that aren’t linking up. So we just launched a new funnel last week for example. And like nobody’s purchasing the upsell. You know, we’ve had a couple of purchases, but like the overwhelming majority aren’t purchasing. And we’re like, okay, this isn’t like a big price jump. So what is going on? Whereas like the disconnect and so it’s just going to be an experiment. It’s called LA. Yeah, sure. It might be@lawlesstoflawless.com. So, you know, going from a business that doesn’t have any kind of like legal administrative stuff set up at all, getting one of our signature courses that we used to sell for 500 bucks for $14.

Christina (29:27):

So, you know, cooking them and then, you know, they’re not they’re not able to purchase for $14 forever. It’s just like this very short term thing for like very cold new subscribers so they can purchase lawless to flawless. And then we have an upsell into exactly how to build a business because, you know, they’re at the very beginning stages. So they get this like like behind the scenes, these three different kits about how like three different ways that they could build their business potentially and reach different people. So that’s the funnel that we just launched. And then obviously they, they get into our welcome sequence after that, but it’s, it’s, there’s a disconnect there. And, you know, just to be totally candid, it’s a lot of experimenting to figure out like why, you know, cause the front end product sells really well, but the backend product isn’t selling as well.

Charles (30:21):

So on that, so you mentioned lawless, it’s a whole separate domain, right? So how, I guess for a two part question, why, why do you create different domains for each one and then how do you drive? Are you driving traffic from the main domain out to those? Like how do you actually, or is each one kind of its own isolated thing that you’re promoting and running on its own world?

Christina (30:45):

Yeah, I mean ideally they would all be through the contract shop. The, the problem though is it’s just so dang easy to build those pages in the upsells and one click upsells and landing pages off of Shopify. So when we’re testing things, we’re not building them on Shopify cause that takes like, there’s just no good, not that I know of, but we just haven’t really found a landing page builder that’s as effective as say click funnels to get something up and going and working consistently like really quickly. So if we know something works, then yeah, absolutely. We’re moving it back to our site so that we can track it, have all the analytics, metrics, et cetera, everything there. Cause that’s the best case scenario. But the problem is it’s just not right now. There’s like this huge gap in the marketplace for for like an effective landing page builder on Shopify that has like one click upsells and all this other stuff.

Christina (31:43):

So it just, I feel like the software on each platform is very different and accomplishes very different things. You know, obviously like to have a shop on ClickFunnels would be a nightmare, you know, to have like it, like there’ll be so many broken links and so many problems, but you know, to have like a funnel, it just doesn’t work for us. And, and the lean team that I have you know, if I had like unlimited funds to just like develop things and I’m like, I think this is gonna work, then yeah, sure. I would build a landing page on Shopify, have everything through there. But yeah, so we, we really operate them kind of like in an isolated mode until we can test them enough and see if they’re working because the changes and the things that you can do on ClickFunnels are just so much more dynamic than what’s available on Shopify right now. Even with like, there’s a couple of landing page builders we’ve checked out and it’s just basically what we’ve decided is like when something works, we’re just going to have our graphic designer you know, tweak it a little bit and then have Curt or ether cycle coded as a custom page on Shopify because there’s the landing pages just so they don’t work.

Charles (32:55):

W so when you develop these pages, so how do you actually get folks from the contract shop over to these new sites? Or what is like the link between them? Like, how do you start from day one,

Christina (33:08):

Typically a retargeting if, if we need to, typically these are for cold traffic. So this, this is to generate new traffic to the contract shop. So

Charles (33:20):

You’re generating to the flaws example, you run cold traffic to the dash.

Christina (33:26):

Correct. And we, we try to entice our current subscribers and current readers to go to those pages as well. Through like graphics, like, Hey, wouldn’t you like to get your business all buttoned up? Like that’s a graphic in the middle of a blog post and it leads to the lawless of flawless site where they can upgrade to four for a $14 product. So there is some organic traffic that’s coming. But typically that, like we’re using funnels to get cold leads into our site.

Charles (33:56):

So you have a few different ways of kind of running traffic into these sites, right? So you have the, yeah. So you said the newsletter, the main blog paid, and then what else was there? There’s several different methods

Christina (34:10):

Affiliates and guest posting, guest webinars, things like that. So, you know, kind of collaborative efforts for content.

Charles (34:18):

Do you have one that kind of works, it’s kind of like a go to way of doing it or is it just testing different ones? Work in different of audiences

Christina (34:27):

Honestly, and it gets a little exhausting, but definitely the collaborative content is the most effective by far. But it can get a little exhausting, especially when it’s such a small team. So it gets a little, you just, you have to find people to reach out to you. Ha. I mean, we’re always tweaking the presentations for them or I’m like custom writing a blog post for their audience so that it’s a new content. So it’s just, it’s a lot of work, a lot of effort. But it also is the most effective for getting in front of a totally new audience. So we, we’ve kind of scaled back on that a little bit because our affiliate programs done really well in the last like two years. So, you know, people are a little bit more encouraged to create some of their own content. They’re doing some of that collaborative content for us in a way, because even though we’re not the ones creating the content anymore, it’s still their audience who’s getting exposed to us, which is the whole goal of that collaborative content anyway.

Christina (35:25):

So we’ve been able to scale back a little bit on that without, without losing the benefit with the affiliate program. But yeah, for sure. I mean, get, if you could get out there and I know Russell at ClickFunnels talks about this all the time, but like, if you could get out there and do a webinar in front of someone else’s audience every week, I mean, there’s, you wouldn’t, there’s no way you couldn’t be driving traffic back to your site every single week. That’s, you know, new, fresh, cold leads that haven’t heard of you before. Haven’t made a purchase yet and are eager and willing to do so. So, yeah, I would say that collaborative content is definitely where you get the most bang for your buck. But you know, everything’s a trade off and when you do that collaborative content, obviously it’s someone else’s audience. And I take that really seriously, which is why I probably, I probably do more than I should. I put a little more pressure on myself, but I don’t want to under deliver to someone else’s audience because they have given me the privilege of being there. So I really go above and beyond with that. And that’s why I think it’s a little exhausting. And, and why why it’s, it’s not that it’s not sustainable, it’s just that you have to be prepared for the work that’s involved.

Charles (36:32):

I see. Okay. So you’re saying you launch a site lots of flowers.com and you have other folks that have promoted that you’ve worked with before? Most likely. So I’m guessing it’s not just all cold every time. So you say, Hey, you know, you publish the article for us six months ago, we just launched this new site. We have this article that would probably do well with your audience on making your business more more streamlined. All right. And they have a bit, they have a blog about that. So you write that article up for their audience, drop a link to Lowe’s to flawless. And that’s how you driving a lot of content traffic though. Yeah. Very cool. Okay, so that, and so you’d say that’s kind of the biggest driver of kind of when you’re sending up these new sites?

Christina (37:22):

No, I think our organic search traffic is, is I, I know from the analytics that’s still our biggest driver. Pinterest and organic search traffic is still our biggest driver of content of traffic.

Charles (37:33):

Hmm. Yeah. How long does it take to get the organic going though when you sit? So as you build, so this new site, you know, these credits, you know, if it’s like new this month, like how long does that organic engine take to get going?

Christina (37:45):

Well, the, the organic traffic is coming from the contract shop.

Charles (37:47):

Oh, okay. There you go.

Christina (37:49):

Yeah. So it’s, it’s like people that are searching for something on the internet and they’re finding our blog posts as the answer.

Charles (37:55):

And you’re linking from, so you’re using the contract shops, so you’ve built up an audience there, you’ve built up the organic there and now you can basically point that to whatever sales funnel you want. And your, so these separate sites have sales funnels. The contract shop is leisure, the engine, the top of the funnel engine.

Christina (38:12):

Yes. in some ways or you know, Facebook paid traffic, you know, cold audiences are also pushed into the funnels. Yeah. If you want it, one or the other.

Charles (38:24):

Okay. So you can use organic even test it. Right. And if someone’s new, well then try some paid and see if you can go up a little more.

Christina (38:32):

Yup. Exactly.

Charles (38:33):

Very cool. Okay. I think this is set up.

Christina (38:35):

Yeah. So for example, you know,

Charles (38:37):

Copying their own business cause it sounds actually pretty effective.

Christina (38:40):

Yeah. And I mean again, it’s, it’s a lot of focusing on, on like the blog posts that do really well. So how do you create more effective calls to action that look, you know, organic, that look fun. It helps that our, obviously our blog doesn’t have like annoying popup ads. And you know, like all this crazy stuff happening. It’s cause I’m using, I’m not using the blog like as a blog, right? Like there’s like blogs that sell stuff on them and then there’s like online stores that have blogs that teach people how to use the product better or like how to do something in their life better that they then need the product. So that’s how the ladder is, how I’m using the blog. And then we’re, we’re plugging our funnels through there so that they can be nurtured for the, through our brand and get to know us better.

Christina (39:26):

Get to experience some of our products, like a discounted, like a deeply discounted price and just kind of start to see like this is definitely the company for them to help them through this like legal aspect that they need help with. So earning their trust in different ways through a lot of different kinds of content. But yeah, focusing definitely on the, the, the, the blog posts that are getting the most organic reach. And then, you know, like I said, you can put some paid traffic behind that on Facebook or Google or whatever. So that you’re showing up in those search results for people and you know, you are, you are literally the answer to their questions.

Charles (40:02):

Very cool. I like that a lot. It sounds like a, a, a great strategy. So I want to be respectful of your time though. That’s a good tip. So anything, any kind of last words of advice or any links to people can find you or see you latest funnel?

Christina (40:17):

Yeah, for sure. Just come to the contract, shop.com. Check it out. We, we’ve got some, some really awesome things available for people just through there. If they want just great content, the blogs there. If you don’t know what kind of content you want, just go to the contract, shop.com and we’ll re target you with something that we think you’ll want. And yeah, I mean I think that’s, that’s the best place to go is just the contract, shop.com. Check it all out. And you know, if you want to get like a, like a how to get your LLC, whatever, you can go to lawless to flawless.com. But yeah, those are, those are the best places to check out what we’re doing and see how things are operating. And you know, my, my best piece of advice that I could possibly give anybody listening is just do something.

Christina (41:04):

You know, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be a system. It doesn’t have to be like this long strategic a well mapped out thing. It could just be, you know, you, you get started and you write a blog post and you’ve never done that before and you have your first blog post up cause you got to get started somewhere and every single time you do it you’re going to get better and better. And you know, start to see how these things could, could connect for you and start to see the topics that you could talk about that your audience is really interested in hearing. So you just literally have to do something. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just something is done. Awesome. That’s perfect. That’s great advice. Well, I think that’s a good place to end it, so I appreciate you coming on the show today. Yeah. Thank you so much, Charles. I appreciate being here.

Speaker 3 (41:46):

Yeah.

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