Episode 3 - Interview with Robbin Block of Blockbeta Marketing
Episode Notes
Host Heather Zager welcomes Robbin Block, the Creative Marketing Strategist at Blockbeta Marketing, to the show to explain the ins and outs of building an e-commerce website. Robbin has an MBA from Boston University and a BA in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany, and through her more than 30 years in the industry, she knows exactly what is needed to start marketing and selling your product effectively.
Heather asks Robbin some of the basic questions she gets asked by her clients so Robbin can weigh in from an experienced professional point of view. The first question everyone asks is which website platform is best for selling products. Robbin answers that question with examples and information on options for differing experience levels. There’s a solution for every question.
Heather and Robbin dig into the topics everyone who sells online needs to know. The difference between a full website and a squeeze page, what a landing page is and why it’s important, the advantages and disadvantages with platforms like Etsy and Amazon, and all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and keywords. Robbin Block offers what is essentially a crash course in E-Commerce 101 in this interview. It’s a vital discussion for everyone who wants an online sales platform and needs marketing advice to drive those sales.
About Robbin Block:
Robbin Block is the Creative Marketing Strategist at Blockbeta Marketing. She has an MBA from Boston University and a BA in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany, which enables her to deliver marketing solutions focused on an entire business, not just a particular marketing tactic.
During her more than 30 years in the trade, she’s developed a unique perspective, having worked with almost every niche business imaginable, from cannabis to mobile tech, and creative makers and designers. This helps her get right to the point when guiding clients through the increasingly complicated online marketing space, from developing high-converting websites through concepting media strategies.
An experienced speaker, she’s also the author of “Social Persuasion: Making Sense of Social Media for Small Business” and various marketing ebooks. A background in economics and an MBA are the foundation for her big-picture approach that gets her clients results.
Robbin excels at explaining marketing in a way that makes total sense, so business owners can make better decisions about how to spend their marketing resources.
Contact Heather Zager | MADE Apparel Services:
Contact Robbin Block |Blockbeta Marketing:
Transcript
Heather Zager: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to today's podcast. My name is Heather Zager. I am the host of this podcast series and founder of Made Apparel Services. In today's episode, we're going to be talking with a marketing and website expert. She has worked a lot with new designers selling product, so she has a lot of good answers for some common questions about building your first website and how to drive traffic to it, how to engage your social media and establish a strategy around that. Also, she'll talk a little bit about some of that background stuff, like SEO and keywords and analytics and how to read those. So stay tuned. We hope you enjoy the show and let's get started.
Heather Zager: [00:00:41] Welcome everybody. We are here with Robbin Block with Blockbeta Marketing. And she's going to talk to us a little bit today about websites for emerging designers who are just launching new product and trying to get the word out there and gain a following. And we have a few questions lined up for her. But first, Robbin, welcome and tell us a little bit about what it is that you do.
Robbin Block: [00:01:03] Well, I've been in marketing for quite a long time and I focus on providing creative marketing strategy. Everything from helping companies figure out what their strategy should be overall from a business perspective, then working with them to develop websites that are high converting and then amplifying their information out to the public so they can drive more business and interest in what they're doing.
Heather Zager: [00:01:30] Okay, perfect. Well rounded. So the first question I have for you is a very common one that I get from my clients all the time, and they ask which website platform is best for selling my product.
Robbin Block: [00:01:42] And everybody asks that. I don't care if you're selling product or driving leads, but if you really want to do e-commerce, which means selling a product directly from your website, a lot of it will depend on how many products you actually have. So if you're launching just one hoodie or a line of hoodies or a line of clothing, for example, the line, you probably want to use something like Shopify. There's a bit of a learning curve, but you could do some of it yourself. You could get help building it. It's a very robust, well-used, trusted platform for hosting your products, building pages at the front end so you can build up your business as well as the products themselves, takes care of all the transactions, the taxes and everything else. So Shopify, if you have several products to sell, I think it's a great way to go. There's a fairly low per month entry fee for the hosting and the building. I mean, you build it yourself, but it's got a builder tool, right?
Heather Zager: [00:02:43] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:02:44] If you only have one product, there are simpler ways to go.
Heather Zager: [00:02:48] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:02:48] Where you might want to use something like Squarespace which is more like brochure-ware. And then you can use their e-commerce or use another very simple plugin to deal with the e-commerce piece.
Heather Zager: [00:03:01] Okay, perfect. And I actually know a manufacturer that I work with that integrates with Shopify, and you have to have Shopify to use their actual services if you want them to handle that part of your production factory. Yeah. So once something is developed and they've sewn it and they're ready to ship it for you, they're going to take all your orders through Shopify. So it seems like it's not an uncommon platform for manufacturers also.
Robbin Block: [00:03:30] Yeah, they have a much more robust version of Shopify for bigger companies, too. It's really expensive though.
Heather Zager: [00:03:38] Right. Okay. But that's good to know. And that's where that's coming from. That integration, okay. And then the next question that I get a lot of is what are the basic pages my website should have? Is there, you know, they're on a budget so they're looking to just have the minimum amount of pages that they need, but still be viable and look like a good collection, good product launch site.
Robbin Block: [00:03:59] So the price really isn't a reflection of the number of pages. Your initial costs have to do with paying for the hosting per month. If you pay for a whole year at once, you usually save a little money. You have to register your domain name and then get that connected. And that's about 20 bucks a year. First year might be cheaper, but the cost comes in developing the content that goes on the pages. And there are basically three types of pages from the e-commerce side that need to be considered. There's the actual product page for each individual product, and you could probably write those yourself since you're very close to the product and somebody could help you set that up, or you could set it up. The platform makes it somewhat straightforward once you learn a little bit about it, and I definitely recommend that if you're the business owner, you should at least know something about how the page is put together. And then you have another type of page called collections. And collections are if you had like hoodies and t shirts and shorts, you could have different products that would fit under each collection group. You can even do collections by seasonality or men/women or whatever kind of grouping that you want, and that's another kind of page you want to have. And then of course, you have your sales pages, which are like your home page, you know, the first page people land on, and About page because people like to know who develops the products, a contact page, and then of course, Shopify, they definitely make it easy to build in your shipping policy and your terms and conditions, and you definitely want to have those not only to build trust with your customer, but also for Google search. Google is looking for trusted websites and that is another indication to them that it is...
Heather Zager: [00:05:44] Like a legitimate site. Somebody who is really genuinely selling product or a service. Okay, that makes sense.
Robbin Block: [00:05:51] I just want to mention one one other really great thing about Shopify and I, you know, I've been building on Shopify since before you could even put a logo on there easily. I mean, it was a really tough platform back in the day, but it also has easy integrations to things like Google Merchant, which is a free offering from Google that enables, that shows when you want products to show up on the top of a search page. That helps you there, so you can integrate with that easily. You can integrate with Etsy and like your socials, like Instagram and Facebook. So it actually has some of the tools built in natively to it that make it easy to start getting the word out about your product.
Heather Zager: [00:06:34] Okay, perfect. If for some reason somebody couldn't use Shopify, I don't know why that would happen, but what would be a good second best website to consider?
Robbin Block: [00:06:43] Well, there are lots of smaller, that are more specifically e-commerce, that can be used independently or as plugins to another website platform. Like I mentioned Squarespace before, allows you to create very good looking websites, and you can either use their ecom, which I don't really think it's that great, to be honest, on Squarespace, but you could plug in other things. And another builder that I haven't used lately, but I had used a long time ago is called Ecwid, ECWID.com. So that's an option you can look at. There's also something called Gumroad, which is a really small, easy, very easy to use platform for not only selling physical products, I think you can do physical products on there, but definitely digital products if you have a book about what you're doing. I know listeners are probably doing physical products, but if there was a digital product, that might be a way to go.
Heather Zager: [00:07:41] Right, okay. And then I'm just going to ask you a question that I have as you're talking that I think will be helpful. I have a lot of clients that speak to Etsy and Amazon and getting on Amazon. What benefits might those have over - yeah, Amazon - over Shopify.
Robbin Block: [00:07:57] I just rolled my eyes.
Heather Zager: [00:07:58] That's right. Yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:08:00] Okay. So Amazon is a very interesting decision that you have to make from a high level business point of view. Because I mean, let me put it back up for a second. When we talk about things like Etsy or Amazon, these are what we call marketplaces. And there are all kinds of marketplaces out there. And it's a way for you to build awareness for your product at a place where people are typically shopping. So getting on Amazon could be useful. On the other hand, you could run ads on Amazon without even having a product there. That could be another angle which we could, you know, that goes into a whole nother realm. But being on Amazon is, you really have to think about how you want to do that. And you don't have to put all your products on Amazon at once. If you just want to build some recognition for your product, you might want to lead with one there and then get people to come to your website. So it's a way of advertising really, because you're giving up quite a lot of commission.
Heather Zager: [00:08:59] Yeah. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:09:00] Or in other words you're paying. So Etsy you're giving a lot a lot up too. It's an easy place to start. But from what I'm hearing from a lot of creators out there, first of all, Etsy isn't the creative platform that they started as. You know, there are a lot of products there that aren't like handmade. They haven't been for a while. They've increased their commissions and it's so crowded on there it's hard to get any attention. So you might experiment with Etsy but I definitely think you should still have your own website because you own that space. You can totally control it. And if you can get customers to come there to your website, you can get their email address, you can communicate with them over time. There are a lot of benefits to doing those.
Heather Zager: [00:09:47] Analytics, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But yeah, so it's the difference between a marketplace versus having your own website.
Robbin Block: [00:09:54] Absolutely.
Heather Zager: [00:09:55] Yeah okay okay. Perfect. Then actually speaking about websites, so what is a landing page versus a website.
Robbin Block: [00:10:03] So a landing page in the broader sense could be anywhere somebody goes to first after putting in your domain name or URL in a browser like www.Blockbeta.com and then go right to my home page on my website. But you can send people a lot of different places, so you can send them to a home page. If you have a slash/something like slash/blog, you could send people to your blog page. All those could be on your website. You can also have, and those could be called landing pages, it's just where they land first.
Heather Zager: [00:10:37] Ah okay.
Robbin Block: [00:10:38] If you have if you don't have a website yet and you're just trying to, let's say, test out an idea that you have or you're kind of getting into production or you're thinking about getting into production, but you're not sure, or you want to build an audience before you actually put out the money for developing a product, you could put up something called, it's a landing page of another type, some people call it a squeeze page and it doesn't have any navigation.
Heather Zager: [00:11:04] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:11:05] And it will have basically like a picture or even a sketch or a drawing of something, some visual element, a lifestyle picture even, with a little bit of a description. And it could be, it will also have a place to put an email address. So then people get on the list. You start weighing how much interest people have in what you do, and then when you launch, that would be a great way to get a good kickoff and you can make it even a little mysterious. So it's a teaser kind of page.
Heather Zager: [00:11:36] Coming soon.
Robbin Block: [00:11:37] Yeah. So basically the difference, a website basically has navigation and a footer and all those kind of elements of a fully blown out website, whereas a squeeze page could just be very simple and it should be very straightforward. And if you if you really want to know how to build one of those, there are tons of places online that will say, oh, here are the five things you have to have on your squeeze page. And a lot of the, by the way, a lot of the email tools out there, you may have heard of MailChimp. I really like Mailerlite. That's another tool. They have typically a way of building that very simple landing page or a squeeze page within their system. And then when somebody puts in the email address, goes right into that database and you can shoot out emails from there.
Heather Zager: [00:12:27] Right? Okay. That's a great idea and a great tip. Okay. Another question I get is once you have this squeeze page or even a website, how do you drive traffic? And you know, where does social media play into that? Maybe even a little bit of like SEO and keywords. We start getting into all the background details that a lot of people don't fully understand. And I think you probably can sum that up in a bit of a nutshell. Hopefully.
Robbin Block: [00:12:53] Oh yes. No problem. It's what we call promotions or amplifying. So once you have your property, the website, the squeeze page. So let me talk about squeeze page because that's simpler.
Heather Zager: [00:13:03] Sure, sure. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:13:05] You're not really SEOing that or what we call Search Engine Optimizing so Google finds it. That really is typically used when you're doing advertising. Or if you just hand out business cards at a trade show and you want to send somebody somewhere, you know, it's a little bit more direct and you can run very fairly inexpensive ads, although it's complicated to set up on Google ads or Facebook ads or you can even send people there from Instagram, whatever you want.
Heather Zager: [00:13:32] Okay, okay.
Robbin Block: [00:13:33] You're not really depending on Google to find you or find that landing page, right? That's the difference. But a website, you definitely want Google to recognize that you exist. And there's a bit to doing Search Engine Optimization, but it all starts with what you do on the site. It doesn't have to be a single word. It could be what they call a long tail. It could be several words together. Like basketball shoes, I don't know.
Heather Zager: [00:14:00] Yeah okay. Yeah, yeah that's good.
Robbin Block: [00:14:02] And the very first part of that is figuring out what your keywords are. And the keywords and--
Heather Zager: [00:14:08] The words they're using to do that. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:14:11] And it's the keywords are what you think your target audience wants for sure or what, or the questions they're trying to get answered and the words are using in the browser or Google. And typically, you know, if you can do it for Google, it's going to work for Bing and DuckDuckGo and everything else. And that will help them locate your information or make, allow Google to connect that question to what you're resolving on your page. So that means you want to make sure what's on your page clearly connects with what that search is for. And there's all kinds of ways to do keyword research.
Robbin Block: [00:14:52] Google has its own tool which is buried within their Google Ads platform. But there are lots of other places to look for keywords. And, like I think one's called Knowledge Anywhere. I mean, I have a whole database of keyword searching tools. But you always want to think not only of the product in terms of a keyword, but think about what people want to know. Like, I was just doing a whole bunch of keyword research for a new client of mine that makes e-bikes or electric bikes, believe it or not. And sure, you can put in electric bikes. That's one. You definitely have to have that one. But what about electric e-bike or just e-bike or what does it take to maintain an e-bike? You can start thinking about questions that people have around that in their search for a product like yours. So that, I mean, there's a bit to the keyword research, but those keywords become so valuable because not only do you build them into your website in certain places, and there are very select places you put it so Google can see it and rank you accordingly, but also when you're writing an article. Or you're writing a blog post, those keywords should be in there too, so they can be found. And even when you're on the marketplaces, how you describe your product becomes very important, because on those marketplaces, people are searching too. So really understanding how those keywords play in can work for you across the board when you're promoting. And socials too, by the way, because people search on social, although their search engines are terrible, but generally it doesn't hurt to build it in. Oh yeah, they're not like Google or something like that. So that's the keyword part.
Heather Zager: [00:16:40] Right.
Robbin Block: [00:16:40] And then once you have your keywords on your website, you definitely, there's some information that's at the front that people see, like the content in your site, your product descriptions, your names of products, all those things. Right? But there's stuff that only Google sees, which are the titles and descriptions. And when you, just quickly without showing you a picture of this, when you go to Google search and see the results page, otherwise known as the search engine results page or SERP.
Heather Zager: [00:17:12] Right. Okay, okay. Acronym for everything.
Robbin Block: [00:17:15] You'll see something in blue, which is the title. And then the description underneath. Now Google really cares about the title, but to get that person to click that description should be of interest to the person scanning the page. So that's more the human side of it.
Heather Zager: [00:17:31] Ah. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:17:31] And one thing I want to say right away you cannot, I wouldn't try to game Google.
Heather Zager: [00:17:36] Yeah, sure.
Robbin Block: [00:17:37] Because over the years, I've been teaching this for, I don't know, 15 years, Google is just trying to be more human. And the more you can respond in a real, authentic way, what they call EEAT.
Heather Zager: [00:17:49] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:17:50] Showing Experience, showing Expertise, showing Authority, and Trust. EEAT is what Google is looking for and will help you rank.
Heather Zager: [00:17:59] Okay, so trying to defeat Google or outsmart it is just going to work against you to some degree.
Robbin Block: [00:18:05] And you know what, there's so many people have been there before you.
Heather Zager: [00:18:07] Yeah, exactly. Don't try it. Yeah. It's all been tried.
Robbin Block: [00:18:12] Yeah. Well a lot of it has.
Heather Zager: [00:18:13] Yeah. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:18:14] Just be yourself. Be authentic. Really push your brand and your value proposition. Things like that are important.
Heather Zager: [00:18:22] Okay. That makes sense. So it sounds to me like knowing your keywords is really helpful because you can just work those into social. Any posts that you do, no matter what platform you're on there. So that kind of wraps into driving traffic to your site is using those similar keywords to do that.
Robbin Block: [00:18:39] I thought I would go into the social aspect, because everybody wants to know about socials, right?
Heather Zager: [00:18:43] Yeah. Exactly.
Robbin Block: [00:18:44] So before you start going crazy, you're trying to be on every social, the most important thing is to know who your audience is and where they're playing. Are they on Instagram? Are they on TikTok? Are they in LinkedIn even? I mean, I don't know where your audience is, but you want to be where they are. That's the first step. Then just try to pick 1 or 2. I mean, once you pick the solid ones, fully fill out your profiles on those sites so at least you own them.
Heather Zager: [00:19:12] Mhm.
Robbin Block: [00:19:13] And make sure it's all matching data to what's on your website. That's really key. And then pick one where you feel comfortable. Are you doing pictures, do you have really visual product, do you have models? What do you, you know, try to show some lifestyle and try to fit in with the platform style of what it is. So there are lots of ways to do that, but to be honest, to really show up on places like Facebook, you have to start paying.
Heather Zager: [00:19:39] Ah, yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:19:40] That's what Facebook really wants. So running ads there sometimes that is the what we call paid social versus organic. Paid versus the non paid. Let me back up for one second. There's one thing you definitely want to do when you set up your SEO.
Heather Zager: [00:19:56] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:19:57] There are a couple of Google things that are offered. One I had mentioned was Google Merchant. You definitely want to sign up for that. But there's also something called Google Business Profile.
Heather Zager: [00:20:08] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:20:08] Which will help you show up when people search and also helps you rank. And I would definitely recommend signing up for that, which is also free. So you want to take advantage of all the Google stack things.
Heather Zager: [00:20:19] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:20:20] Before you even go into the socials and then finally, don't expect socials to sell for you. The real benefit of social is amplifying content you already have.
Heather Zager: [00:20:31] And followers.
Robbin Block: [00:20:32] And, or, if you already have an audience, like you have a thousand followers on Instagram, just to get started let's say, that would be wonderful before you even launch a product or spend money manufacturing, because then you have followers, potentially built-in customers. They already like you. They know you. To really just start from ground zero, and you've already spent a whole bunch of money finishing your product, that's, you're already behind the eight ball. That's why a lot of influencers, before they even sell product, they build audience first.
Heather Zager: [00:21:05] Okay, so if I could summarize this really quickly, it sounds like the social side might be the one to be thinking about first, to gain a following and establish a reputation or gather interest. And then you can have something of a coming soon page, the squeeze page you talked about. If you get closer and closer with your own vision and product idea, get that up and then you can encourage people to then sign up on that page, and then you have, well, if it's like Mailerlite, I think you said, then you're already collecting your list and then you can keep them posted from there and keep them updated. And it's moving off the social platform maybe to some degree. But now that's good. You're getting, you're capturing people and kind of funneling them into your particular product with something that they would be interested in and eventually purchase, because that's what we want, right?
Robbin Block: [00:21:54] Yes. So on your website, you want to make sure it's high converting.
Heather Zager: [00:21:58] Okay. Yeah. You want qualified.
Robbin Block: [00:22:00] You really, you know, a lot of it's going to be imagery and don't just think about showing a product. Lifestyle is great, in situation is great, if it has a certain attribute, like I have a client that makes dog leashes and they're good when it's wet or snowy outside. So the immediate imagery we show is somebody on a kayak with their dog. Are it demonstrates the utility of the product. So you really want to give some thought to some of that before just slapping up a product image.
Heather Zager: [00:22:32] Okay. That makes sense. So the last question I have is, so you've got this traffic. You've gained a following. People are coming. You've got a list of interested parties. You want more information. So how do you know, how do you track the analytics of this I guess? Like where the people that are signing up, where are they coming from because you want more of them. So how do we read into that information?
Robbin Block: [00:22:56] So the first thing you want to do is set up a Google Analytics account, another free part of the stack, and it's easy to sign up for it as long as you have a Gmail address. And if you don't have one, you can get one of those and you get that connected and you make sure that's connected to your website. And Shopify shows you where to plug in the information. They have a new thing now where you have to get an app, a free app, and then you can plug it in. Anyway, it's totally doable.
Heather Zager: [00:23:24] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:23:25] And then, so not only do you have Google Analytics for data, you also get Shopify data. And their data is pretty good. That's all the e-commerce stuff. But tying those two together is really important because you can see where your traffic is coming from, say from organic search results or paid ads or from social media. And then how much did each of those people even purchase. So you might be getting a lot of traffic from socials, but your sales might be low. I don't know, it really depends on your product and your audience and so many things. And then you find, oh, I'm getting less traffic for organic, but they're buying more. So what do you want to be doing? You want to make sure your SEO is really tight. And then you might even say, well, if the organic is working, maybe I can give it a bump with some paid ads on Google.
Heather Zager: [00:24:19] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:24:19] Right? So having that data gives you real insights into how you're doing. And you can make sure you maximize or let's say make sure that your marketing is very efficient and effective.
Heather Zager: [00:24:32] So once you have your Google Analytics that you're set up for, you just go to like GoogleAnalytics.com and you can see graphs and information and how long does it take before you actually start getting some decent information? Is it instantaneous or what is a recommended time frame?
Robbin Block: [00:24:49] Well, the first thing you do is you go to Analytics.Google.com.
Heather Zager: [00:24:52] Okay, I had it backwards. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:24:55] To be official. It's okay. I think it could be Google.com/analytics, too.
Heather Zager: [00:24:59] Right. And they might have all of those so they'll get you in the right place.
Robbin Block: [00:25:03] The problem with the new Google Analytics, what we call GA4, not affectionately, is that the data is much harder to look at unfortunately. But you still have to do it, you know, so you can go in there and look at your data and you're going to look at the traffic and the acquisition. And they have something called engagement, which talks about how many pages they looked at and how deep they got into your site.
Heather Zager: [00:25:30] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:25:31] And what product pages they looked at and all that stuff. And then the Shopify data is right there for you once you log in to Shopify. And that's really cool. There's a lot of great data in there. And they'll show you where your traffic is coming from too. But I think it's always good. They each gather data in different ways. They don't usually match exactly, but between the two you'll get, you'll start to get a good idea of what's going on. And you do need a fair amount of traffic. Like don't just look at it every day, because when you're just starting out, you might get three visitors.
Heather Zager: [00:26:01] Yeah, yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:26:02] Don't start making decisions based on three visits.
Heather Zager: [00:26:05] Based on three visitors, right. It's like weighing yourself every hour if you're on a diet.
Robbin Block: [00:26:11] Exactly, exactly. You kind of want to look at it, it's like you don't want a photograph, you want a movie.
Heather Zager: [00:26:16] Yeah, right.
Robbin Block: [00:26:17] You want to see how things trend. And the whole objective is to trend in the right direction.
Heather Zager: [00:26:24] Right.
Robbin Block: [00:26:24] Even if it's small and incremental, at least you're moving in the right direction. And I always say, if you can sell one product, you can sell two. If you sell two, you can sell four. If you sell four, you can sell eight. You're just, in a lot of ways, you don't even know if you have a market yet, I would imagine. So you got to start with something. And you know, if you're not getting the sales you need, you're going to have to shift.
Heather Zager: [00:26:46] Yeah and knowing that sooner rather than later is the goal. Yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:26:50] Right. And part of the issue there is, is it a product problem? Is it a website problem? Is it a promotional problem?
Heather Zager: [00:26:59] Yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:27:00] So by having your data you can tell whether, if you're getting a lot of traffic but no sales, that tells me there's something either wrong with the website or wrong the product.
Heather Zager: [00:27:11] Okay. Because you're getting the wrong traffic. Yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:27:14] If you're not getting a lot of traffic but you're doing okay on your conversion, like people are buying stuff, oh, well, we got to tweak up the promotional aspect and see what we're doing there. So that data really gives you insight about what to do next.
Heather Zager: [00:27:27] Okay, we only have a few minutes left, but the last question I have for you is now that we've talked about, like signing up for these websites and these domain names, and to some degree this probably just overwhelms people a little bit to hear all this information. It's a big process to get set up and to start a product, website and brand, and just get people buying even three of them. So they're considering probably hiring experts such as yourself. So what price range on average can you speak to how much somebody should be thinking about spending to have somebody maybe such as yourself, just review what they've already done, point them in the right direction if they're not going the right direction, or is it just more in depth than that? Just seeing if you can speak to something of an average for costs on getting this going.
Robbin Block: [00:28:11] There are like three ways to think about.
Heather Zager: [00:28:14] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:28:14] One is if you really don't have any money but you have a lot of time.
Heather Zager: [00:28:19] Yes, okay.
Robbin Block: [00:28:20] In other words, you know, you have more time than money, you really should learn it yourself, right? Get, you know, do it the best you can. Get it set up, read the documentation at Shopify. There are tons of videos. And it is challenging because there's the whole back end you have to set up with shipping and all that kind of stuff, and then building the front end so it's compelling and interesting. But you could start somewhere on your own. I'm not saying you couldn't do it yourself, but there is a learning curve depending on how techie you are.
Heather Zager: [00:28:49] Right? Okay. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:28:51] And it's not even techie, it's webby.
Heather Zager: [00:28:53] Yeah, right.
Robbin Block: [00:28:54] And I'm not saying you know how to use social media. I'm saying you really know how to optimize images and you know how to pick fonts. And you know, there's the whole color palette thing and things like that.
Heather Zager: [00:29:04] Right. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:29:06] So that would be the DIY version. I mean, of course you have to pay for the monthly hosting, which I think on Shopify is like $25 a month. I can't remember now. But it's, for what you get it's pretty amazing. If you start adding a lot of apps, though, that do specialty things, it gets very expensive, like bulk pricing or... So if you're at that level of sophistication, I definitely recommend speaking to someone about finding the right tools. But if you're just starting out, I think you'll be okay. And then of course, you pay for the domain name every year, like 20 bucks for the year or something. That's not really unreasonable. I remember back in the day, it used to be like $3. Anyway. Or $1.50 or something. I don't know. And then on the other end of the scale is having somebody do it all for you, and I do that kind of thing for my clients. And setting up an initial e-comm is, if I'm writing all the content and guiding you the whole way and holding your hand and building the whole thing, whatever, roughly about three grand. We're not talking about a lot of products, though. You know, just to kind of get things rolling. And that wouldn't be providing you with imagery.
Heather Zager: [00:30:15] Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:30:15] It could be stock, it could be whatever. And you have to provide your own product images and things like that. And then there's the middle ground where you put it together. You work as a team. I do some, you do some. And you know, it's going to be much less because then it's more like a consultancy and not actually doing all the execution for you.
Heather Zager: [00:30:34] Right. Okay.
Robbin Block: [00:30:35] But for a lot of my clients, even if they have Shopify sites already, I'm doing the SEO for them because that is more of a learning curve.
Heather Zager: [00:30:44] Yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:30:45] And not everybody wants to do that. And the thing is I don't know how to sew products.
Heather Zager: [00:30:50] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Robbin Block: [00:30:52] So by teaming with somebody who knows how to do marketing and you stick with your knitting, so to speak, it makes for a really good setup.
Heather Zager: [00:31:01] That makes sense.
Robbin Block: [00:31:02] And of course, it all depends on what your budget is.
Heather Zager: [00:31:04] Yeah. Well, I think the $3,000 number is the good number because people listening to this are probably going, what should I just even budget? Like, let's do a worst case scenario. So 3000 is a good number. And then okay we can do some things like you suggested collaborating or just learning if you have more time than money, and getting it somewhere to a point where, you know, if you just kind of throw up your hands and go, okay, I need help, at least you've gotten that far. But 3000 is a reasonable.
Robbin Block: [00:31:31] And I set up with my clients like 500 a month for six months.
Heather Zager: [00:31:34] Okay. Yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:31:35] And it just becomes very controlled and comfortable. And you have someone kind of in your, not in your back pocket per se, but you have someone you can shoot an email and say, am I on the right track here?
Heather Zager: [00:31:50] Pull me off the ceiling.
Robbin Block: [00:31:51] It will end up saving you so much time. What, pull me off the ceiling.
Heather Zager: [00:31:55] I'm lost, freaking out. Yeah, not uncommon.
Robbin Block: [00:31:59] No, I understand, I mean, I've been doing this, I've been doing digital marketing for, gosh, forever at this point. And there is a lot to know and you just you just have to realize that you can't do everything yourself.
Heather Zager: [00:32:12] Exactly. And people have an idea and they want to get it launched, but they know that they don't know all the things they need to know. And there's moments where like they they have the passion, they have the enthusiasm, they want to have their part in it that they play, also, they don't want to necessarily hand it off to just anybody and have them do it. They want to, they want to start a business. They want to be part of this and be their own owner and operate this. So you get to that point where you're hitting your head against the wall and you're like, I need help. And so, yeah, having people in your back pocket that know these things that can just remove that roadblock and allow you to move forward and get excited about it again, that's important, that keeps you moving forward and ensures success to some degree right there that you're going to get through to the finish line. So very good.
Robbin Block: [00:32:54] I have one last point to make about when you're looking to hire somebody, really have a conversation with them.
Heather Zager: [00:33:02] Yeah. Agree.
Robbin Block: [00:33:03] You want them to understand your business. How you're operating, what you're trying to do. It, in some ways it needs to be somewhat personal.
Heather Zager: [00:33:14] Yeah. Feel understood.
Robbin Block: [00:33:15] So you have to be careful going with companies that say, oh, you know, I'll just build your website for 500 bucks. But then down the road, there's all these extra add-ons and everything else.
Heather Zager: [00:33:25] Yeah.
Robbin Block: [00:33:26] So that's a little iffy. And there are a lot of people, there's, I hate to say this, so a lot of scammers out there, there are a lot of SEO people. Just be very, very selective.
Heather Zager: [00:33:37] Yeah. Okay. That's a very good tip. And a good closing tip because we are at time. But that was all very helpful. And yeah I think that's it. We'll just close out our interview from here.
Robbin Block: [00:33:47] Thanks for having me.
Heather Zager: [00:33:49] Oh yes. You're welcome. Thanks for being with us.
Heather Zager: [00:33:53] Thank you for listening to today's episode. We hope that you enjoyed it. If we didn't answer all of your questions, or you just have some comments or suggestions about future podcast episodes, please email me at Heather@MadeApparelServices.com.