Ep. 11: How can I promote my E-book?
About this Episode
Ring riiing! ☎️ In this week’s episode of #1800HEYPUNO, Alarice Stuart, founder and creative director of Brand Babes Studio (@brandbabesstudio) is calling us from THE FUTURE (aka…New Zealand lol). She wants to know what marketing strategies she can use to promote her e-book, “Your Step-By-Step Guide to: Working Remotely in Bali”. Puno walks her through some ways she can market her digital product and make the most of her marketing budget.
*Disclaimer* We can’t promise that you won’t want to move to Bali after watching this episode 🤭
⭐️ Don’t forget to check out our Squarespace Design Course⭐️
🎨 Check out Brand Babes Studio here! Interested in Bali? Take a peek at the e-book mentioned in this episode.
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Transcript
Intro
Puno: [Phone Rings]. Hello?
Alarice: Hello!
Puno: Hello, Who is this?
Alarice: It's Alarice, the Founder and Creative Director at Brand Babe Studio.
Puno: I love that we do this.
🎵[Music] 🎵
Puno: Okay. So what day is it, because I hear that you're in the future?
Alarice: I am in the future. Hello from the future. It's Saturday afternoon in New Zealand.
Puno: You're one day ahead! You guys are just so much more productive.
Alarice: Yeah, I'm always ahead always. Always. You know, you missed the deadline.
Puno: So tell me more about you and what is Brand Babe and your question.
Alarice: Yeah. Okay. I started Brand Babe about two years ago after I went to Bali and I fell in love with Bali and all these people who are digital nomads and travel full time. I was like, oh this is a thing. I should probably use my design degree now. I pretty much just created this business so I could move to Bali. When I was there, people would just ask me questions because I'm a single mom, and I was running my business and I was with my son. People were like, how are you doing that? I just started recording all the questions, and I would just answer them.
Alarice: Eventually we were like, well, okay, should we just do a book? We pre-sold it for two weeks priced at 29 New Zealand dollars, and it did really well. We didn't really do much, other than sharing it on Instagram, and we engaged an influencer. Digital products are really new for us, so we're just trying to figure out, okay, how can we actually market a digital product? Since we've released it, and the price obviously went up, we're not getting as many sales as we did before.
Puno: Yeah. When you said that you guys had really good sales, the first go, what was that?
Alarice: We made around 800 New Zealand dollars, and this was like very minimal effort. The influencer did an Insta story with a swipe up link and that was it.
Puno: Were you tracking the influencer?
Alarice: Yeah, yeah, yes. We obviously got them, our sales, from her story. She's based in Perth in Australia, and it was interesting because we could see like a couple of days after that Perth people still purchasing. So we knew that it was still the influencer who was driving the sales.
Puno: Well, your life is freaking grand. [Laughs].
Puno: The types of people that said that they were interested in your book. Describe what kind of people they were.
Alarice: They were mainly New Zealanders who were working nine-to -five jobs. A lot of them didn't have businesses yet, and then some of them had either side hustles or very, very early stage start-ups.
Puno: And then the influencer that you worked with, what kind of influencer was she?
Alarice: She's a content creator, so she purely just creates content. She's not someone who is a lifestyle influencer, but the reason we engaged her was because a lot of Australians in Perth will go to Bali. That demographic was kind of outside of our immediate audience, and we just wanted to taste it and see will people from Perth who really want this book, will they find it valuable? And they did.
Puno: Perth was like two thumbs up.
Alarice: Yeah. Perth is like a good demographic, and her dad lives there as well, so it was like she was having a really organic conversation. She talks on her insta stories a lot, so it was natural. It wasn't like we were like, oh here's a product.
Puno: What is her Instagram account?
Alarice: Instagram account.
Puno: Damn! 4.6% engagement rate. You're not messing around with influencers.
Alarice: No.
Puno: I think the first thing is, what would be really good goals for you? The first sales were about 800, and then the second sales, when you doubled the price, was half of that or?
Alarice: Yeah, we want to figure out like a solid marketing plan, so that we actually make net 400 a week because I think it's so achievable. We kind of want the book to be something that is like, oh yeah, like we know we're going to get x amount minimum a week just coming in.
Puno: That passive income!
Alarice: That passive income.
Puno: Yeah.
Alarice: That's not very passive.
Puno: It never is. Everybody's like, I want passive forms of income. Then I'm all in front of the computer.
Puno: So, 1,600 a month. Okay, cool. In terms of marketing budgets, the way that a lot of people do it is they'll take a percentage off of the revenue.
Alarice: Yeah.
Puno: You know, if you want to invest in it, there's that. You can also just reinvest from what you've made. Yeah. So I guess my question is, how much are you willing to invest a month?
Alarice: For now while we testing and trying to figure it all out, we're happy to invest everything from it because this is a, this is a product that sits outside of our services and our monthly income goal. It's just really something to test and then, in a couple of months, we know cool, if we do these things, we make this amount.
Puno: Awesome. I'm looking at the website and I actually asked a friend of mine, Christina Chan, @ghostfacex. She went to Bali. I asked her, well you went to Bali, you know, did you buy anything? Did you buy any tools or books? She did. She bought... it was from remote...
Alarice: Is it No Man's List?
Puno: Yes.
Alarice: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They are awesome. They're so good.
Puno: I think she said she paid 50 bucks for something that they created. I sent her the Balli book page and she said, do you get to see a chapter? That was the first thing.
Alarice: Ah, no.
Puno: So you signed up for my Squarespace course. Did you join the waiting list at all?
Alarice: Yes and I received all your lovely emails!
Puno: There you go. So yeah, I use those with MailChimp.
Alarice: Yeah. We have a mailing list, but we don't have anything specific to the book.
Puno: Yeah, girl, you need something for the book. I think what you need to do is increase those conversions from the people that are coming to your site. So definitely a free chapter. The main questions that she had were, what is in it? Even if it's, you know, in creative market where they'd show you a zoomed out version of all the pages. Yeah. The other thing she was asking was where is all the good internet?
Alarice: Oh, okay. Yeah, I've got that in there too.
Puno: Okay, great.
Alarice: And I've even got, I've even got the backup Internet place when the island loses power, which is a thing that happens a lot.
Puno: You should totally put that in the email. You've got a ton of content in there. If you have all that content, I'm just giving away a couple of pages.
Alarice: Yeah, sure.
Puno: Maybe you have this somewhere on Brand Babe's studio. I didn't know anything about you on this landing page.
Alarice: That landing page. I see.
Puno: Who are you? How long have you been a nomad? Why are you the person that I should be listening to?
Alarice: Yeah.
Puno: The fact that you're a single mother. Girl. That's a vertical, including the content creators. So you've got your content creators, you've got the nine to five that are ready to freelance, and you potentially have single moms that are like, you know what, I'm going to take my maternity leave in Bali.
Alarice: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Puno: I mean, Jesus, that sounds amazing. Okay, so now the second part is figuring out how you're going to market it. We used to do on made with map is we would analyze that person. Let me see if I can just show you an example. So here you would sort by top commenters, and I would even remove the followers because that doesn't matter. If you scroll down, you can see that this person commented 45 times on this person's account.They are engaged, and I think that's a great opportunity to just start commenting. They might be someone who could potentially go to Bali. Another thing is, I don't know if people write Perth in their.... Perth. Here you go. So then you could reach out to this person as well.
Alarice: How good. I need People Map! Yeah.
Puno: So, whenever you do that, then the other thing that's important is tracking that you're seeing that it's coming from Perth, but there's another thing you could do. You can give them a specific URL with UTM codes. Have you ever used UTM codes?
Alarice: No. Okay.
Puno: Do you have Google Analytics on your Squarespace?
Alarice: Yeah.
Puno: Okay. Google UTM Codes. If you scroll down, there's this developer tools app. What I would do is take that URL, and then the campaign source would be M Davies. You could even call the campaign "Influencer," then it spits out this URL. Just make sure that she uses that, and you can track it in Google analytics.
Alarice: Awesome.
Puno: Oh, okay. Last one.
Alarice: Okay.
Puno: In campaigns, you could create a campaign for her. So I'll call this one, "Influencer." Then, just track when M Davies mentions Brand Babes. There it is. Oh, so when that happens, you'll be able to see your daily follower growth that you guys get.
Alarice: Yeah. Wow. Oh my goodness. I'm obsessed.
Puno: I would do some location-based Instagram ads.
Alarice: Okay, cool.
Puno: That's where you can put your budget.
Alarice: Right.
Puno: So in terms of your marketing budget, what I do is I take into consideration, my time. So if I'm going to be spending $800 a week or $400 a week, I'll divide that by my hourly and then I understand how much effort it is, at least for my time. Then, I can possibly hire someone to do that for lower than my hourly.
Puno: Yup. Super Helpful. Cool. Feels good?
Alarice: Yes, I'm pumped. I'm going to go and do all this stuff now. Okay.
Puno: I feel like now that I'm talking to you. Yeah, I want to go to Bali.
Alarice: Oh my God. Do it.
Puno: Girl. Let's look up some flights right now after this.
Puno: Well, thank you so much for sharing everything and I'm so stoked for you for building your digital business and taking this course then educating yourself and asking questions and being on the call...
Alarice: Yay. Thank you for having me. This was so helpful!
Puno: Have a wonderful Saturday. I'm going to finish our Friday up for the rest of the world here, and I'll talk to you later.
Alarice: Okay. Thank you. Bye.
Outro
Puno: Thank you so much for watching this until now and increasing our watch time number. Subscribe! That one is so good. It teaches you how to use the zoom key and it's cute a funny. We use the green screen. Subscribe! Please!
