How to Build an Online Community for B2B and B2C Businesses in 2021 - Complete Guide

Transcript:

This is the most important sentence with regards to anything that you might learn today with regards to like maintaining your community. Think value first, don't even think about monetization, and it will happen later.

But everybody that just joined right now, again, we put, we're discussing the aspect of building online communities in 2021. For both b2b and b2c businesses, personally speaking, I feel that online communities are some of the strongest assets that you can have in 2021. Plus, as a business owner, if you own a community, you own your own distribution channel, you can post whatever you want, whenever you want. And you can network whenever you want. And however you want, as opposed to renting space in somebody else's community, as opposed to renting space on a social media platform through ad spend, etc. CPMs are high, right, Facebook isn't as cheap as it used to be before. And the reason as to why I'm saying this is because, like for the past two weeks now, I've been spending literally day and night, like poor sleeping patterns, etc, trying to work out some virality growth hack for my Facebook ads for my Korra ads and my LinkedIn ads. So I can honestly attest to the fact that CPMs are high. And unless you have some crazy out-of-the-box growth hacking strategy out there. It's pretty competitive because you're competing with your, you're out trying to outbid another, I don't even know like millions of businesses, not even 1000s millions of businesses that are all trying to rent space, right. So essentially, if you own a community, you own your target market's attention, and you're able to utilize it, whether it's for monetization, whether it's for networking, etc. So there's a couple of key points.

A couple. So for everybody, that's unaware, my name is Rocco Stallis, I want insider insights on the growth hacking boot camp, a couple of you might have come might have come through the growth hacker groups or any of the other groups. If you've come from the growth hacker groups, let me just check my WhatsApp maybe it's something with regards to my audio, and then I'll move through there. If you guys have come from the growth hacker in groups, then you know that I'm the person who basically built out those groups. And these groups are, give or take two years old right now. And slowly we're building group by group basically. So if you're from growth, hackers Inc. One, you should know that there's another five different growth hacker groups. Now the growth hacker groups are basically groups that I've built two years ago back like, as soon as I stepped into growth hacking, let me very good, I love it. So somebody is already drawing on the screen. And it's totally normal. So if we can just turn off the annotation on the shared content that's done perfect. So the growth hacker groups are basically groups that I built two years ago when I decided I want to learn growth hacking and see how it's done. Now if you remove all the gimmicks from growth, hacking growth hacking is essentially low cost highly effective marketing. I know everybody's like you know, I'm a growth hacker I do growth hacking this and that etc. Like it isn't as grandiose as it seems. It's just low cost highly effective marketing through done throughout like a wide array of industries, you can do it, you can we'll talk real estate, you can growth hack your Facebook ads campaign, you can growth hack, your LinkedIn outreaches, you can growth hack anything. So back when I literally had no idea with regards to growth hacking, I personally thought you know, what's the best way to learn?

Sure, awkward. No problem, I forgive you. Usually I wait for somebody to write on the screen. Like when I share and then it like immediately reminds me to turn off the feature for the crowd. Because Yeah, sometimes, you know, you might have like penises, and it can get a little wild turned into a bit of a fiasco. But back to the back to the growth hacking aspect. So I thought, What's the best way to learn growth hacking? And then I thought why not build a community with experienced growth hackers, right? Because I couldn't find an existing one so that I can ask questions and basically learn from them. And so I did, I set up a LinkedIn outreach of I think it was one account I just wanted made it my own personal account, to work with stylists. And I basically targeted growth hackers saying I'm building a community of experienced growth hackers, and I think you'd be perfect for it. Over time. You know, I started asking questions, I started learning but over time, I started answering more questions. And I was asking, and that's when I basically said, Okay, alright, maybe we can develop a bit of a thought leadership position in this whole thing. And I started creating content to basically back it up. As I started creating content, the group started growing the content started getting a lot more viewers etc. And it basically turned into its own flywheel effect. So the agency insight insight is dependent upon the communities essentially. So for those that aren't aware, it's inside inside it and it's a b2b growth hacking agency. We deal primarily with b2b clients for performance based services. So performance based lead generation, etc. And then on the flip side, I also have the growth hacking bootcamp. Now, the reason as to

Why the growth hacking bootcamp was created was because as I started answering more questions as opposed to asking them, right, a lot of the questions became repetitive. They were formulated along the lines of, you know, how do I automate my LinkedIn account? How do I set up ads? How do I do this? How do I do a cold email outreach, etc. So instead of answering these questions, one by one on a daily basis, what I basically did was was I just packaged the answers in video form, I created a info product around it, hence the growth hacking bootcamp. And people can join, they can pay, it's like 149 per three months. So it's, I try to keep it super, super cheap, because, for me, it's more of a memory depository. So whenever I come across a new growth hack I recorded and I posted there for growth hackers that are in the boot camp to basically take advantage of, and for me to revert to, right. So for me to check out like two to three months later, when I forgot about it to see what type of strategy I can basically employ for whatever I'm doing. And all of this is thanks to the community. So the growth hacking boot camp is growing, we're growing in user base, we're growing in subscribers, etc, the content on insight insight, and I'll explain a lot more with regards to my content marketing strategy a little bit later on. But the content is growing, right. And the agency is also going because a lot of our clients come directly from the community itself, because, you know, they see that we're not a one stop shop that just opened up for a month, and it's gonna disappear. The next day, they see that we've been around for a year and a half, two years, etc, which basically speaks for itself. And if they ever need any growth hacking services, if they ever need any lead generation services, they come directly to us, because they engage with us on a daily basis. So it's, it's like to a content marketing strategy. And the reason as to why I'm saying this, though, is to not boast about, you know, our achievements and what we've done, etc. It's to basically shed light on the fact that these are results that you can basically replicate for yourself, regardless of the industry that you're in. If you're in b2b, the results will be much better. If you're in b2c, you can also replicate them, but the strategies that you need in order to funnel traffic directly to your community are a little bit different. They're more mass market, as opposed to b2b where it's more, you know, it's more, much more targeted approach, well thought out one. And if you have, let's say, 50 people in your community, this can basically change the like change the course of your year, as opposed to b2c where it's low margin, you're selling low margin products that are direct to consumer, right, and you need volume in order to make a difference within your business. But essentially, how do I, I'm trying to see if I can basically delete the yellow line that Ahmed posted, was just additive.

And we'll kick it off from there. So I think it's a razor should be been done. So moving on to the first slide. Now, as I mentioned to everybody, as well, the like, as soon as you join, you're automatically muted, but there will be a q&a section towards the end where you can ask any question, etc, engage, add any inputs, but to kick it off

the purpose of online community? So starting off with the why aspect, right? Why would you want to go ahead and allocate resources and time in order to build an online community. The biggest reason, and you'll find me repeating this over and over again, is, if you own your online community, you own your distribution channel. Now this distribution channel can of course, serve as a distribution channel for content, it can serve as a distribution channel for promotions, it can serve as a grounds for networking as well. When I say distribution channel, right, in marketing, what I mean by this is, Facebook is a social media platform and a distribution channel. If you have a content marketing strategy, you can distribute your content directly on Facebook. Twitter is also a distribution channel, you can distribute your content on Twitter and your promotions, on Twitter, Reddit, same thing, etc. If you own your own community, you basically own that distribution channel from the aspect of you can post whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. And you can network in whatever style that you want, as opposed to basically borrowing somebody else's space. So essentially, as opposed to, you know, joining somebody else's distribution channel, somebody else's group, right, and then checking if post approval is on, like crafting something that, you know, it's not too salesy. It's not too pushy. And at the same time, it's providing value. If you own your distribution channel, you don't need to think about this. You can, I mean, it wouldn't be a good idea. But you can literally send a note, essentially, people will leave your group, but you own your distribution channel. And I just personally find it super important, especially in today's day and age, where attention is everything. Because if you own your distribution channel, you own the people's attention, you own the attention of the community, right? And then you're basically able to provide value guide their attention towards a certain offer, and they'll basically act on it if they see value in it on the aspect of how can this translate to revenue right? So Sonny just joined as well still have people joining how

A community translates revenue. All this depends upon how you're able to basically structure your community and your offer. And I'll give you two examples right now, let's say you own a solar company, for example, because a couple of people are in the real estate industry, if you own a solar company, and when I say solar, I'm talking about a company that basically supplies houses with solar tech, essentially, to basically take advantage of renewable energy. So energy from the sun, etc, pretty straightforward. If you own a solar company, one of the communities that you can basically build out is a community of real estate agents within your region, these real estate agents essentially will serve the purpose of potentially becoming channel partners for your company. So I'll just slow down. And I'll state that once again. Because just for the sake of simplicity, you own a solar company, you want to build an online community, build this online community with real estate agents that can serve as channel partners. And to simplify channel partners even more, I basically call them like affiliates, or, you know,

I wouldn't call them multi level marketers, but I call them like affiliate slash introducers. The reason is, as a solar company, it's pretty expensive to go direct to consumer, right? But it's cheaper to essentially go to real estate agents. And then these real estate agents take your product direct to consumer. So DTC. So what you do in that case, is you basically build a whatsapp group of real estate agents within your region, supply them with content, of course, so have an active content marketing strategy, maintain a couple of weekly webinars, writes with regards to how they can not push but essentially adopt solar within their like sales strategy within their sales cycle, what the benefits are, how much money they can make, of course, as real estate agents with regards to commissions, and that's it. Super simple strategy, right. And a whatsapp group can essentially serve as an asset to your business and your marketing strategy, as well as your sales strategy. Because instead of spending and going crazy on cpms, on Facebook, in order to go to direct to consumer, you essentially have your agents within your group that view you as a thought leader, and trust you, above all, because they engage with you on a daily basis. And they're able to basically push your product forward from there. That's one idea. On the flip side, as well. And I think it's an example that I've mentioned in a previous webinar that I ran two weeks ago, let's say your accounting firm, for example, another b2b example. But let's say you're an accounting firm, and you basically help businesses with their accounting, create a community, it can be on WhatsApp, it can be on Facebook, it can be on whatever channel you like. And essentially fill it up with business owners that are interested in, you know, learning more about accounting, or just making sure that their accounting is like interact, and create content with best tips and practices for accounting in 2021. So that's the bloodline of the community, quote, unquote. On the flip side, create a webinar as well weekly, and then create an info product, right, teaching them essentially, like if they're a DIY business owner that wants to apply these skills and the knowledge on their own business themselves create an info products for like the growth hacking boot camp. And then on the flip side, if they're looking for a dunk for you solution have an agency as well. So that's how the community essentially translates to revenue. So the more you scale your community, the more you scale, your revenue, etc. And it becomes directly cross correlated to the bottom line of your businesses.

The final question, of course, is why not just outreach within existing communities, and it all reverts back to the initial question of what's the like, why is it important to own your own distribution channels, if you join a bunch of communities right now on Facebook, you need to check if post approval is on you need to check if you can post if it's okay, if it's etc, so on and so forth. And it just becomes a hassle. And at some point, you're just going to think, why don't I just create my own space where people trust me, I essentially own the community, etc. And it just works out so much better, as opposed to joining other people's groups, renting space, trying to like make sure that you're not too pushy, not too promotional, etc. Like, because I've done both. And for those that are aware and unaware, I even have a YouTube video where I show people how to basically hijack slash, quote, unquote, steal other people's Facebook groups, not in a hyper invasive Wait, but like in a well thought out way with some cloaking, some, etc. More of a growth hack, as opposed to anything. What you do is you join a group, you scrape the list, and then you basically auto dm people directly with with Facebook Messenger, telling them hey, by the way, I saw that you're in this group, we're also launching another one on WhatsApp, feel free to join by this link. So that's, that's one way for Okay. See, you asked the question, I'll answer to pursue it. And as per the images as well. This is the initial growth hackers in group so for those that know for those that don't know, there's five of them right now. This one started two years ago. And this is growth hackers in one then we have 234 and five, and then on the flip side as well. I also have a Facebook group. So this is with 1.1

key members, etc. Now, both of these groups have translated into the success of both the agency and the bootcamp from a client perspective and from a student perspective. And that's essentially it. So let's answer some quick questions before we move on to the next slide. How do you build that community? Can we search for those specific professions? So that's the, that's the next slide on the aspect of how, how do you build them? Right? How do you structure your online community? How do you drive traffic towards it, etc. On the topic of how you build them,

it's essentially all depends upon where your target market is, right? If you want to build a WhatsApp community of accountants, LinkedIn is the way to go. If you want to build a Facebook group of people interested in blenders, for example, mass market, Facebook ads are the way to go, as well as Google PPC, tick tock ads, etc. If you want to go in the b2c world, if you want to build a group of real estate agents as well, LinkedIn is the way to go. Now, of course, anything that you know, anything that points towards the direction of LinkedIn, the most cost effective traffic driving strategy that exists right now is hands down LinkedIn automation. But on the flip side, as per my predictions, I personally feel that you won't be able to automate on LinkedIn within the upcoming 90 to 100 days, because of the restrictions that are happening right now, you see that there's limitations, you can only send some accounts have a limitation where you can only send by the 100 connection requests per week, not per day, per week, as opposed to previously you could send 100 per day.

fake accounts are being blocked, left and right, etc. So it's it's getting quite tricky. And it's not becoming as cost effective as before. But anything to do with LinkedIn for the next 90 days, of course, the most recommended route. And again, from a cost effective standpoint, I'm just trying to state the way that I do it, if I'm trying to get the maximum results for the least budget. It's most definitely LinkedIn automation, anything b2b. On the flip side, if you have a really big Twitter account, for example, and this is one of the automations that I did yesterday, I don't have a big Twitter account, but it's slowly growing in follower base from the spaces and the clubhouse rooms that I'm running, because people can basically go from clubhouse to your Twitter page. And from Twitter spaces directly on your Twitter page. Of course, it's pretty straightforward. But if you have a big Twitter account, you can basically auto dm all your followers. And I mean, your followers follow you for a reason. If your profile is, for example, niche down and it's let's say a profile of a marketing agency, these people follow you because they like what you're doing in marketing. So it makes sense to basically do a Twitter auto dm, when I say auto dm I mean, automatic direct message right? through a tool like Phantom Buster saying, hey, first name. Thanks for following me. We've also launched the group on Facebook, for example, feel free to join blah, blah, blah, so on so forth, we'll we're providing a lot of value there. People will join. Like, as soon as they open the message, they'll they'll be like, you know, it makes sense. This is a marketing profile. Why not join? Why not? I mean, they followed you for a reason, they might have liked your content, they might have liked whatever. So makes perfect sense.

On the flip side, as well, you also have cold email outreaches. But it's risky at the end of the day, because they might not be perceived. As you know, organic might be perceived as spammy and too invasive. So I generally stay away from that. But the best routes, of course, are LinkedIn, Twitter, in some cases, Facebook as well. And Reddit. So good content marketing strategy paired with Reddit in relevant subreddits can help you boost your community really, really well. So let's say if you're building a group of accountants heading to our slash accounting, and write out some good copy, when the hyperlink your actual communities group, like link the link of your whatsapp group and drive traffic to that, blogging as well YouTube videos, for instance, if you check inside insights YouTube channel on there, every single YouTube video that I ever post, there's a section saying Feel free to join our growth hacking whatsapp group, and people join because they'll watch the content. In some cases, they'll like it. And after that, they'll be like, okay, I want more of the sweet. Let's join the whatsapp group. It makes perfect sense. Now, and this is something that I'll explain later, if you pair if you pair let's say, a YouTube video with if you pair content with community and it's in sync, it's relevant. Then you could like it becomes a flywheel effect because people watch your videos, they like your videos, they join your community, you then post more content in the community. They watch more videos and the cycle goes on. So it's a flywheel effect. Essentially it's the exact same thing that Amazon has for growth because or Airbnb has for growth or Dropbox, Dropbox

As the one Dropbox basically took advantage of a flywheel effect, in order to basically grow without ad spend, because people would join Dropbox back when it started, they would run out of space, Dropbox had an offer, where if you invite three friends, you gain an extra three gigabytes and space, I don't know the exact numbers, people would invite more people, these people would then run out of space. As they run out of space, they would invite more people, etc. And it becomes a flywheel effect, it's essentially becomes a cycle. So if you do the exact same thing for your community, you're basically drop boxing its quote unquote. So that's the that's the flywheel effect with regards to content and community. So I hope that makes sense to everybody. If there's anything that you know, I might say that doesn't really resonate with you, or it doesn't make sense. Feel free to ask in the chat, and I'll be right back. But how do you structure your online community? So which platform

there's a lot of different community platforms right now, of course, you have WhatsApp, you have telegram, you have Facebook, you have discord, you have Slack, you have a bunch of different groups. What I look for whenever I choose a platform is which platform has the least desensitisation. So which platform has people checking their notifications as much as possible? WhatsApp is primarily for friends, family, business colleagues, etc. You don't really join like a lot of groups like just by accident, or etc. Most of the groups that you might have on WhatsApp right now are with friends family, and in some cases business of course, if you're using it for that story,

but personally speaking, as per the research that I did, I know that WhatsApp is hyper personal. Whereas Facebook groups, you join Facebook groups left and right, right, you might join a Facebook group for dog caretaking next day, you might join another one for b2b lead generation. The next day, you might join, you know, Integra mat Facebook group to basically learn more about you know how to use Integra mat because you have a certain question, so on so forth. So there's a wide array, and you won't check your notifications as much because you get notifications from Facebook groups every single hour. So when we see when we get the same thing over and over again, we're subjected to something called desensitisation where the notification just doesn't count as much anymore. Whereas on WhatsApp, because its friends and family hyper personalised, you're more likely to check, revert, engage, etc. So despite the fact that WhatsApp has a limitation of 256 members, I still feel that WhatsApp is the most hyper personal platform at the moment to build a community on and that's essentially why not one group but five on them, and I'm going to scale it to 10 by the upcoming 60 to 90 days, give or take. Now, telegram as well see, telegram doesn't have that limitation you can be you can build a telegram channel of 10,000 people and even 100,000 people if you want to. But the problem with telegram is telegram is so abused by spammers, scammers, crypto like forex, etc. that people might instal it right. And then they're like, okay, like, I'm getting a telegram notification, like every single minute, right? So sort of Screw it. And you might just open it once a day. Whereas What's up, you get the notification, you check. Personally, that's my view. Now Facebook, on the flip side, Facebook is good, right? But

in addition to the wide multitude of groups that exist on Facebook, the other problem is that Facebook's algorithm sucks.

Facebook's algorithm sucks so that you want ads, essentially, it's like a, like an incentivization. At the end of the day, don't make the algorithm sucks so that you look at other you know, like, what's, what other availabilities that we have, and then you look at ads, etc, you pay for the CPM, and you move from there. So essentially, my best bet, and like my best advice is test it out for the whatsapp group. Of course, if you're running, if you're trying to build a b2c community, you wouldn't really you know, be able to fit like a sizable amounts of your target market into a whatsapp group with a limitation of 256 members. In those cases, you actually need to, let's say, consider either a telegram or Facebook group. But if you're in b2b, Whatsapp is definitely the way to go. Now, how do you maintain your community through content?

Back to the flywheel effect, essentially, if you're creating content, right, you're essentially, like shortcutting, the necessary engagement that you need to have like with a group because if you build a community, you need to of course engage with it, you need to grow it, you need to keep it alive, you need to make sure that the conversation is flowing post questions, answer questions, etc. But one of the best like and most engaging, personally engaging shortcuts that I find is create content for the community, right? And then post the content in the community first, and then of course, optimise it for like YouTube search, etc. Because On the flip side, the alternative if you're Deepti, I got your question about slack as well answered super shortly. If you're a content creator, let's say you just created your first YouTube

To video, second thing that you think about is where do I post the video, right? So you might go on Reddit, you might go on Facebook groups, etc, distribution channels that are not your own.

If you own a community, though, and you create content based on the questions that you're getting within the community, right, it's essentially like a pre filmed webinar that you're posting right there. So it's engaging, people will have questions for it, people will watch it, your watch, time will go up, your likes will go up, etc. And then YouTube's algorithm, for example, if you're posting content on YouTube, will basically register that this content is getting viewed, right. And then it's going to promote it to its audience by its algorithm better, essentially. And this, again, creates somewhat of a flywheel effect. How do you monetize and drive traffic to your offer? So let's say in the case of the growth hacking Bootcamp, for example, like all the people that are in growth, hackers and 123, and four and five, if I see a question, right, that's already answered in the bootcamp with like, let's say a video that I spent, I don't know, half an hour or one hour on to basically create. And if I know that that video answers that question, I'll tell him look, feel free to join the growth hacking Bootcamp, the full layout of how to get this challenge, quote, unquote, completed is all there. So you know, why? Why sort of we answer the question from the beginning, if the direct solution isn't the bootcamp itself, and the bootcamp is cheap, it's 30 bucks per month, quote, unquote, 4050. So it's, it's not that much of a dent to your wallet at the end of the day, if you know if you have any question with regards to growth hacking. So that's, that's generally the best way if you're wanting Of course, on the flip side, if you're running an agency, for example, and you want to basically drive traffic to your offer, right? You will, in some cases, have people post questions about, you know, how do I grow my business? Or how do I do this, feel free to dm them, because you own the community, right, and basically say, listen, we're able to help you out, feel free to schedule a call on the flipside, if you're looking for, you know, advice that you can execute on your own, simply do this, this and that, etc. So give them the free option and give them the paid option as well, that's generally like the best way that I see always give value first. And then if they like the value that they get, they'll then basically promote themselves to you know, a paying clients or paying students or whatever, generally, never be too pushy, essentially, just provide value, First, make sure that the community is engaged, and that you're relevant, and like business will happen from there. But essentially, that's that. So as preview images, and by the way, guys, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the chat, and I'll go over them towards the end.

These are essentially the groups that we've built over time. So Inc, 2453, boot camp premium, and then growth hackers Inc. And then as per the flywheel effect, as well, so this YouTube channel, right, which is pretty okay, it's not like top tier, but it's like it's doing quite well, is a direct result of these communities. So the communities allow you to build content, right. And then this content basically drives more traffic towards the communities, creating a flywheel effect again, and I know I'm repeating it, but it's just like, it's basically one of the best aspects that you can have to your business, because you have a process that's basically self generating, and self propelling, as opposed to you needing to like input, more time, more adjustments, more ad spend, etc, it drives itself. I can, for instance, not create any YouTube videos for a month or two months. And I'll still have people joining the community because of all the previous videos that maintain the link, because YouTube does its work in the background. It's going to rank the videos, it's going to, it's going to promote it to I don't know, like ranking on YouTube search, etc. So again, flywheel effect, and it has its own effect without any input from you. So on to the next one.

How do you target Who do you target? Who do you want in your community on the aspect of who it's relatively simple, if again, accounting group, you target accountants, Real Estate Group, you target real estate agents, then what else?

If you're, let's say providing lead generation for law firms, you add lawyers at the end of the day, if you're selling yquem target the target market of the ecommerce brand at the end of the day of like you know who's more likely to buy your product, who can build communities, most definitely business to business and business to consumer businesses. At the end of the day, both b2b and b2c. And the biggest reason behind it is that, of course, your buyers a human right, and humans love communities, they love to engage, they love to watch content, they love to get questions answered, they love to network. So as long as your buyers a human, you can basically fill it up with humans and essentially build a community who can screw up your community. So who can fuck up your community at the end of the day? Hint, spammers, of course, so moderation is key, right? If you see that somebody has joined your community, and it's sort of becoming overboard, like they're over promoting too much, feel free to dm them and say, Hey, listen, we're trying to like keep the level of promotions down to a limit so that the community maintain like, basically stays organic. And you'll see me personally do this within like the growth

in groups, if somebody promotes without any admin approval or without any, like, if they don't ask an admin prior to any promotion will basically tell them to delete. In some cases, we might remove them. In some cases we might forgive, it's a case by case basis. But the point is, once you own your community, you control who posts what, right, not from a sponsorship perspective, but what promotions go out at the end of the day, right. And you control the flow of the community, as opposed to being the subject of somebody else's control, at the end of the day, because if you join another community, right now, if the admin doesn't like your offering, if the admin doesn't like your promotion, if the admin feels like you're stealing business away from him, they're gonna do the exact same thing to you. So the faster that you can understand that and basically build your own right, the faster you can basically take advantage of this. On the flip side, though, if you do want to, and I think I mentioned this before, but I'll just mention it again, because it's the it's a pretty important strategy. If you want to promote in other people's groups, right? Make sure that you have a good connection and a good relation with your admin. Because if you have a good connection and a good relation, if you've been on a couple of phone calls with the admins, etc, right? You have a relationship with them. They'll be like, Alright, screw it, like, you know, we've spoken to this person before it, they have good attention, they have a good product a good offer, it's no problem. But unless you have that relation, and then you just start promoting left and right, it really won't work. Like I've tried all angles. I've tried the hijacking communities, I've tried the, like negligence or just posting without, like any connection. And then I've tried the relation. The best one that works out most of the time is the relation because it'll be like downright, it'll be like, hey, by the way, we also offer this and this, I think your community could benefit greatly. I'm even willing to give you a percentage or a cut of whatever we close from your community. What do you think? In some cases, they'll be they'll look at your service or products? And they'll be like, yeah, sure, why not? In other cases, they'll be like, I don't really feel like it's a fit, etc. And from there on, you know, that you can move on. But most importantly, in the cases where they say like, yeah, sure, it makes sense, you have a relation for 612 24 months, where you can basically utilise their community that they're growing, as opposed to posting for a month and then getting blocked and deleted. It's it's a much more sustainable relation, or the other day becomes a business contact. And it becomes a distribution channel, which you can basically utilise for yourself as well. Just make sure your product and service is good. It's It's a very simple business strategy.

And, essentially, that's that the images that you can see right here are basically examples of how I drive traffic to the community. This is a Twitter automation we did yesterday. Basically, the template here is very, very simple. Hey there. So the Twitter account, basically people follow me know, we're a marketing company, right. And we're basically reaching out saying reaching out to personally invite you to the free growth hacking community on WhatsApp, etc, daily growth hacks, blah, blah, blah. And then positive response, the individual join a couple of cold email outreaches, which again, are risky, I don't recommend them. But if you're interested templates is as follows.

To try to make sure that you guys can see, hey, I came across your profile today on clubhouse reached out, blah, blah, blah, etc, community right here. And then the other one, this is from our mailing list, essentially, because we own a mailing list of growth hackers who join our Facebook community, they input their email, and then we they subscribe to my mailing list, essentially. So this one is totally clean. Join us here, weekly webinars host super active growth marketing discussions. And then of course, the LinkedIn automation one, which I know a lot of you would be interested in. Very, very simple. So

this is the second follow up that I sent on it was mastermind 48, which was another group that I tried to start but it never kicked off. But here's an invite, etc, blah, blah, blah, of course, you need to include a lot more information like growth hacking community, or whatever you're trying to start and just send the link. And yeah, and the thing is, when, when you're when you're outreaching to people with, let's say, a link to a community that you think they'd benefit from, it's classed as a value first approach. It's not classed as a, you know, schedule a call here to basically learn more about our business, which is more invasive, it's a more take take relation as opposed to a give give, right? And when I say give, it's more of a it's a friendly one. It's like, I've looked at your profile, I think you'd benefit from this group, I'm giving you value. So people in most cases, with this type of engagement, they'd be like, Uh huh, it seems like you know, he's trying to provide some value first before whatever, as opposed to, you know, hey, schedule a call here we offer digital marketing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, our retainer is, etc. I hope you guys can see the difference with regards to the two different approaches. If you're sending a group, right. It's in most cases perceived as a value first approach. If you're sending an outreach template value first approach if you're sending a lead magnet, or

like, let's see a list of investors to a company that's currently looking for investment value first approach as opposed to a Hey, schedule a call here. That's a take approach at the end of the show, just so that you can

As can basically understand the two dynamics with regards to any outreach.

Next one. So tips essentially, prior to the q&a, content content content, I think I made that pretty clear flywheel effect, create content for your community, share content, keep them engaged, daily engagement, plus weekly webinars. So if you do start a community, of course, make sure to host a weekly webinar, that's number one, a weekly webinar for the audience. And that is as well recorded, essentially, because if it's recorded, you can then repurpose it across YouTube, you can repurpose it, do an email campaign from it, start a podcast, etc, flywheel effect, and basically proceed from there, value, above all, monetization will happen on its own. This is the most important sentence with regards to anything that you might learn today with regards to like maintaining a community, think value first, don't even think about monetization, and it will happen later, monetization will happen on its own, because automatically, if you provide value to people, they will then look for more value. And if you tell them listen, all this is free. But if you want more, there's the growth hacking bootcamp. There's the I don't know, grow your agency, whatever, become an accountant course, or we have a service for it. They'll be like, yeah, screw it, I really don't mind paying, because I trust this person. They're a thought leader. They know what they're talking about. I've been in their groups for a year right now, it makes perfect sense. So value value value, and then you barely need to think about monetization. Essentially, it will happen on its own. And everybody loves communities at the other day, because as I mentioned, we're humans, we like to group we like to be in parks, etc. We like to relate with other people that share the same interests as us. So it makes perfect sense. So here, we started the family office community, essentially. And the reason as to why I included this image was because I thought that family offices are very stuck up, there's no chance that you know, they would ever join a community on WhatsApp, because they're super professional, they, you know, they'll, they're always in their suits, etc. Sort of like, stuck up at the end of the day. But I was actually proven wrong. So we did a LinkedIn outreach on automated LinkedIn outreach to family office principals and directors, and they actually joined, we filled it up with give or take 60 different family offices worldwide. And we still maintain the group. So it's still growing on a daily basis, people are engaging, they're sharing investment opportunities, etc. So the point here is, no matter how professional or outdated the industry is, you can still build a community of it, you can even build a community of top tier bankers worldwide at the end of the day, because why not? Right? It's possible, they're still human. So that's just a very important point that I'd like to share with regards to that. One of the best performing ones that I've seen so far is dash clicks community, and it's a marketing community. And what they do is they provide white label marketing services, and they'll they'll have agency owners join the Facebook group, right? network with other agency owners, and at the same time, resell dash click services, so the white label marketing agency services. So for instance, um, I think Robbie knows about them, if he's still in the in the call itself. Let's say you want to sell Facebook marketing services, for example, you can either do the delivery yourself, or you can white label it from another agency. That's exactly what that clicks does at like lower costs, right. And then they maintain a community with webinars, content, etc. And they're killing it. As far as I know, still killing it. This is Chad, I think I spoke to him like two years ago. But I was removed from this group, because I tried to take advantage of it because I didn't develop a relation essentially. So just keep that in mind. And Integra mat. Now, the reason as to why I posted this is because SAS plus communities equals great value at the end of the day. And that's one of the biggest things that we're seeing right now, integral math maintains a community of 10,000 members that are all integral math users. And they'll join there to basically overcome the learning curve faster, right to learn how to use the tool better. So this creates a community, it creates instant trust, you're much more likely to use a service much more likely to use the product, etc. So essentially, that's that

on to the q&a section super quick.

I think that's the last slide yet is q&a. If you guys have any questions, I'm all ears. Give it let's say, Max, one minute, if there's any questions that you guys have with regards to like anything that was mentioned, please feel free to ask and essentially, that's about it.

So Damon, how do we growth hack real estate please for an agency selling high ticket coaching programme, how do we growth hack real estate? So Damon, who is your target market, right, who are you targeting

and

High coaching programme. How much does your programme cost as well? Two questions that I need, who are you targeting? are you targeting real estate agents? are you targeting real estate investors? Who are you targeting?

| How To Build An Online Community | Complete Guide/Webinar For 2021 by Kyrill Krystallis of Inside Insight licensed under a creative commons attribution (reuse allowed) license. Based on a work at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhFjbDWHaik&t=1434s |

A Beginner's Guide to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Marketing People

Hi, I'm Jim sterne. And I'm here to give you an introduction to artificial intelligence for marketing. I've been in online marketing since 1994. I've written a slew of books about online marketing, advertising, customer service, etc. And my latest one is artificial intelligence for marketing. Now, I'm not here to teach you how to be a data scientist. I'm here to teach you how to be a better marketing professional. Artificial Intelligence is a new tool for us to use. And I'm here to explain what it is how useful it will be, and how you can up your game so that you will continue to be a valued marketing professional. Here's the outline. First of all, what is artificial intelligence? How does it work? What is it good at? And then what is it good for?

First of all, let's talk about what it is not.

Of getting a machine to recognise cats. We're going to give it labelled data. That means here's a photograph, and we're going to label all of the cats as cats. And it's going to look for what is similar? How are these things alike? Well, they all have these pointy things on the top of their head. They all have these almond shaped eyes, they're all sort of looking in this direction. And then it looks at this thing and goes, I don't know what that is. That's confusing to me. So you have to give it lots and lots and lots of cats in order for the machine to understand. And when I say a lot of data, let me just show you an example. This is how many data points it's necessary for CAPTCHA to understand that it's looking at the letter A.

So that is supervised, you know, the answers already unsupervised is when you don't know the answer. And you want the machine to figure out something for you. You want the machine to tell you something about the data that you didn't know before. So let's look at a bunch of my different customers, and tell me what buckets they belong in. These are the ones who are most likely to purchase. These are the ones with the highest lifetime value. These are the ones who are most likely to never buy from me again. Or let's go out and now that you know what my best customers look like, go out and find others out in the world who looked like that, that I should advertise to this is an labelled data really, really good for categorization.

The third category, the third type of machine learning is reinforcement. This is when you're not sure what the answer is, we want to put the right message in front of the right person at the right time. But there is no exact message to put in front of a person at exactly the right time. So we give the machine the authority, the capability of trying things out of experimenting. And if it gets the right reaction, somebody clicked or they engaged or they purchased, then the machine gets a reward, a mathematical reward. And so it tries to do that better. And it tries to optimise over time.

So we've got supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.

Okay, that's what it is. But how does it work?

So the amazing thing about this stuff is that it actually delivered on the promise of big data. Big Data was a great idea. But it's just too much for the human mind to hold too many permutations too many possibilities, too many numbers to keep track of. Fortunately, computers are very good at keeping track of numbers. So that's great. So data scientists created a bunch of algorithms. Now, it's not terribly important that you understand what all of these are. If somebody talks about decision trees or support vector machines, that's fine. Just go along with the conversation, they'll get around to it being meaningful soon. But just for the sake of interest, let's dive into what a neural network is and what deep learning means.

This is the simplest of possible neurons, we've got three inputs and a decision. The three inputs are, how much will it cost to go to the movies? How's the weather outside? And how much work will it be?

So how much does it cost to go to the movies? Well, if I want to go to a Hollywood premiere, I have to get on an aeroplane and rent a hotel room and rent a toxin. That's, that's expensive, that's too expensive. I'm not going to go doesn't matter about anything else. I'm just not going. But if I'm, if it's a normal price ticket, well, the next consideration is Oh, there's a blizzard outside, or it's 120 degrees outside. I'm not going anywhere. So it doesn't matter if it's free, I'm not going to go. Or Finally, the amount of effort I have to get a babysitter have to stop by and check up on my dad and make sure he's okay. Got to make sure we stopped at the grocery store on the way back. Oh, that's just too many things going on at once. That any one of these can override the others and be the go no go decision. Now, neural networks have hidden layers. So in this human example, the hidden layer is the last time we went to the movies, we saw science fiction action adventure. So this time, we're gonna have to see a romantic comedy. Hmm. Last time we went, I broke a tooth on an unpopped kernels popcorn, bad experience. The last time we went to the movies, my wife and I got in an argument about where we should Park and so that was not a pleasant experience. Hmm. Now, I'm not consciously thinking all of these things. They're just they're going on back here. So when she asks, Hey, honey, do you want to go to the movies? I'm going? Not really. And if she says why, then I've got to start sorting through all of my thought processes. That's what the machine is doing. It's hidden layer.

of computation. And it can have 1000s of layers. It can have many, many hidden layers, which are not logical. They're not reasonable. They're mathematical.

And then the machine spits out an answer. And let's say that we're looking at supervised and it says, this is a cat. And we say, No, no, no, that's not a cat. And it's important for you to know that it's not a cat, and go back and figure out why you thought it was a cat and fix it. So the machine is going to work backwards, and is going to find which node overrode the whole decision and which node cause that one to change its mind and which previous one caused it to change its mind. And this is called back propagation. Now, this is as much math as I'm going to show you backpropagation says, Oh, I see why I thought that was a cat. I'm going to change the model, the mathematical model. So if I see something that looks like that, again, I'll know what's a skunk?

Now, here's where things get fun. Decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, neural networks, deep learning. What if we put them all together in an ensemble? What if we gave the machine the choice over which algorithms to use and how to use all of them? To figure out which one's best? Yeah, it's a little meta. But this is where data scientists are playing these days. It gets really interesting, really quickly. So that's what it is. And that's how it works. But what's a good at? Well, two things specifically, dimensionality, and cardinality. And if you're like me, those terms mean nothing. So allow me very briefly to explain. dimensionality is attributes per object. Okay, what's an object? It is a thing in your database? Let's call it a person. So you've got a bunch of people in your database, big data, lots of people great. But if you know a lot of things about them, that's many attributes, you know, their name, address, phone number. When was the last time they called when? What were the last 16 pages they looked at on your website? What's their phone number? Those are attributes about them. cardinality is options per attribute. So let's take phone number, that little yellow.is that individuals phone number, how different is it from everybody else's? Completely? The number of options of phone numbers is as many people as there are, everybody has their own phone number. So what is their age? Well, somewhere between one and 120. What is their zip code? Well, there's 43,000 zip codes in the United States. What is their phone number? Well, there are 7 billion people, there are 7 billion phone numbers. So there are lots of dimensions, we know a lot of different things. And lots of options per attribute. And you put those together. And there are so many permutations, the human mind can't handle it, but the machine can. The machine is really good at high dimensionality and high cardinality. So here's a quick recap of what we covered. so far. supervised and unsupervised. Reinforcement Learning decision trees. Yeah, I skipped over support vector machines didn't have enough time. Neural Networks, putting them all together and ensemble. And then what is the good machine? Good. Okay, so how is it useful? Well, it's good for marketing. If we go all the way back to the definition of artificial intelligence, you remember, it included things like robots? Well, yes, robots. So this is a Japanese hotel that uses a robot to check you in, step up to the counter, the robot will check you in unless you go to the next counter over. And then this robot will check you in. And if you're really good, this robot will bring you your midnight snack. Robots are also being tested in stores. So the Lowe's, home improvement stores are using robots to greet people at the door and direct them to what they're looking for. When we get to computer vision, here's a company called gum gum that looks at social media to identify what's out there, and reports back to you on where your image shows up. Your brand shows up who's talking about you what kind of influence they have, whether you'd like to reach out and engage them with further promotions or to use their visuals and of course to track the competition. Now computer vision is also useful for augmented reality here to find your store or to identify pricing here to bring to 3d life, two dimensional picture or just to help you find recipes off the ketchup bottle. Warby Parker. is using it to help you identify what kind of glasses would look best on you. When it comes to natural language. Well, you talk to your phone, right? You talk to your Alexa or your Hey, Google device. These things are becoming more ubiquitous and are going to becoming a serious challenge to marketers. When you ask Amazon to send you more paper towels, which brand is it going to choose? And how do we as marketers get on that list? Now when we bring these together, it becomes a very compelling, natural language processing conversation, bots, voice recognition. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the staples easy button. But take a look at this video.

It's just a blue pen, right? sounds simple, but it's surprisingly complex. What brand? What type? What quantity? Now magnify that across the chaos of all this stuff you order for all the people in your office? What if managing this was as easy as saying, hey, please tell me what you need. Blue pens. Now it is. That's the magic of the staples easy system. using simple spoken words anymore post it notes. The easy button lets you order everything your team needs to be productive, fed, and caffeinated French Vanilla coffee and letter size copy paper. Got it. That was easy. It's an extra set of hands, helping you save countless hours, manage costs, and to maintain control of ordering supplies through boxes of Sharpies. The staples easy button brings the power of on demand to businesses on any device exactly when something is needed. Drivers markers order with voice through the easy button or through the app border with a text with an email with a slack bot with a photo. Or even with Facebook Messenger. It's easy to track shipments, I need to check on my order and get in touch with customer service. The brain behind the easy system is IBM Watson. Watson's cognitive intelligence turns what you say into data, and then turns that data into answers you need. The staples easy button learns over time. With every interaction, it becomes more personalised and more intuitive. Please tell me what you need. So when you tell the easy button, you want blue pens, it knows the exact blue pens you want. Got it? That was easy. That's the staples easy system.

I think you'll agree that's a pretty compelling story, and a glimmer of what kinds of opportunities we as marketing people have to work with in the future. But what about today? How do you bring this on board? How do you bring this into your company? what what what's the first thing you need to do? Step one, you are responsible as a marketing person to know marketing, and to know the industry that your marketing for what questions you're trying to ask what problems you're trying to solve what business imperatives you're trying to address, the machine will only do what it's told you need to know what to tell it. Number two, know your data. Where is it collected? How is it collected? How is it stored? How is it cleaned? How is it integrated with other data? how might it go wrong? What How might you bring two datasets together that address different realms but somehow need to find a way to mesh together? That's a human problem. So where do you begin? You start with tasks that are repetitive, and sort of boring, and have a lot of data available. Whether it's sorting sales leads, or coming up with a response to social media questions, or creating a chatbot. These are the things that there are lots of iterations and an opportunity for a machine learning system to help you. The next question is should you build this stuff or buy it and I am strongly on the buy side building, it means you have to hire data scientists, you're going to compete with everybody in their brother who is out there building this stuff, to find the PhDs who can figure out algorithms. But at the same time, large companies like Google and IBM and salesforce.com are adding machine learning tools into their data systems. If you're a Google Analytics user or an Adobe analytics user, those companies are building machine learning systems into their marketing platforms. But there's also a lot of venture capital money being spent at startups. So startups are coming up with ways of taking what data you have applying their data science and giving you insights and answers. You have to decide what problem you want the machine to solve. And then you have to decide what data it should Consider, if you give it too little data doesn't have enough to work with. If you give it too much, it won't be very confident in its answers. So there is a correct amount, or a correct variety of data to be considered. And finally become proficient at the smell test. Now, this is something that's uniquely human, the machine is going to take the question you asked, take the data that it's been given and come up with an answer. And if you change the data, it can change its answer, that's fine. But it can't tell you whether the answer is meaningful. There are some things a human can look at and just go, nope, that is not gonna work. I can tell. So where does the human come into this? What advantage Do you have over the machine, the machine is crackerjack at large amounts of data. It can correlate quickly. It's very accurate. It's low cost, it doesn't get tired. It doesn't take vacations, but it ain't human. It doesn't understand compassion, or empathy, or insight. It doesn't understand ambiguity, it cannot take two conflicting concepts and make sense out of them. And that's what the human can do. So here's your homework assignment. Your job will be to stay tuned with what kinds of tools are available, and what they can do. They're changing rapidly. Stay tuned. Number two, train your bots. This is a very interesting area. You're already using spellcheck, right? Well, there's a system that Google has that will guess the rest of your sentence, not just the spelling mistakes, but suggest entire sentences for you to just hit return, and make it faster for you to write up a response to an email.

If those kinds of tools are available to everybody, then your special value comes in training, your version of that tool to understand you better train your bots, because eventually you're gonna walk into a company, and you're gonna have an interview, and they're gonna say, What experience do you have? What tools do you use? Well, I'm very good at Word and PowerPoint and Excel. And here are a half a dozen bots that I have trained to help me do market research to help me do analysis to help me write reports to help me identify good graphics to use. And those are part of your skills. You're bringing that trained bot into the picture, and that makes you a better catch in the future. My name is Jim stern. I run the marketing evolution experience conference. I'm co founder of the digital analytics Association. And I hope you now have a strong introduction to artificial intelligence for marketing. Thanks for listening.

| Intro to Artificial Intelligence for Marketing by Jim Sterne licensed under a creative commons (reuse allowed) license. Based on a work at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvrkKsdOBoA |

Top ebay Alternatives: The Best Marketplaces to Sell in 2021

Better alternatives to selling on eBay and Amazon? Hey, have you been selling on eBay and Amazon, you just don't want to do it anymore. I mean, maybe the fees are too high, maybe you lost your account. Or maybe you're just tired of competing with people that don't even care if they make a profit. Well, in this video, I'm going to give you the best alternatives to selling on Amazon, eBay. And we're starting right now.

Hey J.R. Fisher here.

If you're new to my channel, don't forget to subscribe, go down there now hit that subscribe button. And don't forget, while you're there, join the family. How do you do that? you ring the bell right next to the subscription button, you hit that you smash that bell, and you turn on all notifications so that you can join our VIP family. And I can let you know every single time there's a new video. Now I've been selling online since 2009. I've sold millions of dollars worth of both physical and digital products. And you know what I share all those tips and techniques with you on this channel.

So you can start run and grow your online business. Now at the end of this video, I've got a bonus for you. It's an e commerce course valued at $97. And you can get absolutely free by just clicking the link in the description. So if you've been selling on Amazon and eBay, what is your experience been? Has it been good? Has it been bad? What have you found that's worked for you? And do you have alternatives to selling on Amazon and eBay? I'd like to hear all your comments, put them in the comment section below. And I'd love to talk to you about it.

Okay, the first alternative I'm gonna tell you is Etsy. Now, Etsy started in 2005. And it was more of a artsy kind of crafty website. And they've grown since then. And I mean, they'd grown in a big way to where they have 1.6 million sellers on there. Now all kinds of products, both new and crafted products. They also have 26 point 1 million buyers on there now, which is amazing. So that's a great site for you to try out and sell your products on. There's all kinds of cool gadgets and T shirts, and mugs and all kinds of stuff. And if you use one of those print on demand companies, you can actually sell it on Etsy. Now both Etsy and eBay both have a listing fee that's required. eBay listings last you 10 days unless it's a fixed price, and then the last up to 30 days. When selling on Etsy, your listings last up to four months, which is a lot longer and it's gonna save you some money and listing fees. etsy is also a lot cheaper when you're selling something. It's only a three and a half percent sales fee.

Now, if you've ever tried to contact eBay support, you know that can be a challenge. etsy has much better support much easier to get ahold of somebody and get the help you need. Now Etsy certainly is more geared towards handmade and vintage products. So if you have something that fits in that area, you're going to do really well on Etsy, something that's more unique. Now this next site that I would recommend to you is Bonanza. Now Bonanza even has a catchphrase that says fine everything but the ordinary one Bonanza, you're allowed to sell a much wider variety of wholesale products, which opens up more opportunities for you. The next one that's available is called Ruby lane. Ruby lane is more on the antique side and vintage type items. If you have items that are antiques or that are vintage,

those are really good products for Ruby lane. Okay, here we are at Bonanza, they are headquartered in Seattle, and they're kind of new to the e commerce scene, but they're doing incredibly well. Right now. The marketplace encompasses more than 22 million items ranging from Godzilla garden gnomes to taxidermy alligators, all kinds of crazy stuff. A lot of the sellers are making good money on Bonanza site has merchants and shoppers in nearly every country around the world. And there's more than 40,000 sellers that have already created businesses here. So Bonanza is one of the easiest selling platforms to use, and its popularity is on a rise amongst almost all sellers. Matter of fact, Bonanza has taken out the top rating for communication once again. They were just voted the most recommended selling venue there is on the internet, according to entrepreneurs, 360 Best Companies list now as we compare Bonanza to eBay, Bonanza is similar to eBay and it is a huge range of different products that are being sold on both, but the sky's the limit for what you can sell.

Unlike eBay, however, many items on Bonanza are quirky and unique, extraordinary items that really do well here. Because Bonanza doesn't make money until its sellers do you'll see much higher profit margins, it's absolutely free to list things on Bonanza, which is really cool because they charge a fee on eBay. And the average fee per sale can be as little as three and a half percent, which is considerably less than eBay. Bonanza is also a fixed price marketplace, meaning that buyers pay the listed price as opposed to bidding like eBay's auction style ones are Bonanza also sends every item listing to Google and Bing and sellers have the option to get more exposure by advertising their listings in other channels such as pricegrabber next tag and Bonanzas affiliate advertising programme. Also, many online sellers like to list their items on multiple platforms, which is why Bonanza has easy to use import features for listings on eBay, Etsy and Amazon.

Now although Bonanza is monthly traffic is lower than eBay's the ratio of shoppers to sellers on Bonanza is much higher. It's like 1300 to one on Bonanza versus less than 10 to one on eBay. This means far less competition between sellers and far more chances for buyers to see your products. Now, if you're trying to decide if Bonanza is best for you, it's really for unique products, products that you're not going to find in other places, products that are really kind of out of the ordinary, that's where you'd want to go is Bonanza, some of the top categories would be collectibles, that's a big category on Bonanza, also homerun garden, women's fashion is also very big, and of course health and beauty.

Now the next place that's available is Craigslist, people forget all of the possibilities that you can use Craigslist for you can sell almost anything on Craigslist, well, including yourself in the personal section. It's kind of like a no frills thing that has no listing fees, no selling fees, but it's also super basic and design, you're not going to get a lot of the bells and whistles you'd get with the other sites. You know, after all, it's really just a forum. It looks like something that was written in the 90s. But keep in mind this is free to you in being able to sell on Craigslist for free. Well, it's pretty good deal. How does Craigslist directly compared to something like eBay or Amazon? Well, eBay charges to list and sell items.

Craigslist only charges for a small handful of post types. So like if you're listing a job, or vehicles, something like that they are going to charge a fee for those products are actually free to list. Now, e Bay will get involved in disputes if necessary, while you're on your own on Craigslist. So there's kind of a higher risk there. Craigslist requires you to sell locally. And often you arrange for pickup or drop off of the items so you're not shipping them out.

There's also limits your marketplace compared to eBay, which usually involves shipping to a wider market area. I like eBay, Craigslist has a free section where people aren't looking to make money. Yep, that's right. They just are trying to get rid of things they don't want. A lot of this will be junk. But you can keep an eye out for anything that you can get maybe resell for decent profit, especially if you're skilled at fixing things up.

Now the next place I want to look at is eBay. That's number four is he bid he bid is like another sell anything marketplace. It's similar to eBay and Amazon in his platform for selling is almost anything still. But it's not as well known. You're going to be selling to a smaller pool of buyers. There's not quite as many people you could sell to. But it's definitely a lower cost option than eBay or Amazon. But the probability rating is also a lot lower the absence of listing fees and a low 3% commission charge per sale does make this a low risk marketplace to test out.

So if you're looking for a change, and you've got little or nothing to lose by putting them there. Now keep in mind Ebid is similar to eBay, in that they both have an auction style format for product listings. eBay is a larger platform than E bid and receives more traffic. eBay is a much cheaper alternative than eBay. And it's a lower risk option. But they're both trusted marketplaces with a wide variety of product categories. Next up on the list number five is racket, Tim. Now they're doing a lot of advertising on TV. Now they're getting a lot of press racket Tim was formerly known as by.com. And they were considered the Amazon of Japan.

Now Japan is not the first country that comes to mind when you're thinking about e commerce but get this Japan's population is more than 126 million. And more than 90% of Japan's internet users are registered at racker time. So that tells you something right there. That's a big marketplace. One benefit of Rakuten is that you're not competing with the website itself. Now that's really different, unlike Amazon, which sells dozens of its own brands on the site. And if you're selling really well in a particular area, they'll probably come up with their own brand. racker 10 does not compete with sellers, you also have more power to customise your store within the platform. And something that other e commerce websites don't allow is that customization that you're going to get over there.

There are some really big names like Dell, Lenovo, Office Depot, air, weed and dice and that use racket. Whakatane is more like Amazon and eBay. It's more of a traditional online retail site, not an auction type platform. Now, believe it or not, the fees on records are actually higher than eBay. And they're calculated a different way you're gonna pay a $33 a month fee just to be able to sell on the site. And then on top of that, you're gonna pay between eight and 15% for a category fee and a 99 cent fee every time you sell something.

Our next site we want to look at is new a new egg is an online marketplace that really claims to be number one in a marketplace for everything technology. So if you're in a technology based type thing, new egg is going to be the site you're gonna want to be on. Now a new egg sellers can list products on the marketplace with reaches up to get this 36 million customers. New egg is based in California and has distribution facilities all across North America and also in Canada is a global reach of more than 50 countries at this point, but you're going to be a lot more restricted in terms of what products you can sell new AIDS is really for tech products.

So if you're not in tech products, you're not gonna be able to do it. Now the flip side is if you're going to sell on Newegg understand that everybody coming to New egg is looking for tech products so you've got a much more defined and targeted audience. New Age also does offer fulfilment service and they're going to be shipped by new egg similar to Amazon's FDA new egg also offers a fulfilment service called sbn shipped by Newegg. It's similar to Amazon's FBA which is fulfilment by Amazon. But eBay doesn't do any fulfilment at all. So you couldn't do that on that site.

Now Newegg provides account managers who can help you set up your business and guide you along the journey. Newegg offers tiered membership options, so they've got a free one. They've got a 2995 a month and they've got a 9995 a month. The more you pay, the more support tools flexibility and listings that you're going to get. They also take a commission and don't forget that that's a rate of between eight and 15%.

The next site I want to talk about is e crater.com. And e crater is 100%. free online marketplace. The main appeal of E crater is that it's free to set up a store. And it even has templates that you can use to easily create an attractive store, it is possible to import your listings from eBay, which is good if you're looking for a transition entirely.

There's not a lot of information on ecrater. online but It's said to be at least 65,000 active stores on the site and the number of customers than the amount of traffic pales in comparison to the larger e commerce platform. So it's probably best to use as a complimentary marketplace, we could sell a little bit more extra goods rather than one that you solely rely on to run your business. So how does ecrater work? Well, it's 100% free to open and run a store and he crater However, if a creator brings you a sale, it takes 2.9% of the total sale, you keep 100% of the sales that you bring to your store through your own SEO and marketing offers. While there's no recent data available, the number of users and visitors on E crater will be much fewer than eBay's numbers.

The ecrater provides online store templates, which does help you out but you can also customise your store to include your own branding. The next one we're going to talk about and we mentioned a little bit was Ruby lane now what's Ruby Lane? Well Ruby lane is really a legitimate alternative to selling on eBay. It's been designed to bring buyers and sellers of antiques, art, vintage collectibles, and all kinds of different jewellery together. It's similar to one's on Bonanza and Etsy. Ruby lane currently has 1.1 million unique visitors per month, which is impressive really for a niche marketplace. The majority of the people who are on the site are either from the UK, Australia, Canada, and the USA, some also in Germany, but it has a global reach of 85% of women users aged over 40 which is pretty darn good.

Almost all describe themselves as collecting enthusiasts. So if your product is something that people can collect, and they can buy more of it would be a great product on Ruby lane. It seems to attract more purposeful educated buyers who may be willing to spend more money so your profits could be much higher there. Ruby lane is a fixed price marketplace. It has no bidding on it. It's much more nice than eBay, focusing only on antiques, arts, collectibles, jewellery, that type of thing, which means your visitors to your store are more targeted, that's a good thing if you have those products. While there's no commission Ruby lane charges 19 cents per listing in a tiered maintenance fee that ranges from $69 a month for smaller sellers. 2.01 cents per item for major sellers. There's also a one off $100 setup costs that you're going to have to incur when you start your store there.

There's also greater quality control and Ruby lane and sellers are much more vetted. The next one I want to talk about is Walmart, Walmart. Can you sell your products on Walmart? You sure can we have our products listed on Walmart. It's not widely known that Walmart, one of the largest retail corporations on the planet has entered into e commerce marketplace world. See Walmart marketplace is a platform where select sellers can list and sell their products. It's very similar to Amazon, because you're going to be competing with Walmart. That's just the way it is. It's definitely worth considering though, as an alternative to selling on eBay. You get to take advantage of Walmart's massive reach and customer base and it's free and easy to get the set up. Walmart seems to be taking the e commerce space more seriously lately.

So it's likely to be investing heavily in this area, which who knows maybe we'll bring you more business there are no Setup or maintenance fees, merchants just pay a referral fee of between eight and 20% for successful sales. Now that's a pretty high percentage. There's no auction option. It's just fixed price listings. Depending on your product and niche, you could be competing against some Walmart known brands, which may be given priority on the platform. Of course, it's their website, Walmart, online sales are lagging behind eBay and Amazon, but it's in the early days and they're just getting started, you're going to have to expect lower margins there because of their fees,

Walmart prioritises competitively priced products, which means you might get caught up in a race to the bottom, which is never good. And the last place I want to talk about Yep, your online store. That's right your store, you can sell stuff on your store, you can have your own website, hey, the cool thing is there's no competition, you can sell on your very own website, you can set up some type of e commerce plugin if you have a WordPress website. And it's really one of the easiest ways to go.

When selling on your own website, you know, you've got to establish your own traffic, people aren't going to just becoming there, you're going to have to drive traffic through ads, social media, or by some other means maybe email marketing. But once you're set up and running, you don't have to compete with anybody, you don't have to worry about cost of fees, you don't have to worry about listing fees, you have your own site. So how does your own site compared to these other sites? Well, if you were selling on eBay, you know, you would have to be competing, you'd be building your own brand. If you're selling on your own site, you can choose things like which payment forms to

accept, or you can tweak the design of your store to see your own preferences. You're not competing with anybody if you're on your own site. And that's a pretty cool thing. This means you don't have to lose sales to other people. It also means you don't have to compete on your pricing, because Yours is the only price on the site.

Okay, so there's 10 top alternatives to selling on Amazon and eBay. They're all great alternatives, and they fit different people based on their products. So you kind of got to look at your product, what they offer, I would suggest you do a little bit more research on each one of them before you actually invest your time and money in putting your products there. Now, if you enjoyed this video, guys, do me a favour, you're gonna join the Fisher family.

How do you do that? You hit that subscribe button down there below, then you subscribe to my channel. And don't forget, you got to smash the bell the bell which is right next to the subscribe button there, you've got to smash that button. And when you do, it's going to get a pop up and you want to click on show all notifications. That way I can tell you every single time I've done a video Now, as I promised I have an e-commerce course it's a $97 value, and you can get it absolutely free. I put a link in the description down there. All you got to do is click on it. I really thank you for listening to this video.

And if you've got some suggestions of places where you would like to sell your products or that you have sold your products for if you've had any dealings with Amazon or eBay, put that in the comment section below. I really appreciate you listen to this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also click on one of those videos there and keep watching on my channel.

| Better alternatives to selling on eBay and amazon - best websites to sell by J.R. Fisher Training is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribution (reuse allowed) license. Based on a work at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1frYxovgp4 |