“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”

You don’t need to be a fictional detective to agree with his statement, nor do you need to be one to uncover your eCommerce store analytics. Luckily for you, the conversion rate data is usually right in front of your eyes. All you need to do is learn how to interpret it and optimise it for even better results.

In under to improve the results of your eCommerce store, it’s important to set up some benchmarks to monitor. Without benchmark metrics, any efforts to make improvements, such as increasing your store conversion rate, is like shooting in the dark.

Benchmarking allows you to define key metrics that you can use as reference points to compare and contrast against industry averages in order to identify potential areas for improvement.

Additionally, when a benchmark shows that your store is above average in a particular metric, you can rest assured that you’re on the right track and avoid wasting time trying to fix what isn’t broken.

In this article, we’re going to explore our top 5 benchmarks to monitor and let you know how to find yours for comparison, followed by an example of benchmark analysis and finally a recommendation on some tools you can use to take your benchmarking to the next level.

Top 5 Benchmarks to Monitor

1. Store Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate shows you how many of your website visitors convert into customers, as any eCommerce agency can tell you. This is a very important benchmark to monitor because slight changes to your website–like changing the colour of the ‘Add to Basket’ button–could decrease or increase the amount of conversions you get. Of course, the higher your conversion rate, the better!

The average conversion rate for online stores is 1.33%. Calculating your conversion rate is easy. All you need to do is divide the number of orders by number of visitors. So if, on average, 1 out of every 100 visitors performs a checkout, then your conversion rate is 1%.

If you host your store on Shopify or BigCommerce then you don’t need to worry about the maths, they do it for you!

To find your conversion rate in Shopify, click ‘Analytics’ then ‘Dashboard’:

There you’ll find your conversion rate (among other benchmarks that we’ll look at shortly!)

If you click ‘View Report’ you can set a date range grouped by day, week or month and export to CSV to view more detailed metrics:

Similarly, if you’re using BigCommerce you can head to the ‘Analytics section’ and your conversion rate will be clearly displayed in the overview section:

As you can see, ‘visits’ is right alongside this so you can get a better idea of how many people are converting into customers. Track this over time – it is a core metric that you want to be able to influence with conversion rate optimisation efforts.

2. Repurchase Rates

It can cost an incredible 5x as much to attract a new customer, than it does to keep an existing one. With that in mind, your repurchase rate is a great benchmark to measure because it allows you to see how many of your customers come back to your site again and again.

On average, eCommerce stores have a repeat customer rate of around 5%–so you want yours to be around that mark, or higher if possible. If your repurchase rate is low then consider implementing a loyalty programme, or email marketing, to keep existing customers coming back for more.

To find your repurchase rate on Shopify, head to your analytics dashboard and find the chart labelled ‘Returning customer rate’:

The purple line represents ‘first time’ customers and the green line represents your returning customer rate.

On BigCommerce, click on Analytics and then the Customers tab to find out how many of your customers are returning:

3. Abandoned Cart Rates

There can be a number of reasons why this happens–some customers leave because they dislike the checkout process, others because of shipping costs, and some because they got distracted or got ‘cold feet’.

On average, ecommerce stores lose about 25% of their sales in the checkout process. So around 75% of people who add items to cart should be successfully checking out. If you find that your abandonment rate is higher than 25% then you should probably take a look at streamlining your checkout process. In other words: make it as easy as possible for customers to convert.

A common ‘quick fix’ for a high abandonment rate is to offer free shipping to your customers. You shouldn’t have to take a loss when you do this, with careful planning you can bundle average shipping costs into your product pricing. This way when people add products to their cart and then go to checkout, they won’t get a surprise when they see shipping costs and then decide against the purchase.

To find your abandonment rate on Shopify, you need to take a closer look at your conversion data:

You need to calculate what percentage gap of users who ‘added to cart’ and users with ‘sessions converted’ – this will give you the % of users who abandoned their cart.

For example using the summary data above:

• Purchases not completed = purchases initiated (added to cart) less purchases completed (sessions converted) = 8,832 − 2,156 = 6,676.
• Abandonment rate = Not completed / Customer Initiation = 6,676 / 8,832 = 75% abandonment rate.

On BigCommerce, head to the ‘Abandoned Carts’ tab to see a clear overview of your abandon rate and also how many orders you’ve lost:

Another simple tactic to influence this particular benchmark is to implement an Abandoned Cart email sequence – which sends an email reminder to people (ideally those who have opted in to communications) with a reminder to complete the purchase. This can be surprisingly effective and there are a number of apps for BigCommerce and Shopify that you can use to automated abandoned cart messaging.

4. Bounce Rates

When people come to your site–for example by having searched for a product in Google, or clicking on a link in a blog, or through a paid advertisement on Facebook–but then leave immediately without performing any action, it’s known as a ‘bounce’. And despite the fun name, a high bounce rate is not good.

When people leave your site without doing anything, regardless of how they got there, it sends a signal to search engines that your site is not useful to visitors. This is bad for your visitors too because clearly they did not find what they were looking for. The average bounce rate of an eCommerce store is around 60%.

If your bounce rate is higher than this, it could signal that your website isn’t user-friendly. Perhaps it’s too busy and difficult to navigate, or it could mean that your store is not in line with what visitors are expecting when they arrive on your site.

You can monitor your bounce rate via Google Analytics. This can be found by clicking Behaviour and then ‘all pages’ under the Site Content tab:

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5. Email Conversion Rates

Email is consistently the top referring channel in eCommerce with an average conversion rate from email clicks to orders placed of around 3.8%.

If your conversion rate is below this, you should focus on running experiments designed to improve clicks to purchases, for example, a redesign of email templates, a review of offers, or a re-permission campaign to clean out your email list and get rid of zombie subscribers.

You should be able to find your email conversion rate through your mail provider, and you’ll also be able to set up experiments through your provider too. If you don’t have a mail provider, some popular choices are MailChimp and SendGrid.

You can also track email conversions through Google Analytics. This article does a great job of explaining how.

You should also check out our article The Importance of Email in Selling Custom Merchandise to find out why email is so important in eCommerce and also for some top list building techniques!

Benchmarking in Action: Setting Experiments & Making Improvements

So now you know what to measure, let’s focus on how to set experiments and make improvements. Here we have an example of analytics for an eCommerce store:

As you can see, we aren’t happy with some of our benchmarks (highlighted in red). At first glance, our sessions to cart is very promising, at 3.31%. However, even with an assumed 25% abandoned cart rate, there is a steep drop between this and sessions to checkout (0.6%), and even less customers are actually placing orders (0.11%).

This is a clear indicator that there is something in the checkout process that is causing an unusually high drop off.

Before going any further, we need to decide what we want the outcome of our experiments to be. In this case, we want our metrics to reach the industry standard:

To do this, we could conduct the following experiments and monitor our chosen metrics to see if they improve:

• Implement Automated Abandoned Cart Email
• Simplify Checkout Process
• ‘Free Shipping’ Offer

For clearest results, conduct each experiment individually for a certain amount of time and then compare the data from each to see which improves your metrics most. At the end of your experiments, you may want to implement all of your changes, or just a few.

Here are some tips for experiments you could do to improve the three metrics above:

5a. Abandoned Cart Emails

There are a number of reasons why website visitors abandon carts. A study of almost 20,000 consumers by WorldPay determined the reasons why they leave eCommerce sites without paying:

Quite the list! Whatever the reason, a follow up email could persuade them to change their mind.

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An email like this one reminds customers that their shopping cart has been saved and it also addresses potential problems by reassuring customers that shipping and returns are always free.

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Similarly, this email offers a discount to visitors who abandoned their cart just in case they were part of the 36% of people that ‘find a better price elsewhere’.

If you’re using BigCommerce, they have an Abandoned Cart Saver tool that automatically recovers 15% of lost sales (on average).

5b. Simplify Checkout Process

As you can see from the chart above, 25% of people abandon carts because the website navigation is too complicated.

Your checkout is one of the main parts of your website that you should A/B test, because it is arguably the most important part for conversions. Test your checkout screen with various different layouts to determine which is the most customer-friendly.

In general, a clean page with few distractions and clear CTA buttons is favoured by customers, like this:

It also helps to let users checkout as a guest and pay with an easily accessible payment option, like PayPal. Basically, the less obstacles there are, the better!

5c. ‘Free Shipping’ Offer

You may think that you can’t afford to offer free shipping, but the truth is, competition is so fierce that if you don’t then customers may look elsewhere. Also, free shipping doesn’t need to cost you anything.

All you need to do is work the cost of shipping into your product prices. Of course, this means your products will be more expensive, but consumer psychology doesn’t work like that. People see the ‘Free Shipping’ banner or button and their brain automatically says “You’re getting a deal!”

When offering free shipping, make sure it has pride of place on your site so that customers can’t miss it–especially when they are checking out! This should help when it comes to increasing your conversion rate.

Recommended Tools

Monitoring benchmarks and setting experiments is a like a never-ending marathon. There will always be something you can improve on. To take a little bit of weight off your shoulders, here are a couple of tools that make it easier to understand your eCommerce analytics.

1. Google Analytics

As an online store owner, you are completely blind to the people who visit your store and make purchases–unless you have access to an analytics tool.

Google Analytics is free and can be linked to your eCommerce site by simply pasting a ‘tracking code’ into the backend of your store. This works differently for each platform, so make sure you contact your current website host to find out exactly how to do this.

Once it is linked to your store, Google Analytics can give you access to an abundance of real-time reports that tell you who is visiting your site, how they got there, and perhaps most importantly, their behaviour on-site.

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With access to data like this, you can set benchmarks and easily monitor the effectiveness of your efforts to optimise your store for conversions and sales.

Top Tip: if you take time to set up a conversion funnel in Google Analytics – this can be a great way to augment the metrics you can pull directly from Shopify or BigCommerce.

2. Compass

Like Google Analytics, Compass allows you to view up to date metrics for your online store. In addition to that, it also enables you to compare your metrics against similar stores. This peer benchmarking allows you to learn about your individual strengths and weaknesses, and make informed decisions on how to improve.

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Compass works with both BigCommerce and Shopify (with dedicated plugins), and it allows you to track and benchmark your conversion rates in one central dashboard.

Thanks for Reading

Now you know which benchmarks to measure and how to measure them, optimising your eCommerce store will be a piece of cake! Or, as Sherlock Holmes would say:

“Elementary, my dear Watson!”

Monitoring your conversion rate benchmarks and analytics, and improving the success of your eCommerce store is an ongoing task. The more you adjust, tweak, and measure, the more optimised your store will be.

All benchmarking statistics used in this article were sourced from Compass, a leading provider of eCommerce benchmarking.

The post Understanding your eCommerce analytics and setting benchmarks for conversion rate optimisation appeared first on KITE.

H. G. Wells is perhaps best known for his novel War of the Worlds, which infamously caused quite the stir when it was adapted as a radio play by Orson Welles in 1938.

By that time, H. G. Wells had been diagnosed with diabetes and co-founded the British Diabetic Association (BDA). Radical from the very beginning, the association had a bold mission:

“to ensure that everyone in the UK could gain access to [the newly-discovered] insulin, whatever their financial situation.”

A couple of decades later, the forward-thinking charity gathered a group of medical charities together to discuss the coordination of selling charity cards at Christmas to raise money. Nowadays, it’s common to see charity Christmas cards everywhere. It’s the perfect way to spread Christmas cheer and support a worthy cause at the same time.

But the season of goodwill isn’t the only time charities and nonprofits should look to raise awareness and funds by selling products. This can (and should!) be a year-round endeavour and print-on-demand merchandise, from cards through to t-shirts, is the perfect mechanism to help charities and nonprofits generate awareness and much-needed funds.

The Problem with Traditional Merchandising

As a charity with an important mission, you want to remain razor-focused on delivering your core service-offering. So it doesn’t make much sense to get side-tracked into the intricacies of setting up and running a complex ‘traditional’ merchandising operation.

By tradition, we’re referring to the old school method of designing your products and then purchasing bulk from a printer. There’s all of the stock to hold, maintain and replenish, then you need to handle fulfilment, and mailing orders. Before you know it, your volunteers are spending all of their time handling merchandise orders when they could be out there spreading the message about your cause.

Enter Print-On-Demand (POD)

If the above sounds like a headache you’d like to avoid, then a POD store can help!

With print-on-demand, you can reap all the benefits of selling merchandise, without the time and effort of the traditional model.

In this article, we’ll be looking at what print-on-demand is, why it is a great fit for charities, and how you can set up your very first store!

What is Print-on-Demand?

Print-on-demand works particularly well for charities by allowing you to have a range of branded and themed products that resonate with your charity’s audience, that are only printed, packaged and shipped on the completion of the purchase.

For example if you were selling charity branded apparel, this means that you don’t have the usual upfront costs related to ordering bulk stock in all the different sizes and colours that you’d usually need to cater to your audience.

You simply upload your designs, add them to products (virtually) and then publish them to your online store.

You can test different designs and introduce a huge range of awareness raising products to your audience, without spending a single penny of your nonprofit’s funds upfront on stock.

When a sale is made, the POD technology takes care of everything – your order is automatically sent to the printer/supplier who then manufactures and prints the product, packs it neatly and ships it to your customer’s door. Your charity pays the wholesale cost and keeps the profit.

The best part? Apart from adding designs to products and publishing to your online store – you don’t need to lift a finger.

Setting Up Your Store

When it comes to setting up print-on-demand for your nonprofit, we always recommend using a dedicated eCommerce platform like BigCommerce or Shopify.

This will allow you to create a branded store with all the bells and whistles (aka functionality) – you’d expect from a leading eCommerce store.

They are super powerful and economical to run and will save your charity a fortune in trying to develop eCommerce capability from the ground up.

You then easily add a print-on-demand App, like Kite.ly, to your store which you’ll then use to publish your pod products and make them available to sell to your audience.

These eCommerce stores can then be added as a sub-domain to your main charity website. E.g. if your website is www.pawsforcause.org your shop could be on www.shop.pawsforcause.org (Note. your web developer can assist with setting this up.)

To show you how easy this is – we’ll walk you through a very high level view of setting up a store on BigCommerce. You can also use Shopify, to learn how – check out our walkthrough here.

We’ll be using a fictional charity we’ve named ‘Paws for a Cause’ and will be using this logo:

BigCommerce:

1. Visit bigcommerce.co.uk and sign up (you can take advantage of a 15-day trial if you want to test it out before you commit).
2. Pop in a few details including the name of your new store!

3. Your store will be created in a matter of minutes!

4. You’ll be greeted with your dashboard, and will need to check/change a few details before you can get your store up and running.

5. Change your store settings if required, such as dimensions, status and timezone.

6. Create your store profile with all of your information.

7. Add your preferred payment methods.

8. Manage your shipping zones, carriers and rules you want to offer your customers within the checkout.

9. Set your default currencies. Adding more than one can allow overseas customers to pay in their own currency.

10. Upload your logo.

11. And finally, edit the theme of your store to get it on brand.

12. You then need to visit the App marketplace and install the Kite plug-in. (this is what allows you to add print-on-demand products to your store)

Simply search for “Kite” in the app marketplace and install.

13. You’re now ready to upload your designs, add them to your choice of products and publish them to your storefront.

For a more detailed walkthrough of setting up your print-on-demand merchandise on BigCommerce please see this guide.

The Benefits of Print-on-Demand

1. Reinforce your Mission

A principal driver of offering branded merchandise is to reinforce your mission as a charity. Not only can this be used to raise much-needed funds – it can raise awareness.

With so many good causes that need supporting, all in need of donations, people can be reassured by providing clarity as to where their money goes.

Remind your customers that by purchasing your merchandise, they are in fact doing a good deed by letting them know how much of the profit goes towards your charity and also what that money can fund.

Just like these examples from Alzheimer’s UK, Unicef and The Royal British Legion:

2. Turn Website Visitors into Buyers who raise funds for your cause

Visitors to your website who are aligned and interested in your cause may be looking for ways to support you – but aren’t sure how. Maybe they don’t just want to donate cash, or maybe they don’t have time to volunteer, but they still want to feel part of the good work that you do.

By giving them merchandise to purchase, you’re not only providing an easy way for them to generate funds for your cause, but also a way to show their support.

3. Switch up your Designs

Working with a POD provider allows you to switch up your designs regularly, this can be especially useful for charities. Take advantage of the flexibility that print-on-demand gives you to jump onto current trends and occasions easily.

You can create different designs for different seasons and fundraising campaigns, and switch them in and out easily.

You never have to worry about shifting stock if the design doesn’t take off, as everything is only printed to order (i.e. if a sale is made).

For example, take a look at this seasonal range from the Royal British Legion:

4. Sell and Promote on Social Media

In addition to having your online shop (either stand-alone or as a subdomain on your website), you should also widen your reach and use leading social platforms as sales channels.

Check out our guides on marketing your products on Instagram and Facebook.

In addition to marketing your products on social media did you know that your Facebook page can have a dedicated shop tab that you can easily and very quickly publish all of your POD products to?

This is easily done by integrating your Shopify or BigCommerce store to your Facebook page. It allows your customers to find your products quickly, without having to leave the social media platform! Here is an article on how to set up your Facebook Shop.

Alzheimer’s Society has their shop at the top of their facebook page. This could influence people to purchase something, even if that wasn’t their intention when visiting the page.

It’s a cynical thing to say, but people like to show off when they have donated to charity! So wearing a t-shirt, using a mug or carrying a bag that represents their donation is exactly what they’re after.

For example, take a look at these Instagram posts:

Benefits of promoting and selling on social media include – lots of traffic, easier to convert, being able to encourage your fans and followers to share your content.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to offering charity merchandise as a means to raise additional revenue for your cause, print-on-demand is in our opinion the best way forward.

With practically no upfront costs (apart from design) and no need to hold any stock or manage fulfilment, charities and nonprofits big and small can create custom merchandise to sell to their supporters quickly and efficiently.

The post How Print-on-Demand for Charities & Non-Profits Can Raise Awareness (and funds!) appeared first on KITE.

You want more customers, and organic promotion only gets you so far. Serious POD retailers often turn to PPC to help amplify their reach and bring on board new customers.

You can’t simply assume you know what your customers are searching for. Do the research and position yourself right where your consumers are! In this guide, we’ll show you how…

What is PPC?

PPC Stands for pay-per-click, it’s a type of advertising where, as the name suggests, you pay each time a customer clicks your ad.

There are a lot of platforms available but for the purposes of this guide, we’re going to focus on Google Adwords because it’s the biggest and (arguably!) best.

I’ll give you an example, let’s say I’m an illustrator, and I’ve got this cute dog-inspired hoodie:

I’ve maximised the number of people I can get to see this organically, so I want to reach other people who might be interested in buying it.

There’s a number of different ad’s that we can use:

Graphic display ads:

You can also create YouTube video ads and in-app mobile ads.

Other platforms you can use include Bing Ads and BidVertiser.

Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. This is where advertisers can bid for ad placement in search engines ‘sponsored links’ when someone searches using a keyword that’s related to your product.

For example, if you bid on the keyword ‘custom dog t-shirts’ you could have an ad in the first four listings like the example below:

Any time that someone clicked on the ad, sending a visitor to your website- You’d pay the search engine a small fee.

To build a winning PPC campaign, you need to be ready to put in the work. From researching the right keywords to turning those keywords into a well-organised campaign and ad groups.

It’s worthwhile to put in the effort to create relevant and intelligently targeted PPC campaigns. Search engines will reward you if your campaigns make the grade, by charging less for ad clicks- as a result, your profits will be higher.

Keyword research

Before I create an ad, I need to do some keyword research.

Download the ‘Keywords Everywhere’ Chrome extension as a tool to find high volume, low competition keywords to rank for around your products.

The add-on allows you to access:

• Monthly search volume- this is the average of the total of searches that people have performed for this keyword over the last month.
• CPC (cost per click)– the amount that advertisers are paying for a single click for this keyword with Google Ads.
• Competition data for your list of keywords– this is a gauge of the number of advertisers that are running ads on a specific keyword.

So, say for example I search ‘Dog T-shirts’:

I can take a look at the metrics, either directly on the search engine, or by opening up the extension.

This gives you search volume, difficulty of ranking organically and estimated cost-per-click for paid ads.

This is important since you want to make sure that, when you’re paying ‘per click’ you’re not paying an exorbitant amount. Remember what your margin is per sale and make sure you’re not making a loss here.

Understanding performance marketing lingo:

1. CPC (cost-per-click)- this is the price that you pay every time your advert is clicked.
2. CPM (cost-per-mile)- this is a pricing model, where for example, you pay a flat rate for 1000 displays (impressions) of one of your ads. Note that is not 1000 clicks – but simply 1000 times the ad has been shown. If your ads get high click through rates (CTR) – then this could be a pricing model to consider.
3. CAC (customer-acquisition cost)- this is the cost of convincing a potential customer to buy a product or service.
4. LTV (lifetime value)- LTV is the projected revenue that a customer will generate during their lifetime. So for example, if your customers tend to repeat purchase, you might be willing to pay a bit more to acquire a customer (CAC)
5. Conversion Rates– This is the percentage of your customers who visit your website and convert their desired goal. Typically we refer here to a visitor who completes a purchase. So for example if you had 100 visitors to your store and 1 purchased, then your Store Conversion Rate would be 1%. (Ps. the average benchmark for eCommerce is 1.33% – so you want to be aiming for this amount.)

Monitoring and analytics

Both Google Adwords and Google Analytics are helpful tools to get insights and detailed reports. They both have individual strengths, but together they’re unstoppable! Here are a couple of different reasons why:

You can complete the picture of user behaviour– AdWords helps the visitor find you, and reports on their ad spend and performance. But it doesn’t show you what the visitor does once they’re on your website. But bring in analytics here, and you’re able to see the path your visitor has followed once on your site.

You can get additional data– adding analytics gives you access to extra data such as bounce rate, pages per visit and average visit duration. You can also import all of this data to your AdWords account if you wish.

You can see what’s not performing well and why– On AdWords, a low performing keyword will simply show as not working, whereas if you use analytics, you can identify why the keyword isn’t performing.

You can also set up ‘negative keywords’ for low-performing traffic, some keywords may have differing ‘user intent’ and negative keywords can invite an unintended audience.

Setting up your first campaign

**For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be using Google Ads**

The whole ‘Campaign Setup’ is done on one page, first up, set your location:

Locations – where are your customers?

Then onto languages:

Languages – which languages do they speak?

Bidding – what do you want to focus on?

You can hover over an option to see what it is. Ranging from Impressions – ‘views’ of your advert for awareness – to ‘Clicks’ (for traffic) through to Conversions, which are visitors who take a particular action on your website, app or shop that you define.

Let’s imagine we don’t have Conversion tracking setup on our website yet (we’ll cover that in a more advanced future guide) so we’re going to keep this nice and simple and focus on ‘clicks.’

We just want people to head through to our website and hope our awesome product pages do the rest from there.

Budget – here we get to define the maximum amount we want to pay.

It’s somewhat confusing in wording –

‘For the month, you won’t pay more than your daily budget times the number of the average number of days in a month.’

You might spend more or less than your daily budget on individual days. But, as a super simple example, if you set £5 as your daily budget – you’d never pay more than £155 in a given month.

It’s important to factor in whatever your bidding focus was in the above step here. A conversion is clearly worth more than a click, which is worth more than an impression.

Ad groups – these contain one or more ads, which target a shared set of keywords.

You set a bid, or price, to be used when an ad group’s keywords trigger an ad to appear.

These help group your ads in clusters. This gives you the option of having a variety of different creative ads, with one intent, theme or message.

Targeting – who do you want to reach?

There are different targeting options:

• Interests and habits
• Previous interaction with your business.
• Research and planning behaviour.

It’s a good idea to choose only one of these for each ad group to make sure your messaging is tailored.

If none of those work for you, you can target by demographics instead. In categories such as age, gender, parental status, and household income.

You can narrow your targeting by identifying particular keywords, topics and placements.

(We’ll cover keyword research in the next section)

Automation – Google can expand on your targeting to find new customers.

For now, we’ll select ‘No automated targeting.’

What we want right now is a baseline to work from. This means we want to be in control of our targeting.

Next, it’s time to create and add individual ads to your Ad Group. This is what your audience actually sees.

To create an ad, you first need to define your product or service, add categories, services and tags.

Next, you need to write your ad copy. You’re required to add two headlines and a description, and a preview appears on your screen.

You then have the option to then preview what the ad will look like on different devices.

And you’re done!

Conclusion

Setting up and launching your first PPC campaign can be daunting, but now you should be able to get started on researching your keywords and setting up some basic ads to test and drive new and relevant visitors to your website.

One final bit of advice is that after initial setup of PPC campaigns, it is usually better to ‘tweak’ and optimise instead of starting over if you’re aren’t seeing the results that you would like. Keep an eye on the competition, avoid knee-jerk reactions, go in small and refine along the way.

Good Luck!

PS. if you want to learn more about PPC then do keep an eye on the Kite blog as we’ll be sharing a more detailed PPC guide in the near future. However in the meantime this article from Visiture.com provides a great overview.

The post Introductory Guide to PPC Promotion for Custom Merchandise appeared first on KITE.

Specialising in on-demand custom merchandise and photo print solutions, Kite collaborated with CHF to build an online ecommerce platform for each brand. From t-shirts to cushions, hoodies to posters, the new Pip Ahoy! and Daisy & Ollie merchandise will be exclusive to the e-shops and will be available in the UK from 19th November 2018 at shop.pipahoy.com and shop.daisyandollie.com

Created by Helen Brown and produced by CHF Entertainment, with Jason Manford as executive producer and writing many of the scripts, Daisy & Ollie premiered for the first time on Cartoonito in November 2017 and was an instant hit with parents and their pre-schoolers, quickly becoming the No1 show on launch and subsequently increasing the demand for merchandise

In addition, Pip Ahoy! is a warm and boisterous show that centres around Pip and his friends and features the inimitable voice of Sir David Jason, who plays ‘Skipper’ an old seadog and Pip’s Uncle. In September this year, ITVBe acquired all three seasons of Pip Ahoy! and is broadcasting twice daily, Monday to Friday during key broadcast hours (09:00-12:00).

Helen Brown, Director of Production at CHF comments: “We are absolutely delighted to be announcing the new partnership with KITE on behalf of the brand owners of Pip Ahoy! and Daisy & Ollie. Both brands are doing incredibly well and we can’t wait for the online shops to launch to see how the much anticipated merchandise is received by their dedicated fanbases across the UK!”

Nicola Thompson from Kite comments: “The print on demand model is one that is increasingly being used by brand owners as a flexible and risk free way to get product into fans hands quickly, and we’re delighted to be partnering with the Daisy & Ollie and Pip Ahoy! brands for their online stores. We see great potential for developing the ranges further to include new designs and new products in the future”.

The new Daisy & Ollie and Pip Ahoy! merchandise will be available to buy from 19th November at shop.pipahoy.com and shop.daisyandollie.com

ENDS

For more information, please contact:
Marie-Clare Scott
Sundae Communications
0161 278 1452
marieclare@todayissundae.co.uk

NOTES TO EDITORS

About CHF Entertainment Ltd.

CHF Entertainment Ltd. Is the production arm of CHF Media Group consisting of some of the most sought-after industry professionals and award winning animators.
The CHF animation studio, based in Wilmslow, Cheshire, boasts a team of highly skilled and talented artists and animators. Their unrivalled experience in Animation Production ensures the highest level of quality of Family Entertainment produced in the UK.

High quality Family Entertainment starts with the storytelling which is something upon which CHF prides itself. Childhood memories are full of wonderful stories and images of the shows children watched while growing up; it is now CHF’s turn and indeed CHF’s privilege to provide those childhood memories for both the next generation and many generations to come.

About Kite

KITE is the leading technology provider of global print-on-demand solutions for custom merchandise and photo print across mobile and web. KITE’s technology can be embedded in any consumer-facing app or website, enabling brands and businesses to engage with audiences by printing and distribute bespoke products anywhere in the world.

KITE works with brands, business and creators to help them engage with audiences and create new revenue streams, by providing a range of high quality print-on-demand products worldwide. The main ways in which KITE achieves this is through:
• Photo print solutions: KITE’s technology integrates with photography-focused apps and websites, to enable end-users to print their images onto a range of products.
• Custom merchandise solutions: By working with industry-leading ecommerce platforms, including Shopify & BigCommerce, KITE enables brands and creators all over the world to turn their designs into quality, customised merchandise that they can then sell to their audiences.

The post CHF teams up with KITE to launch online shops for Pip Ahoy! And Daisy & Ollie appeared first on KITE.

That same logic can be used to explain the popularity – and opportunity – of Facebook groups and pages.

The numbers are staggering:

Around a billion people belong to Facebook groups, centred around an almost unimaginable range of topics and themes, from memes to maths, from politics to pets. Groups and pages bring people together around a ‘common cause, issue or activity to discuss issues, post photos and share related content.’

In his book ‘Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us’, marketing expert and best selling author Seth Godin argued that the web has given us all an opportunity to be a part of movements, bringing together groups, or ‘tribes’, of like-minded people. Whereas once upon a time we might have been the only person in our immediate peer group with a particular interest or passion, making it seem quite fringe and unusual, we are now able to connect instantaneously with similar people all around the world, hungry for connection and meaning.

Not only can we join and be a part of these communities – we can create them. This means that hundreds of thousands of people, around the world, have unwittingly found themselves as leaders of deeply engaged audiences.

And it may sound cynical, but if there’s one universal truth of online marketing, it’s that – where there’s a highly engaged audience, there’s potential for revenue. In simple terms, if you’re in charge of a large, active Facebook group or run a Facebook page with a large and active following – you’re potentially sitting on a goldmine.

The importance of being earnest

‘Monetisation’ is what it is. But there are right and wrong ways to do it. You’ve done the hardest part by building an engaged group – it’s no easy feat. The last thing you want to do is undermine all that hard work with intrusive, irrelevant sales posts, or by moving away from what you’ve already been doing.

Each opportunity to monetise your group should be evaluated and weighed up to make sure it’s a good fit for your users, and doesn’t diminish their overall experience.

The opportunity of custom merchandise

With that all said, one monetisation technique you definitely should consider is custom merchandise – apparel, accessories and gifts. We live in the age of self-expression; we all enjoy communicating our passions and interests in the ‘things’ we wear and use.

Our favourite places…

Slogans and mantras that make us smile (while expressing a unique world view!)

Our favourite people…

And our favourite art…

By combining the theme or topic of your group, with great products that people use often – you can monetise your audience in a way that’s seamless, unobtrusive and adds real value.

And by creating a print-on-demand merchandise range, you can eliminate many of the traditional headaches associated with selling merchandise. You can create your product range in a matter of minutes (as we’ll explore shortly) and all the actual ‘work’ of printing, fulfilling and shipping your order is done for you.

All you need to do is create great designs, and get those designs in front of your audience. Let’s get into that…

Creating designs that resonate

As we’ve already established, people are only too happy to buy and use products with designs that speak to them. The challenge is not only to create aesthetically beautiful designs for your merch range – but, crucially, designs that resonate with your audience.

This means isolating the passion of your group – what is it that encouraged people to join and contribute so readily? This passion then needs to be rolled out into the merch range, in a slick, professional, beautifully-designed way.

Take the group ‘World of Coffee’ for example – a group for ‘coffee makers and coffee lovers’ to share their passion. The group has more than 122,000 members and is really engaged. When you click onto the group page, you can see that the group founder ‘Barista Dristan Alsela’ has a ‘Shop Now’ button linked directly to his store.

Clicking the ‘Shop Now’ link takes you right to his store page – with a range of barista tools and cups, espresso machines and – crucially – merchandise.

The designs across his merch range, as you might expect, are pretty broad in their appeal. The ‘World of Coffee’ group is founded on a shared love of coffee – and that theme follows through into the range of merchandise. Slogans like ‘But first, coffee…’ and ‘Make coffee, not war!’ are depicted in beautiful typography. Simple, but effective.

Following the same logic, let’s imagine we have a highly engaged group called ‘I Love My Dog’ – a place for members to share pictures, videos, stories and advice about their precious pooches.

There are a couple of ways to come up with a merch range that would resonate with that audience.

First, we could search Google Images for our niche with the keyword ‘quotes’ bolted on the end. We could pick out a few quotes that reflect the attitudes and opinions of our typical audience member.

A very cursory scroll pulls up some simple but effective classics like:

• “The more people I meet, the more I love my dog…”
• “Life is better with a dog”
• “Be the person your dog thinks you are.”

You could also search Google Images for funny flat illustrations around your niche. Using the word ‘flat’ will help keep your search results away from old-fashioned, clipart-style illustrations, and give you some great inspiration to work with.

Searching design website dribbble.com will potentially get you inspiration even quicker. It’s an invite-only design community where only specially selected creatives can upload work. Searching for your keyword will throw up a diverse range of illustrations in various styles to inspire your creativity.

Of course, using work created by others is not only unethical, but illegal! It’s important that you only use designs you have permission to use, which generally means you either created it yourself or paid a designer to do so. You can find creatives to work with via sites like Upwork, People per Hour and 99designs – or buy stock vector artwork from sites like Shutterstock. Of course, if you do this, you’ll need to make sure that the license covers you for use on merchandise. We’ve written extensively about how to source ideas and designs for custom merch, here. Check it out!

Selecting your products…

Once you have your first designs, it’s time to map them out on your products. Here at Kite, our product range includes over 250 top quality options. There are times when certain products will work particularly well for certain groups and niches.

For example, if your Facebook group is fitness-themed, you could consider selling protein shakers, or gym towels.

If your group revolves around illustrations or photography, you’ll want to sell prints and canvases…

Certain products, though, will work across pretty much any niche, so it’s always a good idea to start with these. T-shirts, sweaters, coffee cups – they’re incredibly popular and versatile starting points.

To create and sell your products, you’ll want to setup a store page via an eCommerce platform like Shopify or BigCommerce. We’ve written extensive guides to walk you through the setup process, which you can check out here and here. (And the good news is that if you only plan on selling through Facebook – you don’t need a full stand-alone Shopify eCommerce store. You only require a Shopify ‘light’ plan at $9pm.)

Once you’ve set up your store and the Kite app, it’s a case of taking your design file and uploading it to the Kite Merch App that has a very easy to use product generator. You can then drag, drop and tweak every aspect of your design – plus available product variations, and pricing options – until you’re totally happy with it.

Remember, you aren’t limited to ‘front and centre’ prints. An image like the below, which is available to buy via Shutterstock, for example, would work amazingly well as an all-over, sublimated print or tote bag…

Facebook Shop

Once you’re done building out your whole product range, we strongly recommend setting up a Facebook Shop. This feature is a big deal, and a good piece of ‘low hanging fruit’ for merchandisers coming from a Facebook groups background, since it allows you to sell on the very platform your audience already hangs out on. We’ve written an extensive guide to setting up your Facebook Shop here that gives you all the tools you need to get started.

Promote! Promote! Promote!

While getting your product range set up is easy and quick, getting those products in front of your audience is often slightly more tricky.

For starters, you’ll want to get as much mileage as you can out of organic promotion on your group. It’s your competitive advantage, after all! Posting a few times a week about your product range – plus notifying your members when new products and designs go live – is a good starting point. You could also ‘pin’ a post to the top of your group feed to make sure your shop has good visibility within the group.

You’ll also want to think outside the box in terms of generating interest and awareness of your new products. Everybody likes contests, giveaways and discounts. You could consider giving away some product to random ‘likers, sharers and commenters,’ on posts regarding your merch range, or offering discount codes to members of your group to thank them for their loyalty.

If your budget allows, you might also consider allocating some ad dollars towards your products to target like-minded individuals. You’ll find some advanced tips for marketing your range on Facebook in this guide which could come in handy.

Thanks for reading

As a Facebook group owner, you aren’t just a community leader and influencer – you’re sitting on a real financial opportunity.

There are a variety of ways to monetise your group and make your passion pay.

But, for those people looking to get started right away, merchandise is the proverbial no-brainer. Setting up your range takes a matter of minutes – and with no up-front costs or ongoing running costs, you can continue to focus on the other jobs you have to do. Your print-on-demand merchandise range will provide you with valuable ancillary income – and all you need to do is create the designs, promote products to your audience, and think of ways to spend the money.

Good luck! 🙂

The post Do you run a large Facebook Group? Unlock this powerful revenue source! appeared first on KITE.

In this infographic, we take a look at a mixture of business ideas with low investment that anyone can have a go at- if you put in the work of course! From a home-based business to being a complete online entrepreneur, the sky really is the limit!

PS. Click the image to open in a separate browser tab so that you can zoom in.

Share this Image On Your Site

</p> <p><strong>Please include attribution to Kite.ly with this graphic.</strong></p> <p><a href='https://www.kite.ly/blog/infographic-10-business-ideas-with-low-investment/'><img src='www.kite.ly/wp-content/uploads/Infographic-10-Business-Ideas-with-Low-Investment.png' alt='Infographic “10 Business Ideas with Low Investment”' width='540px' border='0' /></a></p> <p>

The post Infographic “10 Business Ideas with Low Investment” appeared first on KITE.

But which are the products you REALLY need in your store? In this infographic, we take a look at the 10 of the most popular products to include in your catalogue. In product terms, these are the most popular, the most beloved, and the most widely used!

PS. Click the image to open in a separate browser tab so that you can zoom in.

Share this Image On Your Site

</p> <p><strong>Please include attribution to Kite.ly with this graphic.</strong></p> <p><a href='https://www.kite.ly/blog/infographic-the-top-10-print-on-demand-merchandise-products-for-2019/'><img src='https://www.kite.ly/wp-content/uploads/infographic-the-top-10-print-on-demand-custom-merchandise-products-for-2019.png' alt='The Top 10 Print-on-Demand Merchandise Products for 2019' width='540px' border='0' /></a></p> <p>

The post Infographic: The Top 10 Print-on-Demand Merchandise Products for 2019 appeared first on KITE.

PS. Click the image to open in a separate browser tab so that you can zoom in.

Share this Image On Your Site

</p> <p><strong>Please include attribution to Kite.ly with this graphic.</strong></p> <p><a href='https://www.kite.ly/blog/kite-infographic-how-does-print-on-demand-merchandise-work/'><img src='https://www.kite.ly/wp-content/uploads/kite-infographic-how-does-print-on-demand-merchandise-work.png' alt='Infographic: How Does Print-on-Demand Merchandise Work?' width='540px' border='0' /></a></p> <p>

The post Infographic “How Does Print-on-Demand Merchandise Work?” appeared first on KITE.

We live in the age of digital opportunity! Print-on-demand has given all of us a platform to create thriving, low-risk, low-maintenance online businesses – and Shopify is the eCommerce engine that keeps those wheels turning. This infographic lays out 10 simple strategies for successfully selling print-on-demand merchandise on Shopify….

Click the link to open Kite’s Top-10-strategies-for-successfully-selling-print-on-demand-merchandise-on-Shopify

Note – you can also save this PDF to your computer to access in the future. Please also feel free to share this post!

Summary:

01 Source & Use Customer Photos in your marketing
02 Time-Sensitive Discount Codes
03 Get Creative with Your Product Photography
04 Use all Available Sales Channels
05 Invest in (SMART!) Paid Advertising
06 Always Remember your Customer Service Responsibilities
07 Grow your Email List By Going Further
08 Write Compelling, Unique Product Descriptions
09 Set up an abandoned cart sequence
10 Invest time and effort in your theme

The post Top 10 strategies for successfully selling print-on-demand merchandise on Shopify appeared first on KITE.

There’s a fine line to tread. Of course, you want to make money from your group, but you also want to maintain the integrity of your group and avoid turning people away. To do this, you need to be tactful and follow tried and tested techniques.

In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to make money from your Facebook group (in 7 different ways!) with step-by-step examples. For the purpose of this article, we’ll be using our example Facebook Group based around wedding fitness: Get Fit Tips for Brides and Grooms!

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Grow Your Group & Opportunity

1.1 Create a Facebook Ad Campaign

1.2 Add Qualifying Questions

1.3 Go Beyond Facebook

2. Sell Print-on-Demand Merchandise

3. Create a Paid ‘Premium’ Group

4. Create (and sell) a Course to Help Others

5. Sell Ad Space in Your Group

6. Leads and List-Building

7. Keep Engagement High

7.1 Know When to Post

7.2 Include Media

7.3 Ask Questions

8. That’s a Wrap!

1. Grow Your Group & Opportunity

One of the best ways to increase your chances of making money from your Facebook group is to constantly grow it. As your group steadily becomes bigger and members more engaged, your net of potential customers grows wider.

The great news is, because you already have a Facebook group, you already know who your ideal customers are. All you need to do is go out and find more of them. There are a couple of ways you can do this…

1.1 Create a Facebook Ad Campaign

As you might be aware, it is not yet possible to create an ad campaign directly from your group (although there are murmurs and whispers that Facebook is working on this). However, there are ways to get around it. If you haven’t already, create a Facebook page to match your group. You then want to link your group and your page.

The reason having a page is important is because Facebook pages have the “boost post” option which is great for getting your message in front of a targeted audience. Currently, you can’t do this from your own profile or from a group. To connect your group and your Facebook page, head to your page and click on Groups on the left-hand side. You should see this pop-up:

Click Link Your Group and another pop-up will appear, showing your group. Then click Link.

A further pop-up will appear letting you know that you can manage your group from your page. Click Link Group to confirm.

Once you’ve done this, go back to your page and create a post. Here, you’ll see the option to Boost Post that you don’t get on private profiles and group pages. Make sure your group is tagged in your post so that users are directed there. When you’re happy with what you’ve written, click Boost Post.

Another pop-up will appear (you’ll be seeing a lot of these!) that will allow you to make your post as targeted as you possibly can.

To create a targeted audience, click Edit (you guessed it, another pop-up!) Refine your audience by gender, age, location and interests, then hit Save.

Next, amend your budget and the duration of the ad to adjust the reach of your campaign. When you’re happy, click Set Budget.

You’ll be asked to enter a payment method. Once you’ve done that, hit Continue:

From there, you will be redirected back to your post. Hit Publish to confirm that you want to boost it.

…and voilà!

1.2 Add Qualifying Questions

Growing your group is all well and good, but to make money from your Facebook group, you need to make sure that you’re attracting the right people. You can do this by asking pending members questions before they join. To set this up, click Manage Group on the left-hand side of your group page.

From there, click Member Requests > Get Started:

Ask questions that would be relevant to your ideal group members (a.k.a your ideal customers). You can ask up to 3 questions, but keep it light! You don’t want to put people off joining your group.

Click Save when you are happy with your questions and then click OK on the following pop-up box:

This will ensure that you are the only one who can add new members to the group.

1.3 Go Beyond Facebook

Even though your group lives on Facebook, that doesn’t mean you can’t promote it elsewhere. If you want to grow your group, then you should promote wherever you can: your website, other social media channels (Twitter, Instagram etc.), even offline channels, like leaflets (this is particularly useful if you run a local group!)

2. Sell Print-on-Demand Merchandise

Print-on-demand merchandise is possibly one of the easiest ways to make money online, especially if you already have an audience. Basically, all you do is upload designs to a print-on-demand (POD) platform, like Kite.ly, and then link your Shopify store to your Facebook page.

First, you need to sign up for Shopify (they usually have free trials available for new customers). From there, you need to click on Apps on the left-hand side and then Visit Shopify App Store:

Once inside the App Store, search for Kite and click Get:

Kite will install within seconds. From there, you can upload your designs. Of course, first you need to have designs! For help with this, take a look at our previous article: How to Source Ideas and Designs for Custom Merchandise.

Once you have your designs, upload them to Kite and start creating your products. Within the product generator, you will be able to see your designs on all different products.

You can enable products for your store by simply dragging the toggle from left to right:

Or you can also click on Prices & Edit to make changes to your products, including altering the design and increasing or decreasing your markup:

Once you are happy with all of your products, click Publish Collection.

While you’re waiting for your collections to publish, you can link your Facebook page to your account in preparation for selling to your group. To do this, click the plus icon next to Sales Channel and then click Add Facebook:

You’ll then be asked to connect a Facebook business page to your Shopify. Select your group and click Connect Page.

Facebook will then review your page. This can take up to 48 hours, but usually takes much less time. When it is complete, you will be able to click the Facebook tab on the left-hand side of your Shopify account and view what your products will look like within Facebook:

If you’re happy with how your products look, you can click Enable to complete the process and start selling directly through Facebook. However, to do this, you will first need to sign up for one of Shopify’s paid plans.

Here are a couple of examples of Facebook shops to inspire you:

3. Create a Paid ‘Premium’ Group

Did you know that aside from finding ways to sell to members of your group, you can also charge members directly to join?

Think about it: In “real life” people happily pay membership fees to be a part of groups and clubs, so – with all of the time and effort you put into your group – the same should apply to Facebook.

The first step towards making your group premium is making it private. This way, any new members that want to join will have to pay the fee first and then be accepted by you as a member. To do this, head to your group page and click the More tab under your cover photo. Then select Edit Group Settings.

Scroll down to Privacy and click Change Privacy Settings:

Change your group to Closed and click Confirm. Now, if anyone wants to join your group you will need to accept them first.

The next step is setting up recurring payments. You can do this on a couple of different trusted platforms, like Square, Stripe, and Paypal.

Here, we’re going to go through how to set up recurring payments on PayPal, but if you would prefer to use Square or Stripe, click the links to check out the step-by-steps on their websites.

The first thing you need to do is sign up for a PayPal business account.

Click Tools at the top of the page and then, from the drop-down menu, select Recurring Payments.

From your recurring payments dashboard, click Create a Subscription Button from the list of related items on the right-hand side:

Follow the steps on that page to set up a recurring payment, entering your billing amount and billing cycle, this would be whatever you want to charge members for joining your Facebook group. In this example, we’ve gone for £5 per month.

After setting all of that up, you need to let users know that there is a membership fee for joining the group. To do this, head back to Facebook and update your group description to include your payment link.

Just like in the above example, you need to make sure users know exactly what they’re getting by becoming a member (and why it is worth the membership fee!). This will entice them to sign up for a subscription and join!

4. Create (and sell) a Course to Help Others

One of the best money-making mindsets is to start focusing on how many people you can help, rather than how many people you can sell to. A great way to share your knowledge and help the members of your group is to create (and sell) a course, like the one seen here on the Facebook page, Motivational Mummy:

To start, create a rough plan of what your course will offer. Using our group Get Fit Tips for Brides & Grooms as an example, a rough plan could look something like this:

6 Weeks to Fit in the Dress (or Suit!)

• Week 1: 7 healthy breakfast recipes and 5 cardio workout videos
• Week 2: 7 healthy lunch recipes and 5 yoga workout videos
• Week 3: 7 healthy dinner recipes and 5 exercise videos for when you’re busy
• Week 4: 3 Motivational Weight-Loss stories (including before & after photos)
• Week 5: 7 healthy dessert recipes and 5 fun workout ideas
• Week 6: Countdown to the day! New videos every day, mixture of motivational, exercise and recipes

Of course this is a lot of content to create, but that’s why you can charge a generous amount for it. And, once it’s done, it’s done! You will have a chunk of content that can generate revenue time and time again.

A great platform for creating an online course is Skillshare. Take a look at their Become a Teacher handbook to find out more.

5. Sell Ad Space in Your Group

On the face of it, selling ad space doesn’t sound like the most ethical way to monetize your group. But you are in charge of who advertises, so it can actually be a very positive thing for your group and members.

Selling ad space is also known as affiliate or micro influencer marketing. It is the process of connecting with businesses and influencers in your industry and marketing their product, brand, or service to your group for a fee.

Finding the right influencers to connect with can take a little while. Luckily, we’ve created an infographic called The Influencer Marketing Landscape that lists lots of platforms, agencies, consultancies and more where you can find and connect with brands.

But remember: money can be tempting. However, it is important that you don’t undermine the credibility of your group by advertising irrelevant products or spamming your members with poor content. The long-term sustainability of your group relies on the relevancy and the quality of the content you post.

6. Leads and List-Building

If you’re looking to generate revenue on a continuing basis then it helps to have another way to contact your prospects in addition to your Facebook group. One of the most effective ways to do this is by building an email list. To do this, you need to create content or offers that are enticing enough for people to be happy to exchange their email address for them.

There are different ways to ask for your members’ email addresses, depending on what it is you are offering. If you’re offering content like a video, you can place a lead capture form halfway through, or before the most interesting section, with Wistia’s turnstile feature.

If you’re selling print-on-demand merchandise through Shopify, you can use an app called Privy to produce high-converting popups that encourage users to enter their email address and/or convert. Take a look at the video below to find out more about how it works:

Embed Code: <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/g2dy8bGKbrM” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>

Once you have a list of your members’ email addresses, the real question is: How can you translate this into money?

The answer: you need to create an email nurturing sequence. This is a sequence of emails designed to nurture people from being a lead, all the way to a converted customer. To find out exactly how to do this, check out this comprehensive article: Creating Your First Email Nurture Sequence

7. Keep Engagement High

Your group may have tons of likes and members, but if none of them engage with you, then you won’t generate revenue. Here are our top 3 tips for keeping engagement high on your Facebook group (for free!)

7.1 Know When to Post

Facebook is a fast-moving place. So if you post at a time when none of your members are active, by the time that they do log in your post will be lost among a sea of baby pictures, life updates, and cryptic statuses.

To increase engagement, you need to know the best times to post. By using a social media management platform, like Buffer, you can schedule your posts to appear at the best times for engagement.

7.2 Include Media

Photos and videos receive more engagement than text posts because they are more eye-catching.

According to Kissmetrics, photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts.

7.3 Ask Questions

A straightforward way to encourage engagement is to ask your members a question, like this:

This opens up a dialogue without being “salesy”, which is important when your platform is a social networking site.

That’s a Wrap!

Running a Facebook group takes tons of time and effort, but the great news is, it doesn’t take that much more to monetise it. From growing your group, to selling merchandise and courses, making money on Facebook can be fun and fruitful. For more advice, download our free eBook: Facebook Marketing Guide for Custom Merchandise.

The post 7 Ways to Make Money From Your Facebook Group [Step-by-Step Examples!] appeared first on KITE.

Pretty much anyone can become a digital nomad. With enough planning, persistence and outright gumption, even families are able to uproot and take up the nomadic lifestyle. In this quick guide to life on the road, we’re going to share some tips and resources so that you can imagine making the leap and we’re including some strategies you could use to increase your income. Finally we list some quick hacks to make your journey that little bit easier.

3 Steps to Making the Leap

1. Prepare to Leave

Before you embark on this new and exciting journey, you need to make sure you’re prepared. One of the first things you need to do is create a plan. There are so many things to consider:

• How much money will you need as a safety net?
• Where do you want to go?
• Where are you going to live when you get there?
• Are you going to give up your current home, or find a way to pay the bills while you’re gone?

Once you’ve created your plan, you need to create a plan B. It’s important to protect yourself so that the worst possible scenario simply ends up with you back at home where you started.

Recommended Reading: 12 Practical Steps to Become a Digital Nomad

2. Network with Like-Minded People

Chatting with other digital nomads will help you in a number of ways. For starters, they will be able to share their firsthand experiences with you so that you can learn from their mistakes and benefit from handy insider tips that you might not be able to find on a blog or through a quick Google search.

It’s also great to connect with people that you could potentially bump into on the road. Life as a digital nomad can be lonely, especially if you don’t speak the local language, so meeting like-minded people can be a great way to enjoy the sights and surroundings. And who knows, you might even make a lifelong friend or two!

Here are some of the best places to network with other digital nomads:

• Couchsurfing
• Nomad List
• Digital Nomad Subreddit
• Nomad Together (for families)

3. Adapt Your Skills

One of the biggest roadblocks to the digital nomad lifestyle is money – mainly how to make enough to live! A good place to start is to try and find freelance roles that match your current career. This way you’re not stepping too far out of your comfort zone, and you can also start gathering freelance clients before you cut ties with your current employer. The gig economy is without a doubt the biggest enabler of nomadic living.

Here’s a couple of well-known freelance listing sites:

• PeoplePerHour
• Upwork
• Freelancer

If the skills you’ve obtained so far in your career don’t match well with the majority of freelance roles out there (which tend to be creative or marketing-based) then it may be time to start thinking of getting another job. Living on the road is a highly desired lifestyle and more and more employers are recognising this and offering remote work. Take a look at this list by FlexJobs of the 100 Top Companies with Remote Jobs.

3 Ways to Increase your Income

Without the security and the constant flow of work that comes from your typical 9-5 job, it’s a good idea to have side-projects that can boost your income in periods of work-drought while you’re on the road. Here are a couple we suggest…

1. Document your Travels

The Digital Nomadic lifestyle is interesting to many people all over the world, so one potentially lucrative way to increase your income is to create a blog or a YouTube channel that documents your travels. A couple of successful examples of this are Nomadic Matt (a travel expert who shares his own journey along with other tips and tricks) and Boho Beautiful (a yoga teacher who teaches video classes in various beautiful locations all over the world).

2. Create and Sell Merch

A knock-on effect of documenting your travels is gaining a follower base, and another way to monetize this opportunity is to create and sell merchandise to these people (your fans!). By utilising a print on demand service, like Kite, you can sell a range of custom merchandise products from anywhere in the world.

3. Become a Teacher

With software like Skype and Google Hangouts, you don’t need to be in the same location as someone to teach them. Teaching doesn’t have to revolve around the subjects we learnt at school either, think about your skills and talents and how you can pass those on to others. Don’t think you have any skills or talents to pass on? What about your language?!

Teaching English (or any other language you are fluent in!) online is really easy through sites like iTalki, and it is rewarding too!

10 Quick-Fire Hacks to Life on the Road

1. Get a world clock widget on your device in case you need to schedule meetings with clients in different timezones

2. Save on accommodation costs by house sitting

3. Get an unlocked phone and then use a local sim from the country you’re in to save money

4. Get comprehensive travel insurance for emergencies

5. Find cheap flights using Skyscanner

6. Get coupons from sites like Groupon to enjoy the local area for less

7. Take advantage of free WiFi in cafes, libraries (But remember that WiFi isn’t great all over the world, so it’s a good idea to invest in an ethernet adaptor)

8. Sell or rent your home to help fund your travels

9. Let your bank know that you’ll be travelling around

10. Travel with other digital nomads to save money and have fun

Let’s Get Real…

If you’re lusting after the life of a digital nomad, then you’re probably unhappy about your current situation. Maybe you dislike your job, maybe you want to taste freedom, or maybe you’re just bored. Whatever it is, you owe it to yourself to make a change.

If you’re not yet in a position to quit everything and begin a new life on the road, a great way to start finding that source of freedom is by creating a side project that you can work on at home.

Check out our How to Setup a Custom Merchandise Business as a Side Project article.

The post Digital Nomads: A Quick Guide to Life on the Road appeared first on KITE.

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</p><br /> <p><strong>Please include attribution to Kite.ly with this graphic.</strong></p><br /> <p><a href=’https://www.kite.ly/infographic-top-ways-influencers-generate-revenue/’><img src=’https://www.kite.ly/wp-content/uploads/infographic-top-ways-influencers-generate-revenue-final-1.png’ alt=’Infographic: Top ways influencers generate revenue’ width=’600px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /> <p>

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