When it comes to search engine optimization, content is still king. Doing a little bit of keyword research to create few pillar pieces of content on your blog can double your blog traffic and sales leads over time. Which is why it’s important to build a solid content strategy—one loaded with content ideas that will interest your target audience and high-ranking keywords for your industry.

What’s the point in writing amazing content if no one is ever going to find it, right? (Your family and close friends don’t count.)

So the question becomes, how do we create a content strategy that delivers the content our readers crave and rank in search? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Last month we sat down with our super-smart friend Tommy Griffith of ClickMinded and he gave us a fail-proof method for creating a content strategy based on actual data from keyword research. Believe it or not, keyword research isn’t as hard to do as it sounds, and we’ve broken down his process for you below.

Find your keywords

If you’re going to build a content strategy for your business, you need to know which keywords you should target. And while you could channel your high school test-taking self and just start guessing, it’s better to use an online tool that will give you actual data. One of those tools is called Keyword Finder. This free tool provides actual search data to help you make more informed keyword targeting decisions.

To get started, visit KWFinder.com and insert a common keyword or keyword phrase that your typical customer would type into Google. For example, if you owned a photography business in Austin, you might use “Austin photographer” as your targeted keyword.

KWFinder.com will then deliver a list of additional keywords to consider based on your original keyword. You’ll also notice that it provides the monthly average search volume,  paid ad metrics, and a keyword difficulty score. For the sake of your content keyword research, you’ll want to focus on the average search volume metrics and keyword difficulty to give yourself an idea of how many times a keyword is searched and how easy it will be to rank for that keyword.

From here, you’ll need to refine your list of keywords by selecting only the ones that pertain to your business. So, if you are a family lifestyle photographer, you’d have no business targeting “Austin wedding photography.” However, you would definitely want to include “Austin family photographer” and “Austin newborn photographer.”

You’ll want to add all of the keywords and phrases from the list that your target audience might search for. (Don’t worry about sorting and organizing, we’ll do that later.)

Narrow Down Your Keywords

After you’ve created your list of keywords in KWFinder.com, you’ll want to export that list and open it up in a spreadsheet. You can use Google Sheets, Numbers, or Excel. This is where we will start narrowing down and organizing our keywords.

The three columns in your export that you want to pay the most attention to are Keywords, Search Volume, and Keyword Difficulty.

Using those columns, you can start to organize your keywords based on content ideas. For example, there are several keywords based on “Austin newborn” and “Austin Baby photography.” You can put all the keywords that have to do with newborn photography into one group and then develop a content piece utilizing all those keywords.

As you can see in the image above, creating a content piece for Austin Baby Photography could result in 668 new visits to your website every month, assuming you captured 100% of the traffic. But because perfection is an illusion, you can use ClickMinded’s free spreadsheet to estimate the amount of traffic you actually can get depending on where you fall in Google. We know that a #1 spot on Google generally results in about 30% of the click-thrus. So if you were to create content for Austin Baby Photography and held the #1 spot, you could assume that you would get roughly 2,400 visits per year for that piece of content. Which is an amazing amount of traffic!

Look at the Data and Build Your Content Strategy

Ok, you’ve got an idea of how much traffic each of your proposed pieces of content could get. Now it’s time to add in your business metrics.

Let’s say you have a 10% opt-in rate on your website and a sales conversion rate of 2%. With these metrics, you could assume that the Austin Baby Photography content piece would bring you about 240 new leads and 5 new sales a year, which, depending on your business model, may or may not be a good return on investment. You can use this method to determine which content pieces will have the highest impact on your business and are worth creating.

Here’s a quick recap:

• Use a tool like KWFinder.com to find new keywords
• Group similar keywords into content buckets/groups
• Determine the total search volume and potential traffic for each group
• Layer in your own business statistics to determine the ROI on each piece

Want even more SEO education? Click Here to watch the entire 1 hour SEO Masterclass with Tommy Griffith, or grab this free SEO strategy guide from ClickMinded to get started.

In life and business, there are certain guidelines we must abide by. Some of those are written in stone and some of those are passed down from generation to generation. My friends, today we are passing down our own 10 Commandments of Entrepreneurship. We put these together from the learnings we’ve gathered running our course, Monthly1K, on AppSumo over the years. Each one of these lessons came from trial and error – and we encourage you to keep them handy as you start a business!

1. Validate your idea before anything else

If you are like most entrepreneurs (myself included!) when you get a business idea in your head, you immediately start going through the steps of how to bring it to life. You might think, “I need a logo and a website” or “I need some business cards”, or “OMG, I need to form an LLC right away.”

Stop it. Stop right there.

Sumo-lings, spending money before you’ve actually started making money, is the wrong approach.

Why create a website for a business that you don’t know will work? Why form an LLC for a company that may not last a single month? (Sorry to get all Negative Nancy here.)

The first thing you need to do after coming up with a new idea is to validate it. You’ve got to make sure people actually want your product or service before you put any money towards it. So instead of heading to GoDaddy to start building your website, reach out and talk to the people you intend to target with your business.

For example, if you want to start a new SAAS platform for Human Resources professionals, reach out to the HR people in your network and tell them about your idea. Ask them what they think about it, how they would improve it, and most importantly, would they actually PAY for a service like that? Once you’ve gotten people to agree to pay for your services, then can you start building your business!

Download Noah Kagan’s 10 Commandments for Business

2. Keep it simple

Dear perfectionists, I hate to tell you this, but sometimes in business, done is better than perfect. Yes, it’s true. I’m sure you’ve heard of an MVP before, it stands for a minimum viable product. An MVP is usually the first draft of a product or service and is far from perfect. It’s necessary to put out an MVP so users can start testing it out and giving you feedback. With that feedback, you can continue to iterate and create a product that users can’t resist.

3. Don’t create solutions for problems that don’t exist

Entering a crowded market can be tough, we get it. BUT if you come up with an idea that you think nobody has done before, we’d encourage you to peel back the layers a little more on your idea. Perhaps no one has done it because there isn’t a market for it. Sad but true: not all of our brilliant business ideas are actually brilliant. Some ideas may be solutions to problems that don’t exist or solutions people are not willing to pay for.

Here’s a perfect example, we know a guy (cough, Noah Kagan, cough) who once spent $50k of his own money to create an online site for fantasy sports betting and because he didn’t take our advice (see #1).  He hadn’t validated the idea that fantasy sports players wanted a service like that.

His site, though great in theory, wasn’t something that they were interested in. So when it launched, it flopped. This was an expensive lesson to learn, but that’s why we are telling you this story. We don’t want you to create products and services that people just don’t need in their life.

Instead, start a business that people NEED so you can make it through different cycles of trends and potential economic downturns, and come out on top!

4. Find your place on the totem pole

As entrepreneurs, we’d like to believe that people love our product so much that they absolutely could not imagine life without it. And while that may be the case for some of our customers, it also may not be true.

A simple way to find out where you stack on the customer’s totem post is to ask your them, “If my company were to go away overnight, how disappointed would you be?”

If their answer is “very disappointed” or “slightly disappointed” you know that you have some dedicated customers. But the true opportunity lies with the people who answer, “I wouldn’t care” or “not disappointed at all.” At that point, it gives you the opportunity to reach out to those people and ask how you can improve your product to make it a ‘must have’ in their life instead of a ‘nice to have.’ With that feedback, you can improve the product to suit the needs of your customers.

5. Don’t be needy

When it comes to launching your business, you are going to need a lot of things. You may even need a lot of people. But waiting on a lot of things—or people—can slow you down. Instead, you are going to need to be extremely resourceful and nimble. You’ll want to do as much as you can on your own so that you can move at your own pace. If you do need help, find the right person for the job and let them do what they do best while you focus on other aspects of the business.

6. Focus on the small wins to maintain momentum

In business we’re told to have our eye on the goal and depending on what that is, our goal can seem daunting, unachievable, and downright scary. If you are new to business and aren’t sure what steps will get you there, you can easily become discouraged. But while you are working through your entrepreneurial journey, you have to learn to embrace the small wins.

The small wins are milestones that your business achieves towards your goal. For example, if you are looking to bring on 100 new clients this year, every 10 clients you get it brings you 10% closer to your goal, and this is cause for celebration! If you spend your time focusing on the fact that you’ve got 90 more to go, you’ll never be able to enjoy the work that you’ve put in and the progress you’ve made.

7. Use time limitations

There’s a thing called “Parkinson’s law” which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Which means if you give yourself 2 hours to finish a blog post or 2 weeks to finish a blog post, that’s how much time it will take you.

If you are trying to grow your business, it’s important to be productive. And you can’t be productive if you are giving yourself more time than is necessary to complete tasks. In our example, if you gave yourself 2 hours to write a blog post, you’d be able to complete 80 blog posts in two weeks whereas if you gave yourself 2 weeks to complete a blog post, all you’d have is a single blog post. (One sad, lonely blog post.)

8. Do what it takes to get that first $1

Before you spend money, we want you to make money, which means you need to do whatever it takes to make your first dollar. Reach out to your network. Call your college buddies. Approach people in the checkout line. Try to sell your idea to people and get them to give you money. Some of the best businesses were started as MVPs (Minimal Viable Product) — read: it doesn’t need to be perfect to be selling!

One of the ways that Noah Kagan recommends earning your first dollar is to send out an email to your network with a basic pitch for your business. Tell them that you are opening up this offer for a short period of time and if they are interested, to Paypal you the money for the product or service. Inevitably, you will have at least one person on your list that you can convince, and boom! you just made your first dollar. You are now officially in business.

9. Plan for adversity

Running a business is not for the faint of heart. Some days you will be on cloud nine and other days you’ll have to will yourself out of bed just to get on with the day. Because of this, you will need to have a strong mindset to persevere.

You will likely run into obstacles in your business. AppSumo founder Noah Kagan, was once sued by a well-funded competitor for his social gaming platform. (I’m guessing this is was a day that was particularly hard to get out of bed for Noah.) But instead of throwing in the towel, his company handled the lawsuit and continued business as usual.

Whatever obstacles you encounter (and you will undoubtedly encounter many), you must have your larger goal in mind and a strong dedication to that goal. Otherwise, without strong conviction, you will likely quit or walk away at the first sign of adversity.

Bottom line: Know that obstacles are on the way and have a plan to overcome them.

10. Face your fears

Running a business is hard. There are going to be times that you are going to face your fears head-on. Hate picking up the phone to make a call? Do it. Hate the feeling of pitching your business to people you don’t know? Get used to it. Succeeding in business means stepping outside of your comfort zone.

Want a copy of Noah Kagan’s 10 Commandments for Business? Click here.

Share the lessons YOU learned from starting and growing your business below — we want to hear from you!

As business owners, we’re always looking for ways to find new customers, expand our brand’s reach, and grow year over year. So we read blogs, listen to podcasts, and do everything the marketing experts tell us to do.  And while we flood the usual suspects with our marketing materials, there’s one channel that is often overlooked: Facebook groups.

Creating a Facebook group for your business allows you to do several things: create an exclusive place for your biggest fans to engage and interact, showcase your expertise, and solicit important feedback for your business.

Now I know what you’re thinking…”Who has time for Facebook groups? What will I talk about? What if nobody joins or interacts with me?” It’s like your worst fears from middle school are suddenly resurfacing, and we understand completely.

Recently, we sat down with Dana Malstaff, founder and CEO of Boss Mom, about the strategy she used to grow her Facebook group to over 36,000 members in the last few years (and it’s still growing at the rate of 1000 new members a month!). Below we’ll share some of the most popular engagement post types that Dana used to create a thriving community.

The 4 Types of Posts That Generate Group Engagement

One of the topics Dana and I chatted about was the types of posts one should use in their Facebook group to encourage engagement. Dana has 4 types of posts that she uses in her Facebook group:

#1. Help Me with a Decision Post

This type of post is exactly what it sounds like—you ask your group to help you make a decision about your business. For example, if you are creating new business cards, you might put a picture of a couple of options and ask them to vote for their favorite. Or if you are launching a new product, you can ask your audience what they like or dislike about it.

For this type of post, you might be tempted to use the polling feature in Facebook groups. Don’t! You want members to leave a comment instead because this will increase engagement and will help boost the post’s visibility in Facebook’s algorithm. So while the poll feature keeps results concise, it will make you lose out on engagement.

The people in your Facebook group are invested in you and your business and want to see you succeed. When you ask for their advice on different aspects of your business, it gives them a sense of involvement and makes them feel ‘in the know.’ This sense of belonging is a key driver for loyalty and future engagement.

#2. Opinion Post

Now, you may think asking your Facebook group for their opinion is the same as asking them to help you make a decision. But the Opinion Post is when you ask your group about something general or related to your industry, not necessarily your business. For example, you may ask your group “What are your favorite podcasts?” or “What is the most influential book you’ve read this year?”

These types of questions are easy to answer for your group members, and it gives them an opportunity to share something about themselves (we all love doing this!) so they feel valued. The other benefit to asking for opinions is that people within the group may find other members who have similar interests, which then gives them an opportunity to interact and engage with each other. It’s like they just made a new best friend!

#3. Call to Arms Post

The goal of this type of post is to get your group to rally behind a topic. Something that they can read and think, “this is so me.”

This post type will look different depending on what your niche is. For example, if you’re a designer, you might ask your design group to “show off the best/worst design they’ve ever done.” Or maybe create a post where people can vent about their frustrations about design.

People LOVE these types of posts because it gives them a chance to feel part of a narrative and have their voices heard by people who can relate.

#4. Irresistible Engagement Post

The “I can’t help myself” posts are quick and easy to comment on posts where you encourage your group to share their favorite GIF, drop an emoji, or comment with a 1-word answer. The whole idea is that the task is so easy to do that they just can’t help themselves and will engage.

A good example of this is “It’s Monday morning, drop a GIF of how you are feeling right now.” We all know Facebook users love GIFs so use this tactic often! Asking people to post fun things like their favorite memes or GIFs is a great way to create a sense of community within the group.

These posts are meant to be fun and entertaining. After all, all work and no play makes for one boring group!

Now that you’ve learned the four types of engagement posts to use in your group, we’d love to hear from you. What are you doing inside your Facebook group that encourages engagement? Leave us a comment below!

P.S. If you’d like to watch the full-length webinar with Dana Malstaff, click here.

Doc is a man of many interests and found his entrepreneurial spirit early in life. How early in life, you ask? Well, at the age of 7, he was running his first business, trading baseball cards; at 12, he was a wedding DJ; and at 14, he became a club DJ (yes, 14. We can thank his wise eyes and the club’s lax enforcement of policies for that gig). He’s also been a massage therapist, a physical therapist assistant, owned a crime scene clean-up company, and opened his first gym…all by the time he was 23! Not too bad for someone who didn’t speak until he was 5 and read until he was 9, eh?

Now, Doc runs The Toolkit Agency, which is a branding and marketing agency for fitness professionals.

How to Build a 6 Figure Business with AppSumo: Doc Williams’ Journey

Doc’s Story Starts Here…

After opening two gyms in his twenties, Doc found himself burnt out from gym ownership and decided to pivot his career. He knew he wanted to stay in the fitness industry, but didn’t know which career path to choose. At this point, he began taking courses on copywriting to expand his skill set. (Fun fact: One of those courses was the Kopywriting Kourse by Neville Medhora, a founding employee of AppSumo.) With his newfound copywriting skills, Doc landed at a job at ESPN, took on many side jobs, and eventually became a webmaster for various companies and personalities in the fitness industry.

As word-of-mouth spread, more and more people began seeking out Doc to help improve their branding and marketing. It was at this point that Doc realized he needed to start an agency to house all of this work…and thus, The Toolkit Agency was born.

At the Toolkit Agency, Doc works with fitness influencers to ‘hone their super-powers.’ He works with people to help them understand what their unique talents are and helps them develop signature products to expand their personal brand.

How Doc Grew His Agency to 6-Figures

When Doc launched The Toolkit Agency, he was charging his clients $125/mo. to build their brand and manage their website. But even with a handful of clients, Doc couldn’t afford the software that would automate and streamline his business, so he was doing everything manually and losing a ton of time — time he needed to grow his business.

Luckily, Doc discovered AppSumo. AppSumo allowed Doc to purchase affordable tools that, in turn, helped him expand his agency offerings. In just over two years, Doc went from charging $125/mo. to $5,700/mo. Doc says, without AppSumo, he would likely still be at a 9-to-5 job.

Here are some of the ways that Doc uses AppSumo tools to grow his business:

Book Like A Boss (Appointment-setting and service-selling software — Purchased on AppSumo for $39; regularly $300/year)

Doc uses Book Like A Boss to set up phone calls with prospective appointments. His personalized booking page gives him a professional look that builds trust in his service right from the start.

Paperform (Customizable form software — Purchased on AppSumo for $39; regularly $348/year)

The next stop in Doc’s process is sending potential clients an intake form that he created with Paperform. Paperform integrates with his email service provider and easily sends notifications.

Dubb (Personalized video software — Purchased on AppSumo for $59; regularly $480/year)

Once the client has filled out the form and is officially a client, Doc will send them a personalized ‘welcome and thank you’ video using Dubb.

Notejoy (Notetaking software — Purchased on AppSumo for $49; regularly $249)

Running a remote business can get hectic. That’s why Doc and his team use Notejoy to communicate and stay on the same page with tasks, duties, and clients.

How Doc Is Helping Others

Doc isn’t just using the tools he’s found on AppSumo to grow his own business; he’s also using these tools to help his customers grow their own businesses. For example, Doc was working with an influencer who had a YouTube channel and was really struggling to get views and subscribers. Because Doc had purchased TubeBuddy from AppSumo, he was able to find the right angle to grow his client’s YouTube channel. With the information gathered from TubeBuddy, his client put out a video that garnered over 1 million views and over 10K new subscribers within the first month! This was life-changing for the client and a true testament to Doc’s success.

And if you think Doc is just in it for money (although, it is a nice perk), you’re wrong. Doc’s goal is to accumulate enough capital to start a passion project (does this man ever sleep?) that will help entrepreneurs with disabilities, specifically, dyslexia, break into the business. The desire to undertake this project stems from being late to the talking and reading party as a child and from a college professor who held up his paper and said, “That guy is the worst writer I have ever read in my life.” (Not nice, Professor Meanie.)

Want more?

If you are interested in learning more about Doc and his business, watch the full interview below:

Unless you’ve sworn off using technology for your business, you’ve heard of—or tried—Facebook advertising. According to this study, over 20% of all Facebook business pages are using paid ads to drive traffic to their website and increase engagement on their posts.

Between you and me, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to use Facebook ads and failed…miserably. I throw a few dollars into a Boosted post, it flops, I cry a little on the inside, and move onto the next marketing tactic. Until now. Last month, I got to sit down with Jack Paxton, founder of TopGrowthMarketing and AppSumo’s in-house FB ads guru, to pick his brain about Facebook ads.

Jack’s a pretty humble guy so allow us to brag on his behalf: he has managed over $100 million dollars in social advertising spend for clients like MyIntent and Badgley Mischka Home. So when it comes to FB Ads, Jack has seen it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Below you’ll find five super actionable Facebook ad tips that Jack shared with me during our conversation that you can use to grow and scale your business.

Actionable Facebook Ad Tips to Get Higher Conversions Today

1. Make sure your pixel is working

One of the biggest mistakes novice Facebook Ads users make is not setting up their pixel correctly. Y’all, this is kind of a big deal considering your pixel is responsible for relaying all of your visitor information to Facebook. So you want to make sure it’s installed properly and firing. Lucky for you, many of the major website platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress make it pretty easy for you to implement your pixel.

If your website doesn’t have built-in pixel tracking, you can always follow the step-by-step instructions found here to make sure you’re doing it right. Unfortunately, when it comes to your pixel, it’s not enough to simply install it and pray for the best. In addition, you’ll want to test out the pixel. For example, if you are using on an e-commerce shop, you’ll want to go as far as making a test purchase on the site to ensure that the pixel is firing correctly. You can see if the pixel is firing within the Facebook Ads manager.

Now, not to overcomplicate this, but you also want to make sure it’s firing off the right events. When creating your pixel, you can choose which event you’d like to fire, this can be something like “viewed content,” “added to cart,” or “made a purchase.” You will select the right event to track with your pixel depending on your goal.

How is this put into practice? Let’s say you’re a blogger and are only interested in getting more readers. Then, the “viewed content” event is what you would use. However, if you have an e-commerce shop, you’ll want to know how many purchases were made from your ads, which you can do by tracking the “made a purchase” event. (Note: Jack recommends using the conversion event to get the highest ROI when you’re first starting out.)

Bottom line, whatever you do, do not run any marketing campaigns until you are sure that your pixel is working and firing off the correct events in your Facebook ads dashboard.

2. Never boost a post

If you’ve ever posted something to your Facebook business page, then you are probably familiar with the Boost button that appears on your post once you’ve published it. The idea behind this boost button is that you pay Facebook money and it will show your post to more of your page followers. BUT it’s a trap. Don’t do it.

Instead of boosting a post, Jack recommends using the Ads Manager to promote everything. The Ads manager will allow you to customize your audience much more than the Boost post option will. Simply boosting a post does not give you the opportunity to select the demographics of your audience or when and where your ad will be seen. And if you can’t select who sees your ads, you’re basically throwing your money away.

For those instances where you really want to boost a post, Jack recommends using the post as an ad instead. Now, this is a bit more advanced but stay with us. When setting up an ad, Facebook will give you the option to use a Facebook post from your page. To turn a post into an ad, you will need to find the ID number of that post and plug in the ID number in your Facebook Ads dashboard. This is a GREAT strategy to use on posts that already have lots of engagement because Facebook rewards posts that are engaging.

3. Focus on remarketing

Though Jack is used to working with large budgets, he does have advice for those of us who can only afford a small budget: focus on remarketing. Remarketing is when you show Facebook ads to people who have already visited your website, engaged with your previous ads, or are fans of your Facebook page. These campaigns tend to have the highest ROAS (return on ad spend) because these people are familiar with your brand and products and some of them even had your products in their cart. Since this audience is already interested in what you’re offering, they are perfect for a remarketing campaign.

Abandoned cart and dynamic product ads are two of the best remarketing campaigns that you can run. With Facebook ads, you can target people who added items to their cart but failed to check out. These ads will remind them that they have a product in their cart and hopefully encourage them to return to your site and complete the purchase.

Then, if you are a product based business, you can create dynamic ads using your catalog of products. When you have these set up, people who visit one of your product pages, but don’t add to cart or purchase, will be delivered ads featuring the exact product they viewed on your site. The goal here is to remind them about this great product you have and get them to revisit the site and make a purchase.

4. Add videos to your ads arsenal

When it comes to ads, videos outperform images, so make sure they’re a part of your ad portfolio. Now I know a few of you are probably thinking, “I don’t have a budget to create videos!” The good is your videos do not have to be professional and therefore don’t have to be expensive (in fact, we have a lifetime deal on an awesome video editing tool right now!). You can use your iPhone and a tripod to create short videos that will still look great on Facebook.

Since people are used to watching short videos on Facebook and Instagram, you don’t need lengthy videos. In fact, under 60 seconds seems to be the sweet spot for ads. It’s worth noting that Facebook and Instagram see different success for different types of videos. For example, videos showing the product in use or the functions of the product do really great on Facebook, while more lifestyle videos do better on Instagram.

Size matters when it comes to Facebook and Instagram ads.  In line with best practices, you’ll want to use a square format or 4×5 ratio. The 4×5 ratio video essentially takes up the entire mobile screen which is an advantage in getting people to stop scrolling and watch your video. While horizontal videos will work on both platforms, they don’t stop people from scrolling quite like the square or vertical videos do.

Because you’ve only got a few seconds to make an impression, make sure the cover photo of your video is compelling and that the first few seconds are engaging. Save the boring stuff like for later in the video. Kick it off with a promise, an offer, or an enticing story.

If you don’t have a smartphone or camera, Jack recommends using the slideshow feature within the ads platform—all you have to do is select a handful of images, give them each a tagline, and choose the transition times between images to create a makeshift video.

One last tip: use the caption feature. Many people scroll through their social feeds with the sound turned off. Using captions give people an opportunity to enjoy your video in silence.

5. Use better images

One of the biggest questions we had for Jack was “when it comes to Facebook ads, which is more important, images or copy?” Emphatically, he said that images were more important than copy. Because most Facebook users are scrolling through their newsfeed mindlessly, you need to have a “scroll stopping creative.” This is an image that makes a Facebook user stop in their tracks and pay attention to your ad. One of Jack’s best tips for images is to use colors that are opposite of the traditional Facebook blue, like red and yellow, so that they’ll stand out in the newsfeed.

If you are thinking about adding a text conversion element to your image, Jack recommends running an A/B test. Take your current ad copy and image and add a text conversion element to the image. Then, run both ads to see which one performs the best.

It’s important to note that if you add text to your images, be sure that it accounts for less than 20% of the image area. Facebook used to reject images that contained more than 20% text. And even though that has since changed, Facebook still penalizes images that are text heavy by charging more to run those ads. Jack’s advice is to avoid this situation altogether.

Here are a few resources to help you find the best image for your Facebook ads:

• Depositphotos
• StockUnlimited
• RelayThat

Once you’ve got your “scroll stopping image,” it’s time to turn your attention to the copy. Copy matters because it’s your opportunity to sell once you’ve gotten their attention. Here are two things to remember: longer copy works best for people who are already familiar with your brand and shorter copy should be used when prospecting.

If you’re interested in learning more about designing FB ads, you can get the hottest tips and tricks from our in-house designer, Jeir.

Here’s what you learned:

1. Make sure your pixels are firing for the events related to your business goals.
2. Never use the Boost Post option on Facebook. Instead, use the Ads Manager to promote all your content to your intended targeted audience.
3. If you don’t have a lot of money to spend on Facebook ads, try retargeting the people who are already familiar with your brand and company.
4. Use video ads and keep them under 60 seconds. Be sure to use captions!
5. Create a “scroll stopping image” for your Facebook ad and then use compelling copy to get your potential customers to click on your ad.

Want to learn even more from Jack? Check out this FREE e-book we put together with in-depth learnings we acquired from spending millions on FB ads.

Now that you’re equipped with some of the best Facebook ads tips, we’d love to know how you plan to implement these into your strategy! Leave us a comment below!

When it comes to validating your business idea, there’s no one more qualified to help you do so than serial entrepreneur and AppSumo founder, Noah Kagan. In fact, his Monthly1K course was entirely based on this principle.

We recently sat down with Noah to discuss his new experimental project, an email platform named Send Fox. Below, we’ll discuss the process Noah used to validate his new business idea.

Validating Your Business Idea with Noah Kagan

Solve your own problem

If you try to solve your own problem, you’ll stick with it longer.

Picture this: Noah sitting in his office, sending Bill Gates multiple connection requests on LinkedIn, when he gets a bill from Mailchimp for — several hundred dollars — for an email list he hasn’t used in a month! How frustrating! He immediately called Mailchimp and asked to speak to a manager for the obvious discount owed to him, since he hadn’t sent out any emails that month. Sadly, they told him there was nothing they could do and to please stop crying.

So Noah did what any other entrepreneur would do: he decided to take them down. Okay, not really, but he did come up with the idea of SendFox, which would be a less expensive alternative for his email needs.

Don’t spend any money (seriously)

Noah and his three business partners combined their powers to build a competitive email platform. And in under a month, they built a product that they felt was a good MVP (minimal viable product).

Now I know what you are thinking, “Noah’s situation is different.” He’s got a staff, he’s got a huge network, and he looks extremely good in hats.” And yes, while all of that may be true, Noah did offer some advice for those who may not have the technical skills to develop a product on their own. Warning: you may not like what he has to stay.

If you have an idea but aren’t technical, Noah recommends that you get to work on selling your idea instead of building it. Before you start to build your product or hire anyone to do so, you want to make sure that enough people are willing to pay for your product. And the only way to do that is to do the work and reach out to your network. Manually. Yes, I’m talking phone calls, coffee dates, and personalized emails.

Do the work

If you can’t get people who care about you to buy it, how can you get strangers to buy it?

Most entrepreneurs are scared to reach out to their network. They’re afraid of rejection and they don’t want to be laughed at. So what do they do instead? They try to go after a cold audience first. They buy Facebook ads, they set up a website, and grow their social media following in an attempt to AVOID telling their own network about their idea. And Noah warns entrepreneurs that this is not the way to approach it for 3 reasons.

1. You should NOT spend money until you are making money. Don’t build a website, don’t hire a branding professional, and don’t spend money on pay-per-click ads.

2. You need to move quickly. When trying to validate an idea, you should work as quickly as you can. You don’t want to spend weeks or months building out websites and social profiles for a product that you haven’t even validated yet.

3. You need real feedback. You want to reach out to the people in your network because they will be the most honest with you and give you the most valuable feedback. If they like you, they’ll want to help you and see you succeed (may want to exclude any exes from the contact list). Plus, if they aren’t interested in what you’ve got to say, you can always ask them for a referral that might be interested in your product.

While Noah was trying to validate SendFox, he went through his entire email list and found everyone who was using a competing email client. Then, he started calling all of those people to talk to them about SendFox’s value proposition. Yes, he actually got on the phone and called people! And he did this because he knows that talking to people will push him in the right direction.

Get to the right idea faster

Interestingly, he found that very few people were interested in switching to a new email platform to save a few hundred dollars (must be nice being so rich). But instead of throwing his hands up and abandoning the project, he took his conversations a step further and asked them what would make them excited about switching to a new platform?

Noah took this feedback back to his small team and they continued to tweak the platform to suit the needs of his ideal client.

Key takeaways

You want to make sure that you are solving a problem, not spending any money while validating, doing the manual work necessary, and continuing to collect feedback from your audience to improve the product to suit their needs.

Want more?

To hear where Noah is now with SendFox, we encourage you to watch the webinar! Noah even answers some audience questions at the end! Click here to watch the webinar.

Starting a business is expensive. You’ve got to build a website, hire a branding pro, and buy a bunch of really sweet software to get your operation running smoothly. You might also need office space, supplies, and definitely a bean bag chair. And if you are like most new entrepreneurs, you’re probably panicking just reading this? Well, don’t despair, my fellow entrepreneurial friend because, in this blog post, we’re going to give you a list of business tools that won’t cost you a dime.

10 Free Business Tools to Get Started

1. Google Docs

Despite what you’ve been told, you do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on fancy office suite software. Google gives you everything for FREE. I’m talking documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, and forms. Which means you can run almost every area of your business using just the Google suite. The best part is you can access all your files from anywhere and on any device. So you’ll never be without your important documents.

2. Trello

It’s time to get organized. Once you start a business, you learn that your head, napkins, and random scraps of notebook paper no longer cut it for keeping track of projects and to-do lists. This is why I love Trello. Trello is a project management tool that allows you to set up all your tasks and to-do lists in one neatly organized website, accessible from any device. With Trello’s free plan, you get unlimited boards, lists, cards, members, checklists, and attachments.

3. Zapier

Now that you’ve got Google Docs and Trello set up, let me introduce you to my productivity-boosting friend, Zapier. Zapier is an online tool that allows you to connect two separate apps. For example, you could set up a ‘zap’ that would create a new Trello card each time you created a new Google Doc. Or you could do something more advanced like send an automated response email anytime someone signed up for a webinar on your site. (Psst..if you need more ideas, check out this blog post.)With Zapier’s free plan, you can set up to 5 zaps.

4. Mailchimp

If you are just starting to build out your email list, then you absolutely want to check out Mailchimp. Not only is this one of the most popular email service providers on the internet, but they give you a free account until you get 2,000 subscribers. Now you won’t have to pay to send emails until you actually have a decent-sized list. Mailchimp has dozens of pre-designed templates that make creating your very first newsletter or prospect email a breeze. Not a huge Mailchimp fan? We put together this list of Mailchimp alternatives for you to consider — many of them with free options as well!

5. Pexels

Whether you are writing an email, creating Facebook ads, or brochures for your business, you’re going to need stock photos. Just in case you didn’t know this already, you cannot take an image you found on Google search and use it for your business. Yea, apparently it’s “illegal” and called “copyright infringement.” Because we don’t want you to end up behind bars, we are going to share our favorite free stock photo resource: Pexels. Pexels has thousands of beautiful, royalty-free images that you can use for all aspects of your business.

6. Canva

Once you have the images, you’re going to want to make edits to them. There are a ton of graphic design tools available, but you may want to check out Canva, a free online photo editing tool that let you create branded and personalized graphics for your newsletters, brochures, and social media posts. Edit your own images or choose from Canva’s library of images (some of which you have to pay for, but a good portion are free). Quickly download all your masterpieces to your computer and use them for your print and digital marketing campaigns. For a complete list of Canva alternatives, check out this post.

7. Buffer

Seeing that you now have some sweet looking social media graphics, you’ll want to use a tool like Buffer to schedule them across your various accounts. When running a business, you don’t have time to actually sit down and post to your social media accounts (or to sit down at all), which is why it’s a good idea to automate those tasks with Buffer.

On the free plan, Buffer will allow you to schedule up to 10 posts to 3 different social media accounts. You’ll be able to schedule all your social media posts for the week in just a few minutes! Some notable Buffer alternatives with free plans include Hootsuite, Later, and Publer.

8. Bit.ly

Not to length shame, but long URLs are ugly. Yeah, I said it. Increase clickability by using personalized, shortened links from Bit.ly. These conversion-inducing links will also give you stats on your link, like, the number of clicks. It takes the guesswork out of marketing.

9. Wave

Ready to send out your first invoice and want to look like a true professional? Then head on over to Wave, an online invoicing software program. Wave lets you create and send professional-looking invoices to your clients’ inbox. You can even keep track of who’s paid and who hasn’t so you can send “reminders” if you need to.

10. UberConference

If you run an online business, you’re going to need to set up virtual meetings with your clients (unless you have the cash to fly around the country for coffee dates). UberConference allows you to set up online meetings anytime. Their free plan allows you to set up 45-minute calls with up to 10 people at a time. During that meeting, you can share your screen and record with HD quality sound and video.

Show and tell

Now that you’ve seen our favorite free business tools, we’d love to hear which ones you love! Leave us a comment below!

Whether it’s because you can work when you want to, or don’t have to wear pants, the number of people freelancing has skyrocketed.

We know there are a ton of you freelancers in our community, looking to grow your business. So we called up our old friend, Brennan Dunn, founder of Right Message & Double Your Freelancing, to chat about strategies that you can use to fire up your freelancing business. During our interview, we talked about marketing your business, pricing your business, and scaling your freelance career. So put on your bathing suit because we are about to dive in!

How to Double Your Freelancing in 5 Simple Steps

Get the freelance ball rolling

If you’re currently working a 9-5, the biggest questions you have are “how do I make the transition from a full-time job to full-time freelancer?” and “who keeps stealing my pens?” While Brennan can’t tell you who’s stealing your pens, he can help you make the transition to full-time freelancer.

His advice (surprisingly) leans towards a more conservative approach. Why? Because #adulting. If you have a 9-5, there’s a good chance you have responsibilities like rent/mortgage, a family, or a car payment. (I mean, why else would you willingly spend your time doing something you don’t like?) Even though it would be great to grab your belongings and head straight for the door, that’s not what you should do.

Brennan advises new freelancers to get into a gig mindset first and start networking within your own community. Things like the Chamber of Commerce and local meetups from Meetup.com are a great way to immerse yourself in the local community before quitting your job.

Networking will allow you to get to know people in different fields so you can expand your own professional network. The caveat here is that you shouldn’t go into these network events with the idea that you are going to walk out with new clients. Instead, you should learn who the players are in your local community. Even if you plan to run a digital business, Brennan says there is great value in having a strong local professional network.

How to leave your 9-5

When you’re finally ready to make a break for it and leave the 9-5 behind, Brennan offers up a great piece of advice: try to get your current full-time employer to become your first client. This allows you to still have some steady income while giving you more time to pursue new clients.

If you’re wondering how on earth you should approach this tricky situation, Brennan recommends letting your employer know that you’re interested in becoming a freelancer but that you’d like to continue working with them on a contractor basis. Because you’ve already proven yourself capable, your employer is more likely to be open to this new working relationship at least until they find a replacement for you (which if you’re lucky, could take several months).

One path that you may want to avoid is using online freelancing job boards. Brennan argues that jobs found on these boards are commoditized and you’ll have to compete with people who have less expensive rates than you. It’s important to know your worth and seek work and clients that recognize it.

Grow your freelance business

You should always have work in the pipeline. One of the biggest mistakes that freelancers make is waiting until a current project is finished to find a new client. Brennan recommends that you should always be doing outreach and scheduling clients to ensure you don’t ever go weeks or months without work (unless you really enjoy not knowing when your next paycheck is coming).

He warns that not having a pipeline of customers may force you to do things that you don’t want to, like, working with bad clients or taking lower-paying jobs.

As mentioned before, networking with local business people will help to grow your business. Now, if the thought of attending networking events to grow your business scares the bejesus out of you, don’t worry…we got you. I asked Brennan how introverts can get over the fear of attending networking events and his answer was pure gold. He says to change your mindset from that of “I’m selling to these people” to “my services help people and I want to help these people.”

By changing the way you think about networking events, you’ll have an easier time approaching people to talk about your business. And again, you shouldn’t attend these events with the hopes of scoring a new client because that won’t be the case most of the time. What you are trying to do is build of network of people who will refer you to their friends or colleagues should they need the services you offer.

Use content marketing to build your brand

Brennan is no stranger to content. In fact, he admits that he has been very successful in growing his freelancing career using content marketing strategies like lead magnets, courses, & ebooks.

Brennan uses the example of a marketing automation talk that he gave at a conference to a crowd of five hundred. After the talk, instead of awkwardly saying something like “hire me,” he gave the audience the opportunity to download a guide from his website. This did two things: it gave the audience member even more valuable information and it gave Brennan their email address, which allowed him to continue to market to them via email or Facebook ads.

Know your worth

Brennan has a unique perspective on how you should price your services. He believes in pricing your services based on value instead of commoditizing them into a certain dollar amount per hour.

When working with a new client, you should work to understand their needs and discuss the impact that your work will have on their company. For example, if you’re discussing Facebook Ad management with a client, and this new channel stands to bring them $50k in revenue, you should base your fee structure on the total value that the service would bring. Instead of say, $100/hour.

Another tip that Brennan uses with his clients is to offer a few different packages at different price points — this will allow the customer to select a fee structure that they’re comfortable with and also identifies what the deliverables are for the job.

Want more?

Now that you’ve learned how to leave your 9-5, scale your freelancing career, how to price your services, we invite you to tune into the webinar. Click Here to watch the entire interview, plus hear Brennan take audience questions at the end. There are lots of nuggets of freelancer wisdom in there!

Did you know that AppSumo makes more revenue per employee than Google and Facebook? It’s true. Not only are we ridiculously good-looking and humble, but we are super successful, too. (Please keep reading.) So I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get AppSumo president Ayman Al-Abdullah to spill the AppSumo tea. Luckily, he obliged.

Over a few Al Pastor tacos, Ayman and I talked about how he was able to turn something that started in Noah’s mom’s basement into an 8-figure business in just a few years. Ayman was open and honest (as he always is) about the strategies behind the success, providing me (and now you) with genuine, actionable advice to grow your business and sumo-size your success.

Below, I will share those strategies with you. But you gotta do me a favor, do NOT keep them to yourself. Share them with your entrepreneur friends — the ones who are struggling, the ones who are on the brink of success, and the ones who are ready to scale.

3 Ways to Sumo-size Your Success with Ayman Al-Abdullah

1. Remove bottlenecks in your business

Let’s be honest, as entrepreneurs (and mostly solopreneurs), we think we know what’s best for our business and that no one can run it better. So we do everything ourselves, refusing help from anyone. We do the grunt work, the strategizing, and take responsibility for every task in our business…whether it’s in our skill set or not.

Well, according to Ayman, doing everything yourself is a bottleneck. You are inhibiting your own growth by trying to do everything without help. His advice is to figure out what the bottlenecks are in your business (e.g. the tasks that are taking up too much of your time) and either automate those processes or outsource them so you can concentrate on the money-generating tasks in your business.

When Ayman first started with AppSumo, he was a one-man show. He was closing the deals, writing and HTML-formatting copy, sending the emails, and doing customer service. Because he was stretched so thin, he wasn’t excelling at any of those duties; he was just getting them done. Spoiler alert: This is NOT how you scale a business.

Once Ayman was able to take a moment to breathe, he realized that the only way to grow the business was to get higher quality deals. Closing deals was AppSumo’s bottleneck, so he hired someone solely to find and close deals. This freed Ayman up to do more strategic work for AppSumo, while high-quality deals were still being closed.

2. Hire for the process, not the org chart

There’s no doubt that AppSumo has a very unique hiring strategy.  (I mean, where do they find such smart, handsome, and hip people anyway?) For starters, Ayman recommends ‘hiring for the process and not the org chart.’ By that, he means to think about your business as an assembly line and hire for those positions.

For example, in the AppSumo business, there are several steps in the deal setup process. We need someone to find and close deals, we need copywriters and designers to create the creative assets, we need developers to update the website, a marketer to run Facebook ads, and customer support to keep our customers are happy.

AppSumo Deal Process:

• Find and close deal
• Deal set up process
• Write copy, video script and email and get graphics
• Set deal up on the website
• Launch deal
• Market the deal
• Customer Support

With this process in mind, Ayman hired the best person for each task. He knew doing this would keep the deal process moving smoothly. After Ayman hired his first business development rep, his next hire was head of marketing to help with copy, emails, and advertising. Then, he hired a dedicated and devilishly good-looking copywriter (who totally isn’t editing this post) to nail the voice of AppSumo in both the deal copy and emails. Each and every time that AppSumo has made a hire, it has been to fill a strategic part of the deal “assembly line process.”

One of the keys to AppSumo’s success is having a lean and dedicated team of talented people. What may be interesting to you to know is that AppSumo does not generally hire people immediately. In fact,  Ayman recommends that you have each potential employee do a trial run before hiring them full-time. He usually gives the candidate a project to work on to test out the person’s skillset and to ensure that they fit in with the team. This trial run can go from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. But once the candidate has proved their worth, a job offer is extended.

3. Identify areas for scaling

Once you’ have your team in place, it’s time to think about scaling your business. According to Ayman, there are four ways that you can scale your business:

• Make the product better

When Ayman was running AppSumo alone, he was doing everything well. But well isn’t good enough to scale. So he hired a biz dev guy to go out and find those Tier 1 deals Sumo-lings would love. Then, he hired a head of engineering to increase conversions by making the website easier to use. After that, be brought on a copywriter to make deals compelling.  With each hire, the overall the product became better. And that has stayed true with each new hire since.

• Explore new marketing channels

For a long time, AppSumo relied on its healthy email list size. However, there came a point when Ayman realized they needed to do more to reach a new audience. And that’s when Ayman decided it was time to try Facebook Ads marketing. “Try” is the key word because Ayman recommends that businesses ‘test and invest’ before making a full-time commitment. Just because you think Facebook Ads may be good for your business doesn’t mean they will be. He also advises NOT to make any full-time hires for new marketing channels until those channels have proved a solid ROI.

In order to adhere to the ‘test and invest’ policy, AppSumo tried out several Facebook agencies to see who would rise to the top. He gave each team a certain amount of money and let them run Facebook ads on our behalf to see who would get the highest ROI. After the test was over, he went with the winning agency.

Unfortunately, most businesses don’t personally test the people they are considering hiring and make the mistake of rushing into a full-time offer. This an incredibly risky way to scale your business. The next time you’re thinking about hiring someone to do your marketing, try out several employees and agencies to make sure they can back up the resume talk.

• Sell people more things

The third way AppSumo tried to scale the business was by finding new products to sell to AppSumo’s existing customers. AppSumo tried things like gift cards and a plus membership. The gift cards work well because they make Sumo-lings want to constantly to browse through our store to see what they can spend their “free money” on. Similarly, the Plus membership has been a hit with its discount, one free tool credit, and other surprise perks. Each of these additions has helped AppSumo increase its bottomline.

• Put processes in place

One of the mistakes that many new companies and new entrepreneurs make is they don’t invest time in transferring the knowledge they already have to new employees.

Because so much of the AppSumo’s growth has been a result of new hires, it’s important to have systems in place to ramp up its employees. AppSumo uses SOPs (standard operating procedures) for each of its tasks to reduce mistakes and increase productivity. When a team member comes on board, they are able to quickly learn the ‘right way’ to do things at AppSumo. These SOPs and checklists are available to anyone on the team and are an invaluable asset to running a smooth team.

Want more?

We encourage you to watch the entire webinar with Ayman to learn even more tips on growing a successful business (and to marvel at his beard). Click here to get access to the 60-minute webinar.

If you’re serious about starting your business the AppSumo way, check out our Sumo-size Your Success course, available now on AppSumo!