Profit Hacking With Steve Daar: Simple Ways To Increase Sales Conversion & Profits

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. I am Brad, as the announcer just said, and I'm excited to have you back on the program. And if this is your first time listening, you're in for a huge treat today. As you heard on the intro jingle, here at Bacon Wrap Business we try to bring you the most sizzling hot strategies and tactics and, and ideas to help grow your business. Whether that has to do with marketing, business, sales, operations, you name it. We cover a lot of the topics that are on most entrepreneur and business owners minds. And I love to bring really interesting guests on and experts who can help, who can help add to the discussion and help you out because I think that there's only so much I can add and that's why I reach out to some of the people that I know or I've met and think that you're going to get a lot of value from listening to today. We're going to be talking to Steve Dahr. I'm going to bring him on in just a second. But what's important that you understand is that if you run a business, whether it's online or offline, the number one thing that you're focused on or should be is growing your profits. A lot of people try to have the biggest business there is and I've got friends who have a 20 million, $25 million supplement business and they're jealous of my business because my profit margin is a higher than theirs even though my gross revenue is a bit lower. Profit is really what matters. And Steve Dar, believe I'm pronouncing that right. Steve is a conversion consultant, profit hacker and an expert when it comes to growing your profits. He's written a book that we'll talk about and I think you're going to want to run out there and grab it. As of the time of, you know, this interview, it is just about to go to print but it is coming really soon. He's also, he's got his website@ ConversionForGood.com so he's a conversion and profit hacking specialist. Steve, welcome to the show, buddy. Thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be on.

Cool. Well, I'm glad. Well, the kind of the motto of the show or the way that I want people to walk away from this is if they kind of stole some valuable, some valuable information, like this should be, this is a free episode, but it should never feel like that. We always try to give people something they can run out and do and, you know, just amaze them. So I have read your book, you've sent me a preview copy, and I'm going to be happy to leave you a review on Amazon when it comes out because I think you've done a really a fantastic job of laying out some of the real core principles when it comes to improving profits and, and conversion and, you know, you name it.

And I want to dive into that like a little bit about, you know, how you got started with, you know, understanding what, you know, drives profit and marketing, etc. I noticed on your bio that you were a finance major at University of Illinois. I was a finance major at Eastern Illinois University, right down the street. So how did you go from finance to marketing? Tell me a little bit about that.

Sure. So, yeah, when I was in school, I always thought that the marketing majors were just like the jokes of the business school. Their classes are so easy. And it was like finance and accounting was what was more prestigious business major stuff. And I graduated school and got this job right away with a massive company working with retirement plans for K12 school teachers. And I realized really quickly that the plans that they were selling were probably the worst option the teachers had available to them. Lots of hidden fees, worthless benefits. But this company and a couple others that had basically the same product dominated the market. And I thought that was such a huge injustice. I left and I started my first business a couple months out of college to try and help teachers get access to better information. I had the finance side down, the investing and the personal wealth management. But seeing as my attitude towards marketing, I had no idea how to market, sell, get my message out. And I was totally screwed. I was a sitting duck and I just started hemorrhaging cash. And that was when I realized that the whole marketing thing was kind of important. And I just fell in love with the topic, started reading everything I could get my hands on, started reaching out to experts and trying to buy some of their time or get a meeting or get my hands on some of their training materials. And I still, to this day probably don't go more than a day or two without trying to add something to my library and just eventually got to the point where I was really good at knowing how to drive traffic and then more importantly, how to convert traffic and then how to monetize it and increase lifetime customer value. Basically, the three core principles of what you need to grow your business and grow your profits.

That's great. So the three core principles. I noticed, by the way, in reading the book that you took a lot of inspiration.

As did I, from Perry Marshall and his book the 8020 Sales and Marketing. And I saw how you really built on that and extrapolated that out and covered some of the areas that are really important. So are those three core areas. Those are related to that triangle, right?

Exactly. So if your listeners have a pen and paper handy, you could draw out a quick triangle. And at the top you would put a T in the bottom right corner, a C in the bottom right, bottom left corner, and E. And those stand for traffic conversion and economics. And they all flow into one another. It's, you know, without one of them, if you're weak in any of them, you're really weak in all three. Your business is only as strong as the weakest link. If you're getting tons of traffic and everyone that you turn into a customer, you are wildly profitable, but you can't convert any of them. Then you know, the, the strength of the other two is basically meaningless. And same if you're strong in conversion economics, but you don't have anyone visiting your business or your site. And also same, if you are good at getting a lot of traffic and you're converting them, but you can't get them to make a purchase, sign up as a lead or whatever it is to actually complete the third step and monetize right now.

And I hear a lot of people, everybody, especially if you have an online business or if an online business website is any big component of your business, everybody seems to be so concerned about getting traffic. I just need more traffic. And they feel as though if they just shove enough traffic at their site, they'll be okay. But often, and I know this also from reading your book, you feel, as I do, that it's not. Most people don't have a traffic problem. They have a conversion problem. Because.

If the conversion is good enough, if you know what you can spend on traffic and you know that you can get a positive ROI on the general traffic costs, then you can buy as much traffic as you need depending upon the market you're at. And I see a lot of people starting kind of at the wrong end. But at the same time, most marketers and experts like myself have Something that they are drawn to a little bit more. Either the traffic side or the conversion side in the areas that I mean, what they like to kind of tinker with and play with. Do you have kind of a preference one way or the other?

Sure. And so they're all important. And.

For me, what always made the most sense was conversion. And that was because that was where the most leverage was. If, for example, your business, in terms of those three pillars of traffic conversion economics, you had 100,000 visitors a month, you converted 2% of them and you earned $50 per conversion or per customer. If you wanted to double your business, but you could only pull one of those levers, the highest leverage way would be in conversion. Right. Because there's so much leverage in small numbers. Going from 2% to 4% is likely more doable than going from 100k to 200k visitors a month or doubling your prices or whatever it is to extra economics. But economics is the second most viable place for leverage, usually, generally speaking.

So explain a little more what you mean by the economics.

Sure. So let's say you sell bracelets and they're $30 a bracelet and you just have, you just have one option. You have one SKU, one product and someone buys it. I mean, unless they're gonna, unless they want to have one for each wrist or they want one matching for their best friends after they buy that one, then that's pretty much you're capped out on how much you can earn per customer at $30 each. But if you have a whole bunch of.

Varieties, colors, styles, maybe headbands, anklets, other accessories, and all these different cross sells upsells, maybe like a personal stylist makeover. And you could even get into some super high end stuff like having a fashion party for you and your friends, things like experiences or personalized done for you type things where now all of a sudden instead of earning max $30 per customer, you have the option of selling them something that costs $100, couple hundred dollars, whatever it is that gives you simply the option to.

Earn more per customer. Because it's so hard to get someone to make their initial purchase, to overcome all those barriers of trust and just general laziness to get them to make that first purchase. So once you've got a customer in your best interest to keep them and to keep serving them and figuring out ways that you can exchange value for increased profits, more revenue from that individual.

Right, right. Now when you are taking a look, like whether it's your own business or whether it's a client's business and you're looking to pull these levers. I mean, a lot of us in the know realize that there's really only three ways to grow a business. I did a podcast on this episode on this recently, people can kind of look back in the archives. But the only three ways to really grow a business is to increase the amount that somebody spends, the number of people spending money or how often they spend money with you. And that has a lot to do with the economic side of things. So when you are taking a look at, you know, whether it has to do with, you know, the product mix or, you know, somebody is a one trick pony, like, you know, they're only selling bracelets, they don't have other things or they're just not maximizing a certain area, is there anything in particular that you see most people are doing and that you're able to kind of come in and quickly make immediate results with?

So a lot of times from a conversion standpoint, if it's like the closer you are to the money, the I find a lot of people screw that up. And improvements there are just so closely tied to increased profit. So people with clunky checkout pages or cart pages that aren't really incredibly intuitive, user friendly, you can get some boost there. And like a 15% boost on the checkout is essentially a direct 15% boost to your monthly revenue. But also what I see people doing a lot is.

They'Re not getting enough voice of customer in terms of what to add to their product mix or how to better serve or figure out what their frustrations are. So not only is that an economics thing where you could figure out what other problems do they have that you could solve for them or that you could find someone who does solve that problem and connect them, but you're also missing out on them, giving you the exact language of the problem that you already solved for them. And they'll tell you if you ask them the right open ended questions and let them express their pain, their frustration, their anger, or if you let them talk about how much better their life is or how happy they are that a problem solved that's been solved by your product, you know exactly the conversation that's going on in their mind and you can use that copy back to them in your emails, on your website, in the various places that it's going to trigger them and be like, wow, these people really understand what I need or the problem that I have. And if they understand it so well, and I've seen these other People use the product and they've gotten good results. That makes them, that pushes them that much closer to the buy line where they're going to make that initial purchase and start that relationship with you and your business.

Wait a minute. Are you saying to actually. You should actually talk and listen to your customers? That's crazy. So, Steve, that brings up two great points I want to share with you. And one of them is that when I first started off my, you know, my very first online business back in 2008, selling an information product, one of the very best things that I did, and I recommend that anybody do as a business owner, is to answer the support tickets yourself. I did it for a full year. You don't necessarily need to do that. And it's really, it's really one of the least fun things that you can do is to answer all the support tickets. And it's usually one of the first things that people want to outsource because they just don't want to deal with that. They feel as though I just need to be growing my traffic and other relationships. But by dialing into what these customers are telling you, you can find out so many things, just like you said, that are going to help you sell more. You're going to hear their language, you're going to hear their problems, you're going to hear all of that. And the second part, this is something I did with one of my clients, Kent Clothier, in the real estate investment software niche. And I've done it with several other clients with dramatic effects, but I'll share this one example with you. So with Kent, he sells a software that helps real estate investors down, you know, find motivated sellers for, to send letters to and to, you know, to hopefully buy their house. And on the simply on the thank you page, after purchasing, after everything else, right before we allow them to log in, I asked two questions in a simple survey. And the first one was simply, you know, thanks for purchasing, etc. Number one, where did you hear about us? Because you never know. I mean, you've got affiliate tracking, etc. The real reason for that was really just kind of to butter them up to go, you know, Facebook.

Cool.

The second question was, why did you decide to invest in this program today? Because remember, you've got them right now, you've got them hot. They've just made the decision. And I cannot tell you the wealth of headlines, email, subject lines that I've gotten for a copy, et cetera, that I've gotten out of that. I remember one of them that gave us the biggest boost was somebody said to, you know, why did you decide to invest today was I'm tired of killing myself trying to find motivated sellers. And I was like, that's great, that's his language. So the very next thing I did was I sent out an email saying, tired of killing yourself trying to find motivated sellers. And we had probably about a 30% bump in our average open rate. And then we put that on a headline of a page and just doing exactly what you said, using their language, talking to your customers, finding out what you can do can have dramatic results. So I'm so happy that you said that.

Yeah, that's brilliant. And you can, you can bake these things into your existing marketing, your funnels, your email sequence, whatever it is. So you can ask questions right after they buy, you can have some on page surveys or exit things and you're going to get on some of these things. You're going to get really low response rates. But all it takes is one or two golden nuggets that can completely change how your business performs, how your sales pages, your marketing.

Authentically connects and speaks to your customer. So yeah, I mean those are a couple awesome, awesome case in points. And it points to what we're talking about with when it comes to really understanding your business and your customers, it's almost like there's no excuse anymore. With the level of tools and data available on the Internet, you should be able to track everything. And the three main types of data is the what data, it's what happened on your site and that's what you can get from Google Analytics or whatever other analytics platform you have, the why data, which is the voice of the customer. And that's you're asking why did you do this? Or getting insights into their problems, their dreams, their frustrations, their hopes. And then the third is the how data. And it's how are they interacting with your site? That's stuff like heat maps, scroll maps, even something like sessioncam where you can watch videos of how people interact with your site. And when you combine those three types of data, you'll see exactly where your money is leaking. You'll figure out how you can speak more effectively and persuasively to your audience. And also you see where is your website confusing or frustrating or broken. And when you have that data at your disposal, your ability to come to conclusions and test your hypotheses really quickly and make massive improvements is.

Far beyond what it's ever been in marketing.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's as long as you keep it simple. None of this stuff is rocket science. It really is. It can be overwhelming at times if you're in charge of digital marketing or if you're just a digital marketer and you're trying to figure out all. It feels like there's a million things and variables to change. But I like how you've kind of broken it down. You've even got a system you talk about in the book called the PI System. You care to explain a little bit about.

Your methodology? Is it pie what that means?

Yeah, absolutely. The PI framework. P stands for potential, I stands for importance, and E stands for ease. And so if you have a whole laundry list of things that you want to get done, and this can apply to a lot of things I talk about specifically with how to prioritize your a B testing for conversion optimization. But if you think about it and you just want to go with all right, what has the most potential? And so those are things like the pages on your site that are just hemorrhaging the most cash, hemorrhaging the most visitors. So that might be if you have a 50% cart and checkout abandonment rate, then that's probably a clue that it's an important place to start. High potential for increasing your profits. But then you don't want to forget about ease because a lot of times what people do, especially if you're taking on something a new initiative and for a lot of businesses, a B testing with something like Optimizely or visual website Optimizer is a new initiative. And so if you're taking on something new, it's hard because you're already overwhelmed with these things you have to do and you keep letting the urgent overtake the important. So if you get some easy wins and you know that a couple headline changes or some image changes are likely to win and you get 15, 25% boost in conversions and all of a sudden you're like, wow, we've opened up this bottleneck and now visitors are flowing through the MY funnel. Then you can start being like, okay, we can do some layout or just some design or get some more heavy duty developer in here to make some more complicated tests because you've built that momentum. So yeah, that's the PI framework and I actually use it in more ways than just conversion optimization.

Nice. What other ways do you use it? Can you give an example?

Yeah, so just like my daily to do list, I've got a big list of like things that I'd like to get done and so whenever I have like, I try and estimate how much time things are going to take. And so if I have a free 20 minutes before and I know that I'm not going to get anything done on some like big project, then I've got two options. Either waste my time on Reddit or go to this list and have it ranked by my PI framework and be like, okay, what's the highest ranked thing that takes less than 20 minutes? And then take care of that.

That's great. That's great. Yeah, it's a great way to manage your life, your business, etc. And I like the systematic simplification.

Let's keep it bacon wrapped. The sizzling simplification, sizzling systematic systemication. I don't know, I'm getting tongue tied, but I love what you're talking about because I think it's so important and I've been in charge of doing this for myself and for my clients and as I said, it can get really overwhelming. But if you take that step by step approach, you can really kind of knock things down. What are some of the other things that you've seen? What are some tests you've run or just some hacks that you've made that have been like, oh man, we did this. And it had some pretty dramatic results.

Give me some of your favorite case studies you've done before.

Yeah, a big one that I've seen win for Shopify sites and a lot of e commerce sites, even not on Shopify platform is on their cart page. They'll have the only checkout button will be underneath the list of products that are in the cart. And generally if you have more than one or two products in your cart, that's going to push that button below the fold. And what has been simple is just copying the code of that button and putting it above the list of products in the cart. So it's static and it will stay above the fold no matter what. So someone gets to that page. One, they've got two options. Second, if they've got more than one or two items in the cart, it's right there in their face. They don't need to like there's a great book called don't make me think I believe it's by Steve Krug, usability expert. And basically the theory is you want to make everything is dead simple as possible and obvious for your visitor to take the most desired action on that page. And so simply by adding a second go to checkout button on these cart pages, I've seen the abandonment rate on the cart and then the total overall E Commerce conversion rate boost by over 20% in some cases. And it's a super simple change that has grossed hundreds of thousands of dollars for my clients easily.

I love it. That's beautiful. There's. Yeah, don't make me think I've heard of it. I haven't read it, but it makes me think of. I kind of forgot who.

I wish I could claim ownership of this advice. I can't. But since I can't think about who it is, I'll just steal it. But the three questions that go through people's mind. Maybe it was Mech Labs, but the three questions that come through people's mind when they go to a website that you have to answer is where am I? What can I do here and why should I do it? And it really makes a lot of sense. Like you said, don't make me think like where am I? Am I confused at what this is? I came here to buy bracelets, right? But why? You know, what's going on? What can I do? Well, can I buy bracelets? Can I read articles? Can I watch video? What is it then? Lastly, why they also use the same people Once more, I think it was Mech labs who are conversion experts. But.

Clarity trumps. I think it was persuasion. Clarity is really the key. Just make it clean, clear. Don't make me have to think too hard. Just lay it out. And also, never underestimate how brain dead even the smartest users of Internet sites can be. I mean, I find myself falling trapped to that, just going to a website and I don't want to have to think too hard. I just want to know exactly where to go. So I love that. That's a great example. So you mentioned Shopify and if some people aren't familiar with Shopify, it's a platform that allows people to set up quick E commerce E commerce websites. Whether you're selling your own stuff or drop shipping or you name it, Shopify is a great platform. Do you do a lot of work with E Commerce stores and Shopify type stores as well? Is that at all a specialty or is that just kind of an example?

Yeah, the two main specialties are E commerce and SaaS software as a service. Basically websites that have a goal of existing of trying to sell you a product or service are the ones where conversion optimization for an agency to come in and work generally makes the most sense.

Okay, perfect. And.

Tell me about the ideal client for Steve Darr. Like tell me about the people that you just Salivate when you get in touch with them. And I say salivate because when you take a look at what they're doing, you just know that without shadow of a doubt you're going to be able to help these people out. And it's kind of a no brainer for you. And it, you know, it not only puts a lot of money back in the pocket of your client, but it puts a lot of money in your pocket. Tell me who that ideal company is that you work with. I mean obviously you could help somebody who's doing $50,000 a year with a little side sight, but who are you really best suited to serve?

So just from a revenue perspective, $50,000 a month is generally the lowest. But the reason why the name of my company is Conversion for Good is I spent a little bit of time at a fairly large digital marketing agency in Chicago and the clients were Fortune 500 companies and other large companies that weren't nearly quite that size. But I was working on their websites helping them increase conversion. And one day it was a Sunday night and I was like laying in bed, I was like the last thing I want to do is go to work tomorrow. And I was trying to do some self analysis, figure out why because I hadn't really felt that before and I was like, you know what, working on these huge companies isn't really that fulfilling. I know these companies pretty well now after having them as clients and I felt like they pretty much only existed to me maximize their shareholders value and their profits, which I understand, I get capitalism like the point of business. But I felt like they were really self serving in a lot of ways. And so I was like, there's this new wave of businesses that are, it's growing and gaining momentum. These companies that have a mission and a purpose beyond simply turning a profit and they have initiatives that are helping the environment, helping people in need and eliminating suffering. And I was like if I can help them increase their profits and in the course help them do more good, then that is pretty much, yeah. The next day after that Sunday night, I went in on Monday, gave my two weeks and started. I didn't know at the time that it was going to be called Conversion for Good, but started laying the groundwork for where I am today.

I love that. That's great. You know, it comes a point in a lot of, you know, a lot of, a lot of our lives, entrepreneurs, you know, et cetera, where you reach a degree of, maybe it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, you reach a degree of financial success. I've been there where, you know, just making extra money doesn't really wake you up in the morning or doesn't, you know, get you bounding out of bed. Sometimes you wonder, yeah, what am I doing all this for? And if you have the choice to be able to work on something that, you know, kind of, you know, lights you up and makes you really excited, it's kind of dumb not to take that. So I commend you for doing that. That's, you know, I think it's something that a lot of people wish they could work on, something that they had a strong feeling about and bring their passion to their, you know, to their work. Speaking of that, I read an article about from Mike Rowe. Have you ever seen the show? I think it was on Discovery Channel or whatever. Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. You ever come across that?

Oh, yeah, I watched a decent bit of that show.

Cool. So he had a. He was writing an article and he was talking about the whole concept of follow your passion. And I believe that that concept has led many people to just complete frustration before because they go, I don't know what my passion is, myself included. I don't have a singular passion. I have a lot of things I like to do, but there's not one specific thing that I bound out of bed, like, I'm going to save the, you know, the whales today or whatever. However, one of the points that he made in there, he goes, you know, look, I come across people who have these dirty jobs all the time, but they seem to have a pass for what they do. And how could somebody have a passion for cleaning out septic tanks? And he said, I asked a guy that, one of the people in the show, he asked him afterwards, how do you find the.

How do you get up in the morning knowing you're going to clean septic tanks? Cutting. A long story short, he basically said, look, this isn't my passion, but I realize that I can do a lot of good, make a lot of money at this. So.

I just got passionate about being the best at doing it. And Mike's final. His final words in that article was, you don't have to follow your passion. Just bring it with you wherever you go. And I thought that was a pretty poignant thing. It's like.

It'S too often that we get stressed out about not finding our special purpose or whatever, and I think you kind of did that. You didn't know exactly what you were going to do when you decided to make that change, but you just Knew that.

If you're going to bring your passion, you wanted it to be something that felt good and I commend you. That's great. So if people want to read the book, the name of your book, correct me if I'm wrong. Profit Hacking. Is that correct?

That is correct. Cool.

You got a subtitle on there yet? I'm not looking at it at the moment, but I don't remember if you had a subtitle.

I did and I just trashed it because it's terrible. And trying to follow my own advice, I wrote over 30 new potential sub headlines. And I remember I walked away. I was like, walked away at 32 and I was like, these all suck. And then I logged on to Facebook and one of my friends, he just posted maybe 2 minutes before I logged on. He's like, the entrepreneurial process, Step one, this is going to be awesome. Step two, whatever. And then step three was like, this sucks, I suck. I was like, yup, I just went through that. But yeah, there will be a subtitle. It's tva.

Nice. So as the time of this recording, you're not able to actually buy the book, although hopefully you will be able to pre order it very soon. But your normal website is conversionforgood.com if you want to find out more about Steve and the things that you're working on. Speaking of that, Steve, right now, obviously I believe that your business is primarily consulting, working with clients. I mean, in general, right. This is your bread and butter, is working with businesses, helping them to hack their profits.

And this book is going to be a tremendous way for you to get thought leadership. Get this, what you're doing and why you're doing it in the hands of some great people. What else are you kind of. Yeah, we all have either big goals or obstacles we're trying to overcome or you know, or whatnot. Is there anything you're working on right now that I might be able to either help you with, give you an idea or introduce you to somebody who you think could really help you out?

Well, so my other big thing is I mentioned at the beginning that my first business was helping K12 school teachers get access to better financial information. And so things have not changed. They're still being missserved by the state in terms of managing their pensions and majority of states. Illinois, where we're from, is one of the worst. California, where you're now is not that great. In Texas, where you spend a decent amount of time, they have not one of the. They have one of the worst pension systems as well as far as funding. And so then these private companies who are working with them on the retirement plans are not really doing them any favors. So the next thing I'm working on is once I'm done with this book and kind of doing some promotion and once that kind of dies down, I have a book written.

Specifically for teachers telling them how to get access to better information. Basically everything that I was trying to sell in my prior business and profit from, I'm basically giving away for the price of a book, 1215 bucks. I'm going to try and learn the ropes of this publishing process as well as possible in the marketing process with this book. Profit hacking and take everything I learned.

To get that next book into the hands of as many K12 school teachers across the country as possible.

So if you know anyone with some thought leadership or some connections to how to get my message out to K12 school teachers in the education market, that would be amazing because that's. Speaking of passion. I mean, that's a huge passion project of mine. It's what fueled me through several years of entrepreneurial failure and.

Putting myself through basically a marketing PhD that allowed me to write this book and have my agency and everything that I'm doing now.

Absolutely. You know, there's a million things you. I don't have any direct connections into that world, but on one of my previous shows, and this was a video, I've done two video podcasts and if you go to baconratbusiness.com and on the homepage I've got a featured episode with Mike Koenigs. Do you know Mike by any chance from Traffic Geyser and all that?

I did meet Mike at two separate conferences, but not super in depth, just a short conversation.

Cool. So.

We had a great conversation and one of those had to do with how to leverage your book. And Mike shared just a tremendous strategy for authors, especially of a book like this, to be able to leverage it to get in to open doors that normally wouldn't be able to be opened. And I'd encourage you to. I mean, it's not just one thing, it's multiple things. And you can kind of listen to it if you go back to that show. But I definitely think that if you, if you were to.

Watch that show, I don't remember exactly, I think it was over an hour long show, maybe it was like 30 minutes in or something of that nature where we really talked about how to leverage your book into any audience really in the world. I think you'll get a lot out of that as well as anybody listening to this. We're recording this on my podcast right now. I can't tell you how great a podcast has been in order to get out the message to a lot of different people.

It's a tremendous way with, if you don't have any in any natural in with a market just by starting one where it's at such a critical mass right now that you can find it simply by the right keyword optimization, etc. And a lot of people start to listen to it. And that's another way that you can.

Just jump right in there and start getting a hold of these teachers. I guarantee teachers and educators are listening to podcasts. It's growing and growing. And you know, I was kind of blown away when I first started bacon wrap business and I did not, I did not launch it to a big existing list. I did not do any big fanfare. I kind of just put it out there and kept it going. It's not my primary business, as you know, most of my listeners know. I work with businesses much like yourself, and.

I just put it out there and before I knew it, I was having 100, 200, 300, 400 downloads with very little effort, to be honest with you. Maybe it was the idea that maybe everybody thought they were going to get bacon recipes and maybe they thought it was a cooking show when they first listened to it, they're like, what's this business stuff? But I can't tell you just how impressed I've been with the ability to penetrate a market from out of nowhere. And the market is probably starving for somebody who really knows what they're doing. But that's.

That'S definitely. And Mike and I talk a lot about that on the show as well. I think it'll be a really good episode for you to kind of grab a notepad because I guarantee there's going to be several things you can do to help both of your initiatives. Working with e commerce stores and also working with.

Your passion project. And then we talked about with the book. I may as well just bring it up right now in case there's anybody else listening. But before you got on the call or before we started, we hit record. We were talking about your book and when it's going to be released. And you said mid December is going to be the release date. Well, if there are anybody listening who has either a book out there or is writing a book or is even thinking about writing a book, Amazon's given you the ability to, when you publish it, to start taking pre orders.

So.

And once more I already explained this to you but you can put the book out there in essence coming soon, December 16, people can go buy it right now. You could actually have a best selling book before it ever takes off. And you could even do that with. Although I know you've got a million things going on, you could put that out there like say three months from now you're going to have a book for K12, you know, financial education and just see if it starts to get any traction. Promote it as much as you want. But that's a little publishing hack that I think you can definitely use and guarantee some folks listening to this can use. So I want to wrap it up with just a couple of fun resources and things like, you know, whether it's favorite books on, you know, business or the topics, whether it's business mindset, personal development and also a handful of tools that you kind of use. But we've already mentioned Perry Marshall's 8020 sales and marketing. Is there anything else that you feel is just such a game changing book for you?

Yeah, I thought some of the biggest books that influenced me certainly 8020 sales and marketing.

In general, just a book that changed my life was Choose Yourself by James Altucher.

Yeah, James is a good friend of mine. I love that book.

Nice. Yeah, after I read Choose Yourself, I picked up a couple more of his books and had been reading a ton of his stuff and I actually was just talking with James through message.

That's great.

A little bit before this call and I believe, fingers crossed he's going to give me a blurb and review for profit hacking.

That's beautiful.

So I know he's got. Yeah, I know he's got tons going on so hopefully that comes through. And then in addition to that, just as far as business books go, the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes and the E Myth by Michael Gerber were some huge books for me too.

Those are tremendous. Yeah, I've read them all probably multiple times. Any other, you mentioned a couple things, pieces of software, whatnot.

You use.

The heat mapping software, what did you say it was called? The.

Screen or web. Yeah.

Session Cam.

Sessioncam, that's right. I've heard of that. I recommend it.

It's. It's good and it's affordable. It's like if you want to use something like there's mouse flow and a couple other ones that are pretty expensive. But Screen Session Cam is reasonably priced and I think it actually delivers some of the best among all the softwares. But Then just the must have for conversion optimization is either optimizely or visual website optimizer or those are the two big ones. There's a couple other out there and there's more and more coming into the space. But an A B testing tool, something that will pretty easily kind of like a wysiwyg. What you see is what you get editor that will let you change the text and the images and even some colors, layout design elements and it will track your goals and your numbers for you so you know what works better and what works worse.

That's great, that's great. Anything else off the top of your head? If not, that's cool. But those are awesome tools for anybody.

I guess it's not necessarily a specific tool, but I think a lot of people are underutilizing Google Analytics and the power that you can have through custom reports segments.

So making sure you're fully fleshed out with your goals, whether it's regular goals or E commerce and your funnels. So that's not usually like a quick super easy fix. It's pretty highly custom, but it's almost always worth its weight in gold to really, really know your numbers and getting someone who is an analytics expert to help you make sure that you're getting full value and power from your Google Analytics.

Yeah, I definitely recommend bringing in an expert Google. I have a love hate relationship with Google Analytics. Like I love it when I have an expert design it and then just give me the dashboard reports. But if I have to get in there and dig and try to do it myself, I want to pull out every hair that I've got. But it's super valuable when you've got it dialed in. Well, Steve, I really want to thank you for stopping by and you know, sharing some of your, your sizzle and hot business advice guaranteed to make them profits.

With the listeners and with me. I think you're doing some tremendous work. I love the passion project. I love the fact that.

You'Ve got that systematic simplification and I think that's really all it takes to kind of create just a really, really profitable business out there, whether it's online, offline. I mean all this stuff can be applied no matter what you're doing. So I encourage you guys all to go check out Steve's book, especially when it comes out. If you go to conversionforgood.com you can get on his email list. You can be notified the minute it comes out. Read it. I've already read the first draft, the one that you guys don't get to see yet and I can tell you it's really, really good. And in the meantime, if you've got, you know, if you got an e commerce store, if you got a software as a service business, if you got anything else you'd like to have Steve work on, he's got his contact information right there and I'll put it on the, on the, on the show notes as well. And in the meantime, if you'd like to speak to me personally, if you'd like a second opinion on something you're doing, whether it has to do with marketing, sales, business related, etc. It really doesn't matter. If you want to see another guest on the show, if there's a topic you want me to cover or you just have a question you'd like me to answer on another episode of Bacon Wrap Business, just send that email over to askbradaconrapbusiness.com if you're listening to this on itunes and you don't want to miss an episode, hit that subscribe button. That way you don't have to just wonder if I released another one of these shows. It shows up right there on your phone, whether it's iPhone or Android. And once more, you can jump on my newsletter, get all types of other free goodies that other folks don't get.

Steve, once more, really appreciate your time and wisdom on this. I think you're doing some great things out there.

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me on, Brad. It was a lot of fun and hopefully very valuable for all you guys listening.

Yeah, my pleasure. All right, guys, share the show, talk about it and send me an email to ask bradbaconrapbusiness.com if you've got anything else to add. Thanks a million and I will see you next time.

Sam.