Start Realizing Your Dreams! Paul Gowin, High Performance Coach (interview)

Interview with ex-marine and high-performance coach, Paul Gowin

In this inspiring interview, we talk with high-performance coach and ex-marine, Paul Gowin, to better understand what it takes to break through barriers in your life and live your dreams.

Growing up in eastern Montana, Paul Gowin took a break from college at the University of Montana and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

Performing duties as a Marine Bandsman Saxophonist and later as a Military Police Officer in Okinawa, Japan, Paul was selected for an officer commissioning program in 2007.

Graduating from the University of Arizona, Paul accepted his commission as a Second Lieutenant in 2011 and later saw duty in Virginia, North Carolina, and Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Incorporating the leadership development techniques honed across a 15-year career in the military, Paul is also a leading Certified High-Performance Coach™ through the High-Performance Institute.

Paul has coached thousands of people from many different ethnic backgrounds over the past 20 years.

If you want to learn more and work with Paul you can connect with him here

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The Art of Storytelling for Business: How to Connect With Your Audience

I’m writing a book.

I’m writing a screenplay.

I’m giving a presentation such as a TED Talk.

When you think about what a story is, those probably come to mind immediately.

The truth is, the art of storytelling goes much deeper and is applied to just about everything in our lives.

Today, as entrepreneurs trying to truly make a positive difference in the world, the art of storytelling is more important than ever if you want to connect to your audience.

But first, it helps to understand that our brains have been hardwired for storytelling. It’s how to take a lot of data picked up from our senses and start making sense out of it so we don’t go crazy.

I’m a storyteller. You’re a storyteller. We are all storytellers.

We can all also say that we know how to draw, it’s innate. Give a child a pencil and through instinct, they will create a stick figure. Not the prettiest drawing but a drawing nonetheless. However, to reach a level of excellence, we must learn about the depths of any subject and practice…a lot. Maybe you’ve heard about the book by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers? He found that someone must learn and practice for 10,000 hours give or take a few to become an expert.

Why Your Business Marketing Might Not Be Working

As founders, we have to figure out how to get traction which means find our audience and getting them interested in what we are doing. How to connect with them.

Not always an easy task.

There are many variables that impact marketing results.

But let’s get to the root of it and talk about some BIG barriers and trends you must be aware of to learn how to connect with your audience.

1 – Know What You’re Up Against

Over the years people have faced all kinds of marketing tactics. Everything from false claims, to interruptions, popups and completely irrelevant display banners that are shoved in front of them.

This has conditioned people to hate advertising on many levels which means their guards are up. They don’t want to be interrupted or fooled.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about…

2 – Interruption Marketing

How many times in your life has a commercial or ad showed up in the middle of something like a TV show or video, and you say to yourself, “dammit, I hate ads!”

Maybe you were on a website and some popup shows itself and looks like malware virus that is spam? Yup, that led to more people saying, “I hate advertising.”

That is what we call interruption marketing.

In 2016 the global number of people using ad blocker software jumped to jumped to 615M! Adobe showed that $41B in ads would be blocked in 2016. The fact that people are growing more concerned about viruses and security will only continue ad blocking to grow.

3 – Display Ads

What about those classic display ads?

Well, simply put, people have learned to ignore them.

A study done by Infolinks found that “after being asked to recall the last display ad they saw, only 14% of users could name the company, the brand or the product. This suggests that brands are wasting millions of dollars in ads that consumers don’t remember or even notice.

Related: Download 18 Marketing Secrets From 100+ Expert Interviews!

Why Storytelling IS Marketing More Than Ever Today

As the internet has become more saturated over the years brands continue to find ways to jam advertisements in front of us. We are hit from all angles and after years of fake bullshit ads we not only learned to reject them as skeptics but we have started to crave a human touch with real authenticity.

You know you ‘have to’ spread the word about your business in order to have a big impact and generate great revenues… but it feels difficult, overwhelming, salezy, and unethical even?

When you put your story at the heart of your marketing effort, this authenticity bridges the gap between you and your audience. You can say less and have a much bigger impact – once you master the art of storytelling.

Once you find the right words and the best way to share your story you will attract your ideal audience. It will resonate with them on a deeper level so they are attracted in a real way that earns their trust.

“If what you’re doing matters, really matters, then I hope you’ll take the time to tell a story. A story that resonates and a story that can become true.” ~Seth Godin

3 – A Look at The Magic Behind The Art of Storytelling

Storytelling is not just an art, it’s a science.

Good stories literally change the chemistry of our brains. So, before you practice you must understand what makes it work.

Humans are emotional creatures and as you probably already know we have the ability to empathize with others. Empathy is important for social creatures because it allows us to understand how others are likely to react to a situation.

When you wrap your story in meaning and shift in values you can erase the skepticism we discussed earlier and start earning trust.

There are many types of stories entrepreneurs can tell – founder/origin, company, product, consumer…etc.

All great stories are the same. What that means is they flow according to a structure defined as an arc. It’s known as the dramatic arc.

The dramatic arc according to Gustav Freytag includes six key parts that empower stories for the most impact:

  • Exposition (inciting incident): The exposition is like the set-up of the story. The background information that is needed to understand the story is provided, such as the main character, the setting, the basic conflict, and so forth.
  • The exposition ends with the inciting moment, which is the one incident in the story without which there would be no story. The inciting moment sets the rest of the story in motion.
  • Rising Action: Rising action is a series of events and actions that move to story to a climax. During rising action, the basic conflict is complicated by secondary conflicts, such as obstacles and challenges that frustrate the main character’s attempt to reach their goal.
  • Climax (turning point): The climax is the peak of the action and the turning point in the story. After the climax, everything changes. Things will have gone badly for the main character up to this point; now, things will begin to go well for him or her. However, if the story is a tragedy, the opposite will happen after the climax; things that have been going well for the main character begin to go bad.
  • Falling Action: During the falling action, the conflict unravels with the main character either winning or losing. The falling action might contain a moment of final suspense, during which the final outcome of the conflict is in doubt.
  • Resolution: The story ends with the resolution, in which the main character is better off than at the beginning of the story. However, the tragedy ends with death and sadness, in which the protagonist is worse off than at the beginning of the story.

When we interviewed social entrepreneur and founder of Brave Soles, Christal Earle, she told us something interesting:

“…and one of the things I’ve come to realize, and the feedback that we get now, when people buy our stuff, and when they talk about us online is they always say, like, “I love that I know the story behind what I’m wearing”. […] People want to be connected to what they own, they want to have a sense of pride in those choices.” ~ Christal Earle

This is common for impact brands and social entrepreneurs. People today are demanding morals be put back into business and they want to connect with your mission and origin story.

The story is what people remember and talk about. They buy the experience and story, not just a product.

4 – The Experiment

Paul J. Zak pioneered research in the field of neuroeconomics (a field that seeks to explain human decision making, the ability to process multiple alternatives and to follow a course of action) and works on storytelling with the Department of Defense to help them understand why stories are so persuasive.

In this video, they share some of the fascinating experiments they did to learn about the science of storytelling.

5 – Final Words & Next Steps

I have personally interviewed over 100+ impact entrepreneur experts and when it comes to marketing something has always stood out – The importance of understanding human psychology and how people work.

It’s a lifelong learning process that you continue to figure out and learn how to become excellent.

While one article cannot teach you how to be a master storyteller, I hope that it has opened your eyes to the trends of marketing and the potential behind the art of storytelling to connect with your audience today.

Change Creator is here to empower socially-conscious founders like you to take your passion and successfully make a difference. Because the world needs you.

We believe that storytelling is one of the most important skills to master today in order connect with your audience and scale your impact.

This is why we partnered up with other impact entrepreneurs and experts to create, Captivate. A program designed to put your story at the heart of your marketing. 

Now, you have the can of paint but you must learn how to create your masterpiece.

Related: Download 18 Marketing Secrets From 100+ Expert Interviews!

You might also love:

Seth Godin on Leadership for the 21st Century

Jay Shetty: What is Storytelling and What Makes a Good Story?

Why Storytelling is so Vital to Purpose-Driven Brands

ConvertKit vs. ActiveCampaign: Why We Chose ActiveCampaign!

Choosing the right email marketing tool for your online business is hard. There are so many tools out there you don’t know which one is best for your online business. To make the right decision, you should first do a serious assessment of how you run your business and what your current needs are. To make it easy for you to do that, in this article, we’ll do an in-depth comparison of ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign.

ConvertKit vs. ActiveCampaign: The Comparison Begins

Here’s a quick glance of the services each tool provides:

ConvertKit Features

  • Form and Landing Page Builder: Create forms and landing pages and put them in your domain or host it on ConvertKit.
  • Email Sequence and Broadcasts Creator: Create email series or one-off emails.
  • Tags and Segments: Manage your subscribers in your list.
  • Visual Automation Tool: Automate tagging, segmenting and emailing processes.

ActiveCampaign features

  • Email Marketing Tools Including Form Builder: Build beautiful forms with many templates. Add onto your own website or host in ConvertKit.
  • Marketing Automation: Automate your complete sales and email marketing processes.
  • Sales and CRM Tool: Store leads, track them and follow up easily.
  • SMS and Site Messages Capabilities: Send text messages on your subscribers’ phones and display targeted messages when they visit your website.
  • Facebook Ads Integration: Add and remove your subscribers to and from different Facebook custom audiences based on the actions your subscribers take in your emails.
  • Website and Event Tracking: See how subscribers behave when they visit your website.

If you carefully look at each tools feature list, you’ll notice that ConvertKit’s features revolve around only email marketing.

But ActiveCampaign’s features support a wider aspect of your business’ marketing efforts i.e. sales automation and customer relationship management (CRM)

With this, we can conclude that ConvertKit is an email marketing tool while Active Campaign is a broader suite of marketing tools, of which email marketing is a part of.

Now, let’s compare both tools step by step and see what’s different about them.

Need more info on ConvertKit — Read my full ConvertKit review here to learn more!

2019 Update Up Front: Why We Chose ActiveCampaign (and Switched Over) at Change Creator

This past year, we have made a lot of important changes here at Change Creator. One of the big ones is us moving our email marketing to a new tool — ActiveCampaign. For years, we had stuck with Aweber, that was seemingly a cost-effective and adequate tool. We did a lot of great things with Aweber, but the data and the automations were just not enough for us to grow. 

Here are 5 reasons why we made the switch:

  1. Behavioral Marketing: ActiveCampaign allows you to really customize your emails based on the behaviors of your users, i.e.) Clicks, opens, how much they read, watch and has a lot of integrations for us to get even more data
  2. Better Automated Series: With ActiveCampaign, you can create better, more personalized email series. What happens if someone doesn’t read or download something? What can you send them next? 
  3. Better data overall: The amount of data you get on your email users in ActiveCampaign is by far superior to a lot of tools out there. We’ve just started to dig in and we’re super excited!
  4. Already seen improvements on click rates. Why? We’ve created automations that give people a second chance to open an email. 
  5. Already seen improvements on open rates? Why? Personalization. Knowing what to share and when to share an email is key to improving open rates. 

While we are just starting our journey with ActiveCampaign, I can tell you that it’s been a great investment so far. As we dig around and test the tool more, I will share those updates too. You can take ActiveCampaign out for a free 2-week test, that’s enough time to explore the Dashboard, see if it can work for you. 

ConvertKit Vs. ActiveCampaign: How Are They Different?

Since ActiveCampaign is a full-on marketing suite with other features than email marketing, while ConvertKit is a full-on email marketing service, both of them are extremely different in how they operate.

Here, we’ll discuss exactly what makes these two tools so different from each other.

ConvertKit

Let’s get started…

1. Form Creation To Get Subscribers: What’s the Difference?

ConvertKit gives you two ways to build a form i.e. within a webpage or with a landing page. But Activecampaign gives you just only one way to build a form i.e. within a web page.

When it comes to creating a form, ActiveCampaign offers more flexibility. For example:

  • Using ConvertKit, you can place three kinds of forms in three different positions on your website:
  • Modal Popup: Over your website
  • Inline: Inside a piece of content, sidebar or footer
  • Sliding: From the bottom-left or bottom-right part of your website.

ActiveCampaign offers a fourth way to place a form i.e. as a floating bar. You can place this kind of form of the top of your website.

  • ActiveCampaign offers far more templates for your forms. ConvertKit takes a simpler approach and offers three distinct form styles i.e. Full, Minimal and Stripped.

A set of features exclusive to ActiveCampaign is the ability to reach your audiences on:

  • SMS: You can send SMS messages to your subscribers after they take an action you want – or simply because you want to.
  • Facebook Audiences: Based on how your subscribers interact with your emails, you can add them to similar facebook audiences to show them better ads.
  • Site Messages: You can talk to your audiences when they land on your website by showing them engaging messages.

2. Subscriber Management: What’s the Difference?

ConvertKit provides you a simple way to manage subscribers. There’s just one main list in which all your subscribers reside. You can organize them further using tags and segments.

ActiveCampaign however, takes a more ambitious approach. You can have as many lists as you want. And if one subscriber is in multiple lists, ActiveCampaign will recognize that and will count that as just one subscriber.

In my opinion, ActiveCampaign’s approach is much better.

Why?

Because if you have multiple businesses or websites, you can isolate your subscribers from each website or business into seperate lists – and each list can then be organized separately. To do that in ConvertKit, you’ll have to create a new account for each business.

3. Segmenting Your Subscriber List: What’s the Difference?

Here as well, ConvertKit’s way of doing things is simpler. You get two ways to organize your list in ConvertKit:

  1. Tags: With tags, you can divide your customers based on the actions they take, who they are, where they are location and other factors.
  2. Segments: Segments are a way to organize your tags, which allow you to create specific audiences based on the conditions you want.

Here’s how you can organize your subscriber list in ActiveCampaign:

  1. Tags: In ActiveCampaign, tags are a way to add temporary identifying points to your subscribers. You can change tags much more frequently than in ConvertKit, where tags play a much more permanent role.
  2. Custom Fields: Custom fields can have any information you want – and are attached to your subscribers through the forms their submit. Things like secondary email, date of birth, city and other info can be entered through custom fields.
  3. Segments: Segments play a similar role in ActiveCampaign as they do in ConvertKit. You can add different tags, custom fields and other info to create custom audience of your choice through tags.

In addition to that, ActiveCampaign gives you a full CRM to manage your subscribers. You can:

  • See every single thing about your subscribers including which lists, tags and segments they are a part of.
  • Your sales team can assign activities to a contact which can be automated, followed upon and integrated with your email marketing.
  • See which lead i.e. subscriber has the highest chance of becoming your customer based on ActiveCampaign’s scoring system.

These features are unique to ActiveCampaign and not offered at all in ConvertKit.

4. Automating Your Marketing: What’s the Difference?

It’s easy to automate your campaigns both in ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit. Both offer a visual automation window where you can automate every single thing in your marketing such as:

  • Adding subscribers to lists, tags and segments.
  • Putting them into email sequences and drip campaigns.
  • Triggering different actions based on subscriber activity, time or behavior.

… and much more.

But here’s the major difference between the two:

ConvertKit only has the ability to automate email marketing related tasks for you. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, can automate both your email marketing and sales. And if you use Facebook custom audiences, ActiveCampaign can automate which audiences your subscribers go to based on the actions they take there as well.

Plus, ConvertKit can only trigger automations based on what subscribers do within emails. ActiveCampaign can trigger different emails, tags and other automations based on what your subscribers do on your website as well.

And last but not least, ActiveCampaign comes with tons of ‘automation recipes’ which you can use to quickly automate welcome emails, follow-up messages and more.

5. Reports: What’s The Difference?

Both ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign offer excellent reporting for the activities they help you do. In both, you can see how your forms, email sequences, broadcasts, and automations are performing.

But again, here’s where things go in favor of ActiveCampaign:

That’s because they give you a lead scoring system.

Depending on the actions your subscribers take i.e. clicking a link, open an email, watching a video etc., ActiveCampaign will give them points. And if your subscribers don’t take the action you want i.e open your emails, click on links, ActiveCampaign will deduct points. The more the points a subscriber has, the higher the chances of them converting into your customers.

5. Pricing: What’s The Difference?

Usually, it’s the price that ultimately ends up being the deciding factor. But to properly make the decision, you need to understand what you get for a said price.

Here it is:

ConvertKit’s pricing strategy is simple.

No matter what plan you subscribe to, you get all the features. No questions asked. That being said, their basic plan starts at $29 and limits you to 1000 subscribers. And the more subscribers you have, the more you pay.

ActiveCampaign’s pricing strategy is a bit more complex.

They have four plans i.e. Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise. Each plan starts at $9, $49, $129 and $229 for 500 subscribers respectively. The more subscribers you have, the more each plan’s price increases.

But the lite plan, which starts at $9 for 500 subscribers, gives you all the features ConvertKit has. This means everything from email marketing to automation capabilities is included in the subscription.

But yes, if you want the CRM, sales automation, Facebook ads integration, website tracking and the other stuff we mentioned, you’ll need to get a better plan.

Final Thoughts

Don’t be fooled by ActiveCampaign’s pricing. Their starter plans only give you access to email marketing tools – the same as ConvertKit.

That’s why if you plan to just do email marketing, I think ConvertKit is a better choice. It’s much simpler to use, is as powerful as ActiveCampaign in its automations, and is overall a better choice for email marketing.

But, if you’re thinking of doing sales or want to keep an extensive amount of data on your customers that moves beyond the realm of email marketing, you should go with ActiveCampaign.

Because while it definitely costs more, it’s better to use this as it will help you automate your sales activities and will give you a fully-fledged CRM service – in addition to ConvertKit-like email marketing capabilities.

You might also be interested in:

Clickfunnels vs. Shopify: Which Tool Works Best for Your Business in 2018?

ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact: Which is Best?

Clickfunnels Review: Will This Tool Help Propel Your Business?


ConvertKit

Business Growth Lessons from Tough Failures: Austin Iuliano

This article was originally published in Change Creator Magazine, Issue 18.

No matter how many entrepreneurial platitudes out there tell us differently, when you are in the weeds, struggling to get your idea off the ground, it can be tough to see the positive side of big mistakes.

Yet, why do so many really successful people talk about their toughest lessons or their biggest mistakes? Or do they? Well, they do now.

Whether you are in the middle of a big failure story of your own, just starting out, or even on the verge of a big breakthrough, you are going to find value in these key business growth lessons.

Let’s meet Austin Iuliano.

He shares his toughest lessons on the front line of a growing marketing company.

Today Austin is a bonafide public speaker with over 50 events under his belt this year alone. He and his partners have established a few dozen solid clients and are well into a 6-figure business this year, poised to continue to grow as they prove out their business model.

Social media marketing can be extremely competitive and proving out your ideas and talents can be an uphill battle, but as Austin shows when you find that ‘sweet spot’ in the market and establish your personal brand, the sky’s the limit.

Here is Austin’s story in his own words

When I first started my business (around 8 years ago) I was young and dumb. I was trying to sell social media marketing to a small town in upstate New York area. I knew social media was going to be big but I had no connections, no experience in sales, and the market didn’t care.

The beginning of my journey as an entrepreneur started 8 years ago in a little town in Upstate New York. This little city operated in an old-school analog mentality where Newspapers ads, radio, and good old boys networking clubs reigned. I started selling social media marketing with no experience in the industry, no sales experience, in a market that didn’t really care. Their thought process was “what I have done in the past works, why would I change it?”

When to pivot. When to stick to your guns.

I also didn’t pivot fast enough to a product that the market would want.

At the time, the market only understood vanity metrics (follower growth) at the time, and I wasn’t comfortable selling just follower growth and would shoot for bigger all-encompassing projects. Instead of getting smaller projects and generating cash flow. This lead me to not making enough revenue to keep my apartment and I ended up homeless. It was a real wake up call to set my ego aside and give the market exactly what they want even if it’s not what’s best in the long term for them and build them up later.

From my failure, I learned 3 vital lessons as an entrepreneur.

3 Vital Lessons as an Online Entrepreneur:

1. Keep cash flow coming in from the get-go.

I learned that it’s better to have multiple small client projects that give a rolling cash-flow then to shoot for big projects. Having 10 clients at $500/month is safer than having one client at $5,000/mo. You are beholden to that single client and have no leverage in negotiations. Whereas if one out of the 10 client’s isn’t working, you can drop them and replace them.

2. Clients don’t know what they need, that’s why they hire you.

Client’s don’t always know what they actually need and that is okay. Start by solving their first pain point, for me, this was vanity metrics and follower growth. Once that first pain point is solved a new one will crop up. Be ready to solve that, as they will turn to you if you are doing a great job with the first one.

3. Values and impact matter more than money.

Cash flow is important but my values are more important. I have gone from homeless to a live streaming influencer with an audience of over 1 mil. There were times when I could have “sold out” but my values were and are too important to me. You don’t have to sell your soul to make money but you do have to work your butt off.

Do Things Differently to See Different Results

To overcome my massive failures I did a number of things differently. These changes helped me go from broke, homeless with .43 cents to my name, to who I am today. The mentality shift helped me also figure out how to change my business model. Instead of focusing on those big 5 figure sales, I focused on many smaller sales that are easier to manage. Then grow those clients as their needs expanded.

For Instance, clients are now looking at their Instagram as a massive marketing tool. Rightfully so as Instagram is one of the top social media tools we use and is owned by Facebook. Most clients come in looking for follower growth when in reality they want to generate revenue. After they start growing 2-3k followers a month they inevitably say they are looking to generating leads and sales. Each time they have a new need, I have the ability to address it and they have faith in the service I provide.

Struggling to get your idea off the ground? Here’s some advice:

I recommend taking a page from Product Hunt creator Ryan Hoover. In his post talking about how he created Product Hunt, he shares how he created an MVP of his idea off an email list. This allowed him to rapidly test the idea and get initial feedback.

I would also recommend that everyone finds a storytelling platform that works for them. Each brand is different, some use Instagram stories, other work on Facebook really well. For myself, I learned that public speaking and live streaming is where I dominate. Once you have your platform, obsess over becoming great at it and enjoy the ride. What you think might work and what actually works sometimes are drastically different.

How Austin Turned Things Around:

I moved down to NYC and slept out of my car while I got back on my feet. Being in a bigger more competitive market allowed for more opportunities and I later became well known in the live streaming space. I now live stream to over 1,000,000 followers weekly. I strive every day to grow my business in a much larger market, with a much larger following.

You might also enjoy:

How To Build Smart Tech That Increases Sustainable Purchasing (interview)

Interview with Green Story co-founder, Akhil Sivanandan.

Subscribe to this show on iTunes | Stitcher | Soundcloud

What Green Story is doing is something most aspiring entrepreneurs dream of as a solution but are not sure how to execute such a big idea. He leaned into his experience and passion to answer a key question – How do we tip the scale from an unsustainable economy to a green economy?

In this interview, we talk about the steps they took to build their technology and how it all works. Their experience of ups and downs offers great lessons for all entrepreneurs in the social impact space.

Akhil and his co-founder Navodit envisioned creating a level playing field for companies with green and social products. They would demonstrate the long-term value of these sustainable products by connecting people with the positive impact of their purchase.

[vc_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCNC-26FMek”]

 

By demonstrating, through sound research and data-driven visuals, the long-term value of green products, companies would finally be able to compete with conventional products in the short term.

green story sustainability

Green Story’s embeddable calculators and shareable graphics are flexible marketing tools that translate the tangible data of LCI reports into digestible, engaging digital content. The creation of a customized and repeatable asset suite blends seamlessly into a client’s digital sales funnel and helps their customers identify, trust and ultimately buy sustainable products.

Akhil focuses on business development and marketing at Green Story. With over 8 years experience in the field, Akhil is a recognized expert in sustainability and renewable energy with a particular focus on market analysis.

Feeling inspired? You might also want to check out, I Want to Start my Own Business But Don’t Know What to Do.

Visit Green Story here to find out how they are helping brands like Brave Soles, Tamga Designs, and Ungalli.

The Full ConvertKit Review: Is This the Email Marketing Tool for Your Business?

Choosing an email marketing tool can be a tough job. You want a tool that’s easy to use, doesn’t cost a ton of money and ‘just works’. That’s why I wanted to share my ConvertKit review with you here — is this the email marketing tool that you’ll love and use?

After all, starting email marketing itself can be a tough job – and as a solo entrepreneur, you want an email marketing tool that will make your life easier – not harder.

In this article, I’m going to take you through one of the best email marketing services I know.

It’s called ConvertKit – and in my opinion, it’s the best tool you can use to do email marketing – especially if you run your online business by yourself (or with a small team).

Let’s get started.

ConvertKit Overview: The Best Email Marketing Tool For Solo Marketers & Small Teams

You probably have a website. And you want the people visiting it to become your customers (and more importantly, raving fans).

Convertkit is the software that makes it easy for you to do this.

You see, with email marketing, you’re looking to create a proper revenue-generating system that works with minimal supervision on your part. You want it to work when you’re awake, asleep, in the toilet, or on a holiday.

For that, your email marketing system needs to do three things:

  1. Collect emails of visitors interested in hearing what you have to say.
  2. Send a series of email messages based on specific ‘triggers’ or ‘actions’ to the relevant audiences.
  3. Segments each subscriber based on the way they interact with your email campaigns.

And most importantly, you want all this to happen automatically. ConvertKit, in all its awesomeness, makes it insanely easy for you to set up a system like that.

In the next section, let’s walk through each of the five features of ConvertKit we’ve listed above…

ConvertKit Features Breakdown And Review

In no time, you’ll see how easy it is to create your first email marketing campaign with ConvertKit.

With it, you can:

  • Create forms for both your website and individual landing pages where your visitors can submit their email addresses
  • Set up a sequence of email messages that go to your subscribers exactly when you want them to.
  • Intelligently categorize each of your subscribers based on the actions they take so you can easily send the right messages to the right audience.
  • See all your automated email campaigns and the activity of your subscribers in each campaign in a visual way.
  • Get detailed reports on how your email marketing campaigns are performing.

Plus, getting hang of ConvertKit and all its features is easy.

That’s because it’s well-designed, which means first-time users like yourself will be able to understand how to use it without much effort.

Forms:

Before you can start your email marketing campaign, you’ll need to collect emails of your visitors. For that, you’ll want to create ‘opt-in’ forms, where people can submit their emails.

Create a Form or Landing Page

ConvertKit offers you two options to create email opt-in forms:

a) You can create a form and put in on your website or embed it on your landing page.

OR

b) You can create a landing page and host it in ConvertKit or on your own domain with WordPress.

Here’s what the actual menu looks like:

If you don’t have a website, the second option of creating a landing page can be especially useful.

Style The Form

I’ll be frank with you from the start. ConvertKit doesn’t offer a lot of customization when it comes to forms.

There are three main types of forms you can create: A full form complete with an image, a minimal form without an image and a stripped down, clean form with just the bare essentials.

After you select the template, you can customize the form by changing the color of its elements i.e. text, button and background. In addition, you can customize the text anywhere on the form and add whatever description and pictures you want.

One cool thing about ConvertKit is it lets you see a ‘live preview’ of your form, with which you can quickly check out what your form will look like and how it’ll work once it’s live.

Plus, you can also change the form’s design by entering custom CSS code, either by yourself or by hiring a professional web designer.

Style The Landing Page

Landing pages are another story.

ConvertKit offers much more different-looking templates for landing pages than it does for forms.

The rest of the process is similar.

You can customize your landing page with different colors, typography, images and text – and if you want, add custom CSS code as well.

Configure How And When A Form Appears

It’s not just enough for change the appearance of your forms. You also need to make sure it appears at the right moment as well.

For that, ConvertKit lets you create three types of forms:

  1. Modal Forms: These forms take over the whole page and can be closed by the user. You can trigger this form based on time, scroll-percentage or exit-intent. Or you can trigger it after a visitors clicks on a button or link on your website.
  2. In-line Forms: These forms appear in-between your content, in the sidebar or footer. You can’t customize when and how they appear. Once you add them to a location on your website, they’ll always appear there.
  3. Slide-in Forms: These forms pop-up from the bottom-left or bottom-right corner of your website. You can set them to trigger after a fixed time or scroll-percentage.

ConvertKit

Other Cool Settings in Forms:

In ConvertKit, once you create a form or landing page, style it and set its triggers, you can can then set up what you want to happen after a person subscribes to your form.

Some cool things you can do are:

  • Take them to a thank-you page or any other webpage you want.
  • Send them a downloadable item (like a video, .zip file or PDF)
  • Tag and segment them in a list of your choice for further action.

… and more.

Subscribers:

In ConvertKit, all your subscribers are stored under one list. This list will show you their emails, when they subscribed and what’s their ‘status’.

Status shows you what’s the current state of your subscribers i.e. confirmed, unconfirmed, complained, canceled, cold and bounced. Your confirmed subscribers are the ones you need to pay attention to as they are getting your emails and interacting with them.

ConvertKit gives you two ways to organize the subscribers in your list:

  1. Tags: When you get subscribers, you’ll want to identify them based on their interests and activity to make sure you send the right messages to the right people. Tags let you do that. You can add tags to a subscriber when they click a link or dont, or when they make a purchase (or don’t). Each subscriber can have multiple tags.
  2. Segments: Suppose you’ve tagged your subscribers by products they’ve purchased, the links they’ve clicked and forms they’ve submitted their emails to. Since each subscribers will have done multiple of these things, you will have a lot of tags. To organize these tags, you can place them into segments.

For example, suppose you sell three products i.e. a wallet, a keychain and a purse. When any of your subscribers buy these things, you can tag each of them with ‘customer_wallet’, ‘customer_keychain’ and ‘customer_purse’ depending on what they’ve purchased.

Then suppose you want to know how many customers you have in your list of subscribers. You can then store all three ‘customer_’ tags in a segment called ‘existing customers’.

And in this way, you can organize your subscriber list.

Plus, you can set up automations after which ConvertKit will automatically add a subscriber to a tag or segment after they take the action you want.

ConvertKit

Sequences:

In your email marketing campaigns, you may want to send a series of emails to your subscribers over a period of time. In ConvertKit, that happens under a menu called ‘Sequences’.

Here, you’ll get a glimpse of all your email sequences. You’ll be able to see how many emails each sequence has and for how long it will run.

In addition, for each sequence, you’ll see important statistics like:

  • No. of Subscribers
  • Open Rate
  • Click Rate
  • Unsubscribers

This area is where you’ll be able to create new emails to send to your subscribers.

You can add as many new emails to a sequence as you like. Once you’ve written the email, you can set it to ‘draft’ or ‘publish’. Only emails that are set to ‘publish’ will be sent to your subscribers. It’s up to you to choose which date and time you want each email in your sequence to be sent.

After you’ve set up your email sequence in ConvertKit, you’ll then have to choose which of your subscribers you want to send them to.

You can do this by selecting the tags and segments you’ve created earlier.

For example, suppose you want to send an email sequence only to people who’ve bought a course of yours. Since you’ve created a tag of those people, you can simply select that tag (or segment) and your email sequence will only be sent to subscribers within that tag.

Broadcasts:

There are times you want to send only one-time messages to your subscribers instead of a whole sequences. For that, broadcasts are a perfect option.

In broadcasts, you can quickly create a single email and send it to all of your subscribers, or to ones with a specific tag or in a specific segment.

Bonus Tip: You can resend a broadcast to those subscribers who hadn’t opened your email to boost your open rates.

If you want to send blog post newsletters, special announcements or obligatory security messages to your subscribers, broadcasts is the perfect place to go.

Automations:

In the above sections, we told you how can tag your customers, put them into different segments, send them different email sequences and broadcasts.

Well, doing this manually for each and every subscriber you get is a tiresome thing.

And that’s where automations can help you.

The automations section provide you with a visual map which let you see exactly the steps a subscriber has taken throughout your email marketing campaign – and a place where you can set up different automations.

Right now, there are three types of automations you can create in ConvertKit:

  1. Actions: When a subscriber takes a specific action like making a purchase, clicking on a link or subscribing to a form, you can create an action-based automation. For example, adding a tag to customer who’s brought your course is an example of an action-based automation.
  2. Events: When something happens i.e. a customer buys something, a tag is removed etc., a event-based action will move that subscriber forward in the automation towards a new path. For example, suppose a customer buys a course they got through your email sequence. An event-based automation will pull them out of that sequence to a thank-you email sequence.
  3. Conditions: If you want to send an email based on whether an action or event has happened or not, you can apply conditions. For example, suppose some of the subscribers in your email sequence haven’t bought your course and you want to send the non-buyers to another email sequence. You can do that with a condition-based automation.

This makes the automations section the heart of ConvertKit. Here you can literally automate every single aspect of your email marketing campaign so you automatically get subscribers and turn them into your paying customers without lifting a finger.

 

Reports

Last, but not least, are the reports.

Reports let you see exactly how your email marketing efforts have performed. You can see reports of your:

  • Forms and Landing Pages:

  • Sequences

  • Broadcasts

In addition, there is a main reporting page where you can see the exact numbers of subscribers you’ve gained throughout a specific period of time. Plus, you can filter and view which specific tags and segments got how many subscribers. And finally, you can view your number of unsubscribes as well.

These reports, if not anything else, provide a quick visual look at how your email marketing is going. And with the power of A/B testing, this information will help you make the most sales possible with your email marketing campaigns.

ConvertKit: The Final Conclusion

If you are starting from zero, or have less than a thousand subscribers, ConvertKit costs $29 a month.

But price itself is not the lone metric with which you measure ‘value’. For that, you’ll have to put the services you get in this price in the equation as well.

Keeping this in mind, ConvertKit gives you each and every feature they have at this price i.e. $29. Plus, there’s no limit to how many emails you send or how many forms you create, which, if you look at competing email marketing software, is a pretty big deal.

That’s not to say ConvertKit isn’t without its flaws.

I personally feel they could make a lot of improvements in the way they offer templates. Right now there’s just not enough different designs to go through.

To solve this, you can integrate ConvertKit to another, better form-building service like Optinmonster or LeadPages. You can head over to https://convertkit.com/integrations/ to check out what other marketing software ConvertKit lets you integrate with.

But other than that, yes, I totally think if you’re new to email marketing, and want an easy-to-use, yet powerful email marketing tool for your online business, ConvertKit is the way to go.

ConvertKit

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5 Reasons Why Online Traffic Should be a Priority for Your Coaching Business

I think the only people who love the word “traffic” is online entrepreneurs.

I posted a poll on my Facebook page asking my community whether they wanted to learn more about “How to get Massive Traffic” or about “How to Validate your Business Idea,” and my mother-in-law (bless her heart) chose Idea Validation only because she hates traffic!

She’s not even in my target audience, but you gotta love the family support!

In the online universe, traffic is a beautiful thing and we always want MORE of it!

Every time someone hits your landing page, it’s like a breath of fresh air. It tastes like opportunity.

Unfortunately, many in the online space do not prioritize traffic in their business.

Why Traffic?

Are you too busy to work on getting more traffic?

Or perhaps you believe that getting just enough clients to fill your schedule will get you more money, more flexibility, and more happiness. The online stuff is just gravy, so it sits in the backburner.

You’d be surprised to hear that the exact opposite is true.

When you neglect to create an online community in favor of having one-off clients, you are putting your business at risk in multiple ways.

What does traffic have to do with it?

You may be wondering “What does traffic have to do with creating an online following? And what does creating an online following have to do with the success of my one-on-one client work?”

In one word: everything.

When we talk about “generating traffic” we are specifically referring to you creating valuable content that attracts your ideal client, and posting it on your website (or other social media portals).

The worst thing that can happen is that someone finds you, gets your content, and never comes back.

Once your ideal client has become aware of your existence through your amazing freebies, or simply happened to land on your website, you want to make sure to hold onto them for dear life.

Your goal should be: for every person who becomes aware of you, direct them to your mailing list or to your Facebook group.

As you can see, generating massive amounts of traffic will inevitably lead to you creating an online community with you as the expert at the center.

In this article, I lay out 5 ways that creating an online community (by way of prioritizing traffic to your site or content) can springboard your business in ways you never imagined.

Ready? Let’s go:

1. Have a waitlist of clients

In any service or coaching business, you always run the risk of clients falling off the face of the Earth.

In most cases, it’s not as dramatic as that, but it does happen that clients get busy, deprioritize your meetings, or simply choose to go a different way.

Suddenly, your calendar opens up and you are left scrambling to fill the gap.

If you have prioritized generating great content, driving traffic to it, and growing a community, you should have no problem reaching out to your own tribe and establishing a waitlist of ideal clients who can’t wait to jump at the chance to work with you.

And just like that, you will never be afraid of losing another client ever again.

2. Establish yourself as an authority in your field

Put yourself in the shoes of your next ideal client.

They found you because their friend recommended you, and they hope you will work out.

Some of the time, potential customers who find you through word-of-mouth will hire you simply because you are the lowest hanging fruit: they didn’t even have to research other options, and they will just “give you a try” and hope for the best.

Other times, these same referrals do their due diligence. They will visit your website and that of your competitors. They will check out your Facebook page or Yelp reviews.

What happens next, you will never know because you never find out.

That same discerning customer found this other business which seems to be a little more “legit.” They have a huge following on Facebook, they have a lot more 5 stars reviews than you do, and it seems like other people are talking about them.

As you can see, this customer you never even knew was considering you made a judgment on the value of your services based on popularity.

You heard me: popularity.

When you have a fired-up online community, you become the authority in your field that everyone wants to work with.

You don’t want to be the business that gets passed up. You want to be the one everyone gravitates towards.

Traffic does this for you. An online community does this for you.

3. Charge higher prices

Consider the same scenario as above.

This potential customer is comparing you against someone else who has a larger following and a better-looking website.

Which of the two options do you think the client will assume is more expensive?

Hint: not you.

When you have an online following, you raise the bar in terms of expectations.

The rationale behind it is that: if so many people like her, then she must be the best!

And people will pay more for the best.

The larger your online following, the more your potential clients will be willing to pay for your services.

4. Be featured by other inspiring entrepreneurs

This is a bit of a circular reference, in that it is an opportunity afforded only to those with a large following, and it also helps you build an even larger following.

When you have created an online community that swears by your content and your services, other entrepreneurs will want to talk to you to tap into your audience.

This is a normal practice among entrepreneurs: help each other out, and grow each other’s audiences in the process.

When you first start out, you may be hurting to be featured in other people’s forums so your audience can grow. But once it’s made it to a certain level, you will attract feature opportunities like bees to honey, further cementing your authority as an expert in your area.

5. Open up unimaginable opportunities

This is the hardest benefit to describe because you don’t know what it will be.

When you put yourself out there and start engaging with other entrepreneurs and potential clients, your future opens up to a world of opportunities that you cannot imagine.

Many of us go through life calculating the ROI on our investment before we actually put our money down.

The truth is that most times it is impossible for us to know what the return will be on an opportunity we have never jumped into in the past.

This reward can take the shape of growing your audience, meeting amazing people who will change your life, or open up the chance to travel opportunities.

Jump In. Make Yourself Known.

The benefits of jumping in and making yourself be known in your industry are simply impossible to predict or to measure, and that is the definition of a wild adventure.

Does this article make you want to prioritize traffic and build a community? Leave us a comment and tell us what you are going to do in your business today!

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Seth Godin on Leadership in the 21st Century

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Seth Godin on Leadership for the 21st Century

Seth Godin is the entrepreneurial icon of the digital age, and everything he touches turns to dollars and traffic. His first entrepreneurial venture attracted a $20 million investment within a year. Then he began preaching a concept the rest of the marketing fraternity had missed in the smog of Google ranking mania: that your target market won’t hear you unless you treat it with respect.

Godin’s permission marketing concepts overcame the black hat hype of the search engine optimization (SEO) era irrevocably.

Once he’d sold his first business and grabbed a cool $30 million from Yahoo, he got a few marketing years under his belt and launched one of the web’s most visited sites. He’s still known for changing the way marketers think about their industry, but If his ability to understand business was behind his success, Forbes would have changed an entire field merely by doing what it has always done: produce insights.

Seth Godin is not a marketer, a blogger, or an entrepreneur. He’s not even a teacher, even if he does have some pretty respectable online courses. He certainly wears all those hats, but his career has set him apart from such meagre pursuits because Seth Godin is a leader.

If you meet him, the first thing you’ll probably notice is that he doesn’t parrot Harvard Business Review jargon. Here, there will be no “circling back” or “shifting paradigms.” He won’t ballpark anything, net it out or right size it. He doesn’t recite Gallup studies about employee engagement; he “gets people to do what [he] wants them to do.” He doesn’t strategize; he “makes a difference.” He doesn’t teach. He goes “over there” with people who also want to go “over there.” If you’re looking for MBA propaganda, you won’t find it here.

This is not where best practices are leveraged, but where culture is changed. If you want to achieve the sparkling revenue of Godinesque entrepreneurship, you’re going to have to do the work instead of studying the text.

Related: 21 of the Best Leadership Podcasts You’ll Want to Listen To Now

Seth Godin’s perspective is as refreshing as champagne air, particularly if you’ve never bought a button down shirt or sat in a Stanford Graduate School lecture hall. His go-to-hell presence in Harvard Business Review in amongst all the jargon-fuelled boots on the ground signals one thing: you can become an entrepreneurial titan without a Master’s degree, and Godin will show you how.

[vc_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j89bD3Qg7qg”]

What Management Wants to be When It Grows Up

Seth Godin is changing the world by casting management aside as a poorly fitting garment. During the interview with Change Creator Magazine, he said:

“culture eats strategy for breakfast. Management is about authority. […] It’s about getting people to do what you need them to do.” Leadership, on the other hand, is “about exploration. […] It’s about getting people to want to do what you need them to do.”

He doesn’t label such autocratic pursuits as irrelevant. He knows they’re necessary, but there’s no shortage of them. Leaders aren’t as easy to come by, so creating them can send a tectonic force through the business world and beyond it.

Godin’s insistence on stiff ethics leaks into all of his work, even as it relates to his marketing approach. Here is a business mogul who thinks you need to truly see your customers if you’re to reach them. Here is a Stanford graduate who values trust over mass customization. Here is an MBA holder who thinks caring is more important than ranking. Leadership and originality are mutually inclusive, and Seth Godin is an original thinker if nothing else. Just don’t say he thinks outside the box because this particular lesson eats HBR verbiage for breakfast, too.

“Today […] you can buy something with one click shopping that gets shipped to you by Fedex from a place in China that you’re never going to go for 7 cents less than you can get it somewhere else. Well, we don’t need you to be better at manufacturing. We’ve got that covered. The mindset going forward, and what the culture is realising, is that businesses have so much leverage, we have so much freedom, we have so much power that it ought to come with some responsibility, and the responsibility is to make a difference and do work that you’re proud of.”

The Corporate Imposter

It’s time to resurrect old-fashioned principles in the social impact space. Godin thinks leadership should transform lives, but to do that, young entrepreneurs must combat their inherent imposter syndromes. He meets the challenge by acknowledging that everyone is an imposter. Whether you’re manufacturing, selling, or marketing, you must face uncertainty. You can click through reams of analytics and projections, but business leadership will never be evidence-based.

“It’s not like you’re a physicist who says force is always going to equal mass times velocity. We’re asserting. We’re not proving, and we have to get comfortable saying, ‘You know what? This might not work.’ And the idea that this might not work frees us up to do important work. The reason that litigation lawyers and SEO experts get stuck is because they want […] a guarantee. You don’t get [that] when you’re making a difference. You’re not a manager. You’re a leader.”

Empathy and the Entrepreneurial Giant

Seth Godin’s business leadership philosophy begins with happiness instead of proof because there can be no opportunity cost for that. Do what you want to do. Do what fills your soul. Change lives—but do so with empathy for those you serve.

The capacity to walk in others’ shoes makes marketplace transactions possible. It helps you to find out what your customers value, who they are, and how you’re hoping to change them. “Who can you connect? Who can you lead? What can you make better? How can you do it again?” Anyone can answer those questions, even you in the back row with the shabby high school diploma.

Teaching the Lessons

Seth Godin’s online courses are as original as all his ideals. His Skillshare and Udemy seminars have no lectures, tests, or homework. “We are proudly not accredited,” he says. “And if you ask, ‘will this be in the test?’ we will make a face at you.”

He wants his students to move away from book learning because it encourages them to do as little as they can get away with. Instead, his courses consist of about 14 projects that race through achievements at a neck breaking speed.

“We’re trying to do art, and if you’re making art, it’s not ‘how little can I do?’ It’s ‘how much can I do?’”

That work is underlined by production, mutual engagement, and feedback. Traditional online courses have an average completion rate of 5 percent in comparison to Godin’s 97 percent, because his doesn’t promise any special knowledge. He offers experience.

“You become what you do so let’s do this.”

Related: Seth Godin Marketing: Are You Building Something Average or Magical?

In keeping with his permission marketing ideals, his seminars earn enrolment through leadership. In three sentences, he tells his students, “I wanna go over there. Do you see what it’s like over there? Do you wanna go over there with me? […] Here’s a change in our posture, a change in the world I’d like to make. Do you wanna help me make that change?” Instead of offering schooling, he offers a culture-shift that ends in the opportunity to affect your own change. He’s taking the fear out of entrepreneurship, and that’s as honorable a task as any.

Using Culture to Overcome Business School Propaganda

Godin asks entrepreneurial hopefuls to find fellow travellers who can help them to explore the places that they fear. He wants his cohorts to overcome the intimidating lessons of Stanford and Harvard Business School. Such courses teach two important practices: to ignore sunk costs and understand the math of a decision tree. These aren’t skills people are born with. It’s inherently human to focus on one outcome and ignore all the rest, so decision making is a skill that must be learned.

That doesn’t make it impossibly complicated. You simply identify what’s important based on the ecosystem you’ve chosen as your marketplace, and then explore the unknown territory that terrifies you. Culture will inform your choices, and connection will produce more rewards than didactic management strategies ever will.

Finding Entrepreneurial Success

Seth Godin has written 10 books, produced one of Time Magazine’s favorite blogs, and created two wildly successful online businesses.

When asked what he does every day to make such an impact, he replies, “I do one thing every day. […] Most people don’t.” He compares his approach to a skate park. Some kids repeat the same trick over and over, while others try new tricks that make them nervous—not to learn, but because it makes them happy. “I decided a long time ago to do things that make me nervous. […] I made it a habit that I enjoy, and that’s how I spend my day.”

“I think it’s way easier than people believe. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t try to raise money, you should not have an original idea. If you begin with those two things in mind, the next step is, “What’s the smallest viable market you can serve?” [Then] find one person who’ll exchange money for what you can do for them. [Then] tomorrow can you find two people? [Then] you do it again. I started this when I was 14 and […] then I did it throughout college. That’s what it means to be an old school entrepreneur. At some point, you’ll be good enough at exchanging money for value that you say to yourself, ‘There’s another way I could add value that no one’s done before.’ That’s it. […] And if you want to make a profit while doing it, you can, but that doesn’t have to be your goal.”

Seth Godin found resounding success by choosing a figurative country he wanted to explore. Then he went there and explored it. Along the way, he changed the world, and so can you.

Or, check out our full interview with Seth Godin here.

How This Entrepreneur’s Model Helps Raise Big Funding While Creating Meaningful Memories (interview)

adam capes

Interview with the co-founder of Getaway2Give, Adam Capes.

Subscribe to this show on iTunes | Stitcher | Soundcloud

In this interview we talk with Adam Capes, the founder of Getaway 2 Give. This is a really interesting discussion about his unique model that raises big money for while creating meaningful memories for people. It offers a fresh perspective that should spark some creative thinking for you entrepreneurs.

They currently partner with schools, nonprofits and charities who need help raising money, which you can learn more about here.

Getaway2Give is changing the way non-profits raise money and people think about vacations. Their mission is to be the best in the country at helping charities and schools raise money, and they’ve helped raise over $10M so far.

Adam began his journey to being a Social Entrepreneur as co-founder and president of a luxury residence fund called Equity Estates. This fund was one of many playing in the crowded destination club space and one of the few that survived the economic downturn. He helped raise $60M for this unique equity-based fund where members own the homes they vacation in.

At one prestigious gala in Aspen, Colorado, Adam had an “Aha” moment and decided to start Getaway2Give to help change the worlds of fundraising and vacations. Adam says, “At Getaway2Give, we’re incredibly passionate about two things – helping charities raise significant money and the lasting importance and memories made from meaningful vacation experiences.”

GET INVOLVED

If you want to partner with Adam’s team to raise money or just want to learn more about the work they do to get involved just stop by here at his website.

Ucraft Review: Is This the Perfect Web Builder for Non-Coders?

Looking to build a website without a lot of effort, confusion and time? Then consider a web builder. While there are many website builders out there, I thought we’d talk about one that people have been asking me about, Ucraft. Does it live up to the hype? Will it work for coders and non-coders alike? If you want to build a website from scratch and you don’t know how then you are going to want to read my Ucraft review!

What’s a website builder anyway?

A web builder is an easy to use tool you can use to build your own extremely professional website, which requires zero learning to use. This means you don’t have to rely on so-called web experts to build a website for you.

Instead, you can save thousands of dollars and a lot of time building a website. And because you do the job yourself, you can be sure you’ll get a website you’re satisfied with.

Ucraft is what we’ll be talking about in this article. It’s an incredible website builder you can use to build your very own professional website in a matter of hours, or dare I say, in a matter of minutes.

That’s because when you use a web builder like Ucraft, you can simply click, drag and drop your way towards a complete website. We’ll discuss that in detail how you can do that.

But for now, all you need to know is that if you want to build a website without spending time, money and other limited resources – and want a website that works the exact way you intended it to be, Ucraft is the perfect tool for you.

Try Ucraft for free, start today!

Now, let’s get started with the review…

Ucraft: How It Works and What You Can Do Inside It

Let’s dive right in.

Ucraft is divided into six major components:

1. Website Builder

2. Free Landing Page Builder

3. Logo Maker

4. Ecommerce

5. Create a Blog

6. Designer Tools

With all these components, you get a powerful all-in-one tool with which you can build a website that not only has a landing page, but also one which has a whole blog section and an integrated ecommerce section.

Unless you want to build the next Facebook, Ucraft is the perfect website building solution for your business.

Now, let’s get started by discussing each component and see how you can use each of them in building your website:

1. Website Builder

To begin, the first thing you’ll have to do is choose a template. A template is a website design which you can use as the basis of your website. Ucraft has many templates you can choose from. There are templates from photography, business, travel, restaurant and many other kinds of website.

All you have to do is simply select a template, add your own text, images and photographs, put in your own content and voila, you have just create your very own website within minutes.

But, if you feel you want to create something different, a design totally out of this world, you can start from scratch.

Starting from scratch will give you the ability to build each and every nook and cranny of your website by yourself. You decide what color, font, text, element and shape you want on your website.

And yes, it’s hard work. But Ucraft will give you all the tools you need to build your website in the drag-and-drop builder:

1. Customization Tools: The drag and drop builder gives you tools which will let you customize your website the way you want. You can change the color, typography, and effects of your website. You can add as many pages as you want, change the menu, add buttons, create links, add media elements and exciting widgets to enhance the functionality of your website.

2. Optimization Tools: Thanks to technologies like Cloudflare, responsive web design and SEO optimized design and code, you can make your website built on UCraft extremely fast and user-friendly for your visitors. All these optimizations will ensure your website loads at the fastest possible speed and works on everything from phones and tablets to PCs and laptops.

3. Analytics Tools: Analytics and marketing tools are included in Ucraft. These will allow you to monitor the performance of your website. You’ll be able to see the traffic coming into your website, your sales and other web related statistics.

2. Free Landing Page Builder

The landing page builder works exactly – and is exactly – the same as the website builder you get when building your website.

Here’s how it works:

Start by choosing a template. As we mentioned above, there are a lot of template designs you can select from. The next step is to connect your landing page to your domain. You can either connect your landing page with an existing domain or with a completely new one (purchased separately) on Ucraft.

Next, simply edit the landing page until you’ve customized the design to suit your own branding. Then, add your own text, image, video, and other media elements to make the landing page look more alive and attractive. Finally, write down professional copy that’s optimized both for search engines and your target audience which will help you sell your product.

And that’s it. Hit publish and your landing page will be live.

3. Logo Maker

Every website needs a logo. The logo maker tool provided by Ucraft is probably the easiest way you can make a custom, professional logo for your website. What would have cost you hundreds of dollars can now be done for free.

All you have to do is choose different high-quality icons and vector art to design your logo – . Next, you have to add a font which you can also customize to your own liking. Finally, with the combination of two, the final thing you have to select is your background, which can either be dark or light. And that’s it.

With a few simple steps, you’ll have your own professional logo ready to go.

4. Ecommerce

Ucraft offers users an ecommerce platform included within the tool. So this means, in addition to the website and landing page builder, the logo maker, you also get a fully functional ecommerce platform within Ucraft all within one subscription.

To get started, Ucraft will let you upload as many as 50 products to your website. In addition, it won’t charge any transaction fee so you can keep more of your profits (or offer attractive discounts). In addition, you can also do business in multiple currencies. Plus, you can get paid through 70+ payment channels and provide multiple shipping methods to your customers.

And these features are just in the basic plan.

Features of the Ultimate Plan

If you decide to subscribe to the ultimate plan, here’s what else you’ll get:

  • Ability to offer discount coupons.
  • Edit your invoices
  • Put up your Ecommerce store on social sites like Facebook, Yandex and Ebay
  • Tax exemption and the ability to reverse charge VAT.
  • A store management app
  • The favorites / wishlist option for your visitors so they can save items for later purchase.

In addition, if you subscribe to the advanced plans, you can manage your store online through your mobile phone. You can add new items, modify existing ones and process new orders on the go.

5. Create a Blog

Till now, we’ve covered it all. We’ve shown you how you can build a landing page, run your own ecommerce store and design your own logo. The last, but arguably the most important feature Ucraft provides is the ability to build your own blog on your website.

For that, you’ll get a dedicated articles app.

In this app, you can write down your own articles, customize it with your own images and video files, tag it and add a comment section to it.

There’s no fuss. It’s a simple app with a text editor that lets you create highly polished articles and blog posts for your website.

6. Designer Tools

Designer tools are nothing more but a set of three tools you case use to completely customize every single aspect of your website.

There are three designer tools provided by Ucraft:

1. Typography: This tool lets you modify your website fonts. You can change the typography, the color and even the opacity of the text on your website.

2. UI Kit: The UI Kit will assist you in customizing the buttons and forms on your website. You can change the color, shape, border and other factors of your buttons and customize them to suit the design of your website.

 

3. Layout: It’s important that every single element on your website is properly spaced and in alignment with each other. The layout tool, with the help of the grid, helps you make sure every single part of your website is on the exact location you want.

With these three design tools, combined with the website builder, logo maker, ecommerce platform and the articles app, you can easily create the best website for your business or personal use.

And the best part is you need only one subscription, one tool, and zero coding skills to get all this done!

Pricing: Which Plan Should You Get?

Their best (and most popular) plan starts at just $14 a month in which you get all the tools we’ve mentioned above. The reason why we recommend this plan is because it includes ecommerce functionality, allowing you to sell up to 50 products on your website.

And once you get a hang of things, you can subscribe to the unlimited plan, which costs $60 and removes every single limitation, allowing you to truly create a powerful professional website. In this plan, you can add unlimited products to your ecommerce store and sell items on social platforms such as Facebook, Yandex and Ebay.

But if you don’t want these fancy features, you can subscribe to the ridiculously cheap $6 plan in which you get enough features to build your personal website, but don’t get live tracking features or the ability to sell products on your online store.

So, whenever you are ready to build a professional website, be sure to give Ucraft a try!

Looking For A Ucraft Alternative? Try Wix

If Ucraft seems too simple for you – and if you’re looking for a more complex alternative that gives you more features – like a code editor or thousands of plugins, give Wix a try.

This tool is similar to Ucraft but offers far more. You’ll get more templates, more integrations, more effects, an app marketplace and even a logo maker. And that’s just the start.

In addition, you can also add your own code and upload your own CSS files. Plus, like Ucraft, Wix also gives you the ability to create your own ecommerce store. Also, Wix gives you integrations for a music player, gallery, blog and events which you can use on your website.

Which Tool Should You Choose?

Wix is one of the world’s most powerful website builders. If you’re looking to build a feature-rich website with lots of functionality, give it a try. But if you’re looking for a simple tool to quickly build your personal website or ecommerce store, Ucraft is more than qualified for the job.

Ucraft Vs. Wix: Feature Comparison

Price Templates Ecommerce Blog App Store Music Player Gallery Booking Functionality Hosting Free Domain

Price / Month Templates E-commerce Blog Appstore Ability to Code Image Gallery Booking

Functionality

 Hosting Included Free Domain
Ucraft Basic Plan @ $0

Most Popular Plan @ $6

Unlimited Plan @ $60

 Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes Yes (Except Basic plan)
Wix Basic @ $4.5

Most Popular @ $12.5

Unlimited Plan @ $ 24.5

 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes (Except Basic Plan)