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Chapter

4
A Personal Story

ome of the best lessons in life come from real-life stories about how people in the trenches make their worlds work. Youve seen three already with the examples of ModCloth, BurdaStyle, and Lil Blue Boo. In Chapter 11 youll read three more stories of how successful bloggers used Pinterest with amazing results. In this chapter youll hear Jasons story, about how he and his wife, Cinnamon, built their own business, Liberty Jane Clothing. Youll read how they experimented with dierent social media platforms until one day they stumbled upon the new kid on the block, a crazy new site called Pinterest. And youll recognize common links with what you might be experiencing with social media, e-commerce, and the rapid pace of change in technology. Through research, experience, and those evil twins Trial and Error, Jason and Cinnamon developed over 14,000 Facebook fans and 7,600 YouTube subscribers with over 1.2 million video views. However, it wasnt until they began studying and applying the power of Pinterest that the entire formula kicked in. Within one month after they began marketing on Pinterest, they doubled their monthly referral trac from Pinterest. Even more interesting, they did this by spending far less time and eort than they would have with traditional social media platforms. The rest of the chapter comes from Jasons own words.

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An Aspiring Eight-Year-Old
Cinnamon began sewing clothes for her 18-inch Kimberly doll when she was eight years old. Her mom taught her to sew, and it immediately became Cinnamons passion. She loved making those outts! She became so obsessed that she accidently sewed right into her nger. The needle had broken o in her tiny nger, and her mom had to rush her to the hospital. The next day Cinnamon told her mom she had to keep working and only needed help changing her bandage and installing a new needle in the sewing machine. At one point Cinnamons mom, Vicki, had worked for Switched on Ltd., a designer label in Los Angeles, and so she was an amazing sewing teacher. As well, a friend of Cinnamons grandmother worked for Bob Mackie, a famous designer of celebrity clothing. Shed give Cinnamon scraps of fancy material that Cinnamon then used to make dresses for her dolls. They werent perfect, but not bad at all for an eight-year-old. After Cinnamon and I got married and started our own family, our daughters began getting into American Girl dolls. However, when Cinnamon looked beyond the American Girl catalogue, she found the outts were low quality, designed poorly, or both. So she decided to make her own outts for our daughters dolls. Theyd be similar to things girls see on TV and in magazinescontemporary, fun, and couture.

The Birth of a Business


Cinnamons doll clothes came out so well that we decided maybe there was a business opportunity here. With a lot of prayer and planning, we began to put the pieces together. It was overwhelming but fun. We decided not to become focused on high volume or manufacturing in mass quantities, but rather we would emphasize an intense level of detail, high-quality fabrics, and designs that were bold and trendy. Our goal became to translate contemporary fashion hits into the 18-inch doll market for collectors and young girls excited by todays fashions. We decided to have a line of spring and fall original designs each year. Finally, we picked our youngest daughters rst and middle name for the brandLiberty Jane. It sounded like a clothing brand, and so we went for it and think it works. Now our daughter is the ocial spokesgirl for the company.

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The Journey of Liberty Jane Clothing


From February 2008 to the summer of 2009, we sold our items exclusively through eBay auctions. Our auctions became a spectacle as the prices frequently soared past the limits of what people would consider normal. Prices often ended over $100 and went as high as $153. But by the end of that summer, we were burned out. It was a lot of work. Wed met our goal of $1,000 a month, but we realized wed reached the end of our business model. So we went looking for new business models. We were inuenced most strongly by the writing of Jim Cockrum, author of The Silent Sales Machine Hiding Inside of eBay and Free Marketing 101. The end result was that we decided to publish Cinnamons patterns as a new product. The reasoning was fairly simple. Although we were honored by and thrilled at the high prices our outts got at auction, we realized there are a lot of people who wont ever pay $100 for a dolls outt. However, they would gladly buy a pattern and try to make something themselves. Plus we wanted a scalable modelone that allowed us to sell items without physically fullling the orders ourselves. So we created Liberty Jane Patterns (http://www.libertyjanepatterns.com) as a way to sell patterns directly to consumers. The rst month we sold 11 patterns and gave away several hundred for free. However, the transition from eBay created a collection of benets that fueled our business growth. First, now we had to develop our own method for contacting customers and following up after the sale was completed. Because of this, we learned the original and still single most important online marketing practicee-mail marketing through weekly e-mail newsletters. (See Chapter 16.) Initially our e-mail list consisted of 120 customers. However, by learning how to leverage the power of free, as in free patterns, we began getting 500 to 600 new prospects signing up each month. We began watching our website statistics and discovered where our customers were coming from. There were niche-specic fan boards and forums that we didnt even know existed. We started to realize that social networks, large and small, were a key to our success. Most important, we understood that we would have to generate our own trac; we couldnt rely on eBay to send customers our way. And the best trac was

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that referred by one customer to another, either through word of mouth or social sharing. As we explored how to use social networks to expand our social engagement, we found a fantastic partner in YouTube. As it turns out, theres a thriving doll collector community hiding inside of YouTube. Who knew? We started conducting design contests on YouTube several times a year with staggering results. Our top-performing contest had 2,400 video responses, making it one of the most responded-to videos of all time in YouTubes how-to and style category. We also developed a strong Facebook fan page eort, as we found that strength in one social network (YouTube) led to strength in another (Facebook). In the fall of 2011, two years after we started selling doll patterns online, our little business was experiencing some serious growth. We had over 1 million video views on YouTube with over 7,000 subscribers. We had over 12,000 newsletter subscribers and over 12,000 Facebook fans. Although Twitter had emerged on the scene, we decided it wasnt right for us for a couple of reasons. First, we didnt have time to constantly tweet. Second, our business was visually driven, not oriented around words or messages. So Twitter just didnt t, and we were ne with that. At this point our annual revenue had grown to six gures. Facebook was a signicant source of referral trac, as wed learned to use the fan page system to attract and engage with new prospects. And we learned to cost eectively use the advertising systems in both YouTube and Facebook. So our success on those platforms was via both organic and paid growth.

A Funny Thing Happened


As we checked our website analytics, we saw a new social network popping upPinterest. In the summer of 2011, Pinterest was like any other website to us, a blip on our website stats page. It was referring trafc, but not enough to even make us curious. We certainly didnt have the time or energy to invest in another social media website, and so we ignored it. However, by October 2011 we were increasingly excited about what Pinterest was doing for us. It became our hot topic.

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We now had three social media trac sources of signicance: Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest. Pinterest was gaining ground so quickly, we could see it would soon become our top source. The crazy part was, we hadnt even set up a Pinterest prole yet. This referral trac was being generated by our customers and fans as they shared our products with their friends. By late November 2011, we decided it was time to take Pinterest seriously. We wondered what would happen to our trac stats once we were able to actually start working on Pinterest to drive even more trafc. By early December, we set up our account. We also decided to publicly blog about our experiences and setup (http://www.marketing onpinterest.com). We documented our Four-Step Marketing Plan and began sharing our lessons learned. As we thought might happen, our referral trac from Pinterest zoomed up. The month after we started on Pinterest, it had doubled. By January 2012, Pinterest had become our top social media referral source, way ahead of both Facebook and YouTube. The realization that all our work and eort for several years on Facebook and YouTube was being eclipsed by Pinterest so quickly was both thrilling and depressing. It was, and continues to be, almost too good to be true. By March 2012 we had passed over 1,000 followers on our primary Pinterest account (see Figure 4.1). As of this writing we continue to rene and enhance activities to boost our trac from Pinterest.

Figure 4.1 Cinnamon Miles and the Liberty Jane Clothing prole after four months on Pinterest.

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Lessons We Learned
As time has gone by, weve analyzed our experiences carefully, and here is the essence of what we learned:

E-mail marketing is the original and best form of online marketing. Google can slap you, your Facebook page can be shut down, and your YouTube videos can be removed. Even your Pinterest account could be suspended. However, your e-mail list is a stable and important business asset that you control in a unique and powerful way. Learn to drive all social media trac into your e-mail capture system. (See Chapter 16.) Success in e-mail marketing leads to success in social networks as you simply share what youre doing on a new social network. Convert your current e-mail subscribers into followers on the new social site. Boom, instant followers! Success on one social network leads to success on a second social network, and this leads to success on future social network sites. This happens for a couple of reasons. First, you learn how to quickly operate in those environments without a lot of drama. Second, you can invite all your followers from one site into the next and expand your inuence. Dont feel the need to participate in every social network. If one isnt right for you, then forget it, as we did with Twitter. Social networks provide the most important kind of traffic endorsed trac. Of all the social networks weve encountered, Pinterest is the absolute best for endorsed trac. So if there is one social network you ought to consider participating in, Pinterest is it. Pinterest saves you a huge amount of time because so much of the pinning is done by other people. Youre getting in on the early days of Pinterest, as its forecasted growth rates are astounding. By getting in early, you have a chance to ride the wave as more and more people catch on to the power of Pinterest.

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