How Robert Glazer Built an Award-Winning Company Culture that Helps Them Grow 30% each Year
Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Robert Glazer, the Founder and Managing Director of Global Performance Marketing Agency Acceleration Partners.
Tune in to hear Robert talk about how he built his company’s award-winning culture, how they manage to grow 30% each year, and the nine “why’s” that he uses to keep employees on track.
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How Shane Melaugh Grew Thrive Leads Into A Business Focused On Generating You A LOT More Conversions
Hi everyone, today’s interview is with Shane Melaugh, CEO of Thrive Themes, a company that builds conversion-focused WordPress themes and plugins. Shane’s been on a nine-year entrepreneurial journey that led him up to this point, and he’s got some interesting things to say about trial and error when it comes to getting good software developed.
Entrepreneurial Dreams & Slow Progress
About nine years ago, Shane started dreaming about becoming an entrepreneur, and had ideas in his head about building something on his own.
He was a little slow to start though, because he had no idea what he was doing, and because he was clueless about running a strong business, his feeble attempts didn’t amount to much.
But, even through his failures, the idea stuck with him, and he had the fortitude to be stubborn enough to keep trying again and again, to slowly get to a point where he managed to make something work so he could turn it into an actual business.
One of his businesses was building and selling custom-built computers. Then he did some selling on eBay.
Then, he created and sold his own info products before he hired people to build software for him.
It was a gradual, step-by-step journey of gradually doing more and more challenging things. Trial and error, basically.
Now, his latest project is Thrive Themes.
Quality Team = Quality Products
I’m a huge fan of Shane’s former product SEO Cockpit, and now I love Thrive Themes. (Neil Patel uses Thrive Themes, too.) The products are so high quality, it’s obvious that he’s got a good team behind him.
But building a good team was one of the hardest (and most expensive) things he’s ever done, he says.
When he was doing SEO Cockpit, their CEO was a really good programmer who built the tool, and Shane did the marketing.
But after SEO Cockpit went off the market because it wasn’t relevant anymore, he wanted to find people who could take the ideas he had for software and turn them into something good.
At one point, he made documentation for five small software products, and hired a bunch of agencies at the same time to build them all.
Around $50,000 later, most of those products were never released, and Shane realized that his own instruction-giving may have been part of the problem.
Hiring, says Shane, is more of a process of filtering really, really hard.
Now, if you want to work on one of his teams, you’ve got to do a set of trial tasks to prove the results you can deliver. And then, when you join the team, you’re expected to have a strong work ethic and an obvious willingness to improve your skills.
With this process, Shane says they go through lots of candidates before making a hire.
How Thrive Themes Helps People
In and of itself, Thrive Themes is not one specific product.
It’s a collection of themes and plugins that customers can buy separately, or buy a subscription to all of them.
Beyond the actual WordPress themes that are optimized for on-page conversions, Shane says two their products together do a really good job displaying what the entirety of Thrive Themes is all about:
Thrive Content Builder is a front-end visual editor for WordPress that helps people build sales pages, landing pages, webinar sign-up pages, and blog posts that are fine-tuned to engage visitors and lead them down the conversion funnel.
In the normal WordPress editor, things beyond text, links, headlines, and images can get pretty complicated. But Thrive Content Builder helps people create different column-based layouts, big call to action buttons, image styles, guarantee boxes, pricing tables, star rating systems, and summary boxes to make the on-page content more enticing.
Thrive Leads, on the other hand, is the only list-building solution you need for WordPress, says Shane. It’s also got built-in testing to help you optimize your copywriting, funnels, triggers, and things like popups vs. slide-ins.
Thrive Content Builder vs. LeadPages vs. Unbounce
Though seemingly similar at first, Thrive Content Builder was not built to compete with products like LeadPages or Unbounce.
The biggest difference is that pages created with LeadPages or Unbounce are hosted elsewhere, on someone else’s server… not your own.
Pages created with Thrive Content Builder, on the other hand, are owned by you and hosted directly on your own site.
There’s pros and cons to both methods, says Shane, and which product you use for conversion-ready landing pages will depend on the preferences you have.
The Growth of Thrive Themes: Their Biggest Success & Most Traumatizing Moment, All Rolled Into One
Right now, Thrive Themes has about 3,500 active subscribers, meaning these people pay a yearly or monthly subscription to have access to everything created and produced by Thrive Themes.
But on top of that, they’ve got an additional 14,000 customers who’ve bought an individual product they offer.
In terms of growth, says Shane, it was almost scary. When they first launched Thrive Content Builder, for example, they got a very good response. They were overwhelmed with how many customers they got and definitely weren’t prepared for it.
They even had to shut down for a while and weren’t open for new business until they were able to catch up and grow their team to match the demand.
Customer Acquisition
Shane says Thrive Themes has a heavy product focus, so they don’t really do anything particularly unique in terms of marketing.
The things that work well for them, though, are content marketing and using affiliates.
With content marketing, they provide a lot of useful content and videos on their blog, which helps a lot with slow burn customer acquisition. The videos are something Shane himself spends 15-20 hours per week on.
Their affiliates also help them by writing reviews of their products, or recommending certain products to their individual mailing lists.
Not Taking Advantage of Affiliate Opportunities
Though Shane says that using affiliates is a very important sales channel for them, he says he uses them quite poorly and doesn’t play the game that’s associated with a lot of affiliate marketing out there.
He’s a little stubborn to promote other peoples’ stuff just to collect favors so they’ll reciprocate when it’s time for him to do a product launch. Because he’s got extremely high standards for running Thrive Themes, he’s incredibly picky about what he promotes to his audience.
The only thing he has going for him, really, on the affiliate front is that Thrive Themes creates great products, and that their pages are optimized for conversion, so they convert really well—translating into more profits for affiliates.
The Struggle of Changing Hats as CEO
One of the biggest struggles for Shane in growing his business was how much his role has transformed over time. It can be pretty jarring as your company scales, he says.
In the space of 18 months, he went from being a Solopreneur with a partner (which meant hustling and doing everything himself) to managing a full-fledged company of 22 people working under him.
He said he had to totally change his mindset about what matters, which was really challenging for him because he enjoyed having the mindset that he could out-work other people. He had to stop priding himself on being the hardest worker in his business and instead focus on orchestrating it well.
The Brink of Failure: Nearly Running Out of Money & Vanishing Revenue Streams
The last time Shane was near the brink of failure was when he was in the stage of hiring a bunch of agencies to build software products for him.
Beyond spending loads of money on that, he just took SEO Cockpit off the market because it wasn’t very relevant anymore. It was an honorable thing to do, but it was a vanished revenue stream.
At the same time, a lot of the affiliate sites he was running were destroyed by one of Google’s updates, and since he didn’t care that much about maintaining them anymore, that was another revenue stream that completely vanished.
He was making losses month after month and eating into his savings.
If things hadn’t turned around for him, he would have definitely run out of money.
Advice to His 21-Year-Old-Self
“Listen, this thing you’re thinking about now—you’re right about that. If you just focus on skills and you focus on increasing the skills you need through sheer repetition and through grinding through the hard times, this works.”
Also…
“Do my own thing more quickly.”
And…
“You don’t need these guys. You can do your own thing and you’ll be better off.”
In retrospect, says Shane the things that were holding him back were really silly.
Since he wasn’t a programmer, he thought he couldn’t build websites. But, if he’d just done 30 minutes of research, he would have figured out that it’s very easy to set up a hosting account and get a free CMS.
The Structure of His Day
Beyond that, his day isn’t clearly defined, and depends a lot what happens in the morning meeting with his team.
Two Must-Read Books
Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman. This book is for entrepreneurs in the beginning stages. In many cases, says Shane, the thing that’s missing in an entrepreneurial plan is the marketing aspect. This is a very concise book in how to present stuff in a way that makes people want to buy.
Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book is for someone in the later stages of entrepreneurship with a larger team, and is only really relevant if you have 15 or more people on a team.
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The Trick Blogging.org’s Zac Johnson Uses to Super-Charge His Traffic From 2,000 to 5,000 Daily Visitors
Hi everyone, today we’re talking to Zac Johnson of ZacJohnson.com, Blogging.org, and the Rise of the Entrepreneur podcast. He’s made a living and built a business around affiliate sales and his own product launches, which is something I think would be helpful for those of us in the tech world to wrap our heads around.
Making $1 At A Time Online In High School Created A Thirst To Make Even More Money Online
Zac started making money online in 1995 as a high school student. He made his first few dollars by creating banner advertisements for people in the AOL web diner, and soon made it his mission to make some real money online… the banner ads were only earning him $1 a pop.
He got involved in the Amazon affiliate program by creating an online celebrity directory with affiliate links to the movies and music associated with the celebrities he listed.
The site got a lot of search engine traffic, and with a 5% to 15% commission from Amazon, he did six figures in sales in just a few years, while he was still in high school.
The taste of affiliate marketing then got him interested in CPA (cost per action) marketing, where he could make money of his site audiences without them having to pay a penny… he just had to get them to sign up for a free magazine or fill out a survey.
He continued finding cool ways to make money on affiliate sales until he launched ZacJohnson.com in 2007 as a site that would help people learn what he’d done over the previous years so they could do it too.
Selling His Own Products
On ZacJohnson.com, Zac says he’s been able to sell ads, but his main product is Blogging.org, which came out as a result of everything ZacJohnson.com has done, and offers a membership-based course.
Launching his own product has been totally different than affiliate marketing, says Zac. With your own product, you suddenly have to worry about sales, landing pages, transactions, customers, product, customer support and posting that you don’t have to worry about with affiliate sales… all you have to worry about there is getting traffic to your affiliate links and having a good enough page to provide some conversions.
Traffic & Numbers… And Podcasting
Jon says he gets thousands of people visiting his sites on a daily basis, but the numbers fluctuate based on how much content he’s pushing out and how much promotion work he’s doing.
On average, he says he gets about 2,000 visitors per day, but that can get up to 5,000 per day if there’s heavy promotion work going on.
He says that being a guest on a podcast and writing guest posts are some of the best ways for him to get his name out there as an expert in the space, generating more traffic back to his sites.
When It’s Time To Create A New Product
Jon says he usually knows it’s time to create a new product for his audience when he has the following things going on:
The Blogging.org Sales Funnel
When someone lands on Blogging.org, they see a landing page with a video at the top to watch and enter their email address in exchange for 7-day email sequence filled with vale.
After the 7-day email autoresponder series, they get an opportunity to test membership of a $97/month buy-in for only $1 for 7 days.
After they buy in, a new course unlocks every week, so over eight weeks, they get access to all the content.
People usually stay members of the site for 2-3 months, yielding anywhere from $194 to $291 per sale on average for Jon.
The Online Webinar Bubble
“I think the internet goes through these big bubbles every once in a while,” says Jon. “Like right now the craze is in webinars.”
But that said, scammy webinars and spammy-looking content will never do well.
Internet users aren’t stupid and see advertisements (good ones and bad ones) all over the place. He’s says you’ll know you’ve got a quality offering when people not only sign up, but start telling their friends about what you’ve got to offer.
Making Your Landing Pages Better
Beyond getting better at copywriting in general, Zac suggests A/B testing.
Even if your copy is garbage or amazing, he says, switching things like a green button to red can make a big difference in conversion numbers.
He also says it’s a good idea to check out what other people in your niche are doing to keep A/B testing good ideas alongside what’s already working for you to get the best results possible.
Getting Webinar Attendance From Facebook & Webinar Costs
Zac says that Facebook is really good for retargeting ads for people who are already on his mailing list, and people who have already visited Blogging.org… that way he doesn’t have to pay a ton of money advertising to people who have never heard of him before.
Up until now, he’s only done live webinars, but his attendance rate from his signups is usually 30% to 60%, and each webinar lasts from one to one and a half hours. From that, he gets about 5% to 10% conversion rates.
Each webinar runs him from $300 to $600 to put on, and he gets anywhere from one to three signups for his $497 lifetime access product that he promotes at the end of the webinar.
2015 Priorities for Zac Johnson
Right now, he says he’s working on cleaning up ZacJohnson.com by going through and updating all of his old content from 2007 and after that’s not so applicable anymore.
He wants the website to be useful to people, and to tie it back to Blogging.org, which is his main focus right now.
A Day In the Life
Zac says he doesn’t use a set hour-by-hour schedule to get his work done.
Instead, he wakes up, checks his email, and has a list of a few tasks that he needs to take care of that day, but that can be done at pretty much any time.
His only fixed time commitments are podcast interviews, speaking engagements, and meetings, but his otherwise fairly open schedule works well for him.
Hacking Your Way to an Incredible Sales Funnel
Zac says the best way to learn how to create a great sales funnel is to create a separate email account and join all the lists of the sites you like, the podcasts you listen to, and the blogs you read.
One month later, go back and check that email account and look through the flow process of the different websites.
Anyone who starts throwing ads at you immediately is doing it the wrong way, says Zac. They’ve got to focus on building a relationship with you first.
He says you’ll be able to tell who’s doing it right and who’s doing it wrong by how they make you feel when you read through the emails, and you can emulate the people who are doing it right.
Advice to His 25-Year-Old Self
“Stay focused on whatever it is you’re working on… Focus on what you’re good at and just keep pushin’ it.”
One Productivity Hack
Zac suggests staying on yourself and not letting yourself get lax about your work. There’s not secret to it, but it’s what works.
“You can’t relax in this industry,” he says, “because as long as you’re relaxing, somebody else out there is working to get ahead of you.”
One Must-Read Book
Zac suggests The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth by Chris Brogan. He says it’s a fun book about business, entrepreneurship, and seeing opportunities from a different angle than people tend to think about them.
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