I remember my first sale.
I was doing a lot of WordPress development at the time. During the day I worked for an advertising agency and we built high-end WordPress sites. In the evenings and on the weekends I was building smaller websites for friends. And it was exhilarating. Every day it felt like I learned something amazing and new. And that fueled the next days work.
My first premium plugin.
I built a plugin and launched it on WordPress.org which was fun. I happened to see a blog post from Pippin about Ninja Forms. I turned some custom code into a Ninja Forms plugin and they started selling it on their site. And in the summer of 2013 I got my first sale.
I think I earned something like $13. Not much. But enough to feel valued. Gradually over a year or two I developed a few more plugins and was generating a nice little income on the side.
I realize now that I was lucky because I partnered with a company that was doing all of the marketing. I was a developer for hire and they sold my plugin and took a cut.
But most people aren't that lucky.
Unrealized Potential
I spent the past couple years talking to eCommerce entrepreneurs. And time after time I'd hear about a store owner who spent hundreds or thousands on their store and they have no traffic.
They didn't know they should think about traffic. They thought if they built their website they'd automatically get traffic.
I don't blame them. It's an unknown unknown.
But when it happens – all that unrealized potential can be quite painful.
So when I left WooCommerce last year I started thinking about what I can add to the world. Curing cancer would be great but I have no idea how to do that.
Helping eCommerce entrepreneurs on the other hand is in my wheelhouse. I can do that. So I spent a few months playing with a few different ideas. And I figured I'd start at the beginning.
How do you get that first sale? How do you get the same feeling of exhileration that I got when I sold a tiny little plugin?
You have your logo, you have a product, you have quality product photos, and you even figured out how to setup an autoresponder in MailChimp. Now you just need your first customer.
Lift Off Summit
That's exactly what Lift Off Summit is about – getting your first customers.
I teamed up with BobWP and I interviewed ~20 marketing & eCommerce experts on how to get traffic to your site. We cover every major marketing channel and we compare the costs, the time to implement, the skills needed, and what type of products and industries work best with those channels.
We go over:
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Newsletter marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- PPC
- Local events
- Amazon
- Etsy
- and more
And to wrap up the event we go into how you can measure your progress and keep those first customers. We go into:
- Google Analytics
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Customer retention
- & Postcard marketing (for realsies)
When & Where?
We already covered what. The event is a virtual summit. That means you can be naked and learn at the same time. It's like naked cooking without the cooking.
The event is June 19th through the 23rd. That's a full week. Each day we'll release 4-5 new interviews which you can watch. The interviews will be live all week and you can watch them as soon as they come out.
How Much?
What I'm really happy about with this event is that we're making it free. Anyone can tune in & learn about whatever marketing channel they're interested in for free while the summit is live.
Yup. All of those interviews above ^ are going to be available for free during the week of the summit.
What's the Catch?
No catch.
My goal is to make such great content that you want to get the All-Access Pass ($97 before the event) so you can download the content and keep it forever.
But if you watch it live. It's free. 🙂
Enjoy
I've spent the last couple of months putting this together. I hope you get something out of it. Even if no-one buys the All-Access Pass as long as people get valuable content and launch their store I consider that a win. So grab your free ticket and I'll see you at the summit! 🚀