Understanding eCommerce And The Importance Of Funnels with Peter Pru

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Understanding eCommerce And The Importance Of Funnels with Peter Pru

I am excited because we have Peter Pru. Peter is an eCommerce expert and an expert at funnels. You might be asking yourself, “I sell on Amazon. I spend all day trying to maximize my sales on Amazon, optimize by listings, run PPC. Why do I need funnels?” Peter’s going to tell us all about it. Peter, how are you?

I’m great, Nathan. Thank you so much for having me on here. I hope I can bring as much value as I can to everybody here.

I’m pretty excited. Why don’t you tell everyone about yourself? How did you get into eCommerce and how did you get into the funnel route?

I always love to say I am the ten-year overnight success story. Everybody sees me because I’m a success. They don’t see all harshness that I’ve had. My first interaction with internet marketing was my freshman year in college. This was ten years ago. I first got started with affiliate marketing. Manipulating Google search algorithms, making a few commissions off selling some stuff from Google search. It made me a little bit of money during college and it was truly eye opening. We’re making some money online. This is crazy. During college it was just like, “Let’s go out on the weekend now that’s, it’s fun. Whatever.” It showed me there’s potential to make real money online. Graduation came, got a full-time job, but I always had this itch. Thinking back to that moment in college, I was close. I feel like I was on to something. I don’t feel like this is for me, being in this role every single day, sitting in a cubicle for 40 hours. I don’t know, I couldn’t do it.

I remember even thinking about it, being on the train, sitting in traffic, getting my boss to tell me what to do. It wasn’t for me and I was always like, “Let’s go back. You had some success there but go a little bit deeper this time.” That’s when I discovered eCommerce. This is years ago maybe. I jumped into Amazon FBA. To make a long story short, Amazon did well within our first year. We crushed it, but we had some claims made against us by a competitor. We ended up having our listing suppressed and it was a huge mess. It took over a year to get the account back, but the damage was already done. It was terrible. It was a dark place in my life at this time, trying to figure out because I thought I was doing everything right. I was working on my business, I was making money but it wasn’t enough to be able to quit my job, but I felt like I was close.

I started learning about Shopify. I put all the stuff I learned about in eCommerce and affiliate marketing and Amazon into Shopify and I started making sales. I was like, “This is nice.” I have my own customers, they’re off of Amazon. I feel like I’m building my own business that I cannot get banned off of. I realized quickly, “I’m making a bunch of money but I still have to work full-time and I am working all night on my own business. When is it my turn to get the Lamborghini? Everybody has Lamborghinis but me. When is it my turn? When am I going to make enough in this business? I have my job to sustain my life.” I remember I was in a mastermind group at this time. I was traveling for work and it was a Thursday or Friday night for work.

I had a conference with our mastermind group. It was basically a bunch of eCommerce sellers. A company came to showcase a new software. It was ClickFunnels. I’ve never even heard of that. Nobody even knew who they were. This was literally when they first started the software. They demonstrate the software or what a sales funnel was. I was like, “What is this? I have no idea how I can make this work.” They kept going in depth. This does work for eCommerce and they started showing over how to set this up for your eCommerce businesses.

Let the data tell you, never assume anything.

At this time, I was doing Amazon. I was like, “This is a game changer.” We’re going to talk about why it’s such a game changer. Since that moment, since I’ve started using these sales funnels, implementing monthly continuity programs, our customers basically join a subscription box or a membership site where they pay us on a monthly basis. I was finally able to leave my job, I finally started making enough money to do whatever I want, buy myself a house, all those things. Unfortunately, no new Lamborghini but I was able to live life how I want and I’m not going to be the person that tells other people out of that live their lifestyle. I’m happy now. I get to build my own businesses, live life on my own terms and it’s truly the most amazing thing ever. We had our business, it’s like ClickFunnels 2 Comma Club.

We got that for earning over a million dollars in sales in our business. They gave us that. We sold that business and had a nice little payout from there, probably the biggest check I’ll ever get in my life. I started putting out content on the YouTube channel and sharing how the sales funnels have changed the game for me. Clients are reaching out and start working with a lot of Amazon sellers that were like, “I’m interested in this.” I would want to hear more a lot of Shopify sellers that we have working with and showing them because as the people reading, it’s a whole different way of thinking now. It’s not like, “Let’s go put this product on Shopify. I’ll go put this product on Amazon,” and being like, “Let’s make sales now.” It truly is like a guided process step by step, telling your customer, “Here buy this. No, you don’t want that. Do you want this? Yes or no?” Every step of the way is extremely simple. That is the gist of it. We’re talking, but that is basically ten years in five minutes or ten minutes here.

There are pros and cons to doing Amazon versus Shopify. You’ve got Amazon, you’re using their customers but you have to follow their rules, you’re dependent and you’re not getting customers’ information. You’re not building your brand. Shopify, you get to build your brand, you get to do things your way, but you have to find your own customers. You’re saying that it doesn’t matter which one or if you’re doing both, you can maximize funnels to increase your revenue.

This is the thing. Everybody’s like, “There are pros and cons. I should sell on Amazon. I should sell on Shopify. I should do this.” No, there are pros and cons to everything. There are pros and cons to funnels. Nothing is perfect and you should maximize all of these. I continue to sell on Amazon. You should be selling on Amazon. It’s free money. Put your product on Amazon. I’m telling you, as we talk about this stuff, I just encourage people to start low risk because when I started with Amazon, it was the Wild West. It was awesome. You could literally throw a spatula on there and make money. It was the best. There wasn’t what’s going on there. The only reason I don’t like what’s happening with Amazon, a lot of people are manipulating little things that aren’t actually growing their business. They’re worrying if they should use commas or spaces in their search terms or what giving away hundreds of products when in fact it’s like, “Why don’t we build your audience first? Why don’t we put that product in a sales funnel and build up your email list?”

Maybe you start getting some sales, you start generating some revenue for your business. When you build up some money, then you can source that product, ship it to Amazon, send a blast to your list and be like, “We just launched our new product on Amazon. We want to give you a great coupon code. All we ask for in exchange are a review or whatever.” The only factor that Amazon cares about search is sales volume. Organic real sales. They’re going to know if you’re just giving away products and you’re getting fake reviews. They’re not dumb. If you do it this way where you start building that audience first, your life on Amazon is going to be so much easier. You could see there are terrible Amazon listings out there, but they sell like crazy and it’s because those people have brand loyal customers that are loyal to that company.

That’s the same exact thing that I want for people that are reading. It’s hard to start there. It’s hard to just be like, “I’m going to be the best new coffee brand,” and do it right away on Amazon. I’m not saying it’s not possible. It’s a little harder because there’s a lot of competition on Amazon. A lot of people are just doing things that are against terms of service and those kinds of things. I wouldn’t want somebody to risk $10,000, $20,000 in inventory, ship at Amazon, they break some terms of service and then they might’ve lost their investment. There are pros and cons to everything. I continue to sell on Amazon. I encourage people to sell on Amazon. It’s free sales for you. You also want to realize that you are building Amazon’s business in the process.

We’ve used the word funnel. Let’s say people are hearing it for the first time or they heard it a lot. They don’t know what it is. What is a funnel?

There is no great explanation for that I have found yet, but what I love to look at a funnel, it is literally a step by step guided process that you take your potential customer through that is going to make you the most amount of money possible, but then also give your costs some are the best experience possible. The reason funnels work and convert at the numbers that they do is because they’re simple. A lot of people come into this and they overcomplicate their funnels. They do too much, they convoluted. The reason the funnels work as well as they do is because every step of a funnel is literally binary. It’s literally a yes or no question every step of the way. For example, if somebody is watching a Shopify seller. Typically, a customer that comes to the Shopify store, there’s a ton of products on the page, there’s a ton of buttons everywhere. There are a lot of distractions. Same thing when a customer goes to Amazon. Tons of distractions. You’ve got your competitors on the page, there are all these stuff going on. Where with a funnel, you send them to something called like a landing page, a squeeze page, opt-in page, sales page. Everybody has a different name for this.

The whole purpose of this first page they land on is to immediately qualify that person as a subscriber, to get an asset for your business, their email, Messenger by opt-in, whatever. You want it to immediately collect something where you’re going to make money off of. A lot of people say email marketing is dead. It’s not worth getting into or whatever. Your email list is the most valuable thing you have because we’re all relying on different software, Amazon and programs. Your list, you can put that on a USB drive. You can literally hold it. It’s tangible almost, where everything else is you’re aligned. We want to be able to collect that lead right away. A lot of people, when they come to your funnel, they’ve never heard of you before, they’re skeptical. They’re like, “Who are these people? I’m not just going to pull out my credit card and buy from this guy. I have no idea who this is.” What we want to do is we can build that relationship with that email list.

There’s going to be people that come in from a Facebook ad, an influencer, however you’re getting traffic to your funnel and they’re going to give you their email address. They’re going to buy from your order form right there. They’re going to be great customers. They’re going to go buy all your upsells. The thing is we want to identify that person immediately. A lot of people like to assume that all their customers are the same. The thing is all your customers have different buying habits. When they come in, we get the email address on the landing page. After they give us their email address, they come to our order page. I love to maximize the revenue here by offering quantity discounts. This is going to totally shift people’s mind. I know this is going to sound crazy, and I’ll test this with any product because I’ve been proven where even products that you wouldn’t think would work well, if people don’t need more than one, it could actually works. Test it. Let the data tell you, never assume anything.

I always love to offer quantities of one, two, four, six, and eight. If I’m selling my fishing lures, I’ll be like, “Do you want one, two, four, six or eight?” I’ll give them a better and better deal as they buy more than one. You always want to push them to buying more than one because your margin gets better at that point. We also have these things called order bumps on these pages. What an order bump is it is a pre-purchase upsell. I love to use the example of like going to a grocery store. As you’re checking out on a line at a grocery store, there’re those strategically placed items to be easy toss and items. It’s like a pack of Altoids, some gum, a bag of chips. It’s a great way to boost the average cart value of the grocery store. That’s why those are placed there. We want to have those kinds of pieces inside the funnel as well on our order form. After they purchase on that order form, they get taken to our upsell sequences. Upsells can be complimentary products. It could be more of what they just bought, instead of a better discounted rate. This is where we also put in our continuity program or our monthly reoccurring revenue.

To keep it simple, it’s like BarkBox, Dollar Shave Club where every single month you pay BarkBox $20 and they send you a bunch of dog toys in the mail. Let’s say Dollar Shave Club. You won’t raise it to that amount. Here’s $20. We need to do that in our eCommerce businesses because that right there, the continuity piece was the pivotal moment for me. What I realized is that is where I can actually pay myself from my business. The rest of the money in my funnel, it can be re-invested back into the business. Right there, that continuity, let’s say you’ve got 100 customers in the door. You have a 10% conversion rate where ten people join your continuity program. That’s going to compound. Compound interest is the most magical thing ever. As you build those up, that’s going to be free sales coming into your business every single month.

You might have a crappy month of sales on your funnels and whatnot, but on the 15th of every month, you’re going to have that rebuilt. It’s going to keep your business afloat. I’d love to say it’s free sales because you’re maximizing the back end of your business where a lot of people like to focus on that first sale. That first sale on Amazon, that sale on their product page on Shopify. When in fact, you’re leaving so much money on the table and this is where it’s a lot of people that unfortunately you see a lot of giving out advice that probably shouldn’t be giving advice, but they always are focusing on these front end things and that’s the least of our worries almost. We want to make sure our back-end business is set up in a way where we’re going to be making as much money as possible from our customers.

There was an amazing thing one of my mentors told me. He was like, “Just because you’re done selling it doesn’t mean they’re done buying.” That’s like the truest thing ever. That’s what you miss out on when you don’t have a funnel because every page, you have your opt-in page, they give you an email address immediately. You’ve just created money for yourself. You can launch different promotions to these people. You can build a relationship with them. Build a real audience for yourself. Order form. We strategically give them quantity discounts, order bumps to make others make us the most amount of money. We have our upsells. You can have as many of these as you want, but every one of them is like, “Do you want this or not? Yes or no.” Could be very simple.

If you’re not passionate about your business, it’s probably not a business that you want to be at.

Even on the Thank You page where we show them what they just bought, tell them, “You’re going to get your order in X amount of days.” We try and push them to different stuff. Maybe we’ll send it to our Amazon store, we’ll send them to our Shopify store or whatever. That’s also a great place to make money. The whole goal of the funnel is to make your customer, give them the best experience possible. Serve their needs and help them get the result that they want, which is what most people don’t ever even tried to do. Get results for the customers through physical products, but then also make your business the most amount of money. I hope that was a long but a thorough explanation of what a sales funnel is.

For me, I was at Traffic & Conversion and I’m not a marketer, I’m not a funnel person. One of the best things that someone said that really resonated with me is, if you think of it as a date, and we’ll keep it PG, let’s say the goal is to get the girl home at the end of the day. There are a lot of steps along the way. You invite her out to dinner, you kiss her at the beginning, you meet her to begin with. You would just go to inviting a girl out back to your place. It doesn’t work that way. There are a lot of steps across the way and every single step matters. If you mess up one of the steps, you’re out and a lot of times you don’t get a chance to redo it. For me, that resonated and I want to jump into that. If someone that’s building a funnel the first time. You mentioned a lot of cool stuff that you’re doing to maximize sales to get to that end goal, which is the reoccurring customer and you’ve got all these lead magnets in the front end. What comes after the lead magnet? Can you fill in the blank in there?

What we’ll do is as far as physical products are concerned, we run two angles. There’s the free shipping, and then there’s the big discount offer, which works well. There are some pros and cons to both. As far as lead magnet, like traditional lead magnets like free PDF, we don’t even do anything like that. I want to see and find who those buyers are right away and even get the people that are interested on my email list. That first page of the funnel that they land on, that landing page, that lead page, whatever, that’s going to be like giving them what we call like our offer. If it’s like a free plus shipping offer. You’re going to get this free fishing lure plus these other awesome bonuses. All we ask is that you cover shipping to your door. Entice them. You’ve got to be a marketer here. You’ve got to entice them to give you that email address because that’s going to create a micro commitment in their mind. They gave you their email address, they hit the order page. Let’s ease them into that buying environment. The big discount offer is where you can charge whatever you want, like a free plus shipping. You can’t charge $30 or $20 for shipping.

People would be like, “What? This doesn’t make any sense.” If you have a product that is like more premium priced product, high ticket, whatever, I recommend the big discount offer. The big discount offer, similar to a step where from pieces of the funnel, but you need to make sure your offer is really good here. An offer, basically what it is, it’s like strategically placed bonus items along with let’s say for example, the fishing lure to help them get the result that they want. It has to be like a lot of perceived value here. It can’t just be like, “Here’s this fishing lure for $24.99.” They’re going to, “I’ll just go to Amazon and buy this. I’ll just go to Walmart down the street and I don’t even have to wait for shipping.” No. Instead we craft an offer where we’re like, “You’re not going to get this what I’m giving you anywhere else.” This is like your own unique selling proposition. Your offer is unique to you. With the big discount offer, you’re definitely going to have to make sure that’s good because you might be charging $50, $60 for something. For somebody to come in from a Facebook ad and spend $50, $60 from you, that’s crazy. I always have to ask this question. Have you ever bought something from a Facebook ad before?

For me personally, I got into eCommerce in 2008 and I always had great margins. I saw people buying all this crazy stuff. For me, I almost stay away from them like, “I know how to find the best deal. I know how to avoid that stuff.” I know a lot of people that do that.

I never saw a physical product on Facebook, clicked it and actually bought. You have?

No. I’ve clicked it, but I’ve never actually bought.

That’s the thing. Neither have I. We expect our customers to. It makes no sense. You have to build the relationship. Yes, there’s going to be those people that are impulse buyers. Their credit card is always with them, they’re buying everything but we want to identify those because I love those customers. They’re giving me a lot of money. We also want to get those people in from the lead magnet because if they opt-in and didn’t buy, that’s not a bad thing. They’re just not ready to buy yet. We have to build a relationship with them first to make them comfortable because they just showed interest. We told them, “We have this amazing offer. We’re running it at 45% off today. It’s $49.99,” and they gave you their email. That means they were there. In their mind, they gave you a yes. They gave you a yes on that opt-in page, but they didn’t give you an answer on that order page. You have to build that relationship with them. I personally love email marketing, social media.

I forget what the exact statistic is but it’s like a person needs to see you in twelve different places before they even buy from you. Especially people that are just coming off the internet who have never even heard of your brand before or trust you. Why would they trust you with their credit card information? That’s a precious thing. You have to learn to build this relationship with this audience of people and not just be like, “I’m going to forget about them. Whatever.” You build that relationship with your email list. You do that through social media, emailing your email list a couple of times a week to show them that you’re there, and eventually that person will buy from you. A lot of people have short term thinking where it’s like, “I just want that front-end sale and then whatever. Life’s good.” It’s not. That’s only the beginning.

How do you build out this funnel? I’m assuming the Facebook ads come last because you don’t have the back end to support it, so where do you start? You start with the lead page, you start on the back-end. How do you normally go about building his funnel?

I use a software called ClickFunnels because it’s easiest. It literally is the best software to build these sales funnels out. We personally don’t really use Shopify stores. There’s no real place for them for us. We review a lot of Shopify stores. There’s a methodology out there that says, “Test hundreds of products a day, find a trending product, ride the wave until you don’t make sales.” To me, that’s not a business. For me, I always encourage people, “Start with one good offer, one good product and plug it into this funnel.” You can’t really do a lot of the things that ClickFunnels can do inside of Shopify. We’ve pieced it together before, but it was a ridiculously expensive. It was about $300, $400-plus the apps you would need would actually be taking commissions from the sales they made into me. I don’t like when a business is taking my money from me. I’m already paying you monthly plus you want commissions. It’s just crazy. The nice thing with ClickFunnels, and I personally love them because it’s $97 a month. You have the email marketing, you have the one-click subscription, you have the opt-in, you have the email marketing, all of that stuff in there.

For me, if I’m a beginner, I think that’s the most cost-effective way to go personally, but you can custom code these funnels if you have a development team or whatnot. With ClickFunnels, you can share some templates with the audience if you want, some funnels to show them how these look like. Essentially, a lot of these funnel templates, they’re built out for you. You literally just have to go and be like, “Put my image here. Put my headline here. It’s a free plus shipping or discount? Cool.” It is as simple as that. The hard part is the funnel, believe it or not, is the least important part of all of this. The funnel is easy. Any one of us can go make a beautiful looking funnel and spend some time on it. Usually, building the funnel is the easy part. You could have a funnel built within a couple hours, if that. They’re so simple to build. The hard part of this, and this is where people struggle, is what the offer is going to be, what you’re actually going to be selling in that thing.

The reason this is the hardest part for people to grasp, that offer, is because a lot of people are in niches and trying to serve customers that they don’t even understand the first thing about these people. They don’t care about these people. They’re only just trying to make some money on the front end and not actually try and build that relationship. I encourage people. I always tell people at least for me, I didn’t actually find any success in business, like real success. I started a business that I actually was into, a niche that I actually care about and a niche where I’m my own perfect customer. That might not be the case for everybody. I always encourage if you’re not passionate about your business, if you’re trying to clock out of your business every day, it’s probably not a business that you want to be at. Also as entrepreneurs, we need businesses that are integrated with our life, not trying to escape them. That’s what I was interested in. Find that niche, that group of people that you actually want to help. I know this is crazy, help people like, “What?” Yes, every product solves problems for people, believe it or not. All niches, it doesn’t matter.

For example, fishing, all of these niches have results they want to achieve. Somebody’s going to be like, “That’s impossible.” No. Every product, every niche has the results that they want. For example, fishing. They want to catch more fish. They want to catch bigger fish. They want to make sure when they go out with their kids, they have a good time. They have results that they want to achieve using these products. That’s the hard part for people to grasp is when you’re in your niche and your niche that you might not care about, this is going to be like pulling teeth. To able to really understand your niches, you’ve got to go and join Facebook groups that they’re part of. Go to Reddit communities, go to YouTube channels, forums online and join in on the conversation. Maybe you don’t have to necessarily post in everyday, but every time you open your phone you should be seeing conversations happening in your niche and like, “What’s going on in this niche? Is there a new product coming out in this niche?”

The first part of business which is the hardest part for people to grasp is to be in a niche that you actually care about.

That is probably the most valuable market research tool ever. I see people in this makes me cringe. It’s like with some of the eCommerce people. There are apps that will go scan people’s stores to go find the best sellers so they can go sell this. How can you build any long-lasting business by going in, copying and duplicating what somebody is already doing? This structure makes it easier because again, you don’t need 100 products. You need one offer where you put a little bit of time into caring about the niche, taking that offer, plugging it into the funnel with all the pieces and then you start driving the traffic, which is literally that first part is the hardest part for people to grasp, is to be in a niche that you actually care about.

I get asked all the time, “Why did you leave your Amazon business?” I say, “I wasn’t passionate about selling baby products back then. I’m still not passionate about selling baby products now. It wasn’t that hard of a decision.” I agree. You either have to be passionate, involved and know what’s going on in your space. You have to be committed to figure it out even if it’s painful and you just want to sell those products. What’s your thought on the content? Do you have any strategies that work in terms of content? You mentioned email marketing, you’re going to be sending these people weekly emails, biweekly, whatever it is. How do you engage? How do you relate? How do you make those people on the other end feel like they’re a part of your life and a part of your community?

The thing is, a lot of people make this too difficult than it has to be. If you don’t have content and let’s say you’re just getting started and your email list, maybe it’s like a couple hundred people and you come across an article online, send it to them and be like, “I just came across this article. I found that super helpful and I know you guys would too.” “Is it a YouTube video?” It doesn’t have to be yours. I love to use the framework, hook them with a headline. What’s a good headline that will get your people to open it up? You tell a story in your email and be like, “I was traveling on business. I came across this article.” Personalize it. You don’t always have to be promotional emails. A lot of people like to spam.

Make it a little bit more personal. You tell a good story. Let them see the behind the scenes of your business. Our welcome series in our in our businesses, we always love to show the products how they’re made. What I’ll do is I go to the supplier, wherever I’m getting my products, and say, “Can I take some pictures of some pieces of your factory?” Some might not do it, some will. We plug those and be like, “I want to give you a tour of our factory where we actually are making these products that you are buying.” People love that. They eat that up because, “Look at this. This is cool.” It’s cool to them to see. When was the last time you ever had a company show you the backend of how their businesses is made?

I guarantee people would love to see those kinds of things, “How’s this iPhone made?” Can you imagine? You can Google it now obviously, but to actually do that through a welcome series of emails when the person first joins up with you, super powerful. I recommend anybody that has an email list, as you get new subscribers, put them through a welcome indoctrination series where it’s maybe five or six days and every other day, you just send an email and it’s basically indoctrinating them into your business, into your life. Sharing your brand story if you have one and being all around helpful. Everyone is always going after that sale, when in fact, believe it or not, if you just send helpful emails and don’t expect anything in return, people will find a way to give you money. I’m telling you, it works. If you’re just genuinely helpful and care about your customers, they will want to buy from you.

I found some of my best content that people have shared or read has been the inner workings to FreeeUp. This is how I organize my team. This is how I build the software. People love that stuff. I want to talk about Facebook ads. I know we could talk about this forever and I definitely want to have you back. Is there a different part of the funnel that we didn’t talk about before we get to the ads?

I keep my funnel super simple. Opt-in page, order page where they put their credit card. I do a couple upsells and then our continuity upsell. This entire thing is one product. You don’t need 100. It’s one product. If you want to put in some complimentary stuff in there, you don’t have to, but it’s very simple. The core pieces are that opt-in page, the order page, one or two upsells, and then continuity where you get that monthly reoccurring revenue from your customers.

Talk to us about Facebook ads. I want to hear your strategies. How do you get someone’s attention? How do you get the people like me that won’t buy anything on Facebook to buy or do you not even focus on me? Are you just focused on the other group?

Let me preface this because if there’s anybody new that’s just starting this and you’ve never ran Facebook ads, I want to just talk to those people because there’s something like time versus money. If you have more time and then money, I probably wouldn’t recommend you go with Facebook ads. The reason for it is there are a lot of advertisers advertising on Facebook, typically when you go in and start launching a different ad campaigns, your cost per purchase will be higher. You’re going to have to withstand losing money. Facebook ad is the most amazing ever. Facebook, the more data you can give it, that purchaser data on your Facebook pixel, the better your conversions are going to get. What Facebook is doing, when you launch an ad set to target, let’s say beach body or whatever, and you go in there with a fresh pixel, you’ve never even had a buyer before. Facebook is going to do its best guess who your buyers are.

I’m telling you, guessing is not a good thing in this game. You want to give Facebook at least a handful of buyers that they can be like, “What are the unique characteristics amongst all of these people that I can then serve ads to people who like beach body?” or most like these group of let’s say 100 that you already have given Facebook. Your cost for conversions will be a lot better. Facebook works well when you have a lot of data and also with variation. That means testing different angles of ads, testing different images, videos. If you have more money to split test and withstand some of those growing pains with Facebook, go with Facebook. If you have more time, I actually recommend people go with Instagram influencers, YouTube influencers. The reason I say you need more time here is because you’re going to be building a relationship with people and a business relationship potentially with these people where maybe you send your product to them for review, completely for free, to their YouTube channel. Like me being a content creator, I’m always looking for ideas for content.

If somebody is like those beauty stuff, beauty YouTube channel and you have some beauty supplies that you’re selling, we’ll reach out to them, we’ll send them our products are free and then, “Would you mind doing this review? We’re going to give you all of this stuff completely for free, free of charge. All we ask is that you could give us just a quick little YouTube review of the products on what you think. If you like the products that we have, we would love to actually have more of a formal relationship with you, where we’ll pay you on a monthly basis in exchange for promotions on your YouTube channel, on your Instagram pages.” That’s powerful because think about it, if that influencer, and it didn’t have to be an influencer, it could be somebody who has 1,000 subscribers, 2,000, 5,000 subscribers on YouTube, but that audience that they have, that’s a warm audience. Those are people that know, like and trust that influencer. They’re going to be easier to convert because they trust the influencer.

With power like that comes great responsibility because if your product sucks and that influencer sells your product to their audience and their audience that’s getting the product, “What is this? This is junk. This isn’t what you said that it was going to be,” then you’re going to have a problem. The influencers are going to hate you and the influencer is also going to be upset because you just broke trust with their most valuable asset. This is why this is a very powerful thing. You want to make sure what you’re selling is actually of value to people. I love the influencer advocacy. It’s a great way to build up that audience for yourself. Another reason that this is powerful. It’s like a lot of people when they buy your product, they’re going to search for you on YouTube anyway. You want to be up there and have the review videos, testimonials. By the time that you have a bunch of influencers posting with you and stuff like that, and you can outsource this as well. Eventually, you can be like, “You’re going to be our affiliate manager. Your job is going to be to be reaching out to different influencers in this space, sending them our products, building relationships, putting them on like a retainer or you pay them.” You already have all these buyers now. You can go to Facebook. You have let’s say 500 buyers on your pixel, go to Facebook like, “Facebook, here’s all my buyers.” Your ads are going to be a lot more profitable because Facebook has something to go off of them. I hope that makes sense.

FreeUp does the same thing. I think that’s how we reached out to you originally. We’ll reach out to an influencer and say, “We have this product,” or in my case service, “Here’s a free credit, try us out.” You obviously need to back it up. You have to show it up and show up with a good product or a really good service. Luckily for your case, you were actually a client of ours at and I don’t think I knew it at the time. Peter Pru, actually your last name is Pruzinsky. I didn’t put two and two together that the Peter Pru on YouTube was also already using FreeUp. We do that all the time with different influencers and same thing your product. I think that’s great advice because if you listen to a lot of the gurus out there, it’s Facebook ads and the influencer marketing is a huge part of it as well.

Everyone’s like the weeds of their business where I’m like, “I need to pull you out of there.” You’re a CEO. CEOs don’t run their own Facebook ads. In the beginning, yes, it’s good you’re going to have to do that. You’re going to have to understand it’s good to be competent in all these things, but you shouldn’t be running your own Facebook advertising and YouTube advertising. With eCommerce Empire Builders, I purposely strategically set it up where I’m like, “I’m not doing anything besides creating content because that’s the only thing I need to be focusing on,” creating content and helping students. In the beginning you’re going to have to do everything on yourself because you’re not able to afford all of these team members if you’re starting out.

Guessing is not a good thing in the eCommerce game.

As you grow, don’t feel like you need to be the one doing your Facebook ads. There are professionals out there that do this day in and day out. They know what the latest trends are. They know what’s working for other niches. They can help you. This comes back to trust. A lot of people, when they make that first hire or something like that, they can’t even explain what to do with the person. “I can’t do it. I’m just going to do it myself.” They fired the person, which is a terrible outlook to have. You definitely don’t want to scale your business yourself. You don’t see Jeff Bezos running his own Facebook ads. If you’re trying to build a real business, which is what I encourage people to actually do, and not just like me, some extra $1,000 a month. You have to be like a CEO. You have to take that role. The reasons CEOs are so sought after is because you’ll see Fortune 500 companies like higher strategic CEOs.

They know how to position team members to put people in the right roles and to scale it. The CEO is amazing at managing people to put them in the right spots so they’re doing their job at 100%. I could tell you like for my eCommerce success, for the success I’ve had with my consulting side of my business that I have, it’s because of the team. There’s no way I was able to be do this stuff by myself. Nobody has enough hours in a day to do everything effectively. Imagine all the moving parts that happen in an eCommerce business. You’ve got to send your emails. You’ve got to send social media posts. You’ve got to go do product research. You’ve got to do market research. You’ve got to run your Facebook ads. You’re going to do order fulfillment. It is impossible to do all of those things by yourself.

I want to take this second to point out that whether it’s a ClickFunnel’s expert email marketing, content writers, whether it’s Facebook ad experts, we have all of those on the FreeUp platform ready to go, already pre-vetted. Peter, how can people find out about you? How can I join your group? Tell them more about it.

They just go to PeterPru.com. Super simple. If you go to eCommerceEmpireBuilders.com, it will also take you to the same place or just even search on YouTube, eCommerce Empire Builders. We put out all of our content on YouTube and it’s also put out on the podcast as well.

I really appreciate you having me on. This was very informative. I learned a lot. Hopefully our readers as well and we’ll be sure to have you back.

Thanks again, Nathan.

Important Links:

• Peter Pru
• ClickFunnels
• Dollar Shave Club
• BarkBox
• FreeeUp
• Traffic and Conversion
• PeterPru.com
• eCommerceEmpireBuilders.com
• eCommerce Empire Builders – YouTube Channel

About Peter Pru

Peter Pru is the founder and owner of Ecommerce Empire Builders. He helps people start and scale wildly profitable eCommerce businesses, he is a part of the ClickFunnels 2 Comma Club, and he is a reputable Youtube channel owner focused on eCommerce and business growth.