The Transcript

Why You Should Build a Business That Shines a Light on Your Talents

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. This is episode No. 25 of The Digital Entrepreneur. On this week’s episode, I am joined by someone who is passionate about helping small businesses understand and leverage the power of social media to actually grow their business.

She co-authored the book Facebook Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, and she was the community manager for Social Media Examiner for over two years. She is also the co-founder of Social Media Manager School, an online training course that has helped over 500 students learn how to start their own business as a social media manager or consultant. She also doubles as Grandma Mary, social media edutainer.

Can you guess who it is yet? She is Andrea Vahl. I’m very excited to have Andrea on the show. You’re really going to enjoy the conversation that we have — so much good insight that she has about how to decide what to do next when you have a lot of different priorities on your plate, the importance of really having a mindset of wanting to help, not just to succeed and make money for yourself, but a real genuine desire to want to help other people.

I love the answers that she gives to the questions that I ask about the one word that she would use to describe her business now and the one word that she hopes she’ll be able to use to describe it a year from now. Really great answers and so much else in this conversation. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Andrea will actually be joining me on stage this October at Digital Commerce Summit in Denver, Colorado, which I’ve been telling you about here on The Digital Entrepreneur the last few episodes. The conference will be held on October 13th and 14th. All of us really here at Rainmaker Digital hope that you will join us at this one-of-a-kind event.

Why Digital Commerce Summit Will Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Here’s a few things that make it one-of-a-kind.

First, it’s not like some of those other cattle-call conferences that you may have been to, where every 90 minutes, you have to make a difficult decision about what presentation you want to go to. Then you get buyer’s remorse because you’re thinking, “Man, what if this other presentation that I’m missing out on is good?” You’re trying to get some sort of coherent through-line between the sessions that you pick, but it’s kind of difficult.

Well, at Digital Commerce Summit, you are treated to a single track of speakers. It’s curated personally by Brian Clark, and it follows a step-by-step progression to help take you from point A to point B, or point C, or point D, or even further with your digital product or service. We don’t want you leaving Denver in the same place in your business that you showed up. This is an event about action, and you’re going to be buzzing with ideas and an itch to execute by the time it’s over and you’re traveling home. That’s our goal. That’s our commitment to you.

Second, what other conference is held at a famous theater and treats you to a special musical performance by a band like Cake? Well, you’re going to get both at Digital Commerce Summit. This combination of fun and education is what makes it a great place to network and why Digital Commerce Summit is the premiere live educational and networking event for entrepreneurs who create and sell digital products and services — entrepreneurs like you.

But here’s the deal. The early bird price goes away today. This episode is coming out on Thursday, July 28th, and the early bird price goes away today. You don’t want to hesitate to get your ticket because you’re only going to end up spending more.

Here’s something better. Since I’m a speaker at Digital Commerce Summit, and Andrea’s a speaker as well, I can give you the special speaker link, which allows you to get an even better deal than the one being offered publicly. Now, this deal also expires with the early bird price on July 28th. Again, don’t hesitate to use this URL.

Here’s the link. Make sure you remember it or write it down. It’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit-Speakers. That’s the URL. Use it. Get the best price on your tickets for Digital Commerce Summit because I really want to see you there.

All righty. Well, let’s get to this week’s discussion. You will enjoy certainly some wit, some humor, and lots of wisdom from my guest — the one and only Andrea Vahl.

Miss Vahl, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur.

Andrea Vahl: Thank you so much, Mr. Morris. I didn’t realize how formal it was here.

Jerod Morris: You and I, we did a session recently for Digital Commerce Academy, but I believe we last saw each other in Philadelphia. Is that right?

Andrea Vahl: It was, yeah.

Jerod Morris: We’re going to see each other again in October coming up in Denver, which will be fun.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah, I’m really excited for this event. It’s going to be so great. I attended other events put on by Copyblogger, and of course, the content and material is always spectacular.

Jerod Morris: Well, thank you. We’re looking to do it again this year, so it should be no different. Speaking of, your talk is titled Social Advertising Secrets for Selling Digital Stuff, and you’re speaking on the second day of the conference. Obviously, this is a topic that you know quite well. You’ve built a business around it.

I’m wondering — don’t give away all of your secrets — but is there maybe one secret that you can share with our listeners today that might help them get a little more bang for their social advertising buck?

The Importance of Getting Your Social Media Tracking Pixels Installed NOW!

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. If you want to really rock your social ads, it’s making sure that you have all of your tracking pixels in place so that you can know exactly which ad is giving you the best results. You can do all kinds of tests around different types of ads, different copy, different images, different targeting — but unless you’re really tracking all that specifically, you’re not going to know what ads you can shut down and what ads you can keep running.

What’s amazing about it is you sometimes have a guess about which ad is going to perform the best, and a lot of times, you end up getting totally surprised. If you get those tracking pixels in place and there are tracking pixels for Facebook. There are tracking pixels for Twitter, and there is ways you can track on all of your advertising efforts with all kinds of things. I’ll leave it at that.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. I know I was going to say we’ve definitely found that with the ads that we’ve done — being surprised, thinking that one’s really going to take off. But then it doesn’t do as well as you think, and another one really goes well.

One quick follow-up to that, so you want to get those tracking pixels in. Let’s say someone hasn’t yet started doing their paid advertising. They’re thinking about doing it in the future. Would it make sense to just get the tracking pixels installed today, so you start building an audience? Or is that something that you’d wait until you’re serious and ready to start running ads?

Andrea Vahl: No, absolutely. Especially for re-targeting, your traffic starts building the moment you install a pixel. You want to get that pixel on your website, tracking the traffic that is coming to your website so that Facebook or Twitter, whatever, can start building that audience and putting that traffic into a reserve for you that you can then use in the future.

Definitely, if you do nothing else from this conversation, it’s just go, find that pixel of yours — everyone has one that’s unique to their Facebook Ads account or Twitter Ads account — and just go ahead and put that pixel on your website.

Jerod Morris: That’s great advice. We’ve been seeing our best results from our ads, from those remarketing campaigns. Very good advice.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. For those people who are new to the idea of advertising, the idea of pixels and tracking, pick the pixel … when I say ‘pixel,’ it’s really just a little bit of code, a few lines of code that you just copy and paste into the header area of your website. It’s really not hard. Your webmaster can do it, or a lot of times, your site has a place for tracking codes that you can easily put it into.

Jerod Morris: Yes. All righty. Switching gears a little bit, Andrea, I have always believed that the number one benefit of digital entrepreneurship is freedom. The freedom to choose your projects, the freedom to chart your course, and ultimately, the freedom to change your life and your family’s life for the better. What benefit of digital entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?

Why the Freedom of Digital Entrepreneurship Can Be Both Exciting and Scary

Andrea Vahl: Yeah, it really is truly that freedom and that ability to scale your business up and down, to be able to work from anywhere. I love travel. I try and plan trips to Europe or international destinations, and I can work from there. I can keep my business running from there. It’s just a beautiful thing. Then in the summer, I scale my business back a little bit because I’m hanging out with the kids a little bit more.

Jerod Morris: I’m also curious, from your perspective, taking that freedom idea in another direction, freedom of expression, freedom to be yourself — obviously, some people know you as Grandma Mary. I’m wondering how much that plays into it for someone like you. You didn’t need to ask anybody permission to do that. You did it.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. It’s true. Sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes it’s easy to have that freedom. It’s nice to have that freedom to be able to choose your projects, choose the clients you want to work with, choose the things you want to work on, but also choose the way you want to do it — you make all the decisions. That can be hard and scary sometimes, too, because you’ve got almost unlimited amounts of things you could do, and you have to choose the things that you’re going to really focus on. I know, as entrepreneurs, I think sometimes the ideas start flowing, and we get excited. But there’s only so much time in the day. Double-edged sword there.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s a good point. Let’s hold that thought because I want to get to that a little bit later in terms of how you make those decisions. That is something that I think so many digital entrepreneurs face.

Before we get there, though, I want to go back a little bit. I’d love for you to take us back before you became a digital entrepreneur. What were you doing? What was missing that led you to want to make a change to take you down the path that you’re on now?

How Wine Led Andrea Down the Entrepreneurial Path

Andrea Vahl: I started out as an engineer, so I was working for some different companies. I actually worked for a motor company, and I was actually over in Europe for them for a little while. Then I worked for Agilent Technologies in the telecom field. I was doing technical support, played a technical support role for them. I actually did really like my jobs that I did. There was a little bit of lack of freedom, lack of being able to call the shots, but it was okay. I liked the companies I worked for and the teams I worked on. What happened is, I got laid off through no fault of my own. The telecom bubble burst.

That is another aspect that I love about being a digital entrepreneur — that you can call the shots in terms of not having to worry about your income completely disappearing. Obviously, there are things that can happen in your business, but usually you’ve got different silos, different things that you’re working on. You can even pick up and recreate everything, probably pretty easily, if everything somehow disappeared anyway.

Jerod Morris: What then led you to go into business for yourself? If I remember correctly, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t wine involved?

Andrea Vahl: It was! Heavy drinking — always good in entrepreneurship.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Andrea Vahl: After I was laid off from the engineering field, actually, it was great. I had a one-year-old son, stayed at home, decided to stay at home and stretch out my severance pay there. I started working with a wine company doing in-home wine tastings, and it was entrepreneurial in a way because I was building my business. It was a network marketing company. Then what happened with them is that they folded as well. I was really bummed because who else pays you to drink on the job, right?

Jerod Morris: Right, yeah. Tell me about a milestone or a moment in your career as a digital entrepreneur as it has progressed that you are the most proud of?

Andrea’s Proud Story of the Lives She’s Changed Through Her Work

Andrea Vahl: I would have to say that probably …...