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The addition of Tailwind for Instagram has been a massive time-saver for me, and as I explore it more, I’m starting to actually rely on it instead of Instagram’s direct publishing (at least for photos).

For a while, I wasn’t using hashtags much, because it was annoying and inconvenient to copy/paste lists of hashtags from notes, surface new hashtags, and check on how they were performing.

The Hashtag List feature they’ve got, which is similar to their Board List feature for Pinterest, already saves quite a bit of time. But it also means you’ll be using a specific set of hashtags over and over, which may or may not be the best growth strategy.

There seem to be an endless amount of good to great hashtags to use, which is where the Hashtag Finder 2.0 comes into play. As a plant person on Instagram, it’s a feature that helps me surface some of the hashtags in micro-movements that I may not have otherwise found.

Once you start writing a description, Tailwind immediately begins parsing your text and surfacing hashtags that might fit. Not all of them do, of course, so you can easily delete the ones that don’t quite fit, or have multiple meanings and wouldn’t be a contextually relevant tag for your content.

As I’ve gotten more into houseplants and ornamentals, finding relevant hashtags for what seems to be a completely different world has been a challenge. It’s been invaluable to have them surfaced automatically for me.

Here’s a quick video on how it works in real-time, as well as some musings on the best strategy I’ve found for stacking hashtags and “surfing” up the top 9 grids.

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

It seems like everyone is building a platform for themselves or their business these days.

That’s not a bad thing — but almost no one knows how to do it effectively.

It’s not easy, and everyone building an online platform runs into struggles along the way. But there is one macro-struggle that I see over and over again, especially from people who are just starting to build their profile online.

I’m not talking about “wantrepreneur” types who have absolutely no clue what they’re doing. This is a problem that plagues accomplished, successful entrepreneurs just as much as it does the first-timer.

First, some background: I’ve worked with numerous authors, coaches, and entrepreneurs, both in my time at Book in a Box and as a freelance consultant. These are people that have dominated their fields (medicine, Wall Street, etc.). So they know what they’re doing. But they all run into the same problem when it comes to building their online platform.

Fragmentation.

What do I mean by fragmentation?

Let’s take a look at an author I worked with. This is a highly successful Wall Street executive who left the street to become a high-end performance and career coach for other Wall Street executives and top performers.

That’s a fancy way to say he’s a life coach. Like them or not, life coaches typically make money in these ways:

1. Low-priced books, videos, or courses, in an effort to sell
2. Packaged or group coaching, in an effort to sell
3. High-end coaching on a monthly or one-off basis

That’s the basic model. It’s important to keep the model in mind, because this author’s goal is for more of all of those actions to take place. To make more money.

Now, let’s look at his platform. When I first began consulting with him, here’s what his online platform looked like:

Assets

1. Website branded with his name
2. Website branded with his business’ name
3. A book with a different name than either of his websites
4. A podcast with another different name
5. An email list
6. The standard set of social media accounts

Activities

• On his websites, he published the same articles to both every now and then (no set schedule)
• His book was used as a way to get email subscribers for his websites, and also to sell coaching with a weak call to action
• The podcast was defunct, but still featured on his websites
• The email list was sent the complete text of anything new he wrote for the websites
• His social media accounts were all connected, so he was sharing the same thing on all platforms – often retweets / reshares of financial news

Do you see the problem yet?

It’s not necessarily that he has too many assets. That wouldn’t be a problem if they were all branded correctly and on-message with how he makes money and who he makes money from.

It’s also not necessarily the activities. Those wouldn’t be a problem either, if they were focused on the right people on the right platforms, and not spread so thin.

The Golden Rule of Building a Platform: Always tie your actions and assets to the core of your business. Always.

The most common impulse for people building out a platform is to try a bit of everything and see what sticks. That’s actually NOT a bad idea, but the way that most people try it is terrible.

There’s a big difference between intelligently testing different social media strategies and “Doing Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat for a few months.”

So, what should you do instead?

Let’s get practical now. I assume if you’re reading this, you’re either trying to build a platform of your own, or you’re working on building a platform for another person or the company that you work for.

Step 1: Keep asking “Why?” until you have a rock-solid answer

The first thing you need to do is ask yourself why you’re building the platform. There aren’t bad answers here, but you’ll probably find that your thinking is muddled and unclear the more you work on this exercise.

Imagine you’re my author from above. Why is he building a platform? Here are a few reasons that sound good, but aren’t the real reason:

1. He wants to increase his name recognition
2. He wants to get more media coverage
3. He wants more people to buy his book

Sure, those are all reasons. But try adding the word “so” to the end of them. What naturally comes to mind?

So he can help more people and make more money.

That’s it. That is the core reason he will develop ANY asset or do ANY activity that has to do with this businesss.

Do this exercise for yourself right now, then move to Step 2.

Step 2: Get a 10,000 Foot View

This one’s easy. All you have to do here is gather a list of all of the assets you have and all of the activities you’re doing daily, weekly, monthly to build your platform. Think hard and don’t leave anything out, even if it’s a tiny little social media account or a 10 minute per week activity. Write it all down.

Step 3: Run each asset and activity through your “Why”

Take everything you just wrote down and ask yourself, “Is this asset or activity directly impacting my ‘why’?” Don’t rationalize here — be ruthless. It’s going to come in handy when you get to Step 4, which is:

Step 4: Stop doing EVERYTHING that isn’t helping you achieve your “Why”

Seriously. Just quit it immediately and don’t look back. It’s not moving the needle. It needs to be cut.

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

In case you’re unaware (and you should be, because almost no one reads this blog — yet), I used to run a local produce business where I grew and sold microgreens to high-end restaurants. I stopped to focus on GreatMate, a technology startup that my cofounder and I got some funding for. After that, I worked at Book in a Box for 18 months.

And now I’m back to build up the local produce business once again.

And it’s going to be harder this time.

Last time, the competitive landscape looked like this:

• Huge microgreens producer that goes through a distributor and also services outside of San Diego
• Diversified organic farm that has microgreens and shoots as part of their business, but mostly direct to consumers

There is an obvious gap here: If I specialized in microgreens and San Diego, I could beat both competitors in the space.

The huge producer couldn’t compete on a local scale, especially when going through a distributor. The market would be too small for them to be able to divert much of their energy to. The diversified organic farm couldn’t compete on a crop level, because they have so many other crops they grow at the same time.

Now, the competitive landscape looks like this:

• Huge microgreens producer that goes through a distributor and also services outside of San Diego
• Diversified organic farm that has microgreens and shoots as part of their business, but mostly direct to consumers
• Small microgreens-only producer that services San Diego only

Notice the change? Look what happened in the three years since I started (and closed) that business. A replica of my model came up and looks to be doing well.

So, why would I still try to get into this business?

A few reasons:

1. It’s extremely low-cost in both time and money to test
2. I think I can execute better than the competitor
3. I have a location advantage on my competitor

San Diego is a large city that stretches out along the coastline. I’m close to the city center, while they’re up north. This means I can get my greens to restaurants quicker, cheaper, and be more responsive to the needs of my chefs and restaurants. I can also plug myself in to the local scene much easier due to my life circumstances.

So, What’s the Plan?

I’ll leave the details of out because that’s not the focus of this site. Instead, let’s look at the strategy of launching and rapidly testing this business:

Sample trays of a variety of microgreens are planted and rigorously tracked in a Google Sheet

I’ll get into this later if there is interest.

Use Fancy Hands to build a list of restaurants from Yelp.

I filter for $$-$$$$ restaurants to increase the likelihood that they can both pay for and actually use microgreens. I also filtered for neighborhoods and distance, and instructed Fancy Hands to send me a Google Sheet with:

• Restaurant Name
• Website
• Neighborhood
• Address

Use Fancy Hands again to get the chef’s name and bio for each restaurant.

This is important because your relationship with the chefs is everything. They make the buying decisions, so going in knowing everything about them is just good business.

Package up the sample trays, plot a course for the day, and hit the streets.

This is where the hustle comes in. Last time I did this I was a complete novice to offline businesses, but I’d like to think I’ve learned a lot and my confidence has grown in the last three years. I’ll be hitting a basket of restaurants each day from 2-3pm, when they’re least busy.

If this interests you, leave a comment and let me know what you’d like me to cover in future updates!

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

If you’ve checked out my authority website series, you’ll know that a good chunk of the income comes from the Amazon Affiliates program. While I expect that to change in the future as I add more monetization models into the website, right now it’s the main earner.

Anytime you have one source generating most of your income, and you haven’t started to hit the point of diminishing returns on that source, all of your energy and focus should go into maximizing that revenue stream.

Seriously — all of it. Barring some catastrophic event like hosting going down, the opportunity costs of not maximizing your revenue from your biggest revenue source is simply too big to ignore.

It’s a simple Pareto analysis. For me, Amazon is generating around 2/3 of my site’s income, and growing every month. Why would I focus anywhere else right now?

OK, so I’ve beaten that point into the ground. Now, how do we actually do this?

Do an in-depth Pareto analysis of your affiliate sales

Every month, you can download a report of your earnings and orders. There is gold in here, if you understand how to pan for it.

Here’s one way to do it:

1. Download last month’s report
2. Do a sort by earnings, from largest to smallest
3. Use the formula =sum($J$2:J2) and drag it down a new column to get a cumulative sum
4. Create a cell that is a total sum of earnings
5. In another column, drag the formula =J2/$Sum/$Cell down the column and format it as a percentage

What did we just do? We created a percentage of total earnings number. From here, we can quickly see the how many items made up a certain percentage of our sales. For me in August 2016, I sold around ~500 items. The top 38 items were responsible for 50% of my income, and the top 137 were about 80% of my income.

That means that 7.5% of the items I sold made up 50% of my income, and 27.5% made up 80%. Pretty damn close to the classic 80/20 rule!

What can we do with this infomation?

Now that we know the vital few items that make up the majority of our sales, there are a lot of different ways to increase earnings from Amazon. Here are a few, off of the top of my head:

1. Improve the formatting and positioning of the pages that link to those products
2. Redo the keyword research for those pages in more depth, looking to add more long-tail keywords to the mix
3. Create new articles designed for social traffic that tie-in to the content on those pages (for internal linking)
4. Create special CTAs (exit intent especially) on those pages recommending those products instead of the standard opt-in
5. Remove all display ads on those pages and consider going full-width so as not to cannibalize the product links
6. Create review roundups or single-product reviews based on the products in those posts
7. Create new pages for similar products that you can rank just as easily

As you can see, the list is only limited by your imagination. I’m sure there are a ton more I haven’t thought of, so definitely leave those in the comments if you have any. I’d love to hear them!

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

If you’ve written, are working on, or are even thinking about writing a book, the list of tasks on your plate is probably huge. Chances are good you’re self publishing, which means you’re on you’re own as far as all of the non-writing aspects of getting a book done: interior, cover, book marketing, and so on. This is the nature of the beast – you’ve got big, traditional publishers that have huge (albeit largely ineffective) marketing arms for the vaulted few authors that get traditional publishing deals. And you have the rest of the world, those who can’t get a traditional deal for one reason or another, and need to self-publish.

One of the things that new authors find hardest to do is actually get their book out to their audience, especially if they don’t have a large online platform already. Often times they resort to ineffective strategies like promoting to family, friends, and weak acquaintances instead of hitting up their audience directly. While this isn’t bad, it’s not very effective unless your family, friends, and acquaintances are your exact target audience. Which is the case almost 0% of the time.

Getting Your Book Reviewed

When launching a book, reviews are one of the key factors people use to judge your book. And not just good reviews. Often times, potential readers go straight to a negative review and then move back to positive if the negative review didn’t turn them off.

The question that many authors run into is, “How do I get my book reviewed by people who are in my audience?” This is a nut that I’ve been trying to crack for a while now, and I think I’ve come up with a solid process.

At Book in a Box, where I work, we use a service called BookRazor. It’s run by my friend Dane and so far, we’ve been loving it. I combine Dane’s service with a few other tools and we’ve started to see awesome traction for authors as we ramp up to their book launch. However, you don’t have to use this service. You can do everything that BookRazor does on your own as well – it just saves some time, which makes it worth it for us.

The Basic Idea

1. Find 10 books that your book is related to, preferably with a large amount of reviews
2. Scour the reviews for the public email addresses of reviewers (meaning they have expressed interest in reviewing more books)
3. Compile a list of all reviewers names, email addresses, and the book they reviewed
4. Send them all a short pitch to receive a copy of your book

It sounds like a lot of work – and it is, if you don’t use a few clever services to speed up the workflow. BookRazor does steps 2 and 3, but you can easily outsource that to Mechanical Turk or hire some help on a freelancing site. Step 4 would also take a lot of time if you didn’t use something like Gmail Labs Canned Responses.

Here’s how I do it:

I compile a list of 10 books that are closely related to an author’s book and send them off to BookRazor. Once I get the spreadsheet back, I load it up in Google Sheets, clean up the columns a bit, and then write up a custom draft email in Gmail that looks something like this:

Hi NAME,

I saw that you reviewed TITLE OF BOOK THEY READ. I work with the author of TITLE, which is pretty similar to TITLE OF BOOK THEY READ – it’s a DESCRIPTION OF AUTHOR’S BOOK. Based on what you’ve read recently, I’m pretty sure you’ll love it.

Would you like to receive a free digital copy? I’d be happy to send it to you as a .pdf, .epub, or .mobi in exchange for your honest review.

Keep reading,

Kevin

After I’ve customized this template, I keep it saved as a draft and use Yet Another Mail Merge to send out 100+ emails like this in a flash. So far, I get about a 30% response rate on this template, which is pretty solid for a cold pitch to review a book. I attribute it to a blend of the reviewers being highly targeted, and the pitch customizing heavily to their name, the last book they read, and some compelling reasons they might like this new book.

Once I get a “Yes” back from someone, I send the following email and attach the book:

Hey NAME,

Great! I’ve attached a copy of TITLE for you

When you’ve taken a look, I’d love if you left an honest review here: AMAZON LINK

Thanks again!

Kevin

P.S. We have interesting authors coming out with books pretty regularly. I’d be happy to include you on our reviewer’s list if you’d like to join. You can do that by signing up here: LINK

And boom, there you have it. A scalable, honest, and effective way to get book reviews for a new book. You’ll find people are very appreciative that you took the time to reach out in this manner.
If you have any questions on how to do this yourself, let me know! Also, feel free to hit me up if you’ve discovered a better way to do it, I’d love to hear it

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -