Help others with marketing & advertising? This helps you automate your services.

Fort Collins, CO

Rebecca Colvin

Founder of Boudica Marketing

 

You don't have to know it all to be successful if you have help from reliable experts.

If you help other people with marketing and advertising, you know how quickly tasks can add up.

Hiring experts to help is easy when you partner with the company I use.

They help in all aspects of digital marketing. You can price out and sell your products or use theirs, create packages from the services available to outsource, and become the middleman.

You collect a profit determined by you.

The people you'll work with are real, highly supportive, and knowledgeable.

Join and use them for free here.

There are premium paid plan upgrades that discount the products and remove their branding so you can add your own.

They offer education and help to establish your store.

If you need help with websites, email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, or listing distribution, you and your clients will have every possible tool they'll ever need.

About the Author

Becky Colvin is the founder of Boudica Marketing, a full-stack marketing and advertising agency from Fort Collins, Colorado, specializing in helping businesses establish and grow their online presence.

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Sell anything online using this!

Do you have an idea for an online business, but think it will cost a lot of money to make a website with e-commerce built in?

What you're about to learn will blow your mind and encourage you to go all in on your own online store to be your own boss.
Now anyone can easily set up an e-commerce store with Shopify, and run it from anywhere!
I've tried all the website makers, and this tool makes the process of selling online and drop-shipping so much simpler.

Marketing from a Shopify site is easy and intelligent.

Using the right integrations, you are reminded about new products you've added, so they can easily be shared to all your connected social media channels.

I can always find great products to print on demand, and if I use my own artwork, I know that I'm not infringing on anyone else's copy-writes.

There is no need to hold physical inventory with a Shopify store. This is probably my favorite part. You can outsource it all, from the product creation to shipping it directly to the consumer with a mark up in between to help you make money off the sale.

Whatever I can think of selling, there is a wholesaler that can ship any of my pre-paid items directly to my customer on my behalf.

It makes no sense to hold physical inventory when drop-shipping with Shopify is so simple.

Orders are processed either manually or automatically based on what you prefer.

The way it works is once you have an item set up for sale on your website, people buy it and pay you.

Their money goes into your bank account, and then you turn around and pay the person who has the item for sale, but give the shipping label info to put on the product so it looks like it comes from your online store.

You keep whatever your markup is in between. You literally become the middleman.

You can choose to mark the item up to include the cost of shipping, or you can have the customer pay for shipping.

Who can use Shopify to build an e-commerce store?

Shopify is ideal for anyone needing a solid work from anywhere job they can do on their own time.

For traditional brick-and-mortar businesses to add thier products and services for purchase online to help them stay relevant, and keep up with the demands of the intelligent and savvy online shoppers who prefer the convenience of shopping online.

Musicians can use this website to sell sound clips, book paid performances, sell tickets, and merchandise, plus connect their followers and market to them to grow and nurture their fan base for repeat business and continued growth.

Writers, Artists, Stay at home Parents, and just about anyone with something to show off or say, can use this website easily to become their own bosses, and then work from anywhere with a simple laptop or phone and a wifi signal.

Here's a quick and dirty guide to building your own Shopify Store.

I'll go over how to -
  • Organize your store
  • Test a purchase and return
  • Launch your online store
  • Add other online sales channels

Before setting up your Shopify store, it's important to understand your goals.

Ask yourself a few basic questions. Focus your attention to speed up your setup process.
  • Obtain Taxes, and licenses, and refer to local laws for your type of business. (If you hire a lawyer for advice to help you structure it properly- that is a business expense that could be tax-deductible. )
  • Sales channels to use.
  • Pricing plan that fits your needs

Pricing
Shopify Basic costs $29 per month, with 2.9% + 30¢ per online transaction fee online, 2.7% and 0¢ fee for in-person transactions, + 20¢ per transaction if not using Shopify payments.

The main Shopify plan costs $79 per month, with 2.6% + 30¢ per transaction, 2.5% in person with 0¢ per transaction, plus 1% per transaction if not using Shopify Payments for payment processing.

Advanced Shopify costs $299 per month, with 2.4% + 30¢ per transaction, 2.4% + 0¢ for in person transactions, + .5% for non Shopify Payment processing.

First steps, sign up for a Shopify Account (contact me for a free 2-week trial link coupon to use) 
Before you add products to your Shopify store, enter some information about yourself and your store. Word of advice I wish I followed, think of your exit plan in the beginning. Don't make the name of your store anything too personal or something you wouldn't want to consider selling to another person down the road should your store later become successful.
Decide on some basic standards for your product listings and customer transactions.
Set up your domain so customers can find your store online.

Log in to your store

  • Password-protect your store
  • Name your store
  • Choose your legal business name and address.
  • Add your billing information.
  • Set a default currency for your store listings.
  • Set a default weight unit for your store listings. Staff your store if necessary.
  • Set up your domain.
Organize your store.

The way that your store looks and the kinds of products that you're going to sell are two of the most important parts of your online store.
Try a few different themes to see which one looks best, and then add some products to sell.
Depending on how many products you plan to offer, adding and organizing your product listings can be the most time-consuming step of setting up a Shopify store.

Give yourself plenty of time to add your products, organize them into logical groups, and set the necessary tax and shipping information.

A few tips to get you started:

  • Make your website look great with a theme.
  • Add your products.
  • Organize your products.
  • Set up your shipping settings.
  • Set up your taxes.
  • Set up your payment gateways.

Test your store!

Before you launch your online store, place some test orders to see how the checkout process works.
  • Test successful and failed transactions.
  • Test refunding and canceling orders.
  • Test fulfilling and partially fulfilling orders.
  • Test archiving successful orders.
Launch your online store.

After you've picked a plan and tested your online store, you're ready for people to see it.

You can remove your online store password, and add a chat widget to make it easy for online store visitors to ask questions!

  • Remove your online store password to give customers access to your store.
  • Add chat to your online store and read and respond to messages in Shopify.

Add Sales Channels

After you launch your online store, add some sales channels.

Each has eligibility requirements based on your region, and product types, and sometimes depends on your Shopify plan.

  • Sell with Facebook
  • Sell with Buy Buttons
  • Sell with Facebook Messenger
  • Sell with Instagram

Promote your business

After you launch your online store, you'll need to promote it.

Improve your store's visibility by thoughtfully designing your home page metadata, and promoting your store in all of the appropriate spaces.

Thanks for reading!

xoxo

Boudica

Becky
Becky Colvin

Becky Colvin is CEO of Boudica Marketing, a Fort Collins-based full-stack agency that helps business owners thrive online.

Click here to schedule a 15 min. discovery call.

Connect to me on twitter.com/Becky_Colvin

* The author may be rewarded financially for your referral when some links on this page are used to establish a new Shopify store and later sign up for a paid plan.

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Good honest people are invited to find out what options there are to make a living online.

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Get out of your head. Why you can't do anything about competition. 🗝

Do competitors scare me? Honestly, yes! Do I let it get in my head? Sometimes, but not for long. Here's what I do get out of my head when I feel threatened by my competition.

I landed the elephant of clients when I first started out my social media, marketing, and advertising business. Me doing a good job marketing his business attracted my competition like flies on shit. I get it. When I was working in the advertising department of several news media companies, we would pour through publications to find ads so we could call on them to steal away marketing dollars from our competitors.

If my dream client's marketing attracts my competition, maybe I'm doing my job right.

If my clients have a need, I make it my mission. Whatever they feel, I feel. I treat their business like my own. When any of my partners fail or are suffering, I feel the loss and disappointment too.

I imagine we have a deep mental connection beyond words. I'm there in a second to adapt their strategies to help them reach new goals. I love going the extra mile, always willing to going above and beyond.

When my mind wanders over to the dark side, I start to seek approval too much. I feel fear if my emails and text to my clients are left unanswered. If I see them connecting to my competition, all kinds of thoughts race through my head. Does this mean they're not happy working with me anymore? What did I do wrong? Am I not good enough?

Then I refocus because at this time or anytime I can't be allowing "stinking thinking" to take over. Be secure in my abilities to help my clients.  I can only control how much effort I give to help them get the results with their social media, marketing, and advertising while I am still there serving them.

If I do right by them, I hope they will be thrilled to continue working with me no matter how amazing the competition is.

No matter how fearful, scared and anxious I get from my own dark thoughts that I might lose a client to my competition, it helps to remember that while I have them, I can still serve them the very best that I can and let them leave knowing someone really cared about them. Yes, a piece of me might be lost if they stop working with me, but I know with the right attitude I'm going to be ok, no matter what.  

Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to read this! 

XOXO

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Want to work with me? Fill this quick form out to request a  15-minute consultation –> Contact me

 

 

 

7 steps to designing winning ads

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This is a Heating and Air company newspaper ad that won a company-wide "best ad" monthly contest when I was working at Swift Communications, Greeley Tribune (Jan. 2016) I was the sales rep so I didn't do the graphic design part, only provided the images, instructions and copywriting.

Are you interested in doing paid advertising your business, but unsure of what you need to put into your actual ad?

Paid advertising is a sure-fire way to cast a wider net to reach the audience most likely to use your products and services, and you can find more success by targeting your message to the right person, at the right place at the right time.

Here are a few insider tips I've used while working in the media news industry that helped me put ads together for my clients.  

Seven components for designing award-winning ads. These tips are for newspaper ads, but the principals can be applied to other advertising platforms. In all cases, less is best. Remember this, confusion repels, clarity attracts. 

1. Clear Message - Do you understand what the ad is about instantly? It should target a specific audience. Make it clear, who should do what, by when and why.

2.  Attention-Grabbing Headline - Does the headline tell readers what problem it solves for them? Does it draw you in and make you want to read the rest?

3. Incentive - Give the reader a reason to act. Show them what makes you different and why they should come to you. This should be an offer you have tested and already know works really well. Use your "best offer".

4. Call to action - Use a verb that captures the soul of your product or service, create urgency, and give them a reason to respond immediately.

5. Clean Layout - 50% of the ad should be for the reader, what's in it for them. Make it clear what the reader should read first, second and third. White space is your friend because it draws the eye to more important aspects of your message.

6. Impact - does the ad have a distinct voice? Will you remember it tomorrow? Does it make you feel an emotion or mentally experience the product? 

7.  Use images of your target audience or something relatable to them. 

Combining all of these elements together, you will be able to create an ad that will attract and convert your target audience, helping you get new leads and grow awareness for your business.

Thanks for reading! If you got something from this please be sure to share it with someone that could use the info. 

Becky Colvin

Founder of Boudica Marketing

Connect to me on LinkedIn!

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Keep reading my blog to learn more about marketing and advertising!

The truth about working remotely when you have kids

It's been almost two years since I took the plunge to create my own company instead of going back to the corporate world, giving me the flexibility to work remotely.

I thought that working from home was supposed to give me more time to spend with my kids, but I quickly realized I could probably work non-stop on my business if I could. It's helped to plan out activities with them to keep them on my to-do list. I found that those uninterrupted moments are the memories that I cherish the most.

It is a blessing that I never need to ask permission to take them to Dr.'s appointments or go to their school parties. If dad gets another IBS flareup, I can without hesitation step in to take care of them all, with no worries about begging for permission to work from home.

Working in my pj's, wondering if I should probably take a shower soon, my three-second walking commute, and having my kids, at arms-length, has honestly, been wonderful and worth every second.

I've enjoyed working at coffee shops and restaurants, but they are equally distracting and requires showering and commuting to. Then while I was there, I was missing my kids again. 😆 I think it's fun to do once in a while but serves to remind me why I wanted to work from the comfort of home in the first place.

Boudica Marketing is a social media, marketing, and advertising agency founded by Boudica. Helping business owners with new ideas, build up their online presence, get new leads, sales and customer service support through social media, growing awareness and brand recognition. Like and follow my page on Facebook @BoudicaMarketing for free info about marketing and advertising.

Want to work from home too? For ideas and inspiration, check out my resources page. 

 

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Use this to grow your business faster

 Save yourself some time and hire an experienced social media marketing and advertising consultant to help you!

Someone who can...👇
- Save you time by managing your online presence and reputation
- Handle tedious set up and optimization...
- Create and curate content 👈
- A professional to help you with customer service and sales support through social media 💪
- Someone experienced in online lead generation 🙏
- Someone with experience in copywriting and creating ads, to schedule your digital paid ad campaigns 🦋
- Someone to help you come up with a marketing strategy, then help you advertise it with multi-media buys to get quotes, reserve and manage the ad space
- Consulting, strategic planning and reporting ✅
- Ad & video creation 🦄
- Updates/website creation 🎂
- Seo, blogging and review generation ❤️
- Email marketing 🎶
- Funnel creation 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦
- Someone to keep an eye on your business's online reputation management 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩
- Write and send out press releases.
Social media marketing has huge benefits allowing you to nurture and service your customers. Engaging on social media can impact search engine visibility to help you show up on page #1 of online searches! A review from your happy clients can be the best source of word of mouth advertising.
Becoming visible creates a spark of interest that leads to research before they make a buying decision.

Boudica Marketing offers thriving businesses the next step to achieving the edge they need over their competition.

Every client has different needs, not one size fits all so we create custom solutions to market their business based on their who their customers are, the industry, company needs, budget, and goals.

Boudica Marketing offers over a decade of experience helping businesses and people with every personality and industry, get more awareness.

This is not all-inclusive but to show you what is possible for me to personally assist your business with:

- Facebook
- Instagram
- Twitter
- Linked In
- Snapchat
- Pinterest
- Youtube
- E-commerce
- Video
- Websites - WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify & more
- content creation
- writing and blogging
- reputation management
- online business listings
- review landing page
- email marketing
- retargeted display

I would love to hear more about your business that would benefit from social media, marketing, and advertising.

Schedule a call with me

Becky
Becky Colvin CEO of Boudica Marketing

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If you get knocked down, get back up.

Since the end of May 2017, I've been determined to start my own business so I could work remotely from home.

My why? My 3 young children. It started to get depressing being away from them 10 hours a day at my advertising job in another city working for a large news and media publishing company.

So I decided to focus on creating multiple sources of income.

Among them is this website which I started while working at my last job as a side hustle.

I monetized it with affiliate partners offers and Google Adwords, offering value in the form of information about marketing and advertising.

I started a podcast and monetized that, it's called The Boudica Show.

Whenever I would get knocked down and felt like I wanted to quit, I'd get back up, give my self a pep talk to keep going.

I'd meditate more. I would clean my desktop, office and my house. I would check my account more often and try to plan ahead better.

I would work on my mindset, tell myself during moments of self doubt when things weren't clicking and depression would set in, that Boudica Marketing is the greatest ad agency in the world. 

Then I would focus on being better, learning and perfecting my skills.

The little things helped. The small things. Like the time I got an email that my new podcast was shared on radio public.

I'm happy to report that things are progressing just great with my new marketing agency. And I'm continuing to take on new clients. I have had a few proposals fall through, but honestly, I felt it was meant to be because these were people that wanted free work and guaranteed results. I don't really want that kind of pressure.

I want to work with people that values and understands the benefits of social media marketing as a way to reach new clients for their business.

One of the streams of income that I've fallen into that's exploding right now is social media management. I help my clients with engagement, customer service and even sales support using social media.

It's been amazing being there to see my kids grow up this last year. I had a few oh shit moments that made me frantically apply for jobs but then I realized every time I would say or do the opposite of what I should have. It came back to not being quite ready to give up.

I'm just going to keep being brave, trying new things, and working hard at this thing called being my own boss.

Are you on the same journey as me? I'd love to connect with you. Listen to my podcast and join me inside a group. See below.

  "The Boudica Show" can be found on Apple Podcast, Pocket Cast, and Radio Public.

Here are a few of the groups and pages I run.

Social Media Managers Support Network - Interested in working from anywhere? All you need is a laptop, phone, and wifi. This is a group for all skill levels to connect and help each other learn how to get paid managing social media for busy business owners and other ways to generate income from the comfort of home.

Fort Collins Entrepreneurs - In the Fort Collins area and want to have an in-person support group, a place to form masterminds? Join the community!

Fort Collins Kids Clothing Swap - for N. Colorado parents that want to join the community, we have physical swaps free twice a year.

Kids Clothing Swap - page for news and information about upcoming clothing swaps

Roller Derby Info- into roller derby? This is the group for you! Connect with derby fanatics around the world on this page

You know you like to travel if Group- Here is where like-minded fellow travelers can share great places to go, and experiences they've had along the way.

Fort Collins Working Moms Stay at Home Dads Page - a place for local parents to connect and share information and get support.

Fort Collins Working Moms Stay at Home Dad's Private Group - a place for families in Fort Collins to plan meetups and get support for the wild adventures of being a working/stay at home parent in Fort Collins, Colorado. A place to share things to do in Fort Collins with kids.

7 ways to brand your business With Boudica

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boudicamarketing.com

There is more to branding than having an easy to recognize logo across all your advertising channels, matching images, similar color scheme, a name people can say and remember, a tagline that tells people what your values and benefits to them are.

It's also how you go about nurturing your customers for brand recognition, loyalty, referrals, repeat visits and multiple purchases.

And about how people feel about you when they think about you. What they say about you to people they know.

Branding ensures when people are ready to buy your services, they already know who you are and what makes you special. Branding builds trust.  I put together 7 ways you can start branding your business to grow awareness and get leads for your business.

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#1. It all starts with a plan. Determine your audience, what their behaviors, wants and needs are.

2. You should have a clear goal of the results you want from your advertising, and the current state of your business.  Analyze your strengths, challenges, competition, and threats.

3. Sales Cycle. Depending on what your industry is, you could have a long sales cycle or a short one. How you position yourself in the market will depend on these factors.

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#4 Freshen up your online presence. Create matching social media profiles with high-quality images. You really don't have to be everywhere. It's ok to focus on 2-3 platforms your audience spends the most time on. When you set up multiple platforms you can gather your followers wherever they spend time, allowing them to interact with you in real time to improve the customer service experience. You'll want to be able to be found online by the people seeking you out to service them. Social media is indexed by search engines, so the more live your channels, content, and reviews are, the higher your position will be in the search results.

Many social media platforms like LinkedIn allow you to download your list of contacts, giving you a nice start to an email list to start inviting people to your pages and asking for reviews.

Learn how to use Facebook for your business or brand to grow visibility.
Boudica Marketing

#5 Social Listening

Set up a keyword search and alerts so you can respond to any mentions for possible sales opportunities or chances to respond and share any reviews.

#6 Referrals. The highest form of flattery is a client that comes to you and says they heard about you from a friend.The internet is the ultimate form of word of mouth. Whenever you have public reviews and comments, good or bad, be sure to respond quickly, professionally, publicly, and offer a resolution. Many will seek you out online to resolve any of their issues or rave about your great service. When people have a bad experience offline, they are more likely to share this with their friends online than a good experience. Ignoring your fans, trolls or haters comments that pop up online can be harmful to your reputation, and hurt your chances of getting new or repeat business. Your potential clients can see how you handle their complaint. If you handled it well, it will boost your trust and credibility.

john-schnobrich-520022#7 Community involvement.

Supporting a cause, or starting one that solves a need in your community can instantly put your brand in front of a huge network of talented, giving people in a positive way.

Share everything with your local media and other publishers relevant to your industry in the form of a press release.  For more on how to do this see 5 insider tips on how to get in the news. Create a physical sales funnel with a bounce back offer so people you are reaching "offline" can connect with you later. This could be a sign up for a contest, coupon or special time-bound offer that they submit their information willingly to you. Create custom ads, targeting your ideal audience with compelling images that look like them. Create ad copy that energizes them and makes them feel something. Create a call to actions that feed into a sales funnel you created with your marketing strategy.

Thanks for reading!

I hope these ideas on how to brand your business will help you reach your end goal!

Need help with branding, social media and advertising so you can grow your visibility and business? Contact me today to take your marketing to the next level.

Consultation

Have questions about social media, marketing or advertising? Sign up for a one hour dedicated consultation Q&A session. We will do an in depth audit of your digital and create a customized strategy with recommendations you can use to start growing your business right away.

$500.00

How to design your own ads using Canva

Here are some of the ads and logos I've designed with Canva.com, a super easy-to-use online website design program that allows you to drop and, drag, use templates, and upload your own images to use in customized ads of sizes and formats. you choose.

I've used many other design tools and they are costly and not as intuitive to use as Canva is. This was a game changer in my solo agency that I started in 2017 so I could have job security and work from home.

New features are constantly being added. I invite you to try this out if you have any need for designing or advertising. You can even create beautiful personalized resumes, digital products, and invitations!

Visit: www.canva.com

 

 

 

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