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Welcome to the social life strategy. I am happy to be here as always. Happy Friday. Before we get started on the topic for today, I wanna mention 3 things. Number 1, our sponsor today is ClickFunnels, and it's so appropriate that this sponsor is for this newsletter because ClickFunnels is a way to get your sales funnels organized, and you can click on the link and read all about it.
Helen:They there's a good amount of information in the newsletter today, but I'm putting the link as well in the show notes. So if you're listening, it's worth taking a click on it and seeing what types of things ClickFunnels offers to help you whether you're a bigger business, a smaller business, a start up, whatever. It's worth a look. I learned a lot just by clicking and reading, and I think it's important to do that because education is key. Even if you're not ready to use something, then you'll have it in the back of your mind for when you are ready.
Helen:And I think it's funny that the the sponsor for today just fits right in with the topic because today's topic is really about TikTok shop and selling items directly on your social media. So with that being the topic, I just think it's funny that the timing worked out that that ClickFunnel ended up sponsoring the newsletter today. So that works out. I love it. Next thing I wanna remind you is that I have a transition editing workshop on Tuesday, August 13th at noon.
Helen:So I'm putting the link in the newsletter. The link is in the show notes. This way, if you want to sign up and learn how to do nice fun outfit transitions or simple head turn transitions to make your content a little more interesting, I'm gonna be teaching that on Tuesday. What's really fun I'm gonna just sidetrack a little, but I'm working with a client right now and I'm doing a few brand videos. And what I've done, and I'm really pumped to be launching the tutorial next week on this, is how to make different types of product videos when you don't wanna necessarily be in your video.
Helen:So that topic just feeds in so well to TikTok shop topic which I'm gonna be sharing here and everything's kind of blending together. I'm really, really excited about that. So on Tuesday in the workshop, I'm gonna show you how to do some transitions with your products so you do you don't even have to be in the video necessarily. So you can make interesting product videos using certain transitions. I'm I'm pumped to put that into the workshop next week.
Helen:So if it interests you, make sure you signed up and we'll see you there. And then the last thing is got an interesting influencer opportunity coming up. So if you are a listener, subscriber of the newsletter or whatever, keep an eye out because I'm going to be sharing paid opportunities. And Julie and I created a separate link for people who are interested in influencer opportunities. Some of these we may send out just to the whole email list just because I think some people haven't noticed that you can sign up for this smaller socialized creator group and I don't want you to miss an opportunity.
Helen:So we may start sending it out to the bigger community if the if the opportunity seems right for any size creator. Now let's get into the topic for today which is how does TikTok shop work? And I wanna clarify before I dive into the topic that a lot of the things I'm gonna talk about are related to selling on any platform. So I will be reviewing TikTok specific things, but also things that are relevant if you're making videos for products that are not going to be advertised on a TikTok shop. So tune in and keep stay with me because there's a lot of learning here even if you're not heavily into TikTok.
Helen:But I do have to cover some of the TikTok things first. So the requirements for a TikTok shop seems to be that you need at least 5,000 followers. However, I know that there are creators who have been invited into the program because of their engagement at a 1,000 followers. I know this for a fact because one of them emailed me and mess I think she might have DM'd me. But she wanted to say that because when I talked on the video and I said, I think you need 5,000 followers, she actually came in and said I was offered the opportunity, and I have only, like, 1200 followers.
Helen:So I know this for a fact. I'm not just talking off the top of my head. I like to bring the receipts and I have one in my phone. So for a fact, you may get invited to it and this depends on your engagement on your videos. I guess, possibly the type of content you're sharing in your videos that way TikTok can acknowledge if they think you'd be a good seller.
Helen:So just keep at it because you could get invited in much before you're able to actually join. Now let's talk about the video I posted for a second so I can tell you the findings because I do think this is very interesting when we talk about analytics. I'm gonna open up my phone right now. I'm gonna look right at that video, and I'm gonna tell you the stats on the video and then the money that was made. Stats on the video are it has 524 comments, 800 saves, 188 people shared it, and it has 127,000 views.
Helen:So it's got a lot of traction for the video itself, but that's the data for the actual video. And most of those views came from the for you page. Now I'm gonna go into my settings and I'm gonna tell you exactly where we are as of the recording of this podcast with the monetization. I go into my settings. I go into the TikTok shop's creator section.
Helen:I my commission is $356. So since I've made $1.78, I believe it is, for every one sold, you can do the math on how many people bought this product in order for me to make $356. A lot of people bought it, which is really exciting for me. And it tells me a couple of things, which is, number 1, I guess my video was good and it convinced people and it converted people to click. So that's the first thing it tells me.
Helen:But none of that could have been possible if my video was not seen. If my video was not good enough to get people's attention first, to be shared, to be saved, to be commented on, to be forwarded, I would have never gotten to a 127,000 views and therefore the percentage percentage of people who purchased it would have been a lot lower. So I wanna talk about the tips for why I think I did well on that video and why I think I was able to sell $356, at least to me, worth of tripods. They sold $38100 worth of tripods. So the retail, I guess, 38100 and my portion, 356.
Helen:Okeydoke. Here we go. First thing is choose a product. If you decide to do the TikTok shop, choose a product that makes sense for your content. If I decided I was gonna hop on and do a cakes video for the cakes, whatever or skin care line, I don't know that I would have done as well.
Helen:I don't think my video would have gotten the kind of traction it got because it's not in my wheelhouse of the type of content I share. So my followers who are already watching my videos are more likely to watch a video where I'm talking about gear, a tripod, or a microphone, something like that, versus a skin care thing or a makeup thing. It's not the nature of my content. So I stayed in my wheelhouse for the things that I would talk about that would make sense to my audience who already is following and liking my videos, the bulk of my videos. A lot of people like my lifestyle stuff, but way more people watch my tutorials.
Helen:So if you're gonna pick a product, you wanna think about that and make sure the product makes sense for what you normally do in your content, the types of videos that normally get a good amount of views on your page. That is the type of content that is more likely to do well for you as a shop seller affiliate person creator. The next thing is it's a nice idea. I didn't do this because I'm not committing to the TikTok shop full on. But the nice thing is to create a product showcase so that it's like your storefront and it shows up on your in your profile so that you have a bunch of products in there that you stand behind and then people can click and purchase from your store.
Helen:And I probably should, if I really had a minute, put a few more products in my showcase because maybe somebody will that bought the tripod will look and see what other things I stand behind and maybe I could make money. I didn't really even think about that until this very minute. But that's a really good reason to do it. If you put if you pick out the products and put them into your showcase on your screen, on your home's profile screen, it will show your products and a person could buy the one from your video, and then they can go to your profile and click on your shop and see what else you recommend and tap, tap, tap, tap. So I'm gonna do that actually after I record this podcast.
Helen:I'm gonna add a few more products into my showcase. Let's see what happens. Maybe I'll sell some other things by accident. The next thing is to think about your opening hook line. It's always baffling to me when people say they don't they didn't do well.
Helen:They they posted TikTok shop videos, but it never does well. And I clicked on a couple recently who asked me the question, and I went to their page. And I'm not gonna mention any names here, but there was a particular couple of creators who I went and looked at some of their shop videos, and nothing in the beginning of that video was interesting enough for me to stick around to say what I wanted to hear about this product. If you are trying to sell, a healthy shake and you say, get ready with me while I make my morning shake. That's maybe fine.
Helen:It's a get ready with me hook. Like, maybe people wanna watch get ready with me content. But it doesn't tell me why I should really watch this video because it's like, oh, okay. I'm gonna watch you make a shake. A better hook line for a product like that, for example would be, I'm gonna tell you why this is the best morning shake that you can possibly do for your health.
Helen:Now that I might stop and listen to it like, oh, I wonder why it's the best. And then I'd stick around a little longer. The premise would have to deliver. Like, the person would have to then say, because it has this much more protein for the morning or whatever the heck the thing is. So you've gotta think about the selling premise.
Helen:Like, what is the unique premise that you that, this product has that makes would make someone want it versus just I'm gonna show you how it works. That's not gonna hook me in. I might not even be interested in anything like that. But if you tell me, here's why this is the most most healthy way you can start your day, I might stop and listen to that. So look at listen to the difference between those two things.
Helen:1 is more of a generic get ready with me thought versus a, this is why this is what's gonna make your life better. This product this is why this product is gonna make your life better. The thing about your hook line is probably the most important thing. Alright. Even put that example in the in the newsletter today.
Helen:Exactly. The next one is to create a concise video. And when I say concise, edit your edit your thoughts. I tend to on this podcast, I ramble, ramble, ramble. I would never post this as a video.
Helen:I would definitely go edit, take out all the middle sections where I'm kind of thinking about something or I'm talking about it too long. Concise. Concise. Concise. And I did that so well with that video.
Helen:I was like, this is why the tripod's good. This is it could be a selfie stick. It has its thing thing. It has that. And I've cut, cut, cut, Bam, bam, bam.
Helen:Got to the point. I didn't waste time. So someone that might have been interested, for example, this is why this is the best morning shake. Get right to why. Start listing the benefits.
Helen:Don't you take people on this long ride? And I'm gonna say sometimes a long ride works, and it and you can hit with a long ride with somebody who's kind of following along and you've somehow intrigued them enough to stay. But, typically, you need to keep powering out the information in order for people to want to stick around to find out the next point. So tight editing. It's a good reason to watch some of the editing workshops that we have on our website.
Helen:It shows you how to tighten up your speaking content. We have one in there for speaking videos. It shows you how to tighten up your speaking content. That's a really good one. I wanna say it's a workshop 109.
Helen:But in any case, go look at the workshops because you can tighten up your speaking videos. Then the other thing is whenever you're doing a video, don't forget to link your product. And a lot of times you post and you go, oh my god. And you have to delete it and you have to do it over again. So the the shop makes it pretty easy because you can pick the product first on the TikTok shop and then click upload to the video.
Helen:So you won't if you do it in that order, you'll always remember. And that's why I like to almost think when I teach people to shop, I would say, first, pick your product, then upload your video. Because if you go in that order, you'll never forget. If you upload your video and you're putting titles on it and you type in in a caption, you might forget the step of adding the product. You might forget the step of putting a thumbnail on.
Helen:Sometimes I do it. I'm like, oh my god. I didn't put a title on because it was the last step of my video and I forgot to put the title on it of of what the thing is about. Now we can at least edit the thumbnails. But before we couldn't edit the thumbnails and then I was stuck.
Helen:It was gone and it was was never gonna have a title on it. I do have one tutorial in my tutorial in all of my tutorials on on TikTok that doesn't have a title, and that's always gonna bug me. And it's hard because sometimes people want that tutorial and I scroll and it takes me a while to find it because it was not labeled. So make sure you link your product. Do it first, then upload the video.
Helen:Make sure your product is there and make sure you have a clear description. It will fill in automatically the description of the product, but you can change it. You can say best ever neck firming cream, best ever protein shake, if you want to do that. Otherwise, you can have it just say the default. When you add the link, it puts default title on it.
Helen:Okay. This applies again. Now we're talking about things that apply to any type of sales content that you make. So TikTok or not, answer your comments promptly. People are asking questions.
Helen:That means they're hot to buy. If they're saying, oh, does it why did this should I get the one with the battery or not with the battery? Okay. Answer right away so that they don't forget that they were gonna buy a tripod from you. Answer as promptly as you can.
Helen:If you're on Instagram, it's really great because you can have prompts if someone asks you. It will autumn you can make that ManyChat thing automatically reply to the comments. So my god, if I was a shop seller on Instagram, I'd be using that that ManyChat constantly to make sure that I was my comments were answered promptly. So that's a that's a good one. And then also, if you have a a comment that keeps coming back again and again, do a reply with video, link the product again.
Helen:And that way you have 2 sales videos because you can use reply to comments for your TikTok shop videos. You can do it. It's it's allowed. So you can and I didn't do it on mine because I didn't wanna push that have all my videos or shopping videos. I decided not to do that, but I did it consciously.
Helen:It wasn't a mistake. So on my second video, when I answered some comments, I didn't put the shop link, but I didn't do it on purpose. If you are, you know, really focused on being a TikTok shop seller, put the link on the next video. Make sure because maybe that video is gonna do well too when you're answering comments. Make sure the link to the product is on there.
Helen:That's a good one. Pay attention to when you first join the TikTok shop. There is a kind of a I think there's, like, a learning platform. Somebody told me this and I I don't even remember because I didn't pay attention to it because I wasn't hardcore ready to become a seller. But I think when you join it, it gives you the opportunity to join a workshop, to learn all the the tricks and tips for do it being a TikTok shop creator.
Helen:So look for that if you do join it. I think that's a really helpful one. And I didn't, you know, like I said, I didn't do it myself because I wasn't really interested in that. But you should also make sure to read the guidelines in the shop of what's allowed and what's not allowed. I am not sure if duets and stitches are allowed in the TikTok shop.
Helen:I didn't do the research because I'm not diving in. Make sure you do the research. Find out is a TikTok shop video okay as a duet? Because I have a feeling it's not gonna be because you're using someone else's content. I I have a feeling.
Helen:Same thing with a stitch. If you're using someone else's content, I don't think they'll allow you to sell with that. So I don't I mean, that's just a hunch of what copyright rules are in my opinion, but I don't really know what the TikTok shop rules are. So read deeply. Find out.
Helen:Dig in. And then, the last thing about the shop is to notice the shop notifications. In your activities where you see comments and you'll see all your DMs in that little button on the bottom. It's like your DM activity thing. You can see TikTok shop notifications.
Helen:And what you're gonna see there is shop owners who are going to pitch you to do their products, to sell their products. And you'll see a lot of them. If you're a new creator in the TikTok shop and you have a decent following, mine were coming like crazy to a point where I was frozen in my tracks. I was barely able to function. I was like, no.
Helen:I can't do it. There's too many people. They want me to sell their products. I was panicking. And then I also didn't I so many of them were irrelevant.
Helen:I'm not gonna make a video about an air purifier or a, you know, frying pan or a whatever the heck the things were that I was getting. I just that's just not my wheelhouse. That's not what I wanna talk about. And I'm not gonna start making, you know, a QVC channel out of my TikTok. So be mindful of saying authentic to who you are on your content while you're doing your sales videos.
Helen:I also recommend and this one I'm gonna give Lorraine a big shout out. Lorraine, I hope you're listening. Lorraine Ladysh is a creator influencer on Instagram. She's big on Instagram. And she says that she posts so often, but I think her percentage was like 90% of her content is not sponsored.
Helen:So think about that. She's a full time creator now. Full time salary annual income from being an influencer creator and only 10% of her videos are sponsored. Because the way to keep an audience and keep a loyal community is to not be selling to them in every single video. Even she, when she does it, is not selling.
Helen:She's not telling people buy this. She's just sharing what she knows about the product. It's your decision to buy it. She's creating awareness. So if you think that what I'm doing with my shop here is creating awareness that this is a product I really like, creating awareness that this is a tripod I love and I use.
Helen:Whatever the thing is, if you're doing that, you're authentic to yourself and you're not quote selling out or trying to convince people to buy something. It's really a very different mindset. And I know with the TikTok shop, you only make money from people clicking purchase. So the shop drives you to want to make the sale, hook the sale. But learn from the idea of creators who are doing it organically that they're not trying to push the sale.
Helen:They are really just enlightening you about why they like a thing. And if they're enlightening you and you choose to make the sale, make the purchase, then great. That means you've done a successful job with your content. I want to use a comment I received that I saved, and this is from a shop seller who, does create and use the TikTok shop. And she said, beware to read about the violations.
Helen:I missed this step and got 12 points for saying weight loss and Vaseline like texture on my video. Other brands are not allowed to be mentioned. I'm so glad I read this just now to you because when I first made my video, I was thinking about showing all the different tripods I own and then telling which one was my favorite. But I opted to skip that, and I didn't re opt to skip it because of that reason. I opted to skip it because I thought, actually, if I'm gonna make an effective video to try and convince people to buy something from a shop, if I give them all these choices, they might like a different one than the one I'm talking about.
Helen:So I'm not gonna help myself by doing that. And if I'm gonna truly do a test of the TikTok shop, I'm going to show the product, tell all the things, and see how many people buy it. So I decided to skip that video. I never edited it. I recorded it and I never edited it.
Helen:I decided to remake it and just talk about the one product. So that's a really, really good point. Number 1, don't do multiple products in your video. It's gonna be confusing to your audience. And number 2, beware of words that you use that could cause you violations.
Helen:Apparently, there's a point system. You get points if you say something. So I guess there's some things that are not allowed. Make sure you read the guidelines. And my guess is that those things are also going to be problematic on any platform.
Helen:So whether you're working with TikTok or Instagram or YouTube shorts or wherever you are, just be mindful of your language so that something does not cause you problems and create violations on your account. The other thing to know is that before you post your video, go to more options and select create a link for the seller. This will actually create a dedicated link so that if the seller sees your video and your video did well, they may contact you and they may wanna put promo dollars behind your video and put it in front of more people. So let me tell you a little bit more about that because it's important. I was contacted by the tripod company that I did the video for, and they came into my DMs.
Helen:They were like, oh, we we sold so many tripods. We love your video and we're happy that you liked it. And they were sending me more products for free and they want to promote my video. So I had to figure it out after the fact. I had to go back to the video, tap the thing, look look in the settings, and figure out how to get a link for them to get it over to them so that they can then put advertising dollars behind it, and they're gonna use my video to promote.
Helen:I hopefully, it benefits me, and I'm still gonna sell more tripods. And hopefully, it's gonna help me too and it'll sell more product and then I'll get more affiliate money. So I think it's a win win if a brand decides they're gonna put advertising dollars behind your video. So keep that in mind because that's a really, really good one if they do that because then you're gonna get more views on your video, more sales, more money in your pocket. Alright.
Helen:That is it for today. I'm not even gonna take questions because I went way too long. I I had so much I wanted to say about the TikTok shop this week. So So I'm gonna table the questions until next week. And if you have any interest in the workshop coming up on Tuesday, we're gonna talk a lot about product videos.
Helen:I think it's really gonna be fun, and I highly recommend attending if you are a person who thinks about doing transitions, but they think, oh, no. Too hard. Too complicated. I can't do it because I trust because trust me, I can help you and you can do it. Alright.
Helen:Have a happy weekend. Happy Friday, everyone. Bye.