Hello gorgeous!
I’ve neglected you dreadfully over the last month and a bit, and for that I can only apologize. Strange happenings are afoot in Esme-Land, all good stuff, but a lot of plates are spinning at the moment!
Let’s dive in, to Black Friday bollocks!
What’s in it for you?
The Black Friday noise is in full swing right now, and has been for a couple of weeks (if not a month). I even had an argument with Mother this weekend because she said it was Black Friday, and I said it wasn’t. Of course, Amazon are doing “Black Friday Week,” so that’s what she went on (technically 10 days from Nov 17 to 27). I politely reminded her that it was Saturday, so it couldn’t be Black Friday, and she asked me why everyone was doing more than just one day. My simple answer was: capitalism. Tell me I’m wrong!
Having said all of this, there are a couple of Black Friday deals that I have or will take advantage of this year, and I wanted you to be aware of them in case they fit your needs too.
Before We Start!
Don’t forget, if you got something for a ridiculously cheap price on Black Friday last year, it’s probably going to renew this week for the full price. Now’s the time to hop back on your online banking and have a look to see what you bought (if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably forgotten).
If you’ve not used it, or you only got it to try, log into your accounts now (probably having to reset your passwords #nojudgment) and cancel the renewal. I did this for VistaCreate and Videvo at the weekend. They seemed like a great idea last November. I think I last opened them in December!
Tailwind (for Pinterest)
Black Friday – 50% off your first year, which isn’t to be sneezed at, especially with Tailwind Communities. Their “Advanced” plan (with 1000 posts per month and unlimited Communities) is $19.99/month/annual, down to $9.99/month/annual. This is a hefty saving, especially if you’re new to Tailwind/Pinterest Marketing and want to dip your toes in before making a massive commitment.
Tailwind never does 50% off, except on Black Friday, and only for new paying customers for their first year. You can upgrade from inside your dashboard in your free account, it’s super easy.
Tailwind also covers Facebook and Instagram, so if those 3 are your primary advertising platforms, it’s even more worth it! If you get their “Advanced” plan, with 1000 posts per month, you’re looking at a maximum quota of 32.26 posts per day (for a 31 day month), so around 10 per day. I love me some social media, but there’s no way I’m posting to FB + IG 10 times a day each! Pinterest is a different beast though, just make sure you start small so it doesn’t look like you’re spamming. (And please remember, Pinterest isn’t a social media platform, it’s a search engine.)
I’ve taken advantage of this offer as I already had it on my dance card to buy in December. Key point: I was already aware of this program, knew I wanted it, and was going to buy it anyway. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, more like a Bob Ross happy little accident that the plan I wanted to get is in their Black Friday sale.
I’ve been banging on for a while that all businesses should have a Pinterest strategy, and Tailwind makes this super easy to set up as a newbie and manage moving forward.
If you’re new to Pinterest Marketing, I would recommend watching Simple Pin Media’s YouTube channel. They use Tailwind as well and have videos going over it in detail.
While there are schedulers out there who say they’re affiliated with Pinterest in their marketing, very few of them really are, as you can see on Pinterest’s Partner page. Tailwind is.
Teach:able
Black Friday – up to 40% off your first year.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the 40% off is for their biggest package, but their “Basic” package is down to $29.25 per month, paid annually from $39 for your first year. So your first payment would be $351, compared to $468. And they’re a Merchant of Record, which is crucial to my business success and something that all business owners should probably know about too (more on that below).
Teach:able’s Basic Plan has a transaction fee of 5%, but you get a custom domain, and you can have five courses, five coaching packages, five downloads, and live coaching. If you use this for all your paid offers, this is quite the deal!
Before you ask, yes, you can expect to see courses and coaching coming from me in 2024!
And again, this was on my list to buy in December already, so it’s not a FOMO purchase because of Black Friday. Of course, it makes sense to bring my purchase forward a week or so to take advantage of a lower annual price for a year; to wait would be a little bit silly!
Note: While Teach:able is a MOR, their payment processing is done through Stripe, and you connect your Stripe account to be paid from teachable:pay. If you want people to be able to buy your courses or coaching with PayPal, or you want to have affiliates, you’ll need to enable Teachable Back Office, for an extra 2-2.8% per sale.
Merchant of Record
Ok, but why is this important?
Teachable is a Merchant of Record, which is important if you sell things online across borders. As I’m in the UK, but I have connections across the rest of the world, I need to have a payment processor that’s an MOR. Did you know that Stripe isn’t a Merchant of Record? One of the biggest payment processors in the world? Nope! Neither is Shopify. Both of these really surprised me, I’m not going to lie!
What’s a Merchant of Record? Basically, it’s a 3rd party that deals with sales tax and international payments, so you don’t have to. Tax is different in every country, and it’s a nightmare to work it out. If you sell outside your country of residence (think Gumroad), and you’ve not done taxes for every country your customers are in, you may have fouled up already! For more information about what an MOR is, what they do, and how they operate, Paddle created a great guide (they’re an MOR), and Centra (also an MOR), has written a piece on why you do (or might not) need one.
At the time of writing this email, there are surprisingly few MORs out there. Here are the ones that I know: Etsy (all tiers), FastSpring (all tiers), Fourthwall, Gumroad (UK/EU only, but their percentage increased in 2023 to a point where it’s not worth small creators using it, close to 13%), Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Patreon (all tiers), Payhip (all tiers – UK/EU only), Teachable (all tiers) and Transaction Cloud. Those are the only ones out of 91 payment providers that were examined. That’s not great!
Lemon Squeezy
Also a Merchant of Record. But this has nothing to do with Black Friday!
Like Teachable, they have custom domains as well, so I have store.esmecrutchley.com – but don’t go there because it’s empty!
If you’re selling only digital products/downloads, Lemon Squeezy might be your best bet. There’s no monthly or annual fee, and their take is 5% + 5c per sale. There’s no limit on how many products you can list, they have a Zapier integration if you want to link purchases through to your CRM, and it links to ConvertKit (all on the free plan).
They’re also open to negotiating their 5% if you make a ridiculous amount of money per month (over $100k/month).
If you’re outside the US, you may need to use Wise to get your payouts (twice a month), which would cost an additional $2.92 + 0.2% per transaction. I have no idea if they’re open to negotiating this if you do stupid monthly revenue.
Where Lemon Squeezy might be better than Teachable: if you’re purely selling digital downloads, or you have 6 or more – LS might be the better option. Teachable’s Basic plan only allows 5 downloads, so if the bulk of your income is from that, LS may be better for you. On the other hand, if you want to offer courses or coaching programs, you could still use LS, but you’d have to use Zapier as well (alas, Make doesn’t have LS yet), and jerry-rig something together to get your students from LS into your LMS (learning management system), which might end up costing more than paying for Teachable.
Unlimited Elements (Elementor)
If you’re using Elementor to build in WordPress, you might like to know that Unlimited Elements, a plugin for Elementor, are having a Black Friday sale as well.
They have 300+ widgets and 100+ page templates, and their Lifetime (yes, Lifetime) access plan is down to $99.50 from $199 for a single site. Here’s their pricing page.
The thing I like most about Unlimited Elements is that all of their widgets can be turned on independently (none are enabled by default). Now, this might be a royal pain in the ass if you want lots of them, but for me, I’m only turning on the ones that I have a need for, when I’m building out a page. You can also create your own widgets, which isn’t something I’ve seen anyone else ever doing.
I wish more companies would do this so that we can remove the bloat from our websites for all the widgets we’re never going to need! I’m never going to use WooCommerce on my website, but there are so many widgets installed through plugins for it, and I can’t get rid of them!
They also have a super awesome trick where you can sync widgets together. I can’t explain it, so here’s one of their YouTube videos for a widget, showing how to sync two of them together to get some really funky automations!
So, this one wasn’t on my list of things to buy. This was definitely a “this is an awesome deal, I need it” decision. In my defense, I’ve used it on every page I’ve created since I bought it!
Yes, WordPress is happening
You probably didn’t notice that I talked about a WordPress/Elementor plugin, and my website is on Squarespace.
You also probably don’t remember that in August I wrote (at length) about all the problems I have with it. I even titled it “I Hate WordPress” with an accompanying email to everyone! After 5 attempts, over 3 years, I was done.
Happily, I was wrong!
I can’t get on with Divi or Beaver as builders, they’re not intuitive to me, but Elementor is my best friend! I’m even getting to understand the Gutenberg editor, which I’ve not been able to get my head around for the last 3 years!
The new site is completely different from my current Squarespace one, so if you want to be able to compare the two, head to esmecrutchley.com this week and have a nose around because it won’t look like that much longer!
Yeah, we’ve gone full-on dark mode!
This is the reason that I’ve not landed in your inbox lately. I got caught up in WordPress and not only lost track of time, but also lost track of weeks and months, it would seem!
In case you’re interested, this is what I have:
- Elementor $59/annual
- Essential Addons $49.97/annual – they’re doing a Black Friday for $34.98
- DevOwl RealMedia Library €39/£34.04/lifetime
- Squirrly SEO $69/lifetime from AppSumo (this plays well with Yoast, you can use them both together which is awesome!)
- WP Developer Essential Blocks Pro (for Gutenberg) $99/lifetime for their 2.0 launch
- Unlimited Elements $119.41/lifetime (Black Friday pricing)
There will be content incoming about how I made the move, what went well, what I failed at, lessons learned, why I picked those specific plugins, and all the good stuff. But if there’s anything you specifically want me to cover in my content about the move/build, use my AMA form to let me know!
