RYB 851: The Steps To Increased TRAFFIC and SALES in 3 Months (Action Steps)

Welcome! Today I have one of my very own Brand Creator members, Thai Linda, on the show! She’s going to share how she was able to increase traffic and sales for her business and show that no matter where you are in business, you’ll want to see where the low hanging fruit is. She started building out an email list when she started Brand Creators, and it took off! It wasn’t always easy, but she never gave up. Let’s get right to it!  PSA: We’re opening up Brand Creators on July 6th, for five days! If you want to join, now is the time. We talk a lot about being stuck and how to overcome that. We show you how to get unstuck and to take action to see real results, and we’d love to have you. Head over to brandcreators.com/join to sign up.  Thai-Linda’s Backstory  I got my degree in speech pathology, and on the side, my husband and I had a boat dealership and were making tornado shelters. We were getting by until the economy took a downturn, and we had someone embezzle from us, and we lost everything.  There was a factory near us that made custom picture frames. After talking to a few people that worked in the factory, we discovered they were in need of wood. So we made the decision to move to the rustic wood business, especially because we had plenty of land to make it happen. We were recycling reclaimed wood by working with contractors in the area. We would pick up the wood they wouldn’t use or were planning to dump. We improved the services that our competitors were offering and started to get a lot of business.  Our primary customer at the time was a large chain store that built custom wood frames. We reached out to tell them we wanted to sell wood. They had specific requirements but said they would buy as much wood as we could get them as long as we met those criteria. It was going well until a couple of years ago when they decided to buy the picture frames from China. We had no warning, so we had to think fast of how we could make money moving forward.  We decided to pivot to selling online about three years ago. I had already done research about selling wood online but hadn’t taken any action yet. Once we lost our big client, we got to selling on Amazon. It took a long time to figure out how to ship everything, and it took a few months for me to send in inventory without any problems. Most of our inventory was reclaimed wood for projects. We weren’t making anything with it yet just selling the wood. Most of our competitors were selling processed products that looked like new wood, so we took the direction of going with the really rustic authentic barn style wood to stand out.  We just put it out there, and it took a couple of weeks to get the first sale. It was a sample box, but it was still exciting. It started to sell, and it just kept growing, and we sold more and more every week. The best part was that we were able to keep all of our original employees, and we ended up hiring a couple of other people in the process. I was a rehab director overseeing six rehab centers and then coming home at night to help with the business. We couldn’t survive on the business alone at the time, and I didn’t want to give up the income I was making.  Thai-Linda’s Next Pivot  We decided that we were ready to take the business to the next level so I wouldn’t have to work full-time anymore. I started adding more handmade projects, and soon enough,