33

Chapter

4

A Personal Story

S ome of the best lessons in life come from real-life stories about

how people in the trenches make their worlds work. You’ve seen

three already with the examples of ModCloth, BurdaStyle, and Lil

Blue Boo. In Chapter 11 you’ll read three more stories of how successful

bloggers used Pinterest with amazing results.

In this chapter you’ll hear Jason’s story, about how he and his wife,

Cinnamon, built their own business, Liberty Jane Clothing. You’ll read

how they experimented with different social media platforms until one

day they stumbled upon the new kid on the block, a crazy new site called

Pinterest. And you’ll recognize common links with what you might be

experiencing with social media, e-commerce, and the rapid pace of

change in technology.

Through research, experience, and those evil twins Trial and Er-

ror, Jason and Cinnamon developed over 14,000 Facebook fans and

7,600 YouTube subscribers with over 1.2 million video views. However,

it wasn’t until they began studying and applying the power of Pinter-

est that the entire formula kicked in. Within one month after they be-

gan marketing on Pinterest, they doubled their monthly referral traffic

from Pinterest. Even more interesting, they did this by spending far

less time and effort than they would have with traditional social media

platforms.

The rest of the chapter comes from Jason’s own words.

34 PINTEREST POWER

An Aspiring Eight-Year-Old

Cinnamon began sewing clothes for her 18-inch Kimberly doll when

she was eight years old. Her mom taught her to sew, and it immediately

became Cinnamon’s passion. She loved making those outfits! She be-

came so obsessed that she accidently sewed right into her finger. The

needle had broken off in her tiny finger, and her mom had to rush her

to the hospital. The next day Cinnamon told her mom she had to keep

working and only needed help changing her bandage and installing a

new needle in the sewing machine.

At one point Cinnamon’s mom, Vicki, had worked for Switched on

Ltd., a designer label in Los Angeles, and so she was an amazing sewing

teacher. As well, a friend of Cinnamon’s grandmother worked for Bob

Mackie, a famous designer of celebrity clothing. She’d give Cinnamon

scraps of fancy material that Cinnamon then used to make dresses for

her dolls. They weren’t perfect, but not bad at all for an eight-year-old.

After Cinnamon and I got married and started our own family, our

daughters began getting into American Girl dolls. However, when Cin-

namon looked beyond the American Girl catalogue, she found the out-

fits were low quality, designed poorly, or both. So she decided to make

her own outfits for our daughters’ dolls. They’d be similar to things girls

see on TV and in magazines—contemporary, fun, and couture.

The Birth of a Business

Cinnamon’s doll clothes came out so well that we decided maybe there

was a business opportunity here. With a lot of prayer and planning, we

began to put the pieces together. It was overwhelming but fun.

We decided not to become focused on high volume or manufacturing

in mass quantities, but rather we would emphasize an intense level of

detail, high-quality fabrics, and designs that were bold and trendy. Our

goal became to translate contemporary fashion hits into the 18-inch

doll market for collectors and young girls excited by today’s fashions.

We decided to have a line of spring and fall original designs each year.

Finally, we picked our youngest daughter’s first and middle name

for the brand—Liberty Jane. It sounded like a clothing brand, and so we

went for it and think it works. Now our daughter is the official spokes-

girl for the company.

A Personal Story 35

The Journey of Liberty Jane Clothing

From February 2008 to the summer of 2009, we sold our items exclu-

sively through eBay auctions. Our auctions became a spectacle as the

prices frequently soared past the limits of what people would consider

normal. Prices often ended over $100 and went as high as $153. But by

the end of that summer, we were burned out. It was a lot of work. We’d

met our goal of $1,000 a month, but we realized we’d reached the end of

our business model.

So we went looking for new business models. We were influenced

most strongly by the writing of Jim Cockrum, author of The Silent Sales Machine Hiding Inside of eBay and Free Marketing 101.

The end result was that we decided to publish Cinnamon’s patterns

as a new product. The reasoning was fairly simple. Although we were

honored by and thrilled at the high prices our outfits got at auction, we

realized there are a lot of people who won’t ever pay $100 for a doll’s

outfit. However, they would gladly buy a pattern and try to make some-

thing themselves. Plus we wanted a scalable model–one that allowed

us to sell items without physically fulfilling the orders ourselves. So we

created Liberty Jane Patterns (http://www.libertyjanepatterns.com) as

a way to sell patterns directly to consumers.

The first month we sold 11 patterns and gave away several hundred

for free. However, the transition from eBay created a collection of ben-

efits that fueled our business growth.

First, now we had to develop our own method for contacting cus-

tomers and following up after the sale was completed. Because of this,

we learned the original and still single most important online market-

ing practice—e-mail marketing through weekly e-mail newsletters.

(See Chapter 16.)

Initially our e-mail list consisted of 120 customers. However, by

learning how to leverage the power of free, as in free patterns, we began

getting 500 to 600 new prospects signing up each month.

We began watching our website statistics and discovered where our

customers were coming from. There were niche-specific fan boards

and forums that we didn’t even know existed. We started to realize that

social networks, large and small, were a key to our success. Most impor-

tant, we understood that we would have to generate our own traffic; we

couldn’t rely on eBay to send customers our way. And the best traffic was

36 PINTEREST POWER

that referred by one customer to another, either through word of mouth

or social sharing.

As we explored how to use social networks to expand our social

engagement, we found a fantastic partner in YouTube. As it turns out,

there’s a thriving doll collector community hiding inside of YouTube.

Who knew?

We started conducting design contests on YouTube several times

a year with staggering results. Our top-performing contest had 2,400

video responses, making it one of the most responded-to videos of all

time in YouTube’s how-to and style category.

We also developed a strong Facebook fan page effort, as we found

that strength in one social network (YouTube) led to strength in another

(Facebook).

In the fall of 2011, two years after we started selling doll patterns on-

line, our little business was experiencing some serious growth. We had

over 1 million video views on YouTube with over 7,000 subscribers. We

had over 12,000 newsletter subscribers and over 12,000 Facebook fans.

Although Twitter had emerged on the scene, we decided it wasn’t

right for us for a couple of reasons. First, we didn’t have time to con-

stantly tweet. Second, our business was visually driven, not oriented

around words or messages. So Twitter just didn’t fit, and we were fine

with that.

At this point our annual revenue had grown to six figures. Face-

book was a significant source of referral traffic, as we’d learned to use

the fan page system to attract and engage with new prospects. And we

learned to cost effectively use the advertising systems in both YouTube

and Facebook. So our success on those platforms was via both organic

and paid growth.

A Funny Thing Happened

As we checked our website analytics, we saw a new social network pop-

ping up—Pinterest. In the summer of 2011, Pinterest was like any other

website to us, a blip on our website stats page. It was referring traf-

fic, but not enough to even make us curious. We certainly didn’t have

the time or energy to invest in another social media website, and so we

ignored it. However, by October 2011 we were increasingly excited

about what Pinterest was doing for us. It became our hot topic.

A Personal Story 37

We now had three social media traffic sources of significance: Face-

book, YouTube, and Pinterest. Pinterest was gaining ground so quickly,

we could see it would soon become our top source. The crazy part was,

we hadn’t even set up a Pinterest profile yet. This referral traffic was be-

ing generated by our customers and fans as they shared our products

with their friends.

By late November 2011, we decided it was time to take Pinterest se-

riously. We wondered what would happen to our traffic stats once we

were able to actually start working on Pinterest to drive even more traf-

fic. By early December, we set up our account. We also decided to pub-

licly blog about our experiences and setup (http://www.marketing

onpinterest.com). We documented our Four-Step Marketing Plan and

began sharing our lessons learned.

As we thought might happen, our referral traffic from Pinterest

zoomed up. The month after we started on Pinterest, it had doubled.

By January 2012, Pinterest had become our top social media referral

source, way ahead of both Facebook and YouTube. The realization that

all our work and effort for several years on Facebook and YouTube was

being eclipsed by Pinterest so quickly was both thrilling and depress-

ing. It was, and continues to be, almost too good to be true.

By March 2012 we had passed over 1,000 followers on our primary

Pinterest account (see Figure 4.1). As of this writing we continue to re-

fine and enhance activities to boost our traffic from Pinterest.

Figure 4.1 Cinnamon Miles and the Liberty Jane Clothing profile after four

months on Pinterest.

38 PINTEREST POWER

Lessons We Learned

As time has gone by, we’ve analyzed our experiences carefully, and here

is the essence of what we learned:

■ E-mail marketing is the original and best form of online mar-

keting. Google can “slap” you, your Facebook page can be shut

down, and your YouTube videos can be removed. Even your Pin-

terest account could be suspended. However, your e-mail list is a

stable and important business asset that you control in a unique

and powerful way. Learn to drive all social media traffic into your

e-mail capture system. (See Chapter 16.)

■ Success in e-mail marketing leads to success in social networks as

you simply share what you’re doing on a new social network. Con-

vert your current e-mail subscribers into followers on the new so-

cial site. Boom, instant followers!

■ Success on one social network leads to success on a second so-

cial network, and this leads to success on future social network

sites. This happens for a couple of reasons. First, you learn how

to quickly operate in those environments without a lot of drama.

Second, you can invite all your followers from one site into the

next and expand your influence.

■ Don’t feel the need to participate in every social network. If one

isn’t right for you, then forget it, as we did with Twitter.

■ Social networks provide the most important kind of traffic—

endorsed traffic. Of all the social networks we’ve encountered,

Pinterest is the absolute best for endorsed traffic. So if there is

one social network you ought to consider participating in, Pinter-

est is it.

■ Pinterest saves you a huge amount of time because so much of the

pinning is done by other people.

■ You’re getting in on the early days of Pinterest, as its forecasted

growth rates are astounding. By getting in early, you have a chance

to ride the wave as more and more people catch on to the power of

Pinterest.