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Lessons From Creating and Selling a 7 Figure eCommerce Brand with Mike Jackness


Timestamps
00:36 – Episode & Guest Overview
07:32 – Steps He Took to Build ColorIt
09:21 – Launching Between Amazon vs. Website
12:22 – Starting Tactical.com
15:16 – Traffic Generating Strategies
17:54 – Lessons from Growing ColorIt
19:36 – YouTube for Traffic Generating Strategies
23:12 – Long-Term Strategies for Tactical.com
29:29 – Challenges he Faced in Tactical.com
32:54 – Learn More About Mike Jackness


Lessons From Creating and Selling a 7 Figure eCommerce Brand with Mike Jackness in PDF


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Episode & Guest Overview

Ilana:

So welcome back to another episode of Teach Traffic. I am your host, Ilana Wechsler, and today, I’m really excited to be interviewing Mike Jackness from EcomCrew.

Mike, if you’re not familiar with his journey, has built and grown a seven figure brand, sold it and now on another e-commerce journey. So he’s got lots of wisdom to share in terms of what it takes to build a seven figure seven figure e-commerce brand.

And also you know what he’s working on right now in 2021. So welcome to today’s show, Mike.

Mike Jackness:
Yeah, it’s great being here. Great seeing your face, even though it’s just on zoom. I feel like we’ve lived six lifetimes since we saw each other a year. That’s been changing. It’s kind of crazy.

Ilana:
Yeah. I met you Mike at the Seller Summit in Miami. The other side of the world for me, it was definitely a longer long haul. A long journey. Yeah, it was a long journey. But when was that the end of 2019 wasn’t it?

Mike Jackness:
I believe you know, it’s all a blur. I thought I thought it was 2020. But I actually guess it must have been 2019 obviously, because of the pand…. So it would have been…

Ilana:
May of 2019.

Mike Jackness:
Yeah. So coming up on two years this way feels like not that long ago. But it’s been a while.

Ilana:
And we all know that lots has happened. 2020 for most people was definitely a ride off of it for a year. So anyway, thank you for taking time out of your day to come on the show.

So why don’t we start with you know, for people who aren’t familiar with your journey you created and built an e-commerce brand called ColorIt which is I’ll leave you to sort of explain what that is.

But you want to maybe talk about your journey with ColorIt and I guess what I’d really love to know is, A, why you chose that product. And, and your lessons from growing that brand.

Mike Jackness:
Sure. Yeah, I’d love to talk about it. I mean, it wasn’t our first rodeo in e-commerce which I think is important you learn things along the way I think life is kind of like a staircase you you learn some stuff you go up a step and kind of maybe plateau for a bit then go up another step and so are connected dots of that whole journey was we were affiliate marketers that owned a bunch of keyword domains.

One of them was treadmill.com doing affiliate marketing, we’re like, you know what we want to get into e-commerce one day, we did that.

Realize we didn’t want to do drop shipping, or sell, you know, big heavy pieces of equipment. So we bought another business called “Ice Wraps”. Also, we own “CuttingBoard.com” a domain name and what often are those things and you learn things along the way.

And so you’re asking specifically like why “ColoIt”? Why coloring books for adults, it’s kind of a random thing, right? And so really what it came down to was we learned all these like little idiosyncrasies along the way that are hard to, to learn from reading a blog or listening to podcast, but you just being in the trenches, realize like, drop shipping has a lot a lot of positives, but there’s a lot of really big frustrations for someone like me who likes to be in control, and wants to make sure that if I saw something I can actually deliver it.

And we were running into a lot of problems with that as well, big heavy pieces of equipment, having to ship that on trucks wasn’t nearly as reliable as UPS or FedEx selling other people’s products you run into.

So does everyone else you know, other people can sell those same products. And now you’re competing against other people that do what you do or even worse than manufacturers themselves that are competing against selling against you. And now you’ve got map pricing issues or multiple people on a listing all these different things.

And so we realized all that and wanted to create our own brand. And we settled on coloring books after just doing tons and tons of research. I mean, there’s just all kinds of things that we looked at from ballet shoes to tactical gear, which we ended up getting into tactical gear eventually anyway.

And wanted to fill the gaps of things that we realized were important, which we’re having something that was not necessarily brand new. We didn’t want to be the first one to do something but be able to make improvements in a way that was substantial enough that we could differentiate ourselves from everybody else in the marketplace.

And so we didn’t have to invent adult coloring, but we invented things like these premium coloring books with hardback covers and high quality paper and a spiral binding, perforated pages.

And we were able to do this by just reading reviews of what people were saying by other coloring books, it’s like, “Man, I wish that this thing had a spiral binding. So it laid flat. So I could, I wasn’t fighting the book closing on me” or “I wish the paper was thicker, I wish I could rip it out and frame it” all these different things. And so we just read reviews and figure that out.

But the only things that appealed to us were the potential for high lifetime value of a customer, you know, we were going to sell them a coloring book. And it’s consumable, which I really like, you know, as you color one of the 50 pages, you’ve now colored 2% of the book, and you got to eventually go buy another one. And so I really like that.

And the last thing that was important to us was there being a direct audience of people on Facebook to advertise to.

And so there’s actually a million person audience on Facebook, people who have kind of raised their hand said, I like coloring books.

And so all those things together, were what got us into that particular niche.

Ilana:
So you kind of went, so rather than having the idea, yourself, I want to sell said coloring books, you know, and then doing the research, does this fit your criteria?

It sounds like you went the opposite way you sort of looked at what we’re selling and did some keyword research. Did it fit the criteria of repeat purchase? And can you improve and then settle on coloring books?

So it’s almost like the product was secondary to some degree?

Mike Jackness:
For sure, yeah, it was definitely mean, we were willing to get into just about any niche. And so we were looking at lots of things. And we were costing off way more things. And we, you can only do so many things, right?

So we knew we could only pick one thing. I also don’t like to have analysis paralysis. And so like when we came across coloring books, it was actually when these things were like, immediately, I knew like I mean, it was like, within within 48 or 72 hours, we were already like buying a domain name and just getting started on the project, because I knew like this checked all the boxes, but it was all those previous experiences I mentioned that lead up to no, you have to sometimes just have previous experience to know like, Oh, this is it. You know, I feel like sometimes some of the work you do that isn’t necessarily that fruitful, is just the hard work upfront to be able to put yourself in the position where you create your own block. And I feel like that’s definitely what we did.

Steps He Took to Build ColorIt

Ilana:
Yeah, awesome. All right. So you decide on that product, obviously. And, you know, everyone sort of says, you know, you got to build a brand, you got to build a brand, what would you say, are some of the steps that you took to build the brand of ColorIt?

Mike Jackness:
Yeah, this is, you know, a fine line, right? Because I mean, depending on who you talk to, you’ll get different responses. And for me, it was just one of these things where I think you got to be all in and committed, you know, so you have to do some upfront work and invest some upfront dollars to be thinking about, like, what your, what you want your brand to look like.

And so we pick the brand name, you’ll “Color It” and bought “ColorIt.com, we looked at several other brands, what we knew, we didn’t want to rebrand later, this happens a lot people buy some like three word domain with dashes or ends and dot info or something and regret it later.

And so we invested a couple $1,000 and got a good domain name, we spent money and developed a good logo, you know, from day one, and just kind of have all of our collateral in place, and we design nice packaging.

And presented way above our weight, which I think is very important. You know, we’re just your perception of what you are to the public, even when you’re selling your first dozen items is that a much bigger company.

And so that really just set us up in the right spot, to kind of take the next steps which are important, which are, you know, I think as you’re as you’re going through things, you’re you’re you’re listening to customer feedback and integrating what they have to say into your future products.

And you’re just working towards having a good perception of what you are in the marketplace, I think is very important.

Launching Between Amazon vs. Website

Ilana:
So starting out, I’m sure you were faced with the conundrum of you know, launching your products, do you launch on your own website, first Color It which it sounds like with a brand new domain versus launching straight on Amazon and then driving traffic to Amazon.

How did you form the basis of that decision of which you did first?

Mike Jackness:
We ended up launching on Amazon first. And I still advocate, I mean, this is obviously 2016 we’re talking about here late late 2015, early 2016. So things have changed quite a bit you know, it’s been four years but that’s a lifetime and ecommerce, but still I think that Amazon’s a great place to do this because they have built in traffic.

And so you’re, you can throw something up there, do some PPC, and you immediately have eyeballs, it’s a little bit more difficult to do on your own website.

You don’t always find traffic more difficult. But creating a website that presents as well as Amazon does, is just a lot more work. There’s a lot more upfront time involved with creating Shopify sites, you really need a whole host of products to really kind of fill out your website to make it look legitimate.

And you’re going to spend 1000s of dollars on creative and just making the websites we decided to launch on Amazon first.

But we, again, we did some upfront work to secure the brand name and the domain name and all these things first.

And our hypothesis was that we’re going to make this amazing coloring book with all the features I talked about earlier. And it’ll be received very well in the marketplace. And if it isn’t, we’re willing to have spent 10 or $15,000, whatever it was up to that point.

And write it off if we were wrong, but you got to kind of be convinced your convictions or your thesis is right, which we were in immediately, we realized that we had about a 85 to 90% perfect product, hit right out the door and the rest of the week corrected in our second our second volume.

Ilana:
If you think about it, I guess we’re launching that in 2021. Now if you’re sort of going through the motions again with Color It do you think you’d do this same strategy of watching on Amazon first?

Mike Jackness:
I do. Yeah. I mean, because of the things that we’re just talking about. I mean, we’re past or noncompete, I’d love to go make another coloring book company, again, it was actually quite a bit of fun. I think that it’s a great niche, you can go you know, go do it all over again.
And if I were I would I would definitely watch on Amazon, anything that holds you back from doing I just think it’s kind of the wrong thing to do, even though you are legally past or noncompete.

You know, I always like to treat people I like to be treated, you know, it’s like if someone, you know, paid me millions of dollars, or I paid someone millions of dollars. And then they went off and started becoming my competitor a couple years down the line. I would be kind of irritated by that. And so I don’t want to do that.

Starting Tactical.com

Ilana:
Yeah, fair enough. And obviously, the end result and your journey with ColorIt is pretty well documented on your podcast, EcomCrew and you ended up selling that business and you’ve shifted gears somewhat to. I know Tactical.com. Do you want to maybe talk a little bit about how I mean, because that is also starting from scratch.

You must like taking on these projects from scratch or maybe a sucker for punishment, perhaps?

Mike Jackness:
Yeah, maybe? I think I am. Yeah, it’s interesting, because I do advocate buying a business. I think that but we actually did this by buying a business that we just closed on. About two months ago as a recording this….

Ilana:
Well, congratulations!

Mike Jackness:
in a completely different niche. But yeah, I also do like starting things. So there’s definitely something to that. And it also helps with things like our community and stuff, because not everyone has the money to go buy a business.

And so we like to just document and show people a journey of someone doing this from scratch.

So Tactical, you know, fits a lot of the same things that I was talking about. You know, it’s one of things I didn’t mention is passion. I think that that’s another checkbox you want. And so people are very passionate about coloring.

People are very passionate about guns in the United States, and like prepping and survivalism in these types of things. And so you’re having, having that passion, like allows people to become your own advocate, and they do free social media promotion or telling a friend, I’ll type stuff for you that you won’t get in other other niches.

I mean, we sell ice packs, for instance, is one of our brands. No one’s ever going to tell someone about how Hey, I put this ice pack in the freezer and it got cold. That’s not really all that cool, but they will go tell their buddies about these tactical gloves that they bought that they really love or these really cool trekking poles that they buy.

And so we definitely like that. But our approach with Tactical.com has been First of all, we own the domain name, you know, so it’s another one of these just like Treadmill.com or CuttingBoard.com. We already had our own Tactical.com.

Ilana:
It’s a very nice domain.

Mike Jackness:
Thank you. Yeah, no, it’s a great domain. It’s kind of like the category killer, I think. And it’s like, what are we going to do with it? And so, we took this e-commerce approach of, well, let’s make a blog, you know, a content site about these topics, you know, survivalism and prepping. And 95% of what we do will be getting traffic to that blog about these general topics, but a few articles here and there or product review articles about things that we want to do.

Eventually launch and drive affiliate revenue, and also allows us to eventually sell our own products through those links, and have an unfair advantage to all the other people trying to sell those same products on Amazon.

Traffic Generating Strategies

Ilana:
So I’m curious how you are really ramping up generating traffic to your blog, is it purely just organic SEO? Or are you sort of buying longtail keyword traffic and driving people to your blog posts that way?

What is your traffic strategy and really building up Tactical.com?

Mike Jackness
It’s, as of right now, just 100%, organic SEO type traffic. And so we’re investing all of our money into just writing great content, we have a few full time writers now on staff that do nothing but write content for Tactical.com, we’re releasing probably one or two articles a week, whatever it is at this point.

And these are two to 4000 word articles that are well researched and have lots of graphics in them and are well thought through not just sloppily put together.

And the content does well. And as we continue to grow our traffic, it’s all a numbers game, you know, some percentage of people will click through the links and buy our products.

And it really just comes down to a numbers game. There were even just selling 50 or 100 products a month through those links, really tips of scaling your favor when it comes to Amazon and ranking organically.

Ilana:
I’m curious if you’re really leveraging that organic traffic. By retargeting those people and possibly only running retargeting campaigns. So you said your main traffic strategy is organic SEO.

So you’re generating a bunch of traffic to your site? Are you then retargeting those website visitors possibly, you know, to the Amazon affiliate products, as well?

Mike Jackness:
We don’t know at this point, what we do try to do is when they’re on the site, get their email address, it is definitely a big focus, we have lead magnets on pretty much every page and try to at least get their email when they’re on on site, we do pixel them.

And so we do know that we can, we can run ads to these people in the future. But it’s what I found with and we haven’t even really tried.

So maybe it’s one of these things where we should be doing it. And I’m just wrong. But what I found is that after spending over a million dollars on Facebook ads, if you aren’t like perfectly targeting somebody, it’s hard to make money on them.

And so like advertising someone about a particular product that we might sell like gloves, when they were just looking for how to boil water.

In the woods, it’s just too far of a gap to try to make that connection for somebody and so we just haven’t done that to this point.

Lessons From Growing ColorIt

Ilana:
Yeah, fair enough. So what would you say are some of the lessons that you have learned from building and growing ColorIt that you’re applying with your new business of Tactical, that you sort of learned and you know, I guess, pivoting it accordingly?

Mike Jackness:
Yeah, I mean, building that email list. I mean, I was for color it 52% of our revenue came from email.

Ilana:
Amazing.

Mike Jackness
It’s crazy, right? On million dollar business. And so we’ve worked really hard to collect email addresses. ColorIt was also mean, it wasn’t the first time I have learned this lesson because I’ve been out on my own doing various internet marketing since 2004.

But in the e-commerce space, we had never really done any content marketing for whatever reason, we were just focused on other things.

And so with ColorIt we really had started reading a lot of content like what are the best colored pencils? What are the benefits of coloring? You know, just tons of like, I love the whole, like, answering questions approach to content marketing, and because people are that’s usually what people type in.

And we have applied that same thing to Tactical.com. And so we have a lot of like, how, who, what, why type things on our website and just really working on building organic traffic that you know, diversifies our business, we now can run ads, and click money off of ad revenue.

But most importantly, it helps us be able to sell our physical products.

YouTube for Traffic Generating Strategies

Ilana:
I would imagine in the industry of Tactical.com. My vision for it would be quite, it’s a visual component and therefore YouTube could be a really amazing traffic source for you. I’m curious if you’re focusing on building out your YouTube channel and what your traffic strategies with that?

Mike Jackness:
We are, unfortunately, because of the pandemic, we haven’t released a video and like nine months is very unfortunate because our office has shut down. And that’s where it was all being all being done.

But before that we were and we will get back to doing it, we were very focused on YouTube releasing about a video a month, you know, videos are a lot more difficult to produce than, than writing content, obviously.

But we had a very strategic plan in terms of our YouTube content, it wasn’t that we were just trying to get people to watch our videos from YouTube. But we found that implanting really good video content into a blog piece of blog content really helped that blog content rank organically, significantly easier and better. Because it really increases your time on page metrics and things of that nature, decreases your bounce rate really sucks people in for a long time.

And so we had this, like a cross pollination of, we would each quarter kind of strategically plan out, okay, this is the content that we want to write.

And this is like the one video that we want to produce, like so we’re gonna write 12 articles, let’s say, but we’re gonna produce one one video, like, what’s the one video? And what article is it? And how does that relate? And we really thought through how to kind of marry all that together.

And it was working quite well, I think we were somewhere between five and 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, I’ve forgotten now it’s been so long since I even looked at it.

Which is hard to even get to that level. And, and then you know, the pandemic, and so we produce all that content from our Philippines office.

And it’s very much a hands on, they would go out and do a camping trip per month, a sponsored camping trip from the company, we pay to get them a bus right up to the top of the mountain or whatever they were going in and give them some gear and help them you know, be able to go out for the weekend and do these these types of excursions and then review products and talk about particular prepping and survivalism tech techniques.

But obviously, again, with the pandemic, like all that came to a screeching halt. So it’s, unfortunately, kind of squashed our plans for that right now.

Ilana:
As it has squashed many people’s plans around the world.

Mike Jackness:
Unfortunately, the Philippines has been hit harder than just about any country in the world. And they, they just they’ve had a very difficult time keeping the pandemic under control.

I think a lot of that probably stems from so many people using public transportation, which is very tightly packed in. So as soon as you try to open anything back up, it just all spreads like super quick because everyone, 90 something percent of the population is packed in just in the transportation sector alone, then you have a lot of people working in call centers or other very tight quarters.

And it just has been very difficult for them to keep things under control. So we’ve been fortunate that we’ve been able to keep our people employed and help them work from home and all these different things and try to do the best we can for them, to help them through the hard times.

But one of the things that we had to accept was YouTube content was going to have to wait.

Long-Term Strategies for Tactical.com

Ilana:
Hmm, yep. Obviously, I know, from you know, observing your journey with ColorIt and your other econ pursuits that you very much take a long term approach with building your asset, which is, obviously, I’m a big believer in that as well.

And rather than short term tactics, so I guess what are some of your obvious approaches with organic SEO is a very long term approach with building an asset.

What are some of your other I guess, long term strategies that you’re applying to tactical comm? I guess, you know, one must have a long term vision of what you’d like it to become. I’m just curious what, A, you would like it to become? And B, How are the processes by which you’re going to get it there.

Mike Jackness:
I think you hit the nail on the head with the content. And that’s the biggest part of what tactical has been.

That’s kind of the whole thought process and part of the journey and you’re right, I do take that long term approach.

I think that that’s always just been my style, where a lot of people want to make money right now. They want shortcuts they want a secret sauce, or some secret pill that’s going to like, make the money right a second.

And a lot of times those things do exist. Like it isn’t like, you can’t go out and do these things. I mean, you can see them all the time. We obviously run a community and know all the black hat tactics of the day.

But again, I maintain that’s how to make money right now. And you’re constantly stressed about it. Oh, now I can’t use superheroes anymore.

Like what’s my new thing? Well, I’m gonna go do search, find, buy or you know, whatever. And it’s constantly changing you’re just one step away from Google or Amazon or one of these billion dollar companies from squashing your they’re trying to play whack a mole to stop people like these guys from doing these things.

And so instead of playing that game, which I used to do when I was younger, because I just didn’t know any better, and it seemed to be the way that your highly motivated hustling type person would just make money.

You know, I mean, I’m not saying I’m, it, I do these things. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that, wait a second, instead of playing that game, why don’t I just become who they really want.

Like, if you think about Google, like their their objective is to like, stop having all this spammy, crappy content rank

at the top of Google, like, because it hurts the value of their company they want. They want to be the best search engine, they want to help people find the answers to questions.

And so instead of taking an approach of how can I buy links, or do like a PBN, or, you know, use gray text on top of a web page to like hide keywords, or whatever crap I used to do back in the day, that actually will hurt to rank, like, instead of spending all my time and effort doing tha.

Why not just write the best article about the topic that’s ever been written on the internet, about that topic, put the effort into that and play the long game that way.

And so that’s the approach that we’ve taken. And we take that same thing with, we took that same approach with ColorIt will take the same, we have taken the same approach with Tactical, which is, you know, having amazing packaging, for instance, for your products, which cost money and takes a lot of extra time to design doesn’t help you sell the product, you’re selling it online, it does, the people don’t really see the packaging, unless you incorporate it in your listing, which we do.

But even then it doesn’t necessarily help convert your product that much. What it does is it helps you sell the second one, right, because the person gets the product. Yeah. And they’re like, wow, this is really nice, this thing looks like something from a fortune 500 company. And it’s, you know, just super high quality. And if they think that before they even open the box, and like it’s a self fulfilling prophecy, and they’re going to just want more of it. And so that’s another part of the whole thing, right? Where you just you’re trying to, you know, continue to grow these assets.

So to me, the assets are organic traffic, an email list, followers on social media, a pixeled Audience, you know, like people on your Facebook Messenger list, these things don’t necessarily immediately indirectly produce revenue for you.

But over time, there, there’s some hump that you cross in this whole game, where, instead of it being a significant amount of work, and effort to generate momentum, the flywheel starts to spin on its own.

And, you know, it almost becomes a B almost becomes easy at some point, or at least it feels that way. And so that’s, that’s what we work towards. And the thing that’s fun for me about that, is that once we get to that point, we now have a very defensible company and brand, because the average person isn’t willing to put that effort in.

And if they do want to do it, well, the barrier to entry for them is it’s going to take them two years to get there just like a different retail. And so we think about things in those perspectives, rather than just like, how can we snap a finger and make money today?

Ilana:
Yeah, and I think that’s very much the long term and sustainable approach in really building an asset that you can ultimately sell.

And because that’s what you’re selling a prospective buyer is that defensible asset, that recognizable brand, that consistent long term, SEO traffic, that email database that you’ve been emailing regularly, etc, all of that really has a compound effect in building an asset that you can sell, which is a testament to I guess, you know, you taking that very long term approach and not doing these little hacks or quick tricks that you can game the system for five minutes.

And then as you say, Amazon or Google playing whack a mole.

Mike Jackness:
Buyers see right through that, right, as you’re talking about, like a sale process. And so when we went to sell ColorIt, we had multiple offers in the first week. It’s just because people were like, wow, this is a great brand, and it meets all these things that you just rattling off there. And yeah, I mean, obviously in the end game, if the ultimate end game, but when you go to sell the business, it really pays off.

Ilana:
Yeah, for sure. What would….I’m mindful of the time and I don’t want to take up too much of your time.

So I guess my sort of final question that I wanted to ask you is what have been some of your biggest challenges in building tactical, to where it is today? You’re really growing it to that next level?

Challenges he Faced in Tactical.com

Mike Jackness:
Um, where do we first get hit by a Google penalty, which has been very frustrating.

I’m The first Google penalty I’ve gotten since penguin and panda back in the day, when I finally learned my lesson to keep on doing nothing but white hat stuff.

So it’s been frustrating that the December 2020 core update helped all of our other sites except for tactical.

Um, so it’s been, it’s been very frustrating because like, you know, they don’t tell you why. My thesis at this point is just the next time they do an update, or the one after that will be fine, we’re just going to continue doing what we’re doing, there’s nothing to correct or whatever.

I mean, we’re still our traffic is still up year over year, it just we didn’t take a huge hit from that. So that’s been frustrating, it’s been frustrating to keep my team motivated through that.

For me, like, it hasn’t really swayed me a bit. Because I mean, I know we’re doing the right thing. And eventually, it’ll, it’ll come back. And so that’s been very difficult.

There’s also just been other general ecommerce challenges, you know, at the same time that we’re dealing with, as we’re building this content site, you’re dealing with, you know, in the world of COVID, where supply chains have gotten really difficult.

The cost of shipping has increased significantly. You have the Trump tax, the Trump tariff, whatever you want to call it, which has just basically been a huge tax on our business, we paid over a quarter million dollars in tariffs at this point, which is just a tax to us, like we can’t really pass that through.

And so the thing that’s been tough is we’ve been doing this in a shrinking margin world, we kind of built the business around one set of circumstances and business model and business plan. And the math has changed a little bit.

And so that’s been the other difficulty that we’ve been dealing with over the last year or so. I do think that we’re that ship that will be righted.

I think eventually the tariffs will go away. I hope that we get something in return for it as a country, I think that there’s a bargaining chip there that we’ll use to eventually get rid of the tariffs because I think that the current administration probably understands the economics of this better and realize that it’s not really good for Americans to have that tariff there.

But they also, I think, realize that they can get something out of China in return. So it’s not going to go away overnight. But I do think that they’ll negotiate those out that will help significantly. Hopefully, at the same time. You know, the world gets back to normal in terms of COVID supply chain will come back, and then you will get out of the penalty that we’re in or if there’s not even there was no manual action taken I’m not sure how in SEO and stuff.

You’re like, there wasn’t like, anything happened in particular and like the EcomCrew skyrocketed, for instance, traffic wise, we tripled overnight. And then we just had the opposite happen with Tactical so I’m not sure exactly what signal. Google, you know, got caught up in it but I am convinced that again, it’ll just work its way out.

Ilana:
Yeah. Amazing. Well, you are a wealth of knowledge. Mike, thank you so much for coming on today’s show and sharing your wisdom.

For our listeners who really enjoyed this conversation and want to follow more of your journey. Where can people find out a little bit more about yourself?

Learn More About Mike Jackness

Mike Jackness:
Yeah, I mean, everything is EcomCrew. So EcomCrew.com on iTunes, or wherever you listen to podcast on all the social media things. It’s all EcomCrew, and if you want to email support@EcomCrew, so you got the blog, EcomCrew.com to go read content, podcasts, social media and an email.

Ilana:
Yeah, awesome. Definitely go check it out. I’m a listener of your podcast. And I think you produce some great content there. So our listeners should definitely go check it out. Mike, thanks so much for coming on today’s show, and it was lovely to reconnect with you.

Mike Jackness:
Definitely. Hopefully next time we’ll be in person.

Ilana:
Yes, for sure.

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Privacy Policy

We are committed to protecting your privacy, and this policy explains how we collect and process personal information about you when you use our products and services (our “Services”), or when you otherwise do business or make contact with us by visiting all of the Sites and services owned, hosted, or operated by Altolana Pty Ltd t/a Green Arrow Digital (collectively “we,” “us,” or “our”), including greenarrowdigital.com, greenarrowdigital.com.au, ilanawechsler.com and any other site that we have owned or operated, do own and operate or may own or operate in the future including social media sites (collectively, the “Sites”). Unless we say otherwise, all references to the Sites in this policy include all such Sites.

Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using our websites, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

Green Arrow Digital may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes. This policy is effective from 24/05/2018.

What Type Of Information We Collect

We may collect the following information when you register to use our Services, subscribe to our newsletters, respond to a survey or offer, make an enquiry through our websites, or contact us in any other way:

  • Name, email, address, phone number
  • Job title, organisation information
  • Usernames and passwords
  • Billing details (Payment card details are processed and stored via one of our contracted third party service providers. We encrypt your payment card details in your browser and securely transfer this data to our relevant third party payment provider to process a payment.)
  • Transaction data for of products and services you have purchased from us.
  • Demographic information such as postcode, preferences and interests
  • IP address and your use of our websites
  • If you register for a course the information is used to to track your preferences, and to keep you informed about the course and related events
  • Copies of your communications with us

How We Use The Information We Collect

The personal information we collect from you may be used in one or more of the following ways to help us understand your needs and provide you with a better service :

  • To deal with enquiries, requests and technical support (your information helps us respond to your individual needs)
  • To create and administer records about any online account that you register with us
  • To provide you with information and access to resources that you have requested from us
  • To improve our websites (we continually strive to improve our website offerings based on the information and feedback we receive from you)
  • For website and system administration and security
  • For general business purposes, including to improve customer service (to effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs), to help us improve the content and functionality of our Services, to better understand our users, to protect against wrongdoing, to enforce our Terms of Service, and to generally manage our business
  • To process transactions and to provide Services to our customers and end-users
  • For recruitment purposes, in the event you apply for a job with us
  • To administer contests, promotions, surveys, or other content across our sites
  • To send periodic transactional emails. The email address you provide to process your order and purchase a product will only be used to send you information and updates pertaining to your order. Where it is in accordance with your marketing preferences, we will send occasional marketing emails about our products and services, which you can unsubscribe from at any time using the link provided in the message.

Your Rights With Respect To The Data We Collect

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have the right to access, rectify, port and erase your data, as well as the right to restrict and object to certain processing of your data. This includes:

  • where you have agreed to direct marketing, the right to object to our processing of your data for that purpose, which you can exercise by using the “unsubscribe” link in such marketing communications; and
  • the right to object to our processing of your data where we are pursuing our legitimate interests or those of a third party which you can exercise by requesting us to delete your details at any time by sending a written request via email to: support@greenarrowdigital.com

You can contact our Data Privacy Officer (DPO) and dedicated compliance team at any time by emailing us at support@greenarrowdigital.com and we’ll be able to assist with your data inquiries, requests and data protection issues.

Controlling Your Personal Information

You may choose to restrict the collection or use of your personal information in the following ways:

  • Whenever you are asked to fill in a form on our websites, look for the box that you can click to indicate your preference regarding receiving further marketing correspondence from us
  • If you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by emailing us at support@greenarrowdigital.com
  • We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so. We may use your personal information to send you promotional information about third parties which we think you may find interesting if you tell us that you wish this to happen.
  • You may request details of personal information which we hold about you. If you would like a copy of the information held on you please email your request to support@greenarrowdigital.com
  • If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please email us as soon as possible, at the above address. We will promptly correct any information found to be incorrect.

Email newsletters:

If you subscribe to receive one or more of our email newsletters, you will need to register an account with us. We provide newsletters to you free of charge.

Our newsletters may contain promotions or advertisements relating to goods or services provided by us and associated third parties. If at any time you wish to unsubscribe from an email newsletter you may do so by following the unsubscribe instructions on the newsletter or by emailing us at support@greenarrowdigital.com.

Cookies:

The website automatically gathers certain information such as IP addresses and the number and frequency of visitors to the website and individual web pages. This is collected using cookies and is used by us for security and monitoring purposes, to manage the website, to track usage, to improve the website and to improve the website services.

Cookies are pieces of information that are stored by the browser on the hard drive of your computer. The website also uses cookies to enable us, and any person who advertises on the website, to provide features such as remembering certain information about you and your preferences so that we and they can deliver targeted material which will be of most interest to you.

Cookies can be deleted from your hard drive or you can configure your web browser so that it rejects cookies. Rejection of cookies will not prevent you from using most of the features on the website. If you experience any problems deleting cookies, you should contact the supplier of your web browser.

Information sharing:

We only ever share your personal information with third parties with your permission.

If any third party organises or manages on our behalf a promotion, competition, survey or poll run through the website in which you wish to participate, we may ask to disclose your information to that third party to enable them to do so. They will be prohibited from using your information for any other purpose unless you have given them specific consent.

Note that if you upload or post any information to a public part of the website, we may use it in accordance with our Terms and it may be viewed and used by others.

Forums and Blogs:

Please be aware that when you post information to any forums, chat rooms, blogs, or message boards on or through the website, that information can be accessed by the public and used to send you unsolicited communications.

Data Retention

Your information is collected and stored on servers on behalf www.greenarrowdigital.com. We may keep your information for a reasonable period for the purposes set out in this Policy.

We may retain your personal information as long as you continue to use the Services, have an account with us, or for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in the policy. You can ask to close your account by contacting us at the details at the bottom of this document, and we will delete your personal information on request.

We may, however, retain personal information for an additional period as is permitted or required under applicable laws, for legal, tax, or regulatory reasons, or for legitimate and lawful business purposes.

Security:

We adopt appropriate security procedures to help prevent unauthorised access to your information. www.greenarrowdigital.com shall not be liable for any attempt to hack or crack or otherwise gain access to any part of this website including any of your information.

Use of details:

In order to make use of some services provided through the website such as the forums, email newsletters, competitions and polls, you will need to register an account with us. When you do so, you will provide us with information about yourself and you will be able to choose to receive our newsletter. You can log in to your account and update your preference at any time in the membership details section of your profile. We will only use your information in accordance with your instructions and as set out in this policy.

By providing us with telephone numbers or an email address, you consent to being contacted by these methods for these purposes. If you do not want to receive marketing information from us, you can notify us as part of the registration process, you can stop receiving this information at any time by following the unsubscribe instructions on the correspondence you receive, by amending your account preferences, or by emailing us at admin@greenarrowdigital.com giving your username and password plus details of the information you no longer wish to receive.

If you wish to take part in any poll or survey run through the website, we will also use your information for the purposes specified in the poll or survey. We may also disclose non-personal, aggregated information we collect through the poll or survey to third parties.

If you wish to take part in any promotion or competition run through the website, we will also use your information for the purposes specified in the promotion or competition, to make sure you are eligible to enter the promotion or competition, to contact you if you have won a prize and for publicity purposes.

Governing Law

This policy and the use of this Site are governed by the laws of Australia exclusively. If a dispute arises under this Policy we agree to first try to resolve it with the help of a mutually agreed-upon mediator in the following location: Sydney, Australia. Any costs and fees other than attorney fees associated with the mediation will be shared equally by each of us.

If it proves impossible to arrive at a mutually satisfactory solution through mediation, we agree to submit the dispute to binding arbitration at the following location: Sydney, Australia. Judgment upon the award rendered by the arbitration may be entered in any court with jurisdiction to do so.

Green Arrow Digital is controlled, operated and administered entirely within Sydney, Australia. This statement and the policies outlined herein are not intended to and do not create any contractual or other legal rights in or on behalf of any party.

The application of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, as amended, is expressly excluded.

Other sites:

The website contains links to third party websites. We may, on occasion, disclose non-personal aggregated information to the owners or providers of those third party websites.

We link to a wide variety of other websites and we display advertisements from third parties on our website. We are not responsible for the content or privacy policies of these websites or for third party advertisers or for the way in which information about their users is treated. In particular, unless expressly stated, we are not agents for those sites or advertisers nor are we authorised to make representations on their behalf.

Once you have used these links to leave our sites, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.

Information use:

We may use your information as set out in this privacy policy and in any other manner you expressly consent to us doing so, we may also use your information for any purpose if we are required to do so by any law or other regulatory or government authority, to enforce our terms or to protect the safety of others. In particular, we may collect and use personal information for the purposes of investigating and, if necessary, removing any content about which we receive a complaint.

Policy changes:

By using the website you agree to the terms of this Policy and our Terms. We may amend this Policy and the Terms from time to time. If we do so, we will post an updated version on the website. You will be bound by the new terms upon your continued use of the website.

Altolana Pty Limited trades as Green Arrow Digital

ABN: 72 141 554 047

If you have any questions you may contact us at:

Green Arrow Digital

PO Box 562

Rose Bay

Sydney 2029

Australia

support@greenarrowdigital.com

Terms and Condition

Introduction

Green Arrow Digital regards customer privacy as an important part of our relationship with our customers. The following privacy policy applies to all Green Arrow Digital users, and conforms to Internet privacy standards. If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact Ilana Wechsler at (02) 8060 7311.

Collection of Information

In order to use the Green Arrow Digital website, we may require information from you in order to provide the best service possible. All correspondence may also be collected and stored, particularly in regard to sales, support and accounts, including Email. Any information collected by Green Arrow Digital is collected via correspondence from you or your company. This may be via the telephone, Email, mail, fax or directly through our website.

Use of Collection Information

Any details collected from Green Arrow Digital customers is required in order to provide you with our products and/or services, and a high level of customer service. Correspondence is recorded in order to provide service references, and to assist in our staff development.

Storage of Collected Information

The security of your personal information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card numbers) on our website, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). When Credit Card details are collected, we simply pass them on in order to be processed as required. We never permanently store complete Credit Card details.

We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it.

If you have any questions about security on our Website, you can email us at ilana@greenarrowdigital.com

Access to Collected Information

If your personally identifiable information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, update, delete or deactivate it by emailing us at ilana@greenarrowdigital.com.

Orders

If you purchase a product or service from us, we may request certain personally identifiable information from you. You may be required to provide contact information (such as name, Email, and postal address) and financial information (such as credit card number, expiration date). We use this information for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we will use this information to contact you.

Communications

Green Arrow Digital uses personally identifiable information for essential communications, such as Emails, accounts information, and critical service details. We may also use this information for other purposes, including some promotional Emails. If at any time a customer wishes not to receive such correspondence, they can request to be removed from any mailing lists by emailing us at ilana@greenarrowdigital.com. You will be notified when your personal information is collected by any third party that is not our agent/service provider, so you can make an informed choice as to whether or not to share your information with that party.

Third Parties

Green Arrow Digital may at its discretion use other third parties to provide essential services on our site or for our business processes. We may share your details as necessary for the third party to provide that service. These third parties are prohibited from using your personally identifiable information for any other purpose. Green Arrow Digital does not share any information with third parties for any unknown or unrelated uses.

Legal

We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Website.

Links

Links on the Green Arrow Digital site to external entities are not covered within this policy. The terms and conditions set out in this privacy statement only cover the domain name of www.greenarrowdigital.com

Changes to Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by Email, or by means of a notice on our homepage.

Green Arrow Digital Security Policy

Green Arrow Digital uses the eWAY Payment Gateway for its online credit card transactions. eWAY processes online credit card transactions for thousands of Australian merchants, providing a safe and secure means of collecting payments via the Internet. All online credit card transactions performed on this site using the eWAY gateway are secured payments.

– Payments are fully automated with an immediate response.

– Your complete credit card number cannot be viewed by Green Arrow Digital or any outside party.

– All transactions are performed under 128 Bit SSL Certificate.

– All transaction data is encrypted for storage within eWAY’s bank-grade data centre, further protecting your credit card data.

– eWAY is an authorised third party processor for all the major Australian banks.

– eWAY at no time touches your funds; all monies are directly transferred from your credit card to the merchant account held by Green Arrow Digital

For more information about eWAY and online credit card payments, please visit www.eWAY.com.au

Delivery Policy

After ordering online, you will receive an email confirmation from eWAY containing your order details (if you have provided your email address). We will normally confirm receipt of your order within a few minutes of ordering. We will attempt to send your software/license/access code via email within 2 working days.

If you wish to query a delivery please contact us at ilana@greenarrowdigital.com.

Refund Policy

If for any reason you are not completely satisfied with your purchase we will give you a 7 day money-back guarantee from the time you receive the goods. Please email us at ilana@greenarrowdigital.com within that time if you are not satisfied with your purchase so that we can resolve any problems.

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