Setting Kit Up for Success - Cat Rowley

Website: https://catrowley.com/    

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catrowley/  

Podcast: https://catrowley.com/podcast/
 

[00:00:00]: Hi, welcome to this training on setting up your kit for success. I'm Catriona Rowley, also known as Kat and I run Empower Tech Academy where I empower entrepreneurs like yourself to master their online business tech. And I also have done for you services for those things that you would rather not master. So let's head into kit and get seeing how we can set it up so that you can get the most out of your account and get building your email subscribers today. So this is an account that I don't use. You can see here I have no subscribers. Oh I have 80 in total and I have done nothing with this. Okay, so over here you can see I've not even got an image and my profile and I'm just going to show you how you can set a few things up to actually use your account properly.  

[00:00:50]: As I say, this is not my proper account. This is just a wee other account. Okay, so you go to your name of your business with the icon or your image over here and you click on settings and so here is where you can upload your profile picture. As with everything, I recommend getting your picture in there. You want people to be able to see who you are, not just your business logo. They want to know your face and they want to get to know like and trust you. So get that picture in there and then think here about what name you want to use. So I've got Catriona Rowley in here, but actually I go by Cat Rowley so I would change that and put

[00:01:31]: And of course the relevant business email address. Now currently, as I say, I don't use this account but I would absolutely recommend setting up your two factor authentication. That's important for security and you can do that by an app or an SMS which is text message and definitely go ahead and do that as soon as possible. And then of course you want to check that your notifications are not going to drive you mad. So an account summary is quite useful. You can have that weekly or monthly. Or of course you can uncheck the box and not have any subscribes and purchases. Is exciting to hear those pings coming in.

[00:02:14]: But once you start getting subscribers and purchases regularly, you're not going to actually want to hear all those pings. So it's handy to be able to uncheck those boxes too. And the other thing you can have is an email when you get recommended in the creator network. But of course you can turn off all notifications. Right, so here is the other bit that you Want to edit. And this is your general settings. So here's your business name. That's the business name that you just like.

[00:02:46]: Another bit with your personal name, you want the name that people are going to recognize you for. This is the business name that you want to be recognized for here. And down here you can have up to 10 colors and it's really easy to edit. So all you do is click on here and you can type in the code or you can click and drag around until you find a color you like. And of course, you can run up and down here until you get a color you like and then find the hue you like there. So I always have my brand kit open in Canva, so you can just Ctrl C or Command C and then you can paste it here. Ctrl V or Command V. Oh, I didn't press save.  

[00:03:31]: Make sure you press save and there it is. And as I say, you can have up to 10 here. And this just means that when you're in the other sections of kit, those colors are accessible to you. And so instead of having your canvas kit sitting open on the desktop for you there, you're going to be able to just use these colors from within kit. And again, you want to add your links here. So if you have links, you would pop them in here and it's actually very easy to do. So if I just bin this one, you can see here that I can add a link and I can control V or Command V and save, and then it automatically gives you the logo there. Now, I've popped these two in for an example for you.  

[00:04:24]: So I've got my YouTube link, which is justatrowley, but I also put in my music.YouTube.com channel because this link is a direct link to my podcast. But you'll see here that it's not giving you the music YouTube icon. So you might choose not to have that link because it's not giving you that icon. So you can think about those things. But so far you should have set up your image here, your personal name, your business name, and you want your colors and your links. Now, the important thing to note is if, for example, you changed your business name and your YouTube link changed to Rowley Cat and you come in here and edit it, it will not change it across other things you've already created. So if you're happy to just use it going onwards, that's fine. But you might have some automation set up where it uses these links, in which case you'd have to go in and change each of those individually.  

[00:05:31]: Okay. And here of course, is the option to set up your time zones. You can see here, this is currently Eastern time, US and Canada. And I live in the uk, so if I wanted to make sure that I knew exactly what times the emails were sending based on UK time, I would scroll and find the UK time, wherever that is. Oh, there's Edinburgh. Okay, so you can pop that in there and then you know that you're sending according to your local time. If, for example, I wanted to actually send at the Canadian time that we had there just a minute ago, then I could leave it at that. If most of my subscribers were in that area and I wanted to know they were getting it at five o' clock night, then at their time, then I could leave it at that.  

[00:06:31]: And again, you can uncheck these boxes as you like, which would mean that, for example, if you unchecked all of these, it would mean that when you're setting up an email, then it would automatically be Monday at 5:00. But of course you could change that. It just saves a bit time if you're sending a lot of things. This is a handy feature here where if you didn't have a P.O. box or a private home address that you were happy to share, Kit allows you to use this address. There are pros and cons of this. The pros being, of course, you don't need to share your personal address. The cons being that if you get sent anything wonderful, it doesn't come to you.  

[00:07:17]: And this unsubscribe survey is a survey that your users get after they've unsubscribed. So you could choose to click this. Maybe you've got thoughts on whether you think that's useful or not, but you would want to think about that. And finally, your GDPR settings. I personally recommend just using the GDPR settings for everybody because it keeps you right. But perhaps your audience are mostly in the US, in the areas where not required to have two factor authentication, etc. So double login. So perhaps you don't mind and so in which case you would not show to anyone, or perhaps you want to show to everybody just to be safe, or only the people who definitely need it, which is eu, UK and Switzerland, which is determined by people's IP address.  

[00:08:15]: So you don't need to worry about that. However, I do recommend choosing to show to all subscribers after they log in. Now do remember to save if you make any changes that you want to save and then the other things you want to do. To set up is you want to verify your domain and Kit has the Kit domain. So this is Fat Quarterquilts fqq.kit.com and you can copy that there to share. But if you wanted a custom domain, you could link your and you could use that. Another thing I recommend signing up for here and down in advance is signing up for an affiliate link. Because if you enjoy using Kit, why not have an affiliate link? In which case, if people click on the Powered by Kit badge at the bottom and they click on it, then you would get, you know, that would be counted in your affiliate clicks.

[00:09:21]: Okay, so up to this point, the main thing you wanted to have done is to update your profile image, your name, your business name, your colors, and your links for social media, etc. They're the main things. I also recommend any other things like email notifications and also things like your affiliate link for getting money potentially for the clicks that people will make on your email. Okay, the other things you can do here is edit your creator profile. Now, I absolutely recommend editing your creator profile because this is like your business card on kit. Now you can see here I've already edited my image, but what you can do here is just click on it and choose to add an image. You can click here and edit these just like any block of text in Canva or Word Document. And so of course, you click on Design and template there and you're able to change the colors.  

[00:10:23]: So here you can see this gray is this background color that goes around the outside there. The card color is the color of this bit here and the heading obviously here, general text color. And the accent is your button here. And and then the color of the text on the button. So you could change all of these. So for example, I could change this to the yellow and you can see there that that has changed there. Now this is where you would find your saved colors. Just easy to access there.  

[00:10:56]: If you wanted to change the font, here would be where you would change the fonts. And there the main things, if you wanted to change the template, you would just click here. So this is a template we're currently on. That was the card. And then there was a bit more further down. You could change any of these and it's really speedy to do. I'm gonna move me back over here and show you that when I changed the accent color for the button, it also changed the highlight under here and the button down here, plus the checkboxes. Now, what I want to show you here is that you can add.

[00:11:36]: This is the navigation menu, that was just here. And you can see here I've only got recommendations on, but you can add products, links and posts. And then when you click on one of these, then the highlight bar moves. Okay. So I think that's the main things for that. Absolutely. Recommend doing this because you can use your creator profile to share a little bit about you and what you do and more importantly, how you can help other people. Okay, now when you click on sign up form here, now obviously this is a sign up form here, they're going to pop their email address and click subscribe.  

[00:12:15]: And when they have signed up, you're going to send them a confirmation email. And here you can edit the confirmation email. So this says important, confirm your subscription. I recommend personalizing this so people know who this is from, so that it's really clear. Now the from address is going to be catatcourterquilts.co.uk but maybe that means nothing to someone. So what you could say is confirm your subscription for. So for example, if it was this, confirm your subscription for setting up your kit for success with Cat Rowley. And you could put all that information in there and then you could say thanks for signing up and you could put that information in there again because sometimes people don't read the subject line.  

[00:13:04]: And then this says confirm your subscription. But for example, if you are then going to send them a download, for example, a freebie, then you could say confirm and download. And all you would do is click on that button, double click, and you can edit that as you like. So you could say confirm and download. Yeah, and so you can see how you can start personalizing that. And of course, once again, you can change the button. Oh, my face is on the road. You can change the button color there like that.  

[00:13:45]: I am not going to save it because obviously this is not an account I really use so well. I don't use it though. That is how to set up your creator profile in a whistleblowing tour. And I recommend doing that. So that was your creator profile and now we're going on to recommendations. And this is a great thing to do because it can be hard building your own email list. And if you can do it with fellow entrepreneurs who are on the same journey as you, this is a great thing to do. So here you can see that I have three people recommending me that 243 views of my account have happened and 79 of those people have then signed up for my account.  

[00:14:32]: And that's a 32.51% conversion. Rate. So that's people just seeing my creator profile that you just saw there. And people seen that and have 32.51% of people have said, yes, I'd like to follow Kat as well. And you can see here that. G' day. We're from the team from Make Modern Magazine. They are the people who have had the most views, but also the highest conversion rate.  

[00:15:00]: So it would be really good for me to recommend back because this would be a good, you know, a good partner to partner up with, even if it is just me recommending Make Modern magazine and them recommending me. And so I recommend sharing following recommending. That's what I'm saying. I recommend recommending other creators that are in a similar niche as you. And whilst it might feel like, you know, that you're competing with each other, there's that phrase about, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. And so if you are in. So this of course, is quilting, and if you are in a niche for this is beginners quilting, and if there's somebody else, you know, that's also in the niche for beginners quilting, then why would you not recommend each other to your audiences? Because you're not going to be doing exactly the same thing. You're going to be teaching it differently.

[00:16:13]: And everybody likes the opportunity to learn from as many different people as they can, I'm sure. And then, so you can see here, if you go to my recommendations, that you can then recommend other people. So I am recommending these three people here. And because I don't do anything with my account, I've not sent a single email. These people, sadly, have not had any views from my subscribers. But you can see how that can be a great thing to do. Okay, so we're heading over here now to send and to email templates. And so here you can set up an email template.  

[00:16:55]: So I absolutely recommend setting up an email template because then you can use it over and over again. So. So you can create some default content here. So, for example, you might always start in the same way to say hello. And you can also add tags. So let's say, for example, I always say hi. And then I can look over here and I can do subscriber first name. So hi.  

[00:17:25]: And then whatever name they use, describe, subscribe, and it would be there. And also what I could do is a personalized greeting, which would mean, let me take this out, let me delete that so you can see what happened there. So when I went here and went for personalized greeting, it now says hello, and it'll say subscriber first name. But if there's no subscriber first name, it'll say there. So I might say say hi, because I like to say hi. So it'll say hi, Katrina, but if I hadn't put a name into the first block off the subscribe form, now it'll say hi there. And so that means that there's never going to be a starter to your email where it's just got a blank bit where it should have been their name. It'll now say hi there.  

[00:18:17]: So that's a nice touch. And you can save that there and you can add blocks as you need. And so click on the line and then you can get the plus sign underneath. And now we can add a heading and you could say whatever you need to say, put some letters in. And then you could change this one to being a bulleted list and you could have some lists. And then maybe here you now want to have some more personalization. And of course you can add other things because you could add a button, you could add a recommendation for a creator, you can embed a product if you've saved any. You can add your group of your links here.  

[00:19:17]: You can add links to your social profiles. So you can have your podcast and you put the URL in there and you could add your Etsy account. You put the URL, you can see it starts adding these icons for you. This is where you'd also add a poll if you wanted to. There's a relatively new feature and you could get a poll right inside the email address in the email there. And this is where you can choose to add snippets, which are reusable content. And of course, snippets are little blocks of small, small blocks of content that you reuse over and over again. For example, it might be like a bit of a footer.  

[00:20:16]: So maybe your footer always looks the same and it says, so my emails always say chat soon and then have my image with my sign off. And so this is where you could add something like that. And you can say chat soon and then you could add image here. And let's just use this one because this is what I've got. So we just drag this slider here until it's the right size. Now I want it on the left. So let's imagine this is my signature. Oh, my goodness, I've just realized I can't even spell chat because I've typed too fast.

[00:20:59]: Do you ever do that? There we go. Chat soon and then the image. And so perhaps this is how you always sign off your emails. And so you would then save that. So you want to enter a name and this would be signature image. And then you could save that, and then that means you could pop that in anytime you needed it. As you can see how this could build up quite nicely to be a really good template. But also within the template are snippets of things that you always do.

[00:21:37]: So for example, my starter snippet might always be the same. And then I would come here and I would go snippet for the footer and I would say, oh, I want my signature image and pop it in. And that way you can speed up your content creation. So not only are you able to create a full page of template, but you can create these little snippets of template too that you can pop in. So that's really handy to do. You know, maybe you have different kinds of emails you do. So perhaps you do a roundup of things that have happened in a week or things that you recommend. And maybe you always use the same style of block to do that and you could save that as a snippet and then just repeat it each time you wanted to add a new recommendation.  

[00:22:32]: As you can see a footer here, you could use it for your start of your emails. Really any, any sort of bits of content that you repeat over and over, this would save you having to, you know, so for example, this image, I had to make it to the right size. It wasn't too big. You could do that and then not have to repeat that editing every time. So I think you've got the idea of that, how you can edit and save templates. So that was the email templates. And while we were in there, I showed you about snippets. Now, a really good thing that you could set up if you have paid is apps.  

[00:23:16]: Now, I don't have the paid version, as you know, in this account. But for example, Canva, you can link up canva. And what you can do is when you're creating Canva and you save it, it will automatically be available for you in kit. So you can then use what you've created within kit. Some of the other ones that are great, let me see this one. Send you, you can save text and video testimonials and then basically there's an opportunity to click to add that testimonial and you can choose templates. You can have, for example, a round image with the text, the testimonial underneath or you know, the image to the side with the text on the other side from and you can choose to add a link to the person who recommended you, etc. That's a really great one.  

[00:24:19]: Obviously Shopify or Patreon, these things, adding in your things that you're selling and of course adding to things like WordPress and Squarespace. But they are obviously for if you have a paid for account. I think those are the main things I wanted to show you today. I'm just going to show you one more thing and that is tips. You can set up tips with your account and this means that people can send you a little bit money just as a thank you. So for example, maybe somebody hasn't paid me to do a one to one, but they've asked me a question and I've quickly answered the question and maybe as a thank you they want to send me money for coffee and this is the way they could do it. So I've sent coffee for cats. Then the domain is the kit and I could set up the tips here and this would mean that people could choose to do a tip for this amount.  

[00:25:27]: Again, everything's editable over there. I can replace the image. So there we go. As with everything, it's all editable. I can change the color again and you can set all of that up and then what you can do is you can have a little link to that. As you saw earlier, it was now my kit domain with the coffee for cat at the end. Yeah. So that's a great way just to give your fans an opportunity to give you a little more money.  

[00:26:12]: Now of course you do have to set up payments before that would actually work because you would be selling through there, which of course you can access back in your settings, which is over here and down here in commerce and this is where you set up your payments. So I have now gone through how to set up your branding in kit, how to set up templates and snippet templates and how to set up things like tips to bring in a little extra income. And the other thing of course is to set up your creator profile so that people can see what you can do for them and will want to sign up for your email and additionally so that you can start recommending other people who are in the same or adjacent similar niches that people that are your ideal customer would be interested in and hopefully they will also start recommending you. And these are all great ways to get your account ready for success so that when you start sending emails that people will be really clear about who you are and how they can support you and how you can help them. And it'll make it really easy for people to be able to buy from you because they're going to learn to know, like and trust you. I have created a checklist for you to help you take note of all of these because this was a whistle stop tour and the checklist is in a lovely organized order and you can work through all of these things and make sure your KIT account is set up for success and be ready to start sending those emails. So so if you use your camera to follow the link in the QR code or you can follow the link below and you will be able to sign up for that checklist so that you can make sure you don't miss any of the points I covered today. I hope you enjoyed this whistle stop tour of setting up for success with kit and I was Cat Rowley.