4 Things You Need to Know about Flodesk Templates
Good morning and welcome to the very first attempt to livestream a tutorial on YouTube and Instagram. I've no idea how this is gonna go but we're going to try today we're gonna try. So if you are joining me live on Instagram thank you so much for being here. I'm very curious to see how many of my Insta-friends will actually make it to the party. If you are watching on YouTube congrats because I didn't send nobody an email. This was basically my attempt to raise my blood pressure and challenge my creative muscles. So I came up with an idea and I'm like, You know what? We're going to try. We're going to try, we're going to do it. So later today I will be conducting our group coaching call for my YouTube membership and so this is gonna be a great story to tell them so if it crashes and burns, it'll be great for tea time.
I just want to give you guys kind of an inside scoop on Flodesk templates, they just rolled out this feature yesterday, and I know we can get excited about new features but half the time y'all don’t know what y'all doing. So as a Flodesk University Instructor, I want to help you be great, okay, so that's the goal. I am utilizing StreamYard right now so on top of everything, I am the one clicking the buttons, so I won't even blame it on the software if things go awry. If it gets janky it's because I clicked the wrong button and we're going to extend some grace. That's what we're going to do.
If you are new here because you're watching this on Instagram, and I'm usually not over here. My name is LaShonda Brown. I'm a tech educator, I'm a YouTube coach and I'm a speaker and I have been using Flodesk since literal day one. I won't name the software company I was with before but I was running an African American stock photo brand at the time and I was very frustrated with how my photos looked at my emails. I felt like it was hurting my sales because I wasn't able to market my stock photos in a way that was visually appealing and so I felt like it was like a walking contradiction. And so when Flodesk rolled out I was already ready to leave like the bags are packed. I just didn't know where I was going to head next. And I loved it even though it was in beta and there were so many features they needed to add. I was like I see the potential and you could lock in for 50% off for the lifetime of your account at the time and I was like the hundreds of dollars I'm gonna save every year at the software. Like let's just do the thing. And I have watched this brand, evolve and grow and it has been crazy to watch. It's been insane to watch how they respond to questions and comments in the community and actually take it back to their team and develop new features.
This particular feature was heavily impacted by community input and so if you are not a member of Flodesk Insiders or you are not following along with their public roadmap. I want to encourage you right now to get involved. Tell them what you want, tell them what you need, because you're going to start seeing the things that you asked for, the things that you thought were stretch, start being implemented. And that's what I really love about this company is they really do care about their users, and they want to grow. Y'all forget, this company, I think this is their fifth year because I joined in August of 2019 so I think they're literally hitting the five-year mark. So think about where you were in your fifth year in business if you've made it that far. It's crazy what I've seen, but at the same time even though they are a newer brand you can still leverage this tool now to grow your business.
I love sharing my strategies with you guys, because I want to see you guys being more strategic with your marketing. Here's the deal, y'all are posting a lot and it's not helping you. And so I'm going to show you by example things that you can do so I'm going to hop over to LinkedIn. A lot of you are not on LinkedIn. First and foremost, that's where the money is. I'm not even gonna lie to you, the average user on LinkedIn of all the social media platforms has the highest income. So if you're trying to make money if you're trying to sell to people with money, you need to be on LinkedIn. So go ahead and find me, LaShonda Brown on LinkedIn, and you're going to see this post. I posted this an hour ago. It takes a while for post to breathe on LinkedIn.
I walked people through exactly what I did to help promote these new features for Flodesk even when I didn't have the time to do a pre-recorded video. A lot of you are saying I don't have time to be on YouTube, it’s a struggle, you don't even know, I got kids, I got a full-time job. Girl go live. What am I doing right now? I don't have time nor do I want to pay to have my team edit a video about this new feature rollout. But when new features come out for software, a lot of people are going to flock to YouTube to have their questions answered. So it is so essential that if you are talking about SaaS companies on YouTube, you go live or make a short to highlight these new features when they roll out. The longer you wait, the less chance you have of ranking in the YouTube search.
Now you can also optimize your livestreams before you even go live. Half of yall don’t be doing that? As long as the Live is scheduled, as far as YouTube is concerned, it is a video the content’s just not there yet. So I went ahead into Tubebuddy, I optimized this video. I put my tags, my calls to action, my affiliate link, all of that was done and you know your girl hit the monetization button. So as you guys are watching the livestream, I'm getting paid from Google. That's what we love to see. So I encourage you if you want to leverage YouTube to grow your business, that you hop into my membership. My membership will evolve into being an app in June, right now we are basically in beta, public beta. And I'm leveraging Buy Me A Coffee to do this for free. So you can go to lashondabrown.com/coffee and you can hop into the membership. And I am going to be having a group coaching call today so if you get in before one o'clock, I'll let you in the door. I’m just gon be honest with you, but this is where the strategy is.
If you follow me on LinkedIn, I build in public on LinkedIn as a way to market what I'm doing without being super salesy. So steal that strategy, share what's happening behind the scenes, share why you do what you do, because when you do that, it makes it easier for you to tag your partners, it makes it easy for potential partners to see who you partner with. I mean, everybody be winning on LinkedIn. So if you're stressed about Instagram, and I know you are, get on LinkedIn or go to YouTube, but we are here to talk about Flodesk so my little rant’s over. Natalie is the head of community at Flodesk. She and I go way back, I got to help her with her launch team for her book, Built to Belong. So we are dear friends, she's actually the reason why I'm on Flodesk to begin with because she wrote a blog post and like I said, my bags are packed. I was ready to leave and I went to the Flodesk camp.
We are going to talk about four things that you need to know to get started with this new feature. And I want to tell you that when you're streaming in StreamYard, there is a feature called banners. Banners are a way that you can visually reinforce the tips you're trying to share but it also makes it incredibly easy for you to repurpose because you can drag in your videos to when your pop-ups change and easily find where you need to put your time codes when your livestream is done. So I'm giving you guys all the layers, I'm giving you StreamYard, I'm giving you Flodesk, I'm giving you Tubebuddy. I don't gatekeep on this channel. So if you are watching on Instagram and you haven't subscribed to my channel, girl what you doing. Just putting it out there.
So let's see these banners and action. If you're watching on YouTube. Go ahead and subscribe and turn your notification bell on because more often than not I will be going live with no notice at this point because your girl is busy. And if I see something that I think you need to know I'm just going to go live. I will not be sending an email to let you know, there will be no warning. So if you want to be warned, if you want to be notified, hit the bell. Also, this is another tip, like the video right now if you like it, that engagement, your comments, and your likes we'll carry over when this video switches to a replay. So it will help this video to rank on YouTube. That's going to help me, that's going to help Flodesk, that's going to help you. So if you like this video, make sure you like it and if you're watching this on Instagram, you could circle back and like it because I know you like it, just putting that out there.
The number one thing I want you to know is that you can use the template feature to grow your list. But I'm telling you right now, this as a list growth strategy is going to be a chef's kiss this year, because I'm like this is so easy. Dawn is here the New Product Marketing Manager for Flodesk and my tech bestie. When I tell you this girl and I are kindred spirits, we even have matching sparkly boots. We're going to screenshare and if this goes chaotic, I blame all y'all. Clearly y'all see I just duplicate emails because ain’t nobody got time but I created a template of a high-performing email in my Flodesk account.
The new feature is located in the top right-hand corner. If you click on those three dots, under preview link, you will now see share as a template. What that's going to do is allow you to take an email from your account and share it with whoever you want. Okay, because when you click here, it's going to say share with anyone who has that link and this is the link you need to share, not the preview link to the email, the template link. It's giving Canva templates, okay. So you know how you can design something in Canva and share it as a template, same concept, but with your emails. So this is the link you want to copy. Now don't get confused, but I'm gonna say View in Browser because I want you to see this email.
This is what the email looks like. I'm gonna go slow so y’all don't get lost, so I don't get confused. This is the email I sent to my actual list yesterday, okay. However, I tweaked a couple of things because your girl is strategic, alright. At the top, we have a header image. I talked about my Monday live streams. Typically, this is just linked to my channel but because I'm sending this out as a template, I'm like I might as well link to the replay. So you click on join the live stream or on the thumbnail, you'll be able to watch this live stream. This was an actual call out in the Monday email, but it is now an advertisement for my YouTube membership. Then I added this section and this is what I named the template.
Y'all do not market your affiliate links enough, you truly don't, and putting a coupon code round up in your emails periodically, I do it once a month. It's a great way for you to highlight some of your affiliate partners and drive traffic to your affiliate links. There's even like a little call out here saying I may receive a commission for this referral. And I decided to highlight coupon codes that were expiring these are actually linked to my Canva affiliate link. My Interact affiliate link. Interact is also integrated with Flodesk now and my Riverside link. This code for Riverside as far as I know, is the highest discount Riverside is offering at this moment on their platform. So if people have seen 10% off, 15% off, this is going to draw their attention.
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The last thing I did was I highlighted a high-performing video on my YouTube channel which is How to Make a YouTube Video with StreamYard, Canva, and Epidemic Sound. It's actually named How to Make a YouTube Video on your Computer. That video has gone crazy because all y'all be stressed out about making YouTube content and editing it yourself. I literally make a YouTube video in real-time. And this was in response to questions in my membership and I was like, if y'all have that question, the public has that question so let me go ahead and make a YouTube video. Y'all I even linked to my shop with a PS to drive traffic to a template and I linked to my Buy Me A Coffee tip jar. So on top of giving out this high-performing email as a template, I am also passively driving traffic to things that help my business.
Utilizing that feature allows me to turn an actual email into a template. So the reality is you can use one of your past emails, look at your open rate. Look at what people were responsive to. You can put placeholder text in that email if you want to like go for it. However, I’m like why not put what I actually said? Now I can use this to grow my list because in the description of this video, I put a link to a Flodesk form that will automatically deliver that email as a template that you can edit for your audience. So I can get on YouTube. I can go to LinkedIn. I can hop in an Instagram Reel. If I'm still in the depths of Facebook, I can do that to and I can talk about email being the highest-performing way to market your business. If you want the exact email that I send to my list on Monday mornings, that gets at least a 44% open rate, click on the link in the description, comment template, whatever is relevant to the platform that you're on. You can take your actual work, look at your open rate, look at what people actually responded to, and say, I'm getting 50% open rate on this exact email. Do you want it? You can have it.
And here is the crazy part, y’all not ready for this. Y’all not ready for this. Not only can you turn an actual email and utilize it as a lead magnet when someone uses that template, your affiliate link is connected to the template link. So if they are new to Flodesk and they become a paid customer of Flodesk because of your free template girl, you going to make some passive income, directly to your PayPal account. I mean, y'all are sleeping and I'm trying to wake you up, okay, you're working too hard. These are the types of things that I do that help me to work 20 hours a week. I'm thinking like, I'm thinking on a level, y'all not evenon, we're not even in the same neighborhood. I'm on a different street y'all over here. Okay. Take your actual work and repurpose it. You don't need to make a PDF honey. You don't need to host a webinar. You don't need to do all of that. Just go into your own Flodesk account, scan for an email that has a high open rate.
You could even take a screenshot of it when you market it. You could literally take a screenshot, show your receipts, this email template, this exact layout, got a 50% open rate, 40% open rate, whatever it is for you, for me, my average is 44% you might be getting higher than that. God bless you if that's what you got, but I'm happy with what I got. Take a screenshot of your analytics and say, let me help you out. Y'all, that's tip one. But I told you we're gonna get into the weeds. See, I'm trying to bless the saints. That's what I'm trying to do. So that was tip number one. So if y'all forgot already, use the template feature to grow your list, okay, but be data-driven about this. You don't even need to make a new format from scratch. Look at what you've already sent and say you know what, my audience was very responsive to this exact email and I coach coaches or I coach people who are similar to me, so let me just give them the recipe. This is what I sent, y’all want it, click below. It's easy.
Number two, you can use the template feature to delegate to your team. Think about it, be about it. If you create a template for your regular email communications, now your fonts are in there. Your colors are in there because they're already in your brand kit. Everything is laid out. All you need is for your team to fill in the gaps, girl. That's not messing up anything you already have going on. And now all of a sudden your VA can write emails that look like you wrote them. We'd love to see that. If you want to hop over to ChatGPT and have that write it for you, that’s your business. But in terms of being visually consistent, now you don’t have to worry about it.
Let me show you one more thing, this is a plain text email in Flodesk. Now let me show you another feature they rolled out because y'all probably missed this one too. When I tell you these features are coming fast and furious, they coming fast and furious alright. So one of the ways that I was able to add that Bootstrap Creator section to the template with ease was I clicked on the plus sign that revealed my content block options. Have you all seen this and the bottom left corner? Now this is what I know. I know Flodesk loves some symmetry so we gonna have some options coming. I can't wait to see this whole thing get filled up. But for now, I’m gonna be patient. If I click on favorites, now I have content blocks from past emails that are formatted exactly how I want them even including the text I said in my Monday email.
So if I want to do another call out to Bootstrap Creators, oh, add that logo. Oh, add that text. Oh, we're gonna add this block here. Boom. And if I want the text, you know I had that as a block as well so it's the same size. So if you are opening up a brand new email but you are super extra, you've done custom fonts, you've done your logo, you formatted the blocks. Y'all know how we had to do this from scratch every single time we wrote an email in the past, unless we duplicated an email. Ma'am you don't need to do that no more. That season has passed, I need you to catch up. This is incredible. This is absolutely incredible. The time you're going to save is outrageous. So if y'all didn't know about favorites now you know.
So that's the second thing you can do. Now we're really going to start cooking. Because you can use this template feature to generate passive income by selling your templates. Y'all we asked on that Zoom call if we could sell them you know what they said, yes you can. Yes, you can. This is outrageous. I wish I was a copywriter. I really do. I'm not but I wish I was because when I tell you all of you who have been selling email scripts for passive income put the scripts in a template, sell the templates. You can sell them on Creative Market. You can sell them in your shop, your Payhip shop for free. Y’all know my shop is free. You can sell them to your list just through a direct link, you can sell them with a Flodesk checkout page, you can really get meta with it. You can be like alright, I'm going to sell you Flodesk with Flodesk. When they said you could sell the templates, I'm like are you out of your mind? This is so disruptive in the email marketing sector.
And your template link is your affiliate link. So you can generate passive income while you're generating passive income. Y’all, killed that one. I don't know who's responsible for that one but I'm like, are you serious? I didn't think I was gonna be selling email templates this year but here's the thing. You can sell bundles in the app that I'm building. So they're like if you want to bundle together an offer that's not a subscription, you can do that too. I might need some email templates in my life. If y'all want them let me know, call a girl.
And the last one is, you can use the template feature to drive traffic to your offers. I told y'all. I told you. I left my real links in there because I'm like, if y'all want to bless me by clicking on the links, we love to see it. I'm gonna show you the workflow that I set up to make this happen. So I literally just finished this y’all. This is where the journey begins. Get my template. Hope you enjoyed learning about Flodesk templates in my video, drop your name and email below and I will send you one of my high-performing emails as a template so you can see what that looks like on your end. Take me to the template.
In order to share this template to grow my list, I created a full-page Flodesk form. When you hit Take me to the template, it sends you to a full-page page on my Squarespace site that says my email template is coming your way. Thanks for signing up. The template was sent to the email you provided if you don't see it in your inbox, check your promotions or updates tab. I'm pushing people to subscribe to my channel because I'm like girl why not, we love that. Okay, so that's what you see next.
Now within Flodesk, when they fill out that form, they are not added to my general email list they are just added to a segment called Flodesk Templates. So if I decide to sell some later on, I can sell directly to that segment. I don't need them had and in my general list so they have been segmented. So when they fill out the form, that segment is added to their email address within Flodesk and it sends them this email. So I said here's your template and the strategy behind it. So it says Hi, first name, and if they don't put their first name, it'll say Hi, friend. I think you're gonna love this feature and this template. If you’re a #datagirlie keep reading for the strategy behind the layout. That button is linked to that email template link. Sometimes people click on images so that is also linked. I want to make sure they get it.
Underneath that is the strategy. I send out a variation of this email on Monday morning at 8 AM Eastern and I currently have a 44% open rate. It includes a header image, call out to my Monday lives which happen weekly at 10 AM, info about my YouTube membership which is quickly becoming my signature offer, affiliate code features, and a high-performing YouTube video. This email helps me generate passive income through: Google AdSense on my monetized videos and live streams, recurring subscription revenue through my $50 membership, and affiliate commission for my affiliate partners. This is how I'm able to work 20 hours a week. One email. Five streams of income. Hope this email blesses you as much as it blesses me. Until next time, ta ta for now. LaShonda Visit my site to learn more.
So if they want to keep learning, they're like, oh my gosh, who is this woman? You go on to my website. Love that. So that is the workflow that gets them said template. But you did notice that there was an image, right? I don't know if you caught that, it may have happened too fast for you. There was an image in that email. That image was a mock-up image that I created in Canva. So I went inside of that email, I opened up the color palette in Flodesk so it looks a little bit more visually interesting. Took a little screenshot and dropped it into a mock-up directly in Canva. Once I did that, all I had to do was click download. You having specialized mock-ups for the things that you are featuring, especially when it comes to tech tools, immediately increases your conversions. A lot of you are just dropping logos, you’ve got to give people visuals. So Canva mock-ups make it easy. They partner with Smartmockups to have this technology. This works on T-shirts, it works on tablets, it works on multiple devices. So if you want to get into the weeds girl get into the weeds, but that's where that image came from.
We'll go back into Canva because you're probably wondering, how on earth did LaShonda make a thumbnail for this video so quick. I've got mock-ups all ready. Okay, so these are thumbnails from past Flodesk videos. You can see here, we've been talking about Flodesk for a minute. So what I did, I believe it was last year was I had one of our team photographers take a bunch of cutouts of me in my Flodesk t-shirt. Now we're going to do some updates because their logo has updated. But you can see here because I have those T-shirt photos and I'm able to remove the background in Canva. I can create a thumbnail on the fly. So what I created for today was four things you need to know about Flodesk templates.
To market this on Instagram, I used that same cutout and put myself into an Instagram story graphic that had a button that doesn’t just link you to YouTube, it links you to the Flodesk playlist on my YouTube channel because girl if you want to watch more than one video, I want that for you, I really do. So that went on Instagram.
The last thing I did was made a whole reel in Canva. Now because of the sound I'm gonna use a left the middle blank for me to add some text. But you see this, Comment template for a quick tutorial. I shouldn't put quick this was not quick, I'll say for a tutorial and a custom email template. What yall think that custom email template is, the one that I just showed you .Y’all see what's happening, money is being made.
When I tell you it is all about having an idea and slowing down long enough to say how can I juice this one thing and squeeze every ounce of income potential out of it. You just need to slow down okay, you don't need to post more, you don't need another platform. You aren't juicing your marketing strategies for every last drop and when you learn how to do that, you are going to find yourself enjoying the process of marketing your offers You're going to find yourself excited to show up because it's not happenstance, okay. It's not rolling the dice, it's data-driven decisions that have been tested either by you or someone else who's gone before you. It doesn't always have to be your idea. I share my ideas with my community all the time, I tell them to much. I'd be like y’all, this is what I’m testing, this is what I’m doing. Give it a try. Give it a whirl.
That is the season of life that I'm in. Bootstrap Biz Advice is going to get its own LLC next month. I'm strategically waiting, if I can hold out long enough so that my business and myself will have the same birthday because I just think that's cute. Might get myself an LLC for my birthday. But truthfully, I mean Bootstrap Biz Advice is a mindset. Right now people need budget-friendly education to help them to grow their business without breaking the bank and I am strategically positioned to be that person. So I hope that this gave you just an inside scoop on how I do things, why I do things. Like I said, I don't do this on Instagram very often. I'm really trying to break up with Instagram but I have too many people over there. So if I am going to be on there, I want to be on there my way and this is what I act like on YouTube. Y’all don't get to see this on the ‘Gram. Y’all don’t get to see my mind doing all the things. I love teaching in this format. I love this stuff because I know it works. It’s literally like just handing over the recipe book and going like girl, you're gonna get a tasty meal after this. Like, I know it works.
To recap, the four things you need to know are: you can use the template to grow your list, you can use the template feature to delegate to your team, you can use it to generate passive income by selling your templates and you can use your template feature to drive traffic to your offers. So I think that's amazing, I think it's great. I hope you guys enjoyed this. I hope you're excited about this feature update. Don't forget favorites are there too so even if you don't want to get into the weeds about creating templates, start to favorite those content blocks in your emails that you find yourself creating over and over and over again from scratch and if you mark them as a favorite then you will have access to them moving forward.
If you want to become a Bootstrap Star Student, you can go to lashondabrown.com/coffee . Buy Me A Coffee is free. You can utilize it to sell extras. You know what, you could sell a template in Buy Me A Coffee. This is crazy, like my tools are overlapping. You could sell a template in Buy Me A Coffee then you won't even need a website. That's too much information in one post, it’s too much.
I would love for you guys to become a Star Student because I just want to teach you guys how to grow your biz without breaking the bank. It's not hard if you find somebody who knows what they're talking about and I want to be that person for you. I mean, this is an exciting time in tech and I know there's a lot of stressful things happening all around us but this is the fun part, watching a tech company grow based on community feedback is amazing. And I'm just glad you're here for the ride. So until next time, tata for now.
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