Blogging is key to direct seller’s success
Kristy Empol is with two direct sales companies, an industry she pursued so she could work when she wanted and enjoy time with her family. But it’s her blogging that has skyrocketed her success. In fact, it’s the blogging that has paid dividends to both of her businesses and become a business in itself.
The California mom of two kids — Oliver, 6, and Isla, 3 — left the real estate and mortgage industry after more than 10 years when she had children. She joined Origami Owl as an independent designer in 2015, embracing the storytelling aspect of the company’s living lockets. She then became a Java Momma barista, helping connect people with freshly roasted coffee, tea, cocoa, and other accessories.
She started blogging to help her Origami Owl business, but things evolved. In a big way.
“Beginning in 2017, I challenged myself to grow my business purely online using my blog and Pinterest,” Kristy said.
She stayed active in Origami Owl and built a team, which currently is at five. But the cool part is the 42 new customers who found her through searches on Google and Pinterest — 70 percent of them coming back as repeat customers.
Kristy moved her writing about the jewelry business to a micro-blog on Sassy Direct, an online business directory with 10,000 member profiles — highly optimized by Google. With over 300,000 site hits per month, she’s being found.
Her main blog, Forever Sparkly, focuses on helping others in direct sales with social media tips and guidance on how to grow their businesses. She reached 25,000-30,000 pageviews a month in 2017 and has a subscriber list of over 1,600.
“My main focus is sharing how I work my direct sales business online with my blog and with Pinterest,” Kristy said.
Her techniques of blogging and channeling her content into the social mediasphere through Pinterest have resulted in increased visibility overall. It’s helped pump life into her second business, Java Momma. She now has a team of 62, purely from blogging and has provided Pinterest training to Java Momma consultants, as well as a local moms group.
“I always enjoy helping other direct sellers and other bloggers navigate how to grow their businesses and customer base online,” she said. Some of the most recent blog posts on foreversparkly.com include “Direct sales trends for 2018,” “5 ways to use secret boards on Pinterest,” and “How I grew a direct sales team of 62 people with 1 blog post.”
Kristy and husband, Jeremy, like to travel with the kids and play board games. CinchShare has been a tool that helps Kristy enjoy those things — plus juggle cooking, school dropoffs and pick-ups and whatever else she needs to do — while keeping the traffic flowing back into her businesses. She uses the social media scheduler to manage her Facebook group, Facebook page, personal timeline, Twitter and Pinterest.
She shares the benefits of CinchShare with her teams and with her blog audience, creating yet another income stream. CinchShare brand ambassadors get paid $10 for each new user they refer.
“Knowing that I can set aside a time once a week or once a month to schedule content is very freeing and gives me more time to enjoy the reasons why I work and stay at home,” she said. “As a leader, it helps to share ways in which to work smarter and plan posts ahead of time for groups and business pages, especially when it comes to Facebook parties. I share with them how easy it is to set up entire parties and have the content there ready to go for the next one.”
All the information Kristy puts out in her blogs comes back exponentially as she grows her income by telling others how to grow theirs.
“I am amazed at the relationships I have formed since starting in direct sales in 2015,” Kristy said. “I have invested in myself and learned so many new things, like blogging, that has completely evolved my business.”
NOTE: Sharing Success is an ongoing series of stories where we highlight CinchShare users — the people utilizing CinchShare to grow their businesses while enjoying more of life.
