RF11 | 72Lux – Monetize Your Website Content Now

Heather Marie is the founder and CEO of 72Lux, Inc. Prior to founding 72Lux, Heather was on the founding team at Affinity Labs, a digital media company that became the largest collection of online professional communities helping to lead the company’s lead generation and display sales from the ground up to profitability. Heather has also spent seven years working in retail for women’s clothing retailers such as Ralph Lauren, Express and Abercrombie & Fitch and launched her first “venture” at age eleven, an arbitrage business on eBay. Heather has spoken at several conferences including Fashinvest Capital Conference, The Social Edge Summit and Decoded Fashion. What is 72Lux – a technology company at the intersection of content and commerce working sort of like an affiliate network but with a lot more tools and a universal checkout. Podcast Deep Dive How to get started and use 72Lux (2:20) Benefits for publishers (4:31) 1. Keep your traffic 2. Improves engagement levels 3. Increases time on site 4. Monetize and take a cut on every sale “By actually building your core content as shoppable content, for the publisher, you’re able to keep that user within your site.” Benefits for retailers (5:55) 1. Additional sales 2. New markets & new customers 3. Free native ad placement 4. Free to join & only pay when you get a sale   How does 72Lux differ from prior & existing affiliate opportunities (7:04) 1. The dashboard is unified 2. Lots of editor tools Ex. Easily drag and drop products into a slideshow or grid format 3. The ability to make existing content shoppable and create new shoppable content 4. Multi retailer checkout that sits on your site 5. You create a direct connection with your new customers   How soon can you start pitching (8:59) “We weren’t in development when we started pitching.” How to create your own version of Heather’s first pitch (9:59) Why you want to talk to your customer early on (11:30) What categories work best with 72Lux? (15:50) Will shoppable content ever take over banner advertisements? (21:15) “It’s really hard to say, but the direction we’re going towards with online advertising is: #1 accountability. If advertisers are spending x$ with you, they want to know what they’re getting out of it. #2 shift to native ads”   Commissions (24:36) actual average is 20% which is significantly higher than an affiliate commission around 5% The Challenge (25:19) Two big challenges. #1. One of the early ones was the marketplace and getting everybody on board. “It was sort of like the chicken and the egg scenario. We had to have both publishers and retailers at the same time to make the business work. We had to have them jump at the same time.” #2. So what did they do? “We set a date that was a little bit in the future stating we’ll have this many merchants for you, we don’t know exactly who those will be but we’ll go after the ones that you want from a top down initiative. Then we worked with those merchants and did a custom launch with them.”   Biggest Lessons Learned (26:37) 1. It takes a lot longer than you would expect 2. You need a back up plan for everything – Their first launch partner didn’t work out so they had to wait until they could find their second launch partner. And that took a lot of time to change that up.   The 5 Questions You Ask Your Customers & Yourself During Product Development 1. If we were going to build everything you wanted, what would you want? 2. What does your customer say they want? 3. What do they not know what they want yet? 4. What are you currently doing today? 5. How do we improve upon that? Ex. If you’re doing a story on Spring trends and you’re going to start finding products for them, what is your process? Can I watch you do this?”   Interesting goodies Publishers refer to 72Lux as the holy grail of content and commerce. Uber popular YouTube Vlogger, Lindsey Hughes, also known as Beautybaby44 uses 72Lux on her site Lindseyhughes.com. You should go check out the shopping experience and see how beautifully integrated it feels. Get this, Lindsey has close to 900,000 subscribers on YouTube! Heather lived in San Francisco for nine years and then made the trek to New York. During the first day on a business trip to New York it hit her that she needed to move. “As an entrepreneur you want to control as many factors as you can control and not being in the right location can certainly create even more barriers.” The post RF11 | 72Lux – Monetize Your Website Content Now appeared first on Refashion.co.