We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gina Schmidt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gina below.
Alright, Gina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
I used to work for a sports apparel company and I was assigned to expand the business. Affiliate marketing seemed to be a very popular choice for other apparel companies. We partnered with ShareASale and started to notice that most people who were affiliate marketers had a bio link service website, like Linktree, to guide their followers to the products they were promoting. The problem was, those links guided their followers to the homepage instead of a product page. This left their followers having to find the product they were looking for all on their own. I realized that if images were an option with their own associated links, those followers could just look for the thumbnail of the photo or video they just watched and easily be guided to the exact product page. This would be beneficial to everyone. The company, the user, and their followers. There were websites who did similar ideas, like LTK, but nothing like what I envisioned. I just wanted a simple website with photos and links. Thus LinkMyStyle was created.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Of course. My name is Gina and I am originally from San Francisco, California but I now live in El Paso, Texas. Entering the tech industry wasn’t something I actually expected. I used to be a waitress before this and then one random day I was offered an internship to help design a website. At the time I didn’t expect much. I just saw it as another job for the moment. As time went on, I realized how much of an amazing opportunity I had. Working from home meant if I ever got married and had kids, I could have the best of both worlds. I could be a stay at home mom while also having a two income household. That’s when I knew that I had to make this work for me.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
As someone who was completely new to marketing, I had no idea where to start. I thought the best way to reach users would be through email. I had written an email talking about how amazing the website was and how it could possibly benefit the people I was emailing. These emails barely produced results. It did however produce one very important result. I got a user with a significant following to sign up and then she told me how LinkMyStyle increased her sales by over 100%! As you could imagine, I was the happiest person. Not only did my website work, it worked better than I had imagined. I changed my email to talk all about how amazing this user’s results were and how it benefited them. Then, I started getting into Meta marketing and created ads with the same theme. I thought this would skyrocket the amount of users I had. Unfortunately, I was wrong. This email also barely produced results and so did my ads. Finally, I started reading about cold emails and how to properly make ads. All of these books said to not talk about what you could do for the user but finding the user’s problem and offering a solution. That’s when I realized how wrong my entire marketing strategy was before. The content was all conceited, I was saying results that sounded unrealistic, and I wasn’t even sending follow up emails! So I went back, fixed everything up, and went back to work. And I will continue to learn as time goes on. Learning never ends, there’s always room for improvement, and you have to keep trying.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Not being shy. I feel like sometimes we get in our own heads and don’t want to market our own business. It feels almost…embarrassing for some reason. Did you send an email to someone and they haven’t responded? Send three more follow up emails. You’re at a social event and someone says something that makes you feel that you could market to them? Go ahead and do it. Do you have a friend who has a large social media following? Ask them to promote your business. How do you think I got this interview? I had a friend vouch for me. See what resources you have, use it, and don’t be afraid to be a little pushy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linkmy.style
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/linkmy.style/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@linkmystyle