543: Google Search Is Dying. Here Are Your Best Traffic Alternatives

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I cover the latest strategies to grow an online business. Now with AI adoption, accelerating a super fast pace, Google search traffic is declining and will continue to decline in the next couple of years. And in fact, I predict that search will pretty much be dead in two to three years. So what are your traffic alternatives? This episode will cover better ways to generate traffic and sales. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur Yet,

00:29
It’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now on to the show.

01:02
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today’s episode is going to be somewhat of a self-help episode in a way. The last couple of episodes, we’ve been covering how Google has been devaluing independent publishers and basically screwing up all over the place. And one of the topics of my mastermind groups has been what are some alternate traffic sources outside of Google? And that’s what we’re going to explore today.

01:31
Yeah, I think about your master, you’re talking about your personal finance mastermind group. Yes, that one. Yes. The one that’s like all Google. So I was actually thinking, I was thinking about this topic yesterday and I, cause I was talking to our mutual friend, Jim Wang, who was in that group. And I was thinking about that because that group pretty much in the personal finance space has dominated search for the past 10 years has

01:56
Over a decade, actually. Yeah, probably 15. In my mind, it’s still like 2013. So they’ve dominated search. They’ve built their entire businesses. Some of them are on their second and third business because they’ve sold websites previously. Everything that they’ve done has really been search related. In fact, one of the people in your group, and I’m not going to name names, maybe five or six years ago, I was in a mastermind meetup with this person.

02:21
They were making over million dollars a year from their website and they had no email list. It was all relying on search traffic, paid advertising. That was when you could do Facebook ads and you could get clicks that were less than what you could make on the affiliate revenue. So there was, people were doing that, which was very successful for a period of time. And they had maybe 5,000 people on their email list with a million visitors to the site every month.

02:49
So that actually hasn’t changed all that much. Yes, I’m sure. Because I had a meeting with them. We all got together. I missed this last meeting, but still lot of the guys weren’t doing email because… Actually, I didn’t know the reason why, to be honest with you. They’re getting tons of traffic or they were getting tons of traffic, I should say. But rather than get an email address, they preferred to get the affiliate click. Correct. And they were really good at optimizing for the affiliate revenue. Oh, no. And I remember they would analyze…

03:18
posts and pages to the nth degree to get the absolute most bang for their buck and no shade to any of them. They all made a ton of money and are all very, very successful. So this isn’t about, that was such a dumb idea. Like I thought that was a good idea. I did think at the time I told this person and I still believe this, know, not collecting email or not having that be, you know, one of your main focuses will end up to bite you in the butt. And here we are.

03:48
you know, five years later with that problem. I mean, I agree that to a certain extent, but you still need traffic to get more email subs. So email will just delay the decline. Yeah. Here, but right. If you’re not getting it. Correct. But let’s start with that. So let’s just say you’ve made your living from Google for the past 10 years or even five. I’m seeing this in a lot of the blogger groups that I’m in, the lifestyle blogging groups, especially like the ad groups like the

04:16
Well, it was AdThrive, now it’s called Raptive, but the Mediavine groups, they’re all talking about the declines. And a lot of people are walking away from their blogs because it’s so severe and it’s been like hit after hit after hit. They can’t recover. But these people do have email lists and maybe their list is only 5,000 or 10,000, which is not a small number, right? To me, that would be my first thing that I would do. So if I took a Google hit,

04:44
And actually this happened to me in 2017. I got nailed by Google in 2017 and I never fully recovered from that. But I had an email list. I had some other channels that we’re going to talk about. And that’s when I would start going all in on email to the people that are already on the list. I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying email by itself is not the end all because you need traffic to get email subs. And with every send you are shedding some amount of email. Correct.

05:11
But if you have a list right now, that’s what I would start focusing on is getting that list more engaged because chances are, if you were using Google Azure, know, bread and butter, you probably weren’t doing everything with email that you could be doing to increase revenue from email, increase subscribership by having people share the email. I think our friend Chanel does this really well with her email newsletter and we can talk about that in a minute. And they’re not maximizing every dollar from the people that are already on the list.

05:41
Correct, absolutely. And even in e-commerce land, think search as we know it, my prediction is it’s gonna die in a year. Okay. I mean, those are strong words, but just the way things are going, Google has all the data, but just their cash cow, I can’t think of how they’re gonna incorporate links in with the AI when you can just get the answer. Like already, I have chat GPT on my widget on my phone.

06:11
I don’t even use Google search anymore. I removed the Google search widget because it’s kind of useless. Yes. And what’s really interesting is this just happened to me this morning is, you know, I work almost all day long in Klaviyo and they have an amazing knowledge base. if you can’t figure something out, their knowledge base will walk you through step by step. It’s really great. So whenever I’m not quite sure how to do something and I want to double check my work,

06:36
I just in Google put Clavio and today I was double checking dynamic coupon code. So I was like Clavio dynamic coupon code, right? And Clavio always comes up first in search. just click on it. It’s always right, right? It’s always the right link to everything. So today I do the same thing. It comes up and I start reading through and I get to the bottom of this and it’s just on the search page, right? I’m just reading like the preview. And at the bottom it says, this is AI generated might not be correct.

07:07
of the search and I wasn’t on Klaviyo’s website. I was on AI translating from the web whatever information and it wasn’t 100 % correct because when I was reading it was like, don’t think that’s how, because I’ve done this before. I just wanted a refresher and I was thinking this isn’t exactly what I did before and the code wasn’t right of how you inserted the code into the email.

07:34
Then when I got to the bottom and I looked at it and I was like, wait, is this not Klaviyo? Here’s the other thing, and this is probably coincidental, but the color that it appeared in was Klaviyo’s colors. It was that greenish gray. I don’t know if maybe that’s what everything comes up in when it’s AI and it was just coincidental that it also happened to be Klaviyo’s branding.

07:58
It took me probably three minutes to realize that I wasn’t actually reading anything from Klaviy. I was reading an AI response that wasn’t 100 % correct. know after our last episode, when we talked about Google’s AI overviews, they backed off big time on them. whereas it was like 80 something percent, it backed down to like less than 15 % of queries because they’re fixing it. Anyway, let’s jump to the topic of today’s episode, which is

08:25
Let’s call it alternative Google strategies for traffic. told you the other day that I am doubling down on all things video and social media now, which pains me to even say that. wish we had like the audio video budget to like pull all of your comments from the past six years of, I’ll never do social, get off the hamster wheel, blah, blah, blah. I never said never, but I said I…

08:54
don’t want to do social. I do not If you’re listening right now in your head, get an audio montage of all of Steve’s negative social media comments over the past 10 years. Here’s the good thing though. Now it’s really easy to post something and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Yes. Back in the day, I might use the Jim Wang method now. Jim Wang is our mutual friend and on his walk, it looks like he goes on a He does go on a daily walk. He always has.

09:23
And he just picks up his phone and then just has like an interesting tidbit that he just does on his walk. And that’s just part of his routine. He does it every day. And he’s had a couple of pretty big hits go viral. His one from yesterday is still virally now. We’ve been texting back and forth about it. But here’s what I think is interesting. So if you’re not following him, I think he’s wallet hacks on TikTok. I think it’s wallet hacks. Yeah. He, to me, is someone that you want to emulate on TikTok for ease of creation.

09:53
Now, he will tell you it’s a slog, but he’s also from the SEO camp. So doing anything like this is a slog for people that come from that bucket. But he creates these videos in TikTok directly. I don’t know if you know this. So he actually uses TikTok to film and everything because you can pause it.

10:16
And so he says like two sentences and then he pauses it, thinks about the next two sentences, says it. So he’s not using a teleprompter. He’s not really writing a script. He knows what he wants to talk about. He’s very knowledgeable about the topics that he’s sharing on TikTok. However, it’s very easy to create because there’s no editing afterwards. It’s literally talk, pause, talk, pause. And in doing that, it does break up the video so that it’s more TikTok friendly.

10:44
right with the cuts. Now it’s not the quick cuts like we talk about a lot of people doing with editing. However, it’s enough to me, in my opinion, to keep people on TikTok engaged. The other thing I like about social now is that it’s merit-based. Yes. Back in the day, it was not like that. So if you actually take the time to produce something that’s interesting, it doesn’t really matter how many subs you have, you can actually get a lot of traffic. Oh, yes, for sure. I mean, I should look up his latest video, but…

11:14
He still doesn’t have a lot of subscribers, if I remember correctly. No, he doesn’t. Not at all. Not at all. But you had this same thing happen when you started on TikTok. You had a couple items go very viral when you only had, I don’t know. I had less than 10,000 when I had that 1 million view video go viral. Yeah. And that felt amazing. I actually got a lot of email subs out of that. I think the problem here is you have to be consistent. Yes.

11:45
And by consistent, I think back in the day I was doing three a week. I’ve been trying to do five a week, which is pretty much every business day. And it’s been tough, mainly because just mentally, I know I’m not making any direct money. And it’s hard to correlate the views to actual email subs and money. Although just recently, I’m going to do some experiments. Problem is, is you see someone on TikTok that you like.

12:13
Your instinct isn’t to go to their profile. At least mine isn’t. Mine is to just Google that person and then maybe subscribe or follow them. So it’s hard to You don’t just click the follow button on TikTok? No, I’m talking about if I want to see their website. Oh, if you want to see more. Yeah. Well, I’ve been doing a lot of e-commerce related because that’s where I’m going to focus next. E-commerce related short form video. And typically if I see a product that I like, I’m not going to click on the profile. I’ll just Google whatever that is. Okay.

12:43
and probably buy it. I haven’t bought anything from TikTok directly, but I’m, I’m exploring TikTok shop now. And I’ve been doing a lot of research on it lately. And here’s the problem, especially in e-com land, all these platforms want people to stay on their platform. Which means that you need to use their built-in shopping cart and you need to abide by their rules. So TikTok has some really gargantuan rules where you must

13:11
ship something out within three days. And if you have too many of those and if something goes viral and you run out of stock, you could just get banned permanently. And so what people have been resorting to is shipping empty boxes if they run I did not know this. With a note that says, hey, we’re out of stock, but we’re going to get your order in real soon. Interesting. here’s a coupon code or whatever. Here’s mail fraud for you.

13:39
Yeah, so all these platforms are forcing people to stay on. So I looked up Jim because I wanted to get his TikTok, if you want to follow him, his best wallet hacks, but his video. So he’s got 6,000 followers basically. And I will tell you guys, I think he would be okay with this. He did boost his stuff to gain followers. So he did run some ads to get more followers, which I don’t think is a bad idea if you have a strategy behind it.

14:05
But his video that he posted a couple of days ago that went viral, know, at 5,000 or 6,000 followers has 295,000 views. So when we talk about the ability to reach more people, and it’d be interesting, and obviously he would have to tell us this, but you know, how many people did he have before that video went viral? And then how many followers does he have today? it, cause you got a lot of follower boost from the virality of those videos. So.

14:31
That is the nice thing, especially about TikTok is when you have something go viral, you will gain followers from it. I actually noticed this as well with YouTube shorts. When we did our video challenge, when I posted, I had a couple of videos go viral on YouTube shorts, not anywhere to this extent. And I gained 20 to 30 followers.

14:55
in that period of time versus on the next day when the video just did its normal amount and I maybe gained two followers.

15:25
all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

15:44
See, I think followers don’t matter at all anymore, which is kind of nice. It’s more of like a vanity metric. I think it sometimes matters in that it can, like if you have a lot of followers, then everything you put out is going to do fairly well, percentage-wise. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna have more viral content. Yeah, I think you’re correct. It establishes the base. So if I produce like a YouTube video now, even if it’s like the worst thing I’ve ever produced in my life, it’ll probably get 2,000 views. Okay. Right?

16:13
in its lifetime. When I published my book launch one or how to write a book, that was the worst performing video I’ve ever done in the last, I don’t know, two years or something like that. But it’s still got almost 2,000 views. Yes, so you’re still going to reach people. I would say if you’re going to jump on the TikTok train or any of the short form video trains, before you start creating this content, you have to have some sort of strategy behind it.

16:42
Are you going, is your main call to action going to be to subscribe to your channel, to subscribe to your email list? Is there going to be a product? Are you trying to get people on a webinar? You need to have that in mind because one of the reasons why I think Jim has done really well is because his content is all very focused on one thing, right? In the personal finance space. what Jim’s angle is, is…

17:08
He’s explaining it in a way that the lay person can figure it out. And I think his tagline is, I’ll make you sound smarter to all your friends or something like that. He’s got a great intro line, but that’s what he does. I’m kind of addicted to his content because he talked about the banking collapse, the, what is it, synapsis or something? Synapsis. Yeah.

17:30
It’s not a bank. It’s something else. Fintech. And like the way he said it, I was like, oh, this is sort of makes sense to me now where I would have had no clue about anything. So that’s what he does. So like figure out what your angle is. I mean, for you, and I’m not saying this is your angle, but you know, if you wanted to do something with e-commerce, could make it, you know, break it down and make it easier for people, or you could take it and do really, you know.

17:55
complicated and like tech heavy information, right? You could, if you find that angle, then you can attract the right crowd and get the algorithm working in your favor. And then when you try to sell something to these people or get, want people to subscribe or some taken action, you have the right people that are seeing the content. Here’s a quick tip that for some reason I stopped doing for a while, but I remember when I first started out by just adding the last line, follow me for quick and dirty e-commerce tips.

18:23
actually increased my follower count dramatically percentage-wise based on the number of views. What is a dirty e-commerce tip? You’re to have to watch the video to find out. Short form video, think is what we’ve seen people start investing in as far as their time and resources. I think probably a much harder thing to do, but a better payoff is long form video.

18:51
Correct. I’m doubling down on long form video. In fact, I’m so glad that I started that channel. What has it been like four and a Well, we’re not going to argue it because we argued it on another one and it’s been four years. Yeah, it’s been four. Yeah, I started in during the pandemic and thank God because it’s really hard to fake video. Whereas like with the written word, you can just hire a bunch of writers and you can use AI to just pump out a bunch of stuff. Although arguably you can use AI to punch out

19:21
pump out a bunch of videos on YouTube now also, which apparently is working well for several people. For my purposes though, I’m trying to create a personal brand. and philosophically, I think those AI generated videos are not worth as much. Because if anyone can do it, you’re building an audience of what? You’re building an audience of a robot or just, like the audience isn’t as valuable to me.

19:50
Well, think especially, I mean, if we wanna take this to the furthest level, let’s say you’re building a YouTube channel and at some point you want to sell it as part of selling your website, selling your email list, selling the channel, things like that. If you have an AI generated content on your YouTube channel, it’s probably not going to be as valuable as, I watch a lot of like DIY tutorials and things like that. I’m sure a lot of that content could be created with AI, but

20:19
when you have that other connection with people, it’s pretty valuable. It doesn’t even have to be like someone’s face. It can just be like the style or the types of videos that people are creating where AI can just be duplicated all day long. I was actually thinking the opposite. If you had an AI channel, it be easier to sell. I don’t think it’s as valuable. Easy to sell, yes. But as valuable, no. You know, was watching one of Gary V’s recordings the other day and he’s predicting that

20:48
AI influencers will be a big thing in two to three years. Interesting. Where literally people are just creating these artificial influencers with big accounts. And apparently it works because I think it’s been happening in Japan for quite a while now. This was talked about in my Seller Summit mastermind. Oh, was it? And what did say? Well, basically these people, and it’s all happening in Asia already right now. And I think it’s also happening in China on the Chinese version of TikTok, which isn’t that our version, but whatever.

21:17
But basically they have AI influencers who it’s all AI and they go live for like 16 hours, right? But it’s not really them and it’s generating all sorts of views and sales and it’s all AI created. I mean, it’s already a thing. Yeah, it’s already a thing in Asia. So maybe we’re all destined to be doomed. I don’t know. Well, because during the mastermind, couple people were like, that’s not true, that’s not real. And then it got

21:46
We pulled it up and sure enough, these people were on for 16 hours and the guy’s actually taking a nap and eating a bag of Doritos in the background. It’s crazy. I think if the AI content is fun and engaging, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work and if you could program a personality in and the person’s attractive or guaranteed to be attractive, right? Because it’s AI. Guarantee attractive level.

22:17
So, I mean, for now though, I think having your face on a long form video, if you’re trying to build a brand and an audience is probably the way to go. Or having your voice. mean, I think your face is great, but I do think if you’re teaching people how to do stuff, like with cooking videos and things like that, you don’t necessarily need to show your face. So here’s the thing with AI, like the 11 labs work super well. Especially if you have a lot of training data.

22:46
It actually even gets the intonations right now. Interesting. I’ve actually considered just using that tool to just pump out just kind of voiceovers too for a different channel. Are you going to have a voiceover where your mouth is moving but it’s not synced up? No, no. My face isn’t in it. It’s just a bunch of B-roll with narrations of little… It’s just an experiment really.

23:13
on one of the channels because that saves a lot of time. Oh, for sure. Yes. Because one of my other friends actually has a company where they automatically take a script and put together B-roll. Yes. Okay. That makes sense. That’s where the experiment comes in. Anyways, back to the topic. I think YouTube is my number one now. Whereas it used to be the blog actually. I think that’s a very

23:44
smart route for people. they’re, know, Google searches tanked their website, bite the bullet and start making that long form video. And if you’ve been a blogger for five years, 10 years, 15 years, you have an entire encyclopedia amount of content on your website already to pull from to make video. So it’s not like,

24:07
you’re starting from zero, you have an archive of content that you can probably massage in some way to make that video content. So it’s, I feel like it’s less overwhelming because a lot of people I think start with, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to talk about, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so I think, you know, this is something that where Google has hit you and you’re struggling. This is, this would be my like turn to this and start immediately.

24:33
And I think if you’re an e-commerce, I short form is, is where it’s at. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on short form for e-comm trying to come up with a low energy strategy. a lot of these videos that do well are literally just photos or videos of people just fulfilling orders or, or they find an order that’s interesting and they just write a little caption. right now what’s working a lot is POV captions.

25:02
Point of view, you’re looking for the best gift for your girlfriend, but you can’t think of anything. Stupid things like that are doing really well and you just show off your product. Things like that you can do pretty easily for an e-commerce store. Yes, you don’t need to be standing there like a QVC talking about the product. Right. These don’t have to be long clips. We’re talking like five seconds. Yes, just crazy. The bar is so low.

25:30
The bar is really low and that’s how people shop these days. So I actually literally spoke to my wife yesterday about this. was like, how do you feel about taking transactions, you know, on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok fulfillment? I would have to write something up to integrate everything since I’m not on like a Shopify, but the fulfillment would be the same.

25:57
It’d be just like having multiple Amazons in a way. Is that where the world’s going? then hopefully you’ll get, is you don’t get their information either on these platforms. Correct. And you know what’s so interesting about all of this, because this is another traffic channel that we’re going to talk about, but Pinterest tried to do this like 10 years ago. Remember when they came out with, I think they were initially called viable pins. And I want to say this was like 2014, 2015. mean, this was…

26:26
a very long time ago and it bombed. They just could not get any, mean think they kept it for several years but they finally sunsetted it and now they have a different program. But they just couldn’t get people to, and the whole benefit was everything happens on Pinterest. They see your product, they buy it, it’s all nice and sanitized and people just were like, nope, not doing it. But nowadays,

26:53
Like I want to buy it on TikTok. I don’t want to have to go like every time it takes me off somewhere and like I have to go to a store and I don’t know anything about the store and then like my information isn’t pre-filled and all that stuff. I’m immediately like, yeah, I’ll wait for them to send me the abandoned cart emails. Like I don’t want to deal with it anymore. The TikTok experience is really good. It’s very good. went through the video still playing. Yes. And you’ve like already ordered 10, whatever it is.

27:21
It’s a little dangerous. Like I don’t like to go on TikTok at night anymore for that reason because I’ve ordered stuff and I’m like this might I might have some buyer’s remorse. And every platform is going to have one of these. Yes. Pretty soon. Yeah. Right. If I mean, they already do to a certain extent, but they’re going to copy TikTok’s model. Yes. And TikTok does integrate with Shopify. You don’t get the customer information.

27:44
which is very, except for their email addresses show up in Klaviyo. So your number of emails actually shows up and it’s like some garbled address that you can’t email. It’s just like Amazon. Yeah. So anyway, it’s kind of a pain, but it doesn’t count towards your subscriber count. So it’s not penalizing you like monetarily, which is nice. But yeah, feel, yeah.

28:11
I think we had a couple of talks on TikTok at Seller Summit. Tiffany broke down how it works from the seller point of view. It’s got a lot of negatives, however, I know she shared her revenue. She’s doing like half a million dollars a month on TikTok Shop. This nuts. So it’s something I think if you are an e-commerce store, you should probably at least give it a very serious consideration. I mean, this might be the future of shopping.

28:41
I think it might be. And if you have a brand that is, so let’s just talk about search, right? Like, so you have a brand, no one’s really heard of it. You’re not a household name. You’re not Yeti. You’re not Nike. You know, you’re not something everyone’s heard of. People are searching for a very specific thing. Like they’re searching for a leather belt, let’s just say, and they land on your site because you’ve rocked it out with like, you know, long form, you know, long tail search words and they get to your site and it’s like,

29:09
I’ve never heard of this brand. I’ve never heard of this. You know, there’s all these factors that go involved that, that changed people’s mind about making a purchase and you can do everything right. You can have the reviews, you can have the little, you know, phone number at the bottom and all the things that we recommend people to do. But the reality is if they came to you by Google search and they don’t know anything about your brand, the conversions harder. But if you’re on TikTok and you see, you know, two or three of the people you follow talking about this belt,

29:37
And then all of a sudden the belt shows up in your feed as either an ad or the TikTok shop or whatever. there’s 5,000 comments and 70,000, you get all this data along with the post, because you can see all that on TikTok. And then the next thing you know, you’ve clicked, in your cart, your credit card’s already saved and you’ve bought it. And so the path to purchase for people is just so smooth.

30:01
and it removes a lot of those barriers. In return, you don’t have the customer where you would have had it on your own site, but the ease of people buying, your conversion rate’s probably significantly higher from people who come from the referral process. I mean, it’s basically another Amazon. Another Amazon for all these platforms. So I guess, sure, you’re beholden to these platforms, but I guess if you’re beholden to multiple platforms, that’s diversifying. Well, yeah, you’re beholden.

30:31
But you’re already beholden to Amazon. You are correct. That’s what I’m saying. It’s just like Amazon. Whereas with your site, at least you’re getting a phone number and an email. So I think they all kind of work together in a way. mean, this is where the world’s going. So I don’t even remember what my wife said, actually. She was like, I’m not making TikTok, Steve. That’s what she said. Well, here’s what we’re doing with our store now. I just created a Dropbox folder.

31:00
and I just told them every single day, just film two videos. They can just be five or 10 seconds, just whatever you’re doing that’s even remotely interesting. Or if someone buys a personalized hanky or if you have a pile of orders sitting on the table, just make a quick video and then I’m gonna hire a social media manager to just put little captions on it and post. So what are you gonna do when all their videos are like in the break room, standing outside smoking a cigarette, eating lunch?

31:29
There’s actually a lot of material for our stuff because people put some of the funniest captions. OK, but that’s the thing. Like when you were talking, I was like, why do you not just have a live feed of the embroidery machine? Like people watch that kind of stuff all the time. You know, that’s funny. Yeah. You know what I mean? Right. I mean, how many people waited for that giraffe to be born? It was like two days of like watching a giraffe walk around a pin.

31:55
People would love to watch a little t-t-t-t-t. That’s very engaging. That might even work for just people just bystander. Yes. They see it being stitched. Yes. I know you’ve convinced everyone that Jen’s in the back room hand sewing everybody’s handkerchief as the order comes in, but sometime the truth’s got to come out. I’m just trying to think whether my employees would like that. It’s a camera basically, not necessarily on them, but No, just on the stitching.

32:22
The other thing I was thinking is you have that new fancy printer with the press and all those things. Yes. Like to me, the process of like making the print, I don’t know what’s what the official term is, but that sort of content would be really like people would watch that. Because I watch all the time, people fill candles and, know, any manufacturing of a product people watch. That’s like that’s good live material. Yeah.

32:51
I could do that actually. People would watch this maybe doing that stuff. It’s kind of boring. People watch a lot of boring stuff online. Yes, I know. Who was it that I just talked to the other day? Basically, they just put up a camera of them just copywriting. No, that’s boring. I don’t know if I would write that, but yes.

33:16
But people tune in? Yeah, no. Sometimes they just leave it on the background for 30 minutes. Okay. mean, did you want to talk about Pinterest? Yeah, I was going to talk about Pinterest. mean, Pinterest is not dead. It’s growing. Their numbers are growing. Their younger users are growing, right? They’re teen and 20s. I don’t know what that was, that Generation Z. I don’t even know.

33:44
They’re growing. I just know I’m not getting. Yes, you’re not. You’re not. Their users are growing and people still use it as a visual search engine. It’s not dead. We talked about this a couple of podcasts ago. As Google gets worse and worse, think Pinterest will capitalize on some of that as far as people searching for things that have a visual component to it. They’re not going to use Pinterest to find out how to add a dynamic coupon code in Klaviyo. That’s not going to be what Pinterest ever is.

34:13
but they are going to look for best hotels in Croatia or travel outfits for the spring or chicken noodle soup in the Instapot. I think Pinterest is gonna continue to pull from the Google searchers to get a bigger market share for the search platform. And it works, people do still use Pinterest. I still get traffic from Pinterest, I know a lot of people do, but it’s like everything else, you have to continually be.

34:42
working on your account.

34:45
I find Pinterest a little overwhelming. It is, it is. Like I do a search and I actually prefer text actually when a search result comes up because I’ve been disappointed before, I guess that happens at Google too, where like the image isn’t that great or it’s fantastic and you click on it and it’s crap. It’s garbage underneath. And what turned me off about Pinterest for the longest time was the fact that like the strategies that you were teaching

35:15
was you pin the same thing, just switch up the images, right? I don’t want to click on Pinterest and find the same stuff. I don’t think you’re going to get the same content in. I don’t think when you do a search, you’re going to get five of the exact same URLs in the search results because the images are different. I have not seen that. Doesn’t mean that it’s not happening because I only have my own experiences.

35:43
But I mean, think it still works if you are pinning, if you are putting your content out there, it still works. It’s still a tool, lots of people, I don’t even know what the numbers are, but it’s growing. And I wouldn’t give up on it. And that’s something, it’s like one of those things too, where you were talking about having a VA do your social, like take the video content. Like you can completely outsource your Pinterest. You never need to do anything with it, right? It’s not like YouTube videos where you probably need to have some sort of involvement, whether you’re the one making the videos or editing them.

36:12
I mean, Pinterest is something where you can completely hire an agency, someone overseas, someone on your team, a kid to handle for you at a very low cost with some sort of return. I’m just curious, what’s up with the Pinterest Merchant Center stuff? I don’t have any experience with that. I actually, don’t know anybody who’s using it. So I have had, you know, I don’t have any like information, but I’m curious to see if that because,

36:41
They failed with the Bible pens. Now is this going to become the next TikTok shop? Are they going to be competing in that area? Probably. It’s funny. I have my ears and head down in the e-commerce space. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about it. Because I think people got excited about it 10 years ago, and then everyone saw poor results and got disillusioned and were like, forget it, I’m not messing with it anymore.

37:10
By the way, I was just checking my Pinterest account. So I’ve been auto posting my shorts onto the Pinterest platform. So it looks like I am getting around between 15 to 30 views per video. That’s not bad considering what you’re talking about. just auto posting. Yeah. So here’s the other thing. Pinterest used to be all just images, right? And now it’s a much bigger video component. But the cool thing about it, and I think we did an office hours on this and we might have talked about it on a podcast.

37:39
you can take that TikTok content. I’ve been telling Jim, put all that on Pinterest. Like take the TikTok content, take the Instagram reels, take the YouTube shorts, whatever you’re doing and put that on Pinterest, uploading it as the short form video. It does perform better. When I’ve done, I’ve done a lot of tests. did a ton of tests with this in, I think it was April where I would try a static image with the blog post and then a short form video linking to the same blog post, the short form video performed better.

38:07
I wanna say like 90 % of the time. So if you’re already creating that short form video, this is something that you just have your VA or set aside 30 minutes a week and just upload schedule amount. You can schedule right on Pinterest, you don’t have to pay for anything. And I think that is something that you should also be doing. It’s just like you’re already creating the content, put it out there. Yeah, I mean, that’s why I love the repurpose.io so much.

38:36
It’s pretty much hands off. Like I only just publish on, on tick tock and then everything just gets magically uploaded and remove the watermark. Yes. So I don’t know where this world’s going though. Yeah. Uh, I think video is, the hardest thing to copy. Yeah. And video conveys both your tone, your persona. And I think it’s, I think.

39:04
video is where we all need to be going forward. I agree. And I think, you know, we talked about this at the very beginning, but if you do have an email list that you started with, you know, that you collected over the years haphazardly and didn’t have a true strategy, this is the time to like revive that list. Start emailing people, start figuring out, you know, up the email sends that you’re doing, giving them interesting content, you know, encouraging them to follow you on other channels, all the, you know, giving content directly in the email.

39:33
just try everything because you probably already have some sort of list. so, you know, making sure that list stays really active. And then, you know, we talked about Chanel earlier, but you know, she has an offering in her email newsletter that when you share her email with like 10 people, if you bring in 10 subscribers, there’s some sort of benefit to you. I can’t remember what it is, but like you can do incentive based content in your emails as well. So,

40:01
Don’t forget about that because you probably already have some things. Like maybe you have a Pinterest account that you haven’t used for a while or maybe you have an old YouTube account, right? You might be able to go in and revive some things to get you a little bit of a head start rather than just feeling like you have to start from zero.

40:19
That incentive system’s interesting. Do you have any specifics? I would have to pull up. Let me pull it up really quick since we’re on. Because I know the hustle had something similar. Who did? So if you were the hustle. Oh, yes. OK. This is back in the day before Sam sold it. But he had a system where if you referred someone to the hustle, you got points. And then he would give out like swag. OK. like that if you reach a certain number of points. mean, people like the.

40:48
When we do points in our course, right? And people love that incentive based, the gamification, whatever you wanna call it, people just really like it. I think if, okay, if you refer to 10 friends, and this is actually perfect for the brand that Chanel is building with, because her thing is all based on building a business, email marketing, refer 10 friends and you get a shout out in her newsletter. So if you have another business that’s like a SaaS product or a marketing product or.

41:17
you know, anything coaching, all that stuff. mean, referring 10 people, we probably referred 30 people to her newsletter at this point, just from talking about it. Um, and her newsletter’s got a ton of subscribers. want to say 30, 40,000. How she tracks referrals. There must be a plugin for it. There’s a special link. Um, it’s spark LP.co is the beginning of the link. Spark loop. Okay. Yes. Actually Nathan Barry owns that. Okay. Well, I think she’s on convert kit. So that makes sense.

41:46
Anyway, but yeah, incentivize people to share your newsletter. Yeah, just think there’s so many, obviously Google search was a foundation for many people, but there are other things you can be doing today. I know it’s frustrating and probably a little bit discouraging to see like something you’ve built over a decade or more to sort of crumble in two, three months, right? But.

42:11
there’s a lot out there that’s still working and still available. And I think as long as you continue to provide like amazing content, be your authentic self, work in your zone, don’t try to be somebody you’re not, you’ll see success.

42:27
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now the shift is coming and when things change, they are going to change fast. So be prepared. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 543. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.