382: Post-Pandemic Business Strategies To Focus On In 2022 With Andrew Youderian

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have a very special guest, Andrew Udarian. And if you don’t know Andrew, he runs the Ecommerce Fuel podcast and a community of seven and eight figure ecommerce entrepreneurs. That’s actually one of the few podcasts that I actually listen to. And if you want to learn more about ecommerce, then check it out over at ecommercefuel.com. Today’s episode is about strategy.

00:27
Specifically, Andrew and I are gonna discuss what we are double downing on for our businesses in 2022 and beyond. But before I begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10X bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email.

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It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Claviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories, do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies, well.

01:25
They do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo helps you with your own growth,

01:54
visit claviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And finally, I wanted to mention a podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:30
Andrew Euderian. How are things going? It’s been a while. Good. It’s been a while. It’s good to to chat with you, man. Although I got to say you look a little sweaty over there on the other side of the, as Eric Bandholz would say, the interwebs. I just got back from my tennis lesson and I talked a little trash to my instructor. I had a really good game against my friend over the weekend where I crushed her and I got really cocky. So I told my instructor, hey, let’s play today. Let’s play today and don’t hold back.

03:00
And I actually started out really well. Cause I, you know, to be honest with you, I think I’m in better shape than he is. He’s, he’s a much better player, but like I can run faster. So I wanted the first couple points and then I started talking trash. I was like, yeah, get that shh. Oh, we don’t cuss on this podcast, but I said, get that shoot out of here. And then I started giving them the double guns and everything and then he got pissed.

03:22
This is your coach, right? Like he- coach, yes. We’re friends makes you think, well sure, sure, but he’s someone you’re, you know, were knowing you, you are not someone that would submit yourself to coaching unless someone was much better than you, you know, like any, any coach, right? Like you want it, they should be better than you. So what made you think you could just wall up your coach? The thing is I’m faster than he is. But speed doesn’t matter, apparently, if you’re not, if you don’t have the skills. Oh man.

03:52
I don’t know. So my goal is to just be able to take a game off of them. But after I started talking trash, I don’t think I won many more points after that. Yeah, you said you just stopped keeping score, which is, is anyway, I said, how badly do you get beat? You’re like, here’s how bad he won two points with in between the leg shots. Oh, wow. And he didn’t even have to say he just chuckled after he won those points.

04:20
You sure you’re faster than he is? I mean, you gotta have a decent amount of speed and like flexibility to be able to, you know, do an in-between backward shot. I was running back and forth, back and forth, and he was just standing still most of the game. Could I get his contact details? Would you mind just connecting me with him? think I might. We’re not here to talk about tennis today. You can make fun of me all you want. I get some video of this. That would be wonderful. I would be able to put that to use in many places over the coming year. But we are going to talk about business.

04:50
and what we are doubling down on. And me and you, I think we have different strategies, right? About what’s going on. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is actually really timely. have been apart from podcasting, I’ve been really bad at content the last couple of years for a of reasons, but just haven’t done as good. One thing I’ve always, and I’m gonna give you a rare compliment in public here, which is, know, given our little frenemy feud rarely do, but you, I’ve always been impressed that you do a really good job of consistently like,

05:18
blog post every single week, like bam bam bam bam. You put a lot of great content and I would love to get back to being more consistent on that. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that, but I feel like it’s changed. I like the landscape has changed significantly in the last two to four years. Yeah, so I think it’d be, and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how I want to try to, where I want to spend my time, which I think you have as well. So it should be a fun episode. Yeah, I don’t know how you want to start this. I mean, I guess I can start by saying what I’m not focusing on much.

05:45
Why would you be willing to start? Because I have a couple themes that are like informing all of my decisions on this. Do you have any thoughts? Like how do you think what’s maybe we can start with saying what’s changed for you or what have you noticed in the broader macro perspective and marketing online that has changed that’s making you kind of, you know, informing how you’re laying your strategy for content. And I’ve got some stuff from Thoughtstar as well. Yeah, well, let me tell you, I’m going to start by saying like, I never learned my lesson.

06:14
So let me elaborate on that. Back in the day, and I’m just gonna pick on Facebook for a minute here, I spent all this time building up my Facebook page, and then they took away the reach. And then the next thing that happened was Facebook Groups. I was like, oh, okay, the reach was much better on Groups. So I started a Facebook group and grew it to, I think, like 20,000 people, and then they took away the reach there too. And then there was Facebook Messenger. I jumped on the bandwagon for Facebook Messenger, made a lot of money off of Facebook Messenger for the last couple years.

06:42
And then they made it pay to play and a lot harder to get reach. And then that audience kind of disappeared. I keep falling into this trap of spending a lot of money and time on social media. then it gets taken away from me. And I feel like with Apple iOS 14 and 15 now with email, like Facebook is, like the advertising is much harder now. So I think I’m finally gonna learn my lesson and focus on things that I own more.

07:12
Yeah, I love the, this is not a plug for Klaviyo, given they’re a sponsor, but I love the owned marketing. I really wish I’d come up with that theme, because I think that’s super, yeah, I think it’s just gonna get more more important. The things that I’ve been thinking about are like, what are my unique advantages? How can I play in a way that other people can’t? When I think about that, I think I enjoy talking to people, I enjoy the podcast medium. I have a, in terms of kind of running the ECF community with the great team that I.

07:40
that we’ve got have access and have perspective on a lot of different e-commerce sellers, have an ability to like put some proprietary data together on that. So that’s one thing I’m thinking about, you know, making a better use of that platform. I think in-person is really important. Coming out of COVID, people want to get together. Relationships are always super powerful when I think about, I mean, I don’t have to go off on this. think anyone who is in business knows how.

08:06
super important and valuable relationships are. And so that’s something that you can’t, know, that Facebook and Google can’t really steal from you. The other thing that is a theme is I think brevity, I’ve always thought brevity despite the length of this answer has been something I really value and appreciate in other people. And I think that’s only increasing. Like people’s attention span is shrinking. When I think about blogs, I have not, I don’t go out five years ago, I might used to go out and read, sit down and spend.

08:34
10, 20, 30 minutes reading a blog. I don’t do that anymore. Much more of what I do today is much more like I need an answer to a question, how do I go get that information and the answer in as time efficient of a manner as possible. There are very small handful of blogs that I read, but very few. And so I think other people are like that too. think that how long your message is from a contra perspective needs short form, I think it’s going to do better going forward. I think it’s just…

09:00
depends on the nature of what you’re trying to research. Like I still read long blog posts if I’m trying to really get to know a subject. But I like what you said, like you had to focus on your strengths and I’m gonna give you a rare compliment here. Good Lord, what type of podcast is this? Like your strength, and I remember this when I first met you, is that you have a really good way with people. So like everyone who meets you, and I’ve been told this by many people, thinks…

09:27
think that you’re like the nicest guy that they’ve ever met. Have you ever heard that before? I have. I don’t think they know me very well. they hung out with me two or three times, they would probably change their mind. So but yeah, so it’s a skill that you should leverage. And I think events like the community, like you’re really good at building community. I mean, that’s definitely one of your strengths is definitely not one of my strengths. So yeah, doubling down on what you’re good at is always a good thing. Yeah, well, thanks, man. I appreciate it.

09:56
We’ll have to cut that part out. Like note to the editor, please cut that last segment. There was a counterpunch there. There was a joke. was thinking about queuing up at your expense. I was like, dude, I can’t hit him when he’s being so nice to me. What is happening to our relationship, Up is down, down is up. This is not normal. For people who haven’t listened to you long, a lot of you know this, but at ECF Live, I made a couple of jokes at Steve’s expense. He does the same at his conference to me.

10:22
And when we got up on stage to actually do like the Q and A for all the speakers at once, the number one question people submitted that got upvoted was why does Andrew hate Steve Chu? Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, this is, know, the universe is bending here. But anyway, we should, enough of the niceties. So what do you, like, what are you doubling down on? What are you focusing on from, especially from a content perspective, you know, kind of going forward? So let’s riff on what you just said, right? People’s attention spans are getting shorter. That is 100 % true.

10:50
So I actually, I actually haven’t told anyone publicly this, but people know I started a TikTok channel. we know Steve, we have seen the dances, the dad dances. Well, I mean, I took 12 months with the dance lessons just so I could start it. So I’m not going to let that money go to waste, right? Steve, I can tell you from seeing the dancing, you wasted the money. I’m sorry. Oh yeah. Well, what about that 50,000 subs, huh?

11:17
Say otherwise, that’s pretty good. Actually, I know I saw that that’s that’s impressive. So within actually, I would say six weeks, I hit like 20,000. And then I think I’ve been doing it for like seven months now. And I’m at like 50 something thousand, it’s actually really easy to build a following there. And I’ve been interviewing a lot of people on the podcast, e commerce brands that have been killing it on tik tok. So you know how things go in waves, like, you know how I talked about like, my journey with Facebook, I think

11:46
My philosophy now is a little bit different. I think you have to kind of catch the wave on certain things and just ride it for as long as they last. And I think TikTok is just really hot now. Who knows? Once it becomes saturated, maybe it’s not going to be the same. Maybe it’s going to take Facebook’s path. But right now it’s pretty easy to build a following on there. Yeah, I think there’s, I think there’s, I’m surprised we don’t have a word, you know, like growth hackers and things like that, all these, these totally overused words. I’m there’s not a field dedicated to just leveraging emerging technologies for marketing. And I think the people who are smart,

12:15
use it as a way to be able to build up your core community list, audience, whatever it is, customer base, but they don’t bank on it they have a model that’s more sustainable underneath it. What I’m curious on the TikTok side, because I have heard, yeah, I’ve chatted with a handful of people too that have seen real success with it. One actually person that is speaking slash spoke, well, this will probably air after it, at our regional event in Austin, built an entire business to a million dollars in about a year off of TikTok. How…

12:43
But I’ve also heard people say it’s really hard, it’s been really spotty, they haven’t seen a lot of traction on it. So have you seen, you’ve got the audience up, do the awesome dance moves, which is great. But do you actually see that translating into like email subscribers, people signing up for your course, people buying your handkerchiefs, things like that? You do. So here’s what’s surprising. And when I think of TikTok, it’s not like you overly advertise anything, you just entertain people. And when it comes to e-commerce, for example, if they wanna find you, they’ll just Google you.

13:12
Right? Or they’ll click the link in the bio, but more often than not, they’ll just Google and find you. Like it’s not hard to find someone from social media. And I suspect this is the case. I don’t know if it’s a hundred percent true, but if you like mention a URL or displayed on the screen, I think they detect that and nerf your reach. Like there’s been a handful of TikToks where I just experimented with that and none of those ever do well. Like they’re the worst performing ones and people want authenticity, right? It doesn’t even have to be complicated. It could just be like,

13:42
giving them a warehouse tour or something like that. People are interested. Yeah, interesting. So are you, how often are you publishing? Are you doing every day? I started out doing twice a day. Like in the beginning. And that’s not a pace I can sustain. So I’m now down to three times a week. I have a nice system now where I actually don’t use the TikTok app to edit. What I do is I just record something on my phone, throw it overboard to my editor, and then she edits it.

14:10
And we can talk about repurposing content here, but she’ll edit it and I’ll post it on TikTok. And then if it falls within 30 seconds, I’ll post it on Instagram reels, which is what Instagram is making you do right now. And then occasionally I’ll try YouTube shorts. I’m actually thinking about putting my YouTube shorts on a completely different channel altogether. Cause I don’t want it to accidentally ruin my existing channel. I haven’t heard of YouTube shorts. I mean, can guess the image. Why, do you need a separate? It’s why do you need a separate platform for shorts versus just YouTube?

14:39
So shorts, like every platform is promoting their short form video right now. And in the event that you attract a lot of subscribers that are just interested in your short form content, like let’s say I really did a dance video, right? And I attracted like 100,000 people who liked that dance video. Well, those people aren’t gonna be interested in e-commerce. And so those subscribers might actually hurt my channel, right? So if I’m gonna do shorts and.

15:07
And oftentimes when I do these TikToks, sometimes they veer off a little bit more random, right? I try to stick to the e-commerce theme, but sometimes it’s more random. I don’t want those people hurting my channel on YouTube. Yeah, that makes sense. And how long does it take? Last question on TikTok and then we can move on to other stuff. how long, when you’re doing it three times a week, how much time are you investing? Because obviously it’s all that’s on the phone. The production value is intended to be not, this isn’t Hollywood production.

15:34
Is it, is it pretty, are you, do have a pretty good flow down for being able to crank these things out? I can do one in like 10 minutes. Okay. Yeah. But mainly the reason why is because I have a blog of like 600 posts that I can just take a piece off of and turn into a tick tock. Right. Right. If I were coming up with things from scratch, it might take me a little bit longer, but it’s really easy to just pick up your phone and do something I made. So I’m trying to convince my wife to do tick tocks for bumblebee linens.

16:04
Like I had the whole strategy in my head. I just can’t necessarily be the one to deliver it, you know, cause I’m a Asian dude. Hacking handkerchiefs wouldn’t work as well. But maybe we’ll get someone to do them. It’s almost like, yeah. Did you say hacking and handkerchiefs? Is that what you said? No, no, no. I like hocking handkerchiefs is what I said. I know. I know. I’m just giving a hard time. Yeah. Yeah. You just pick up your phone. It doesn’t have to be professional. That’s the beauty of it. You can just pump these out.

16:33
Like if I, I might make it more of a priority actually going forward because I can do them quickly, but I just have a lot of other things going on which I have to prioritize and we’re going to get into some of these other things too. Cause cause you’re getting into them also. Yeah. Cool. So tick tocks one, my first one I’m doubling down on is, I kind of did a podcast previously on this the last couple of months with our new director of events, Audrey Smith, but his events like we’re, I mean, normally we’ve done.

17:00
one event per year, one meaningful event per year. this, in October of this year, we’re do two meaningful ones and next 2022, we’ll probably do, probably close to 10 major events between ECF Live and regional meetups and like adventure trips and stuff like that for our members. yeah. And the reason is like, I think when I look at our most powerful source of…

17:28
referrals to the business and also just value created for our members. It’s always in in-person stuff. Like that’s where people connect the most. It’s where they learn the most for their business. It’s also like word of mouth recommendations is a huge driver for our community. It’s also a great vetting way. Like if there’s someone who’s a great member and they refer someone, we trust them. Then, you by proxy, it makes a lot easier to vet that new member. Yeah. And so just events are really powerful. I also think coming out of COVID, like people are

17:57
Especially on the interesting to talk, we don’t know if we want to go to inside baseball with event planning, given not a whole lot of people listening this podcast are event planners. But you and I both do this, Steve, you have a conference as well. And, like we just signed the contract for our, our car, our event, ECF live this year in Norfolk. And it was a, it was a, it was rough this year with all the COVID stuff and contingency planning. And I think there’s, you know, and also even just think how do you do an event with all the different opinions about COVID and safety issues? Anyway, there’s a big barrier to entry right now.

18:25
But I people really want to get back together. And so I think for people who are willing to kind of brave those super choppy waters now to get a jump on that, I think there’s an advantage to be have. So anyway, long answer. I remember this conversation, but I think the year after, the first year I did Seller Summit, I had a talk with you about just running events. And I remember like our both sentiment was like, why the heck are we doing this? Why the heck are we this? Like, it’s not a whole lot of profit and it’s a ton of work. So for you, it?

18:54
Presumably you’re gonna make a profit off of this also, but I mean are there better ways to I guess you’re thinking longer term, right? This is better for the community as opposed to your profit Yeah, 100 % if we didn’t have a community of of merchants and that wasn’t the court, know the core part of our business then I would not be in the event business like Do we make money on a PNL from from the events that we do? know, you see off live and stuff we do but when you take into account the vast amount of time and energy and stress and work that goes into and the risk you take like

19:24
I mean, we just signed a contract for ECF Live and if we have to cancel the event, we’re on the hook for a significant amount of money. And with COVID, I thought it’d be easier to negotiate, but it wasn’t. Anyway, so you do make money, but there’s a lot of risk you take there. And the amount of time you put into it, no, it’s not a profitable enterprise. If we didn’t have a community that the event was really crucial and important for strengthening and building trust and connections, I would not be in

19:56
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

20:24
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

20:54
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. And there’s something that you said that was actually really important that I want the listeners to hear is that the barriers to entry are a lot higher. I think in my experience, like the harder it is for to do something, the better off you’re at in the end, if you’re willing to kind of brave through it. Totally. Like for example, never in a million years would I hire an event person and throw like

21:24
would you say 10 events a year? Yeah, it’ll be probably back to me. I would say the barriers to entry for that are pretty darn high for someone, right? Like, we’re not going to just wake up one day ago, okay, I’m gonna I’m gonna launch 10 events in a year. Yeah, I mean, it takes it takes lower. I mean, there’s crazy to do that. I really like the saying if you don’t have a hard part to your business, you don’t have a business right? Like, right? have some I mean, that’s it’s pretty self explanatory. But it’s it’s a good mo anyway, so events are what we’re doubling down on next year is my first one.

21:52
Steve back to you, what’s your second one on the list here? Oh, back to me, okay. So I’ve been experimenting with a lot of things. Let’s talk about own marketing a little bit since we were talking about that. Like SMS is just destroying it for me right now on both fronts. My wife quit and Bumblebee linen. So when I first started this maybe a year and a half ago maybe, I was still kind of lukewarm about it because I don’t like getting interrupted with texts from brands or whatever, right?

22:19
But I think that sentiment has changed in just the last year or so. Now I’m much more open to getting texts from the brands that I really care about, in addition to restaurants, hotels, like everyone is doing it, so it’s become part of the norm. And it works super well. Like it blows email out of the water, probably like 8X, I would say. Yeah, how do you, I still hate getting, I’m very binary, I like.

22:48
I really don’t like business communications or marketing on SMS. hate it. But I think you’re right. We’ll probably warming up to it. How do you, what’s the best way you found to get people on that list? Like, especially for like your, the My Wife Quit job. I mean, the hanky side of the things, Bumblebee Linens, it makes a little more sense. But on your, your My Wife Quit side, how do you, how do you get people onto the list for that? Yeah. So My Wife Quit, I try to get the email first because there’s a little barrier to entry there. And then I offer like a bonus lesson that can only be obtained with

23:18
text. Got it. And then whenever I give a workshop, I say you can’t get any of the free bonuses unless you subscribe via text. On the Bumblebee linen side, what’s worked the best is just giving away free product. So here’s what we do now. And this is something that anyone out there listening can do. We just go to our vendor, our existing supplier and say, Hey, what merchandise do you just want to get rid of for cheap? Right?

23:45
And then they sell us, I mean, they’re happy to get rid of it. And then we just give it away for free. The perceived value is really high. So for example, a handkerchief that we’re giving away on our site right now, the perceived value is like maybe 13, $14. But we actually paid 15 cents per piece. And so we’re giving away that free handkerchief in return for an SMS subscriber who’s then going to buy that free handkerchief. Like you can’t get the free handkerchief without buying something.

24:13
So they’ll go get that and they’ll buy something else and they’ll check out and they’re thrilled because they think they got something really valuable. Yeah. That’s smart. Do you do that as a pop-up before even people purchase or do you do it as a part of the purchase flow in, when people are checking out, where do you do it? It’s actually on every single page of the website highlighted in yellow. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And what’s nice about text is like we have it set up as a two-tap. So if they click on it, it automatically opens the message app and then they just have to hit send.

24:42
And then they instantly get the link to the free handkerchief. Nice. Yeah. That’s cool. What, um, what are you mostly sending texts about? Because I think like you get it is different. You got to be a little more judicious with the texts that you send, especially in a marketing capacity versus email. So what are you, how often are you just blasting people and what kind of things are you, is it sales? Is it special promos? Is it more like new releases? What’s worked best for you? Cause I feel like being careful with what you send, like you, yeah, you just gotta be much more.

25:11
selective. Yeah, so this has taken a little bit to refine and I can talk about both businesses. So for Bumblebee, we at least text once a week. And usually it’s about like a new product release or a sale. Flash sales work really well. Like every month we discount something like 30, 40%. And it’s usually something that we want to just kind of get rid of anyway. And the flash sale works probably the best out of all the texts that we send. So we just rotate.

25:40
there’s like probably like six reasons that we text and we just kind of rotate them out. And occasionally if we’re releasing a new product, okay, so we just released, actually we haven’t sent this text out yet, but by the time this goes live, it’ll be sent. We just released, we had mother daughter aprons before, it’s like matching mother daughter aprons, but now we have daughter doll aprons. Like where you have a matching doll. So we’re just, would, when we launched that, we’re gonna text everyone who purchased an apron for their daughter.

26:09
And that’s just a natural way to, mean, chances are they have a doll also. And what do you, are you using Postscript or Klaviyo? We use Postscript. Yeah. You do. Okay. I don’t want to get into that since both of them are actually sponsors of the podcast of the differences, but yeah, I’m a huge fan of Postscript for text and I’m a huge fan of Klaviyo for email. Yeah. Awesome. So the next one doubling down is for me is podcasting. And this is one that, you know, I’ve been doing this for

26:39
Can I take some credit for this by the way? Cause you were gonna quit your podcast, you remember? Was I gonna the podcast? You were gonna quit your podcast. I don’t think I was gonna quit it. I took a sabbatical maybe four or five years ago. I don’t think I was ever gonna quit it though. Okay. Well whatever it was, I remember I said, what the hell are you doing? Like you were born with this voice for podcasting and you’re gonna take a sabbatical? Like what the heck does that mean?

27:05
I know, slacker. It’s all in the effects boards. You can get effects boards that make anyone sound amazing these days. yeah, think it’s easy to, I think some things is, I’ve been doing it for, just hit 400 episodes, I think actually more like 450 with some of the mislabellings and been doing it for eight years. I think sometimes it’s easy to, if you’ve been doing something a really long time, to get a little bit burned out on it. But I think what I’ve found is trying to identify, because I’ve been doing it more recently. I’ve changed some things up.

27:34
on the podcasting front that has made it easier to do it more consistently. First one was before I was doing like, I think we’ve talked about this, you kind of do them once a week, once or twice a week. And I’ve changed over to that because for a while I would block out a week and I would schedule like 14 podcasts and I would do them and I’d be done for like three months. But A, the content sometimes would get stale and B, I would just be a train wreck at the end. Like I’d come home and people would be like, hey dad, I’d be like, don’t talk.

28:03
me. I’m down. Right. was rough. But also some other tweaks in terms of being comfortable with asking kind of veering off of just the e commerce stuff. I got some feedback from thank you anyone in the community who gave me some candid feedback on this was helpful to try to get a sense of what people liked what they didn’t know one thing I found that was interesting was people weren’t as excited about the really in the weeds tactical stuff as I thought like

28:32
Which kind of actually makes sense like if I want to set up a Facebook ad campaign I’m not gonna do a podcast about it But if I hear some really cool story I think stories can be overdone on that especially the entrepreneurial front But if you have a unique perspective and it’s niche enough to a very specific audience I you may be like a separate bigger store owner people if it’s done well like that kind of stuff so I think podcasting still it’s much more competitive, but I think there’s still plenty of room for for for building connections for getting your name out there

28:59
And it’s an amazing way to connect with people. When I think about people that find out about me or the community or the business, you know, there’s probably at least a third of them are through the podcast. yeah, continuing, I think trying to take the long ball approach on that and changing things around that are that have been made up kind of hard is been useful. So I mean, I was just thinking to myself, like, who do I know personally, that I interact with on a regular basis, who’s willing to listen to me for an hour? I don’t know anybody, actually.

29:28
And yet here are like thousands of people, right? And those connections are made even though it’s funny, like when we go to events or whatever, people, at least people recognize me for the podcast and they feel like they know me because like the stories that I tell on there and everything, it’s sometimes awkward for me because I don’t know anything about the person I’m talking to, but they seem to know all these small facts. It’s just amazing the connection that you make with a podcast. Yeah, agreed. It’s super cool. So podcasting for me, what’s your next one? We got SMS TikTok for you. What’s your number three, Steve?

29:58
I would say YouTube and I want to get into Twitter at the end for sure, but YouTube, you know how we say podcasting, really deep connection. The problem with podcasting is that it doesn’t, it’s hard to get new listeners. Whereas YouTube’s the opposite. Google does a really good job of getting you new viewers and you have a similar connection as your podcast guests. Just it might not be as strong, but on the other hand, they can see you as well, which might be worse in certain cases, I guess.

30:27
But yeah, YouTube has been really good for me. Like I’ve been serious about it for like the last year and a half. And I built that up to 50,000 sub. That actually brings in a lot of leads and a lot of business. Wow. And do you, same kind of content? Well, I’m guessing you’re doing slightly different content from like TikTok. It’s longer form. Do you have, what do you think has been most effective for you on the YouTube? Obviously you’re doing not the content so much, in terms of, especially like calls to action, do you have strong calls to actions on that? Like kind of use the overlaid links or what do you attribute the most success to in terms of?

30:58
It’s a double-edged sword. It’s just like TikTok, right? If you try to guide people off, that’s going to hurt you. So ironically, and this is counterintuitive, but you want to keep people on YouTube. And if they want to find you, they will. By either Googling or they’ll look at your show notes. So have you seen a pretty dramatic increase in your direct traffic over the last, let’s say, year and a half between TikTok and YouTube then? It’s hard to say, but I do know that for the people signing up for my class, I’ll ask them.

31:28
And a lot of them now say that they found me through YouTube. Actually, they find me in a lot of places, but usually what closes the sale is either a YouTube video or a TikTok video, ironically. How does that close the sale? Like it, like they’re on the fence about signing up, they’re on the fence about signing up, but then they’ll see me on TikTok or some other platform, like a different platform than they’re used to seeing me on. And then that makes them sign up. I can’t explain it. I just know what I, from, from asking people.

31:58
Interesting. Do you find with a lot of your content, and this kind of bleeds over into blogging and the people’s shorter timeframe, like when I was going through on earlier this week and putting together a list of content topics to write on and create stuff for the coming months, and it was exclusively super long tail stuff, which is, mean, anyone who’s been in this game for a while knows that converts really well, but hyper long tail, like stuff that is only applicable to people running seven and eight figure stores. And so I was less concerned with

32:27
Hey, what’s the search volume here? It played into it, but that was not the primary thing. The primary thing was, this something that someone who is a perfect fit for our community would be interested in? For example, how do you pick an ERP system? Not great search volume. 80 % of the people who are gonna be searching that article are gonna be great fits for our community. So it’s much more focused on that. And then also with how competitive, more competitive search results have gotten, it’s nicer to have those shorter, those longer tail results that are keywords that are not as…

32:56
you know, not as top of funnel and people are competing for. But also like questions, like a lot of it was really hyper focused on trying to get answering questions, finding people that are looking for something. That was what was guiding my content approaches. How are you doing that on YouTube? Like, are you taking a similar approach to that? Or are you kind of just kind of looking through your archives, like you mentioned on the blog and just anything you feel with guiding your content strategy? as I mean, I don’t, I don’t have time to create separate pieces of content for each.

33:24
So literally it starts with a blog post that turns into a YouTube video. Sometimes that turns into a podcast that turns into a Tik Tok, multiple Tik Toks. Usually it also turns into Twitter. So, so for me, like I’m different, you’re, you’re, you’re trying to target like seven and eight figure sellers, right? Whereas for my content, I’m trying to attract people who are potentially just interested in e-commerce or they already run their stores, but they aren’t quite hitting the levels that they want. So

33:52
I think your strategy is correct. Like if you go after the ones that you know it’s gonna attract your target audience, it’s probably better. Yeah, because otherwise you might get a bunch of people that aren’t gonna sign up anyways, right? If you’re just trying to build that community. Yeah, you’re talking about podcasting and repurposing and I think, have you given, one thing I thought about for a while was trying to have someone take the podcasts that I’ve done and repurpose them into articles. I even used some services and tried this.

34:20
What I found though is that’s really stinking hard to go from a podcast and make it a really good solid blog post. It’s much easier to work from the blog post than like you’re doing smartly. Kind of create a podcast out of that from that very cohesive, coherent blog post. Have you had any success with repurposing podcasts? Because that seems like a really hard game. I have not had much luck, although I did rank number five for your name at one point. And I was going to use that against you because I could just turn that page into anything.

34:49
I’ve actually learned a tremendous I’m just gonna give a shout out to Jeff Oxford here I’ve learned a tremendous amount about SEO in just like the last six months We’re talking about stuff like digging into like Google patents and how things work. So it’s it’s a different game now and It’s almost this is what I don’t like about blogging as much anymore Like you almost if you want search traffic You almost have to write things in a certain way that Google wants even if it’s not your normal writing style You know

35:18
And then you have to ask the question is, okay, should I write this post because Google wants me to write this post and I’m more inclined to rank or should I write something that I really want to write about that might attract people to read it, but will never rank in search? Yeah, definitely different approach. I feel like it’s, you can do both. It just takes a lot of work to like think about the keyword. One thing I’ve always thought is an art is trying to write.

35:45
like titles for things that are keyword optimized, but also appeal to humans. that is a people that can, if you can do that well, you will have a job anywhere on the planet. Cause it, I mean, I’ve tried to do it and it just takes a lot of time to do that well. see, that’s the only case with blogging. Like with YouTube, like you want the clickbait titles. Like it took me like, it probably took me like a year to discover this, but if I come up with a clickbait title, it always does well.

36:15
Because YouTube is less keyword focused. The recommendations can take your video really far. Interesting. You gotta be a little careful though too, because I agree with you, good title writing is an art. You want some curiosity there, some interest to pull people, it’s copywriting. But if you’re too clickbaity, I think you lose a little credibility with people if you do it too much. If you’re trying to build a brand and all of your articles are clickbaity, yeah, you can kind of burn yourself in the intermediate.

36:43
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, there’s obviously a fine line. That’s what makes it interesting though. I mean, it’s a skill that always fascinates me. Dr. Robert Cialdini, he had a latest edition of the book. I actually just had it on the podcast. It an amazing interview. He talks about all these different situations on how to use these persuasion techniques for everything, whether it be titles, selling products. And I learned a ton from this new edition of his book. So recommend you guys go and get it.

37:12
Yeah, he’s a classic. I’ll have to pick that up. What you mentioned, Jeff and yeah, shout out to Jeff Oxford from 180marketing.com. Amazing guy. He’s actually the ECF SEO expert. He’s guys fantastic. What were the what were a couple of the things that you learned? Because I feel like SEO SEO is one of the things sometimes where people rehash and and change a little bit on the fringes. But you know, really, it’s about like links, good content, usability, like how long people say on your site, there’s kind of some fundamentals that haven’t changed a wild amount.

37:42
Was there anything groundbreaking that you’ve learned from him over the last six months that you were like, wow, this is totally new information or kind of in that vein?

37:52
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

38:19
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

38:46
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

39:12
Yeah, some of the things that are groundbreaking is he actually hired this guy. He’s from Turkey. And maybe you’ll have to have him on to talk about this, but basically he’s managed to rank sites with a lot of traffic without any link building whatsoever by structuring the content in a certain way. So I’ve actually adopted some of those techniques, just creating the right content silos and manipulating your existing page.

39:41
or ranked use, I should say, or link juice to the appropriate articles to help Google along and rank. it ever heard about like PageRank sculpting? Are you familiar with that? Like that old school term? I feel like I thought that was kind of a thing of bygone eras. And was this was this a brand new site that he used to rank or was this a site that had something? This Turkish guy has a ton of case studies where actually he just hit go on a site.

40:11
And within like a month, it already has like, I 10,000 visits a month or something like that. It’s crazy. Wow. Yeah. Um, there’s a lot of new things I learned just about like topical authority and I mean, you’re right. SEO gets rehashed and the fundamental principles that we all know about are still true. But if you can establish topical authority in a certain subject, then you don’t really necessarily need backlinks.

40:41
to rank. Interesting. I have to have him on talk about it. Or if you interviewed him, did you have him on a podcast when you look up to your podcast as well? I’m actually doing a case study with him right now where I’m using my sites as guinea pigs. And I’m going to just document everything that we’ve done. And we’ve done a lot. I mean, it’s like, I can’t even remember everything. We had this big master spreadsheet of all the things that we’ve done. And the thing is with SEO, you just kind of do everything. And then you just, you don’t know what you did, did what, as long as the trend is up, it’s all good.

41:11
So let’s talk about Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, this is an interesting one. so Twitter has been something I’ve been on Twitter for probably close to eight years, maybe more. And I’ve kind of come ebbed and flowed with how engaged I’ve been. I noticed recently, like, and shout out to Bill, Bill D’Alessandro. He’s a great follow on Twitter if you’re not following him at Bill D.A. But he would do some of these tweets that he’d write some tweet storms that were just, you know, they got insane traction.

41:42
And recently spent a little bit of time writing one up about kind of the state of e-commerce and added a few kind of stats from the community and a little perspective on a few things, a little opinion, some memes. And I think it was hopefully had some value in it, but it only took a couple hours to put together. Anyway, it got really good traction. It got picked up, people retweeted it. And it seemed in terms of like people finding out about, yeah, myself and the community, was very effective. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.

42:10
Twitter, especially if you’re B2B, is still relatively, it’s not nearly as good as it was five years ago, but it’s still, you can get through to your audience in a reasonable way. Although one exception I actually did try, I was curious, because that tweet did really well. So I was I wonder how it would work if I promoted this tweet, just see if it would, you know, how that would work. Yeah, and so I actually did a little experiment and was planning on spending two or three hundred bucks on it, just not very much at all. But I started promoting it and…

42:39
I thought Twitter would be smart enough to be able to send it to people who are interested in e-commerce and direct-to-consumer and digital marketing and things like this. Not at all. All of the people who liked it and retweeted it and engaged after the organic surge had died down and it was just the promotion, were all 67-year-old farmers in Nebraska or mothers of dog razor kennels in Florida or

43:09
people with like super left or super right political, like nobody, and it just seemed, and I don’t know if it was, I don’t know what was going on, but either Twitter’s algorithm was really bad or it was a bunch of fake accounts or something, but I was pretty unimpressed with the paid reach that in terms of the targeting on Twitter. And granted, I didn’t do like a, there’s different types of campaigns in Twitter. I think the advertising, if you actually put just in a, do an advertising campaign on there as opposed to a promoted tweet, the targeting is much better.

43:35
but yeah, was pretty underwhelmed with you. mean, can comment on that a little bit. Yeah, go for it. So by the way, I was not a Twitter believer. If you asked me this eight months ago, I would have said I’m not a believer. But a couple of things, I can’t remember who I talked to. Eric Su was one of them. He’s like, you need to be on Twitter. He told me that two years ago and I was like, oh yeah, whatever, Eric. And then I talked to Chase Diamond, if you guys don’t know who he is, he’s the master email marketer.

44:05
And he was like, dude, you got to be on Twitter. And I was like, okay, well, I don’t know anything about Twitter. And he’s like, okay, here’s my guy, try him. And I just had this benefit. just to be clear, like I’m doing a case study with this guy also about growing Twitter, my Twitter account, and he’s actually handling my Twitter account. He’s literally, he’s listened to a lot of my podcasts. He has all my blog posts and he’s watched a good portion of my YouTube videos and he’s just forming tweets out of those.

44:36
And what works the best are these, I can’t remember the term for it, but they’re like tweets that are like 10 tweets long. Do you remember what? It’s not a tweet storm, tweet, thread. That’s what it’s called a Twitter thread. And he’s just posting my content just kind of in this mini form and it gets a ton of likes and a lot of leads. There was one, there’s one Twitter thread that he posted.

45:03
that got me like 250 email subs per day for an entire week. It was nuts. Just purely organic? Purely organic. then like I was getting all these DMs, which I’ve learned to respond to, because you’re establishing conversations. On the advertising front that you were talking about, instead of advertising using Twitter, it’s better to just take someone with a huge Twitter following and say, hey, can I just pay you to tweet this, you know, like once a day or something like that? And that works better.

45:33
It seems like it’d be hard to find people. I… It like it’s working really well for you. I would have a really hard time outsourcing my Twitter because I feel like you’re building kind of your personal brand. are… I love Twitter. One thing I love about Twitter is there are people that you would never be able to get to reply to an email to you. But on Twitter, especially if you’ve built up a little bit of an audience or following there, or even if not a lot of times, you can reach out to them in their DMs and drop them a quick note and they’ll get back to you. Like in terms of access, it’s amazing.

46:01
I would feel weird having somebody. But it’s own content, right? It is, but somebody else’s, I guess it’s kind of like the akin to like if somebody is ghostwriting a book for you or not. It’s true. I mean, obviously you would never let me control your Twitter, for example. You know what? We could have a mutual destruction and have a day every year where we flip each other’s, we control each other’s Twitter accounts. That could be fun. So. But I’ve been shocked actually, which I’ve been pleasantly surprised with.

46:32
people on Twitter looking for business stuff. I think it’s a really good avenue for that. I’m not so sure about e-commerce though. I actually don’t, do you know a lot of e-commerce brands on Twitter? I wouldn’t say e-commerce brands. People don’t go there to, like if you’re thinking about like, you’re selling stuff or pushing content for sales. No, I think it’s much more. Twitter’s great for politics, for news, for marketing, for business, for startups, stuff like that. So I know a lot of e-commerce and agency.

46:59
people in the e-commerce ecosystem, owners or source providers on Twitter, the marketing of customers not so much. Yeah, yeah, that’s what I was discovering too. Yeah, you’re right about Bill. I actually follow Bill and presumably he writes his own stuff, but they’re really good. They’re like pithy, they’re really concise and they’re really interesting tweets. Yeah, he does a great job. I think it’s, yeah, think it’s, yeah, he does a really nice job with them. So at BillDA, follow him if you’re.

47:28
Yeah, think the secret to blowing up on Twitter is Twitter threads. to me, I write a blog post a week, you turn that into a thread, and everyone thinks it’s like the best thing since sliced bread. Right? Well, think part of it is because it makes you be concise, right? Like, if, if you can, people don’t have time, people are busy, they want to know that they want to know the forget the 80 20, they want to give me the 2 % 98 here, right? Like, what’s our read you have time for your 2000.

47:54
word blog posts, like what’s the top 5 % of this I need to know. think that’s why Twitter is good, especially if you can be kind of a little snarky, self-deprecating, if you can make it entertaining and like tie those two things together, I think things can do well. So I mean, this, this whole concept bothers me about society today. Like these quick things, like you don’t have time to do anything. That’s just not my personality. You know what mean? Like I’d rather delve deeply into a topic than just give me like the first

48:22
the quick five second version of it. Cause you can’t go into any amount of depth on any like TikTok, Twitter. mean, you’re not going to get any depth. YouTube is different. That’s why I like YouTube better. Agreed. And yes, in terms of commentary on society. Yeah. We should, we could do another follow up podcast about, know, why the systemic problems this may be pointing to. But I do think, I also think there’s something to be said for like from, as an exploratory, if you, if you’re looking to like, get a high level pulse on something quickly.

48:51
Twitter’s great. If you’re looking to kind of get up to speed on the latest news in a topic quickly, Twitter’s fantastic. Or like high level trends, interesting things. Yeah, I think those are great for that. If you’re in exploratory phase, yeah, Twitter’s fantastic. If you’re trying to become an expert, world class expert in email marketing, yeah, Twitter will get you kind of pointed in the right directions in the right places, but you’re not gonna get your email marketing, digital marketing, MBA from Twitter. Yeah, I I think of it as a big funnel like Twitter and

49:20
TikTok are like kind of top of the funnel. You get people interested. You’re a little bit more vague, high level. And then maybe they’ll graduate to YouTube or the podcast. And then once they sign up for your email list, those are like your true bottom of funnel people. Yeah. I’ve got one more here in terms of doubling down on, and this is more of an experiment, not sure how it’s gonna work. Don’t judge me until you hear me all the way out here because if I would have been in the judgment shoes for sure. we are traditionally, we haven’t, we’ve never done any marketing for

49:50
for e-commerce in terms of community members. We’ve always, partially because we haven’t wanted to grow super fast, partially because we’ve generally had a pretty reasonable pipeline of people coming in. But with the events that we’re building up this next year, we’ve selected some cities where we really want to try to invest heavily in the community there, a handful of cities based on just the fact that we have a good group of members there already and kind of a somewhat of a great base to grow from.

50:15
And to that front, like I want to be able to proactively reach out and try to connect with the e-commerce store owners in that city to help our efforts and buffer our efforts. And so for the first time ever, I’m going to try a little bit of cold outreach via email. And there’s a tool that I’ll be testing out called GrowBots. And it’s kind of a database of different direct emails. So you can go through, you can screen it. And it’s nice because it doesn’t just, you don’t just blast it out to a list.

50:43
It’ll pull for you, it’s a very curated list you can build and you go through, you set the criteria, pretty, pretty in-depth criteria on things. And then you can screen each email and each contact first to be like, hey, is this actually someone that I should be reaching out to or is it way off base? And then it helps you kind of follow up with them and maintain a healthy email list and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, gonna be trying that going forward on a limited scale and see how that works. But…

51:08
Yeah, so just to be clear, you’re not broadcasting. You’re literally curating a list and then emailing them individually kind of. Yes. And you mean, you set up some things where you can set up. You can set up some flows that make it a little bit easier, but it’s much more it’s much more customized and much more targeted. It’s not like, oh, hey, I want to be the email list of all of these, you know, all the people who own dogs in North America and you blast it out. It’s much more like a here’s a broad criteria. Here’s a list. can quickly see if if these people match it and then using

51:38
you know, you can email people kind of in a more efficient manner, but you know they’re high quality leads because you’ve kind of scrubbed them at a high level. so if I get an email from you that says, dear Steve, we would like to offer you free contents for your blog in return for a backlink. We won’t be doing that. Those are the worst, worst emails in the entire world. see how that goes, you know, who like chase, maybe you should talk to chase diamond. used to do a lot of cold email. Yeah. Um, and I think it actually works. It’s just,

52:08
hit or miss, right? It’s a numbers game, I think. I think it’s a numbers game, I also think it’s a partially I think it’s also a targeting game and a writing in a psychology game. I think there is a lot of art behind writing good outreach emails. I think people do it really poorly. A lot of 95 % of the emails you get are their cold emails are horrific emails. But it takes into account like if you need to think about psychology, keeping things again, going back to brevity, keeping things brief.

52:36
get to the point in one or two sentences, have a really strong value prop, kind of leave, you know, have some mystery in it, good subject lines. Like there’s a lot to, I love when I get a great cold email, I love it. It’s fantastic. But it happens so rarely that it’s an anomaly. So I think there’s a lot behind, you can do an entire course, I think, or training session, multi-day training session on writing good cold emails. I’m curious though, are you going to use personalization in these cold emails? Like are you going to

53:05
talk about their company? I definitely will test that. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of having some stuff where you look at them and and yes, we’ll absolutely test that. mean, for me, like a good cold email always involves them knowing something specific about me. Yes, that is beyond Steve. I love your last blog post titled exact title. Yeah, it was fantastic. I learned so much anyway. would. Yeah. Yeah. So if you do it like that, I’m sure it’ll work pretty well, actually.

53:36
There was this one, I think the best outreach email I ever got was this dude who just whipped out all these very detailed facts about me that he clearly had listened to a ton of podcasts or watched YouTube videos. And then he, I think he did like a whole case study on my site and how it could improve. And he put together like a video, like it was a lot of work, but it worked. I got on the phone with this guy. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, mean, it’s hard cause it takes a lot of, you can’t just, you know,

54:05
buying a list and 50,000 people and emailing them, yeah, you may get a couple hundred people respond, but you play the numbers game, you burn that list up pretty quickly unless you’re actually customizing it well. Yeah. So just anyone who gets an email from Andrew at ecommercefield.com, you might want to put them in your promotional folder now ahead of time. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Steve. oh man, it feels even weird even mentioning this because it’s, know, it’s just like cold outreach. I you’re it like that, personalized.

54:35
I don’t really even consider that spam anymore. You know what I mean? Yeah. It’s gotta be highly personalized and relevant. yeah. Yeah. That takes a lot of work. Well, what any, we’re kind of getting close to an hour here. Any final kind of parting thoughts or stuff we didn’t cover in terms of things you’re doubling down on apart from smack talking your tennis instructor? I mean, if I were to summarize everything, like I’m just kind of doubling down on my personal branding because that’s something that no one can ever take away from me. And even if I decide to do something else outside of

55:04
selling manly handkerchiefs, for example, like just having that personal brand will allow me to do whatever I want. You’re doing something similar. I haven’t, it’s actually funny, I feel like I’m doing less about personal branding as much and more about just like targeted content for, really targeted for our community that is not beholden to other platforms as much. Have you, I’ve never seen you like, I think you need to do some like.

55:30
some modeling slash merchandising of the handkerchiefs. I’ve never seen you do this before, Steve, like a scissor reel of you and the hankies. I think that would be very cool. You know what’s funny? I’ve almost gotten to the point. So my wife doesn’t like doing any of that stuff. So I’ve actually almost gotten to the point where, screw it. I’m just gonna try to be the face of Bumblebee Linus and just see what the hell happens, right? I think you should do it.

55:53
There’s absolutely, there is zero chance I would do any memes or make any kind of, you know, any kind of entertaining repurpose material from this. I guarantee that wouldn’t happen. I would let, will give you as much feedback as you’d like. think that sounds like a great idea. I am going to, it is on my plan. Probably the first of next year, it’ll probably be the year of TikTok for Bumblebee linens. I’ll just put together a strategy. We’ll just probably batch film, kind of like how you do your podcasts in the old days, where I’ll just batch film like, you know, three months worth and then just.

56:23
schedule them out. That’s the plan. Yeah. All right, Andrew, thanks a lot for coming on. You’re right. I think usually we make fun of each other, but I think I’m just tired from my tennis lesson. So I wasn’t really on my game today. But if any of you enjoyed this interview with Andrew, then you should go to ecommercefuel.com and check out his community of seven and eight figure e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know that when I started my online store, it was a very lonely process.

56:53
And so if you want to find a community of vetted entrepreneurs where you can kind of bounce ideas off another, ask questions, share like war stories, I highly recommend the forum. I believe I was one of the charter members. Is that right, Andrew? I think you were actually. Yeah. I’ve been with it for long time.

57:13
Yeah, you haven’t logged in though recently though, because otherwise you would have noticed that your account has been restricted due to inactivity and general bad behavior. But I mean, I’m sure when you were in there a year ago, it was great. So obviously, you know your friends aren’t in your community when they don’t mention it when you ban them. And then Andrew also runs a bunch of events. Like the flagship one is going to be in March in Norfolk, Virginia. That one’s only to community members though, is that right? It is, yeah, it’s just for community members. Okay, yeah.

57:42
If you become a member of the community, which I encourage you to join, then you can go to this really incredible event that’s held once a year. Uh, actually 10 times a year now, right? But those are regional events, right? Yeah. Our big one is ECF live that we have for community members, but doing a lot more stuff. Most, almost all of our events are for, for community members, because it’s, we’re trying to, yeah, just build a great community of people who know each other and trust each other and can help each other. But, um, yeah, most, almost all the events are for, for community members. So, and if you enjoy listening to his smooth, buttery voice,

58:12
He also runs an awesome podcast over at eCommerce Fuel where he brings on entrepreneurs also. he he talks a little bit, I would say more about the psychological aspects, right? Of entrepreneurship, you’ve been branching out to that as well. Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s fun to talk about things that a little bit, not directly eCommerce, but like, do you balance family and business? How do you, know, did one recently on like living in two places, did another one about like, did some of the stuff that’s not that entrepreneurs

58:42
deal with as well as opposed to just setting up Facebook ads. Yeah. Well, Andrew, thanks a lot for coming on, man. Always good to have you. Yeah, this is fun, man. Always love catching up and giving each other a hard time. A few people I enjoy ripping on and having rip on me as much as you, so it’s always fun.

59:00
Hope you enjoyed that episode and if you enjoyed listening to Andrew today, go over to ecommercefuel.com and check out the podcast on your favorite podcast app. For more information about this episode, go to myvotequitterjob.com slash episode 382. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

59:27
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog,

59:57
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce 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.