564: Blogging Is Dead…Or Is It? What’s Actually Happening With Google

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You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Their Job podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, we’re going to continue with our four-part series on creating content to promote your business. In this episode, we’re resuming from where we left off to talk about blogging and whether it’s still a viable option today. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit

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is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their 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.

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I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

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Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. And finally, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % 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 get 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 mywifequitherjob.com slash book.

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So go to mywifequitherjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:13
Welcome to the MyWifeQuitterJob podcast. Today we’re going to talk about content creation and specifically blogging, which is actually a topic I didn’t really want to talk about today, but Tony wanted to talk about it. Mainly because I’m kind of down on just regular blogging. And just to be clear, this is blogging not for e-commerce, not when you have a business already established. I’m just talking about blogging in general. So I know you’re very down on blogging right now. Yes.

02:43
But we’re doing a blogging basics series or content creation basics. And so we can’t not talk about writing in the series. That’s correct. So maybe like the way I can, otherwise I’m just going to be in a bad mood the whole time. I know, I know. I’m trying to redirect here. We can just frame it in terms of blogging for e-commerce, which is still working very well. And if all of you listening out there, the reason why I’m down is because Google’s algorithm changes

03:11
pretty much penalized every standalone blog in existence. So basically if you have a blog without a business under it, they really hurt you in the search rankings. Whereas, so for example, mywifequitterjob.com is down, whereas the Bumble Bee Lennon’s blog is kind of taking off actually. But you know, My Wife Quitter Job, I’ve spent so many years working on it.

03:41
I’ve talked to a bunch of SEOs and Google has pretty much admitted that they’ve over-corrected. I wouldn’t be surprised if things change, but as of right now, I’m actually down on it. How’s that to start the podcast, huh, Toni? I think that’s fair, but here’s what I think. I know you’re down and I know you just got a quote for some stuff that was absolutely insane to…

04:08
to help fix some of the issues. I usually overguess when you say, guess how much this would cost. I usually wildly overguess and I was six times under when I guessed initially. I know why you’re down and I know that for a lot of people who have made a living off of SEO and ranking, that all of the changes has, I hate to say the word decimated, but it really has decimated a lot of people’s businesses.

04:38
That were, I would say, providing really helpful and great content. So I understand the frustration. I also find it, just side note, very entertaining to watch all of these SEO guys make TikToks now. So for my own entertainment. But here’s why think it’s important to talk about. Because no matter what, even if you are like, listen, I don’t even want to do a blog. I just want to be on TikTok. I just want to make my Instagram reels. Just give me my YouTube.

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You have to have that home base. And we talk about this all the time. We talk about it in our webinars. We talk about it in the course. You have to have a place where people can go to, if absolutely nothing else, get on your email list. Sure, but that’s not a blog, right? That’s not a blog. That’s not a blog. You have to have a home base. But my argument would be your home base should have a little bit of content on it, even if you’re not building out a 300 post blog.

05:36
Right, like you’re, don’t know how, I know you’ve culled your posts a lot, but you know, not saying that you need three, you know, a thousand posts or even 25 posts. But I think the creation of content, understanding how to format things for the web, understanding how to write for the internet, which is not like writing a book. And I think people get very confused about that. Those are still things that you need to know even if you are going to do just like the bare minimum of blogging.

06:06
I guess I could agree with that. I mean, the format of writing that we were teaching was how to rank and search, right? For standalone blog. And we can go over those principles and they still apply if you have a business underneath it. Let me just take a step back in case people are just not up to date on all this stuff. So thanks to AI, people just started generating all this AI spam.

06:36
like all over the internet. And it was working for a while. And so I think Google was not able to control any of this. So they just put the hammer down and just said, hey, anyone who’s creating content that doesn’t have like a business underneath it, we’re just going to devalue those blogs. Right. And so let’s just take my wife, Quitterjob.com. I don’t sell anything on that blog. It is a pure content site. And so that’s why it was devalued. Whereas Bumblebee Linens,

07:05
It’s got an e-commerce store behind it and it has sales, it has reviews and that sort of thing. So it’s a legit business. So hence that blog actually got promoted. Yeah. Which is I think great news for e-commerce store owners, right? Because a lot of people we know struggled for a long time to get their stores to rank and search against blogs, right? Against your traditional content-based sites. So I think in the e-commerce world, this is exciting news, right?

07:34
but you also have to once again, and I think you said we taught how to write for search, we also taught how to write for readability. Because if you go back to your English, ninth grade English class, and you think about everything that you had to do, or if you ever took a creative writing class in college or anything like that, basically you have to throw all of those things out the window.

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that you learned in writing class. All of the things that you can remember from eighth grade on are garbage when it comes to writing for the web. And this is if you have an e-commerce store blog or if you have just a traditional website because people don’t read that way on the web. I don’t know if I agree with that statement. Okay. What you said is true if you’re writing for search, but it’s definitely not true if you’re just like, like take Mark Manson.

08:29
Do you read his stuff? I do. This stuff is amazing. He writes it like a book. It’s not like the way we teach it, because he doesn’t care about search at all. Yeah. He writes stories. It’s excellent. He’s developed an audience without depending on search at all. Yeah. So yeah, the style of writing that I don’t know where you want to go with this, but what you just described is writing for the search engines to me. Well, I was meaning more about

08:58
just things that we would traditionally not do. What did you learn a paragraph was in high school? Four sentences, right? Usually the bigger the better for these paragraphs. You’re talking about aesthetic formatting. Yes, which is very important. I think this is the easiest thing for people to learn. This is the easiest shift that you can make. This is really important in e-commerce because I guarantee most people are probably looking on mobile.

09:22
This becomes far more important when you think about the size of, even though these new iPhones are gigantic, but it’s still a much smaller screen than a desktop computer. So just basic things like using bold and heading tags to break up your text, adding images into your content, making your paragraphs one to two sentences, which to me was like the hardest thing as someone who wrote a ton before the blogging world.

09:50
to think that you could have a paragraph that was one sentence is absolutely nuts. And then one of the biggest things that I think, we don’t talk about a lot, but this was a tip I think I got from our friend JD Roth, who’s a great writer, is that after you write something, you walk away from it and then you come back and you trim as much as you can off of it, right? It’s not about, like I remember certain classes in high school and college where it was like you just had to get the word count in.

10:18
Like the more words, the better. And I know there was a time in SEO where you were, I think you were doing like 5,000 word posts or something crazy like that. But nowadays just for the reader, for the use case, is go cut all the fat off the content. You don’t need to overwrite and over explain. Figure out how you can say the same exact thing and as least words possible.

10:45
And you’ll give your reader a much better experience when they come to your website. And again, I think this just depends on the type of content we’re talking about. If they’re looking for answers, then yes. Most people don’t even read the content. They just look at the heading tags to get an idea. But if you’re writing a narrative, like your however many page thing that you wrote about your life, which was like 15 pages or whatever, I don’t think any of that stuff matters. What I will say,

11:15
is that if you have a blog and it’s like the full width screen, it’s actually really difficult to read something that’s super wide on a desktop also. Because I like lose track when I go back to the left where the sentence actually left off. So even though you have all that screen real estate, you don’t want to make your content the entire width of the screen either. Yeah. And the nice thing is whether I think you’re on WordPress or even if you’re just building a blog on Shopify,

11:44
you can have a mobile view of your content before you ever publish it. Yes. And you should be arguably designing your blog for a mobile phone first instead of desktop because I mean, that’s probably 75 % of my traffic. Maybe even more. Actually, I haven’t checked my wife quit her job recently. I found that the store websites, their traffic is so mobile heavy. Right. Yes. And so

12:12
I’m 99 % sure that every Shopify theme allows you to do this, but you have to check this stuff, right? Before you hit publish, because what you don’t wanna do is drive an ad to something or a lead ad, right? Or even send out an email where you want to drive people to your e-commerce content and then have people scrolling around like crazy, not able to read it because it looks wonky on mobile. And so often it does.

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if you don’t do mobile first. And I think really the mistake that most people make is embedding images and videos. So for example, let’s say you’re gonna embed a YouTube video by default. If you were to cut and paste that code into your site, it would not look right on mobile. In fact, don’t know why YouTube does this actually. I always have to add extra code just to make sure it automatically sizes to the container that it’s done. But yeah, videos can look wonky if you don’t do it right.

13:11
And then images also. Yeah, you got to just make sure that, I remember looking at my blog once and I had an image that almost fit the entire width, but then there was space on the right side of the image where it could fit just one word. So the paragraph started with, you know what I’m saying? Yes, I’ve had that happen before. Or like one letter going down. So yeah, I think that’s a big thing for sure is that

13:38
the aesthetic of the content is actually really important these days. I also think that, and this drives me nuts, and I do this too, so I’m I’m talking to myself, but people do not grammatically check their content. And I feel like we’re just in this world where it’s like, we have spell check, if it doesn’t check it, it’s fine, if he doesn’t catch it, it’s fine.

14:01
but it doesn’t always catch the correct use of they’re there, you’re you’re, like all these things. And depending on what type of content you have, and I think especially if you’re a brand, like if you’re selling something, that to me, if I see typos on a brand site, that is a red flag for that product, especially if you think about this, right? Like everyone’s competing against Amazon to get people to buy their stuff. Amazon is a trusted,

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resource for the buyer. I know for the seller they might not call it a trusted resource, but for consumers like they know Amazon, they order it, it comes in two days. If there’s a problem, Amazon fixes it immediately. Like their experience is very positive. So if you’re trying to compete with Amazon on your Shopify or BigCommerce store and your content is loaded with typos and just mistakes, to me that immediately diminishes the trust in the brand.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

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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.

15:42
Yeah, you know what I do these days? I just cut and paste everything in the chat GPT and just say, fix grammatical errors without changing the content. Yeah. Spelling and grammatical errors. And then it does that. And you should, there’s no excuse basically. Yeah, there’s no, yeah, there’s no reason to have this. I mean, there really isn’t ever a reason, but you know, there, you should absolutely make sure that everything is written correctly. back in the old days before AII, I mean, it’d be very easy to miss like,

16:12
For some reason, I always had this problem where I would miss an A or B or something like that you’re reading it fast, right? You’ve also written it typically, so you’re reading what you already wrote, so you’re reading what you thought you wrote, not necessarily what you actually wrote. Honestly, as I get older, I fully omit words in my sentences now. I have found that I will just absolutely forget how to spell something.

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Like last night, we were texting back and forth with friends. And I mean, this is kind of a word that not many people know how to spell, but we were talking about the different types of salami because we were doing we’re doing charcuterie. And so there’s a meat called sopracetta. It’s probably not being pronounced correctly, but I just couldn’t even get to like the fourth letter.

17:03
Right, I was just like, and it was so poorly spelled that like my phone wouldn’t auto correct it. It was so bad. And I was like, I have no idea how to spell this word. Like absolutely no clue. I just went completely blank. And I feel like that happens every once in a while with writing. It’s just like, there’s a word where you’re like, I don’t have any idea. Or I’m always like, is it principal or principal? Like there’s those words that, you know, have the double spelling. So anyway, that kind of stuff is actually important, especially if you’re a brand, because I feel like everything that you put out on the web,

17:31
is building up trust in your brand. so having the least amount of problems on your pages is gonna help people realize that you’re a place where they can confidently buy. Yeah, so just run everything through AI really. So are we talking about e-commerce blogging right now then? I mean, I think we’re talking in general, but I think it’s just so much more important for e-commerce. Yeah.

18:00
And you know, it’s hard for me to hide the fact that I think SEO is going to die. Yeah, eventually. But it’ll probably take a while. I don’t know if we’ve talked about the Google antitrust case much. We talked about it once. But I don’t know if you listen to the all in podcast. And there’s some other podcasts that I listen to that specifically cover this. And it looks like it’s going towards a direction of breaking up Google and the separate companies.

18:28
And all those deals where Google’s paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine will likely not happen anymore. Oh, that’s right. Yes. So when you get your phone, that’s where it has the biggest, I would say, one of the bigger impacts. Yeah. I mean, think things will fundamentally… The reports are saying that all this stuff just takes forever based on prior trials.

18:57
We might not see any changes for like five years, right? So if we can talk maybe in the context of five years, things probably aren’t gonna change a whole lot. in terms of just search market share, Google actually hasn’t lost much market share at all. Because if you look at percentage wise, we talked about people using perplexity, people using chat GPT instead of search. It’s really just like a percent or something like that for now.

19:27
So all the things that we’re talking about, if you’re writing for search and you have an e-commerce store, they still apply. The principles of ranking and search have not changed fundamentally over the years. So do a quick overview for people, because I know a lot of people out listening do have an e-commerce store. so I think there is some good news. I know you’re all down on blogging right now, but

19:56
I do think there’s good news for store owners. For store owners, I’m really happy with the Bumblebee Linens blog, but the Bumblebee Linens blog is also not something that I spent the last 13 years painstakingly writing the content myself. You know what saying? That’s why it’s great on Bumblebee Linens land, but I’m not proud of that content like I’m proud of the content that I’ve written on the blog. That’s why I’m down on it, just to be clear. Probably because you’re not a big wedding hanky guy.

20:25
No. Honestly, what we’re ranking for on the Bumblebee Linen’s blog is mainly anniversary gifts and wedding-related stuff, which drives traffic in the store, which is great. It’s not like I put my blood, sweat, and tears in that content. If you sold something different, you might feel differently. Maybe. If you sold microprocessors, you would be thrilled right now.

20:52
So, but just for people that are listening that are like, okay, give me a five minute SEO basics for my e-commerce blog. Basically, you want to figure out which keywords that you’re trying to target. And then you want to, you need a keyword tool to figure out what the best word is to target. And then there’s a lot of related keywords that are often used with those keywords. So you can use a tool like Surfer. We use Ahrefs for keyword research and just write a post that

21:20
Answers the question for the keyword that you’re targeting as succinctly as possible or all the different questions that are related to that and Do it in like the first sentence and be succinct Yeah, if I were to just that that’s like a 60 second lesson basically I mean there’s a lot more to it obviously but I Did want to talk about some of the other concerns about SEO that people were having

21:46
We can just focus on e-commerce since I’m still, I’m very up on e-commerce blogging actually. Before we go to the next topic though, because I people ask this of us every webinar, you talked about the tools. We use Ahrefs. You want to say why that’s your choice versus some of the other tools? Ahrefs unfortunately is expensive, but I think they have the best data of any company. Data is the important part of these search tools.

22:16
They have this Chrome plugin also that a lot of people have installed where they’re tracking people directly from the browser also in addition to the other data. That’s why they’re the most accurate. If you had to give people a budget option, what would you? Probably Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest, yeah. Neil Patel’s. I feel like Neil often offers deals on that where you can…

22:42
I don’t know, I feel like they’re in my inbox every once in a while, where if you sign up, you get a period of time free, or if you pay, you know, I don’t know, I feel like there’s still some deals running on that every once in a while. So if you’re not on his email list, that might be a place to start. Yeah, they have a, he always offers a lifetime deal. I think the last time one of my students checked and it’s still available, I think you sign up first and then they get you with a lifetime deal after a month or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

23:09
Anyway. He’s got an interesting tactic though. His close is always, you want to book a call? Is it really? I didn’t know that. Yes. I mean, you don’t talk to him, but yes, that’s his close. Anyway. Well, it’s very effective, right? Yes. if I ever wanted to blow up my course, if I ever wanted to do it, I would just hire an army of salespeople and just give them a commission because people want to talk to people with courses, right? Yes.

23:38
Okay. All right. So where was I? I don’t even remember what I was going to talk about. So SEO for businesses. Yeah, no, I was going to just talk about some of the concerns that people have been having, some of the questions I’ve been having. Mainly has to do with AI, right? People often ask me, hey, is it even worth it to do this stuff anymore? Right. And if you look at Google right now, you’ll notice that sometimes when you do a query, there’s this like purple box that pops up.

24:08
that it’s called the AI overview that basically summarizes your question. feel like that always pops up now. Well, it actually only pops up for 7 % of search queries. Back in the day when they first released it, it was like everything, but then it started hallucinating and they got a lot of negative press on it. How am I in the always 7 %? I don’t think I’ve never not seen it. Oh, I haven’t seen it actually in a while. I saw it yesterday. Anyway, go on. What are you searching for?

24:37
We can’t talk about that on the podcast. The stats are it’s 7 % of search queries and 17 % of e-commerce queries. Oh, interesting. I guess most of my searches are probably very AI-friendly, like how many cups in a quart or how many. Oh, yes. Most of my searches are how many kilometers or in a mile.

25:02
type questions, so that would make more sense. So 17 % in e-commerce, 7 % regular. That’s interesting. Yeah, but the whole point is people will worry about creating content and those AI overviews totally eating up the clicks. Ironically, and someone did a study, I can’t remember which website did the study, but the search clicks actually went up as a result of AI overviews. Because apparently, no one really trusts what AI says.

25:31
And then they actually click on the links to just verify what AI is saying. Interesting. So we’re talking about low single digits here. Everyone expected a decrease, but surprisingly, it’s actually resulted in an increase. Yeah. And my long-term view of all this also is all your efforts in search are probably likely going to translate over to AI eventually as well.

26:00
So for example, if you’re ranking number one for wedding handkerchiefs, when you ask AI, and I’ve tried this with Chachi BT, like what’s the best place to get wedding handkerchiefs? And Bumblebee Linens was listed, probably because they’ve crawled the web, maybe using Google or another search engine, and those are the ones. So even if you look forward in the long run, I still think doing SEO is worth it. It’s just gonna be different. You’re now gonna try to rank in AI as opposed to just search.

26:30
We’re looking like five years out, probably five, 10 years out. Do you think ranking in AI is going to be significantly different than ranking in search, like the strategy? Or it’s too soon to tell? I have no idea. But AI has to get the data from somewhere, right? Yeah. And like the authority. it’s probably natural that it piggybacks on some ranking algorithm, right? Nobody knows. mean, we’re looking too far in the future.

26:59
If you’re worried about AI overviews, it hasn’t really been much of a factor yet. Yeah. So let’s see what else. And I think I already mentioned before, like if you’re worried like chat GPT, search GPT and perplexity are just going to eat Google’s market share, probably not going to be happening. Because as long as Google has those deals in place. Yes, yes.

27:27
which might, which they might lose. we’ll see about that. we’re talking, you know, we’re talking years out, think. Yeah. In case any of those things change, like I probably wouldn’t, there’s always going to be some sort of search engine. So I think the work that you’re doing will translate to the other ones. But I mean, we’re talking chat GBT, we’re talking like a percent right now, even if everyone went to chat GBT now, but.

27:58
So do you have anything else to say about e-commerce? Because I have a key for people. I think one of the things you should take away from this podcast is that if you have an e-commerce site, you need to be working on the content side of it. You need to be creating that blog style content for your website if you have a store. If you are a content creator and you do not have a physical product to sell, I don’t think that you can just

28:28
jump up and down and be excited that you never have to write again. Because I do think that writing is important and understanding how to communicate via the written word is still something that you need to do. And here’s where it matters, on a sales page. Now, I would argue that like, I would use Claude to help me write my sales page, right? Like I would use AI tools to help me do some of these things. However,

28:56
Claw, ChatGBT, all those tools are really only as good as you can prompt them to be at this point. So if you, and I think whenever I’ve, realized this when we did the webinar where you gave the YouTube prompt that was like 16 paragraphs long of how to get, but the response from people of like frantically trying to like get that information down and you did it in office hours and everyone was flipping out about it and in a good way.

29:24
But I think you still have to understand how to communicate well to be able to get the results you want in any sort of AI tool. to think that like, okay, this is great, I’ll never have to write again is not really true. You do have to figure out a way to create persuasive copy to be able to explain your value proposition. And you know what, if you can do that in a video, awesome, but you’re still gonna have some text, you know,

29:52
on the page somewhere to continue to close the deal. And then you’re gonna have to email people, which we talked about email last week. So you’re gonna be writing emails to people. So there is still something to be said about practicing your writing and understanding how to communicate in the written word. It’s just not looking the same as it did when we got started 15 years ago. And just to be clear, I don’t think…

30:19
every store has to have a blog. I think every store needs to be doing some form of content. Like a blog might not make sense for certain stores depending on what you sell. True, true. And we all have limited time, so you just need to choose the right medium. Like for example, if you’re in fashion and you sell like dresses, for example, I don’t think blogging is gonna be the right medium for you. No, I would create video content somewhere.

30:47
Yeah, exactly. Or short form or influencers. Whereas if you sell something a little bit more obscure, then maybe blogging because those keywords probably won’t be that hard. And again, we’re just talking about in the context of ranking. Or if you have to teach people how to do something with your product. Yeah. So if your product is complex or is used in a way that, you know, it’s not like a dress where you put it on, you zip it up.

31:12
Right? Like there’s not, usually don’t have to have an instruction manual to put on clothes. But a lot of people sell products that are a little more complex. And so having that content to explain or to explain to people why they need what you’re selling versus a different product or less expensive product or something like this, especially when you don’t have the name recognition. Yeah.

31:39
And I’m just people always ask me about the product descriptions and whether it’s worth it to put a lot of effort in there. I think your product descriptions, again, if you’re thinking about it from a source search perspective, you want to put in the keywords that you’re going for in the description. But honestly, no one reads the description or very few people. Like if you look on Amazon, very few people look at the description. It’s mainly the image and bullet points, right?

32:08
Yes, I was thinking bullet points was part of the description. I was like, think people do look at those. Again, it totally depends on the product. If you’re buying something tech that’s very technical, maybe you’ll look at it. This is where I think your niche is so determining of what you do. I don’t buy a lot of clothes on Amazon, but if I need something for a party or whatever, like, what does Amazon have that can be here tomorrow?

32:36
and I’ll go on Amazon. The only thing I care about is what the blend of fabric is. I want to make sure it’s not 100 % polyester so I won’t sweat to death. Then the next thing I do immediately is scroll down where the user-generated content lives, where people take pictures of themselves in that piece of clothing, which is all in the… It’s not lower carousel, but it’s where the lower carousel is on Amazon.

33:01
And I will scroll through and I will find people that are like my size, my shape or close. Right. Like, OK, this person is six foot tall, so it’s definitely not going to look like that on me. You know, and that’s how I make my decision fully, fully based on pictures of other people in the outfit. However, if I’m buying like a bookcase or, know, I’m read I’m what kind of what is it? What are the dimensions? How thick are the shelves? How tall is it? Does it have a thing that bolted to the wall? Like, right. Then then you’re much more invested in the product.

33:31
bullet points and descriptions. So I think this is really like a niche specific. It is. It’s funny though. There was the only reason why I said that there was a statistic somewhere I would I’d have to find the article, but it’s like the amount of people that actually read an Amazon description is like single digits. I me just me over here reading Amazon description. Actually, when I buy clothes like I don’t I don’t

33:58
I just look at the picture that I buy. Yes, because you just want to see how it looks. Yes, but I clothes that often. Yes, I don’t buy a lot of clothes on Amazon, but when I do, I’m just immediately to the lower carousel. Show me regular people. I don’t want to see the six-foot Russian model wearing the outfit that looks nothing like me.

34:22
Actually, if you think about it, it’s actually hard to find the description on Amazon, too. You got to scroll down many pages. they continue to hide it. They don’t hide it. It just goes to show that very few people are looking at it. So why put it higher up? Yeah. No, and you know, it’s interesting. And this is where it drives me nuts when like e-commerce store owners think that they know better than Amazon because like,

34:49
I noticed like Amazon did that, right? Where they continued to like bury the description. And then if you go to other big websites like Lowe’s or Home Depot, like I can’t, one of them also has descriptions like significantly further down than they used to be, right? And it’s like all these other huge e-commerce brands, right? Follow suit. And they’re like, well, if Amazon’s doing it, they clearly have spent millions of dollars researching and know every single thing about everyone’s mouse movement on a page.

35:17
but then an e-commerce store owner who sells, you know, $100,000 a year is like, no, I know better. I know better than Amazon. It’s like, no, you don’t. Just copy exactly what they’re doing and move on. So yeah, that always, I always find that entertaining.

35:35
Yeah, so I guess people are probably listening to this wondering if they need to start a blog. Right? Yes, which we saw. We kind of have said the same thing for a while now, which is you need a website that’s a home base. Correct. Correct. Yeah. mean, that that home base, like in the context of e-commerce can just be your store. Like Shopify, you can put put together landing pages and, you know, content pages. Yeah. And if you’re on big commerce, the same thing.

36:04
If you’re on WooCommerce, you’re on WordPress, so you already have like a home base. So, I would say that if you’re going to start a standalone blog today without a business to do affiliate marketing or whatnot, I probably wouldn’t do that right now to be frank. No, seriously. Burn it down. Well, I’m just giving it to you straight. Like if you’re doing it, like an app, your affiliate blog today, I just wouldn’t do it.

36:33
But you do need a website. Like let’s say you want to sell course or whatever. You definitely need what you said, a home base to collect emails, to talk about your offer, to talk about yourself, kind of like a portfolio sort of website. Yeah. Because I will say as someone who has worked on the brand side and on the content creator side, it is frustrating to me to find a content creator on TikTok or Instagram.

37:01
who has no website at all. The only way to contact them is through a DM. To me, is, if you want to become a content creator and you want to educate people through whatever medium it is, video, podcasting, the written word, if you want to write a book, you want to put a book on Amazon, you have to have some sort of home base because if you get, you

37:30
You don’t have to get that famous or that big or that many views for people to want to reach out to you. And a perfect example of this is, um, I don’t, we are in such different Tik Tok feeds. Every time I bring up a Tik Tok reference, I know you’re going to have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Um, have you seen the 17 diaper mom? What do you think? Well, only because she ended up on good morning America or one of the morning shows.

37:57
I don’t either, but at that point it’s in national news. So she made a TikTok, she has a newborn kid, and she posted a video. I didn’t even see the original video, but it was like, here I am, I got a four-day-old baby, and I’m going around the house collecting all the dirty diapers from the day before. And they’re not in a diaper pail or anything like that. There are literally three on the coffee table, and one on the floor, and one on the couch. OK.

38:24
But if you’ve had a newborn baby, you know that sometimes in the middle of the night, you’re changing that baby on the couch and you’re just leaving that tiny little newborn diaper. It doesn’t matter. It’s like, how bad is that thing? Not that bad, right? So people like came after her, right? Like, how could you do this, whatever. But then, and of course the internet is a wild place, right? So then she had all these people defending her. basically people were making videos, moms that were like, this is my 17 diaper moment. When I had a two week old,

38:53
you know, baby, I had such severe postpartum that when my husband came home from work, I would give him the baby and drive the car around my neighborhood for two and a half hours every night. Like, and they were sharing like, it’s okay to have 17 diapers because everybody handles like having a baby. And it got to be so viral that she got invited on a morning show. And you know, she made this, I saw the video she made where it was basically like this video changed my life, right? But.

39:20
You never know when you’re creating content when you have the 17 diaper moment, right? If you make that video that like the girl that Elise Myers a couple of years ago who posted the bit about the date at Taco Bell where she went on a Tinder date and he said, let’s go to Taco Bell and they get in the drive through, he orders a hundred tacos and then he doesn’t have his wallet, right? She blew up from that one video, ended up leveraging it into a lot of different things, but.

39:43
If you don’t have that website where people can contact you, sign up for your, I mean, if people are trying to find you, let them find you, know, give them that place to, you can grab their email address. They can fill out a contact form, all those things. You want to make it as easy as possible for people. Cause especially when they’re watching it on their phone, if it’s not super easy, they’re going to move on to the next person. I mean, I have a counter example. I actually know a lot of people who don’t have a home base and collecting emails and they’re just depending on

40:13
You know, whatever social media platforms, built in audience, like they’re just relying on Instagram, for example, like the Instagram lists and whatnot. And I know that this is just a story back in the day when Facebook allowed you to collect messages, subscribers, there were a lot of people, including myself, building a list on that platform until Facebook basically decided to destroy it. Yeah. So all that work was just gone in the span of

40:42
of an announcement. if you have your own email list, that’s yours and no one can take that away from you. So even if you think you have an audience on a social media platform, anything can happen when you don’t own the list yourself. Yeah. So I think if, before you go cry over Steve’s depressing- I know, I’ve been very negative this episode.

41:08
I’m you, didn’t want to record this. I you didn’t, but I think it’s important for people to understand just the basic stuff. think if you’re thinking about that content creation, give yourself a home base if nothing else. That’s an important step because you and I both know way too many influencers who have the algorithm changes, Facebook changes the rules, they stop showing things to groups, whatever it is, right? Where then all of a sudden, their reach that used to be a million is now

41:37
10,000, right? So you wanna be able to capture as many of those people as you can, especially while you’re riding the wave of virality. And if you have an e-commerce store, you should be creating some kind of content, whether that’s written, video, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, you need to have something out there so people can discover you and learn more about your brand, but it definitely needs to be something that you think about when you’re creating that online store.

42:07
Hope you enjoyed this episode. As you can probably tell, I’m a little down on blogging, but only when it comes to a pure content site. For e-commerce, blogging is still a viable traffic strategy. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 563. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs, and learn a ton, then come to my event.

42:37
Go to SellersSummit.com and if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitherJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.