643: We’re Ditching WordPress After 12 Years. Here’s Why

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, we’re diving into a debate that’s coming up more and more with e-commerce store owners right now, whether to keep blogging on WordPress or move everything over to Shopify. We break down why, after years of recommending WordPress as the gold standard, we’ve changed our minds for most situations. You’ll also hear us get into the state of blogging in 2026, what’s actually still working, and why where your content lives.

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matters more than ever for tracking ads in AI search. But before we begin, I just want to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free at mywifequitterjob.com slash community, and I would love to see you there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community. Now onto the show.

01:04
Welcome back to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today we’re to be talking about a topic that’s kind of sensitive for me. We’re going to be talking about blogging, the state of blogging in general, and whether you should still be using WordPress versus the Shopify blog for an e-commerce. Yeah, so this is actually, we’re recording this because this is a big debate right now with one of my clients. So I thought it would be…

01:27
I don’t want to say fun to talk through it because I don’t know how much fun this topic is, but I think it’s important because I feel like if I’m getting this question, then probably a lot of people in e-commerce are thinking about this right now. I mean, the topic is still sensitive for me because once Google released that helpful content update, which was not very helpful at all, it basically decimated my blog over at my wife Quitter job and it decimated all my friends. But like we had this mastermind group where, we were

01:56
doing very well blogging for very long time, like two decades. To the point where some of these people have now released rap albums. mean, are tough. No, I’m just kidding. And then specifically on the topic of WordPress versus the Shopify blog, which we’re going to be talking about today, I have strong feelings now actually against WordPress. uh Did you follow this drama?

02:24
I want to say it was the end of 2024. Okay. uh Matt Mullenweg, who’s the CEO of Automatic, went on this tirade against WP Engine. Do you remember the story? No, actually, I don’t know. I don’t know about it. Okay, so the two CEOs had some sort of beef and you know WordPress is open source, right? Anyone’s supposed to be able to use it. Well, Matt, like abused his power and tried to shut down WP Engine. Oh.

02:54
because they didn’t like each other for some reason. And so basically he blocked WP Engine from having access to any of the plugins and then sued him in court. And it’s an open source platform, right? He was blocking him from being able to access free plugins. Yeah. Okay. That sounds, well, sounds typical. That sounds like girl drama. Well, no. And it left a huge bad taste in the mouth of developers, right? Right. Yeah. And then so Matt,

03:24
like it made him look really bad. It actually made me really not like him after that whole drama because now it’s like an abuse of power. Like, is it an open source platform really or is it something that he can own and abuse? Right. Is it open source just for the people you like? Right. Exactly. Exactly. That that makes me nervous. It kind of reminds me of like, you know, our friend Charles who, you know, spoke out about some things and then got quarantined. And, you know, there was like, is that

03:52
true or not true. It’s like when big companies start doing that, it concerns me. So I don’t actually remember what happened or the outcome of that. think it just kind of blew over and I think WP Engine is still alive. the developers revolted and some of them actually went off and created this other platform. uh I can’t remember what it is, but supposedly it’s gaining traction now. Interesting. Not enough for us to remember the name. Well, I don’t know anyone who’s on it because blogging is

04:21
People aren’t starting blogs these days. Yeah, people aren’t starting blogs these days. Okay, sorry, back to the topic. I just wanted to tell that story. this question came up because one of my clients has a very long-standing blog on WordPress. I want to say 13 plus years old and still gets decent Google traffic to the blog.

04:45
You know, one of the problems and I don’t remember if we talked about this on the podcast that were recorded live in New York or if you and I talked about this outside of that. But, um you know, one of the strategies, it’s always been the strategy for e-commerce is to create content. And we teach this right. You create content about your products, right. But not like a direct blog post, just writing about the pros and cons. You create helpful content. And in the content, you mention products that you sell.

05:13
And then obviously those products are linked to your store, whether you’re on, you know, Shopify, BigCommerce, Woo, whatever. um And you were talking about how that is not a great user experience. And I don’t remember if we did this publicly or not, but you were saying that, you know, your strategy has now been to like build out collection pages and try to get, you know, those pages or category pages um and put the content there. You think that building out all the content on WordPress is actually provides for not a great user experience.

05:42
And that’s what we’re realizing right now is that we have all these pieces of content, most of them, 95 % of them link, they were written specifically to link to products, but to get people over is very clunky. And so I think that’s the first argument against WordPress, right? Is the user experience is not great. You’re not on the store page. It looks like a blog usually, and getting people to click over is just one more step in the process, which makes it harder for people to buy. I don’t remember what I said.

06:12
Or this long goes full week. But yeah, I always try to get people in the category pages. But I mean, you can’t like replace a blog with correct pages, right? Right. I mean, blog covers a whole bunch of topics and there there still are uses for the blog. I don’t know if you want to just talk about blogging in general first before we even get to the subject of WordPress versus Shopify. Yeah, I think blogging from an informational standpoint is

06:42
is gone. the only reason I would ever start a blog today is if I have an e commerce store or some sort of service that takes transactions, all the standalone blogs, I think that business model is dead. You have to offer something for sale on the site. Okay. Because the purpose of a blog now is to get mentioned in AI, right? Right. According to Bumblebee linens.

07:08
you know, these handkerchiefs are commonly used for whatever. And then you click and then you land on Bumblebee Linens where you can take transactions or you have some sort of brand associated with that. And what I’ve been doing, because Bumblebee Linens blog has actually taken off. It’s up in traffic around 40%, I would say since December. So in half a year, it’s up 40%. And I think it’s up that way because Google is favoring blogs for

07:36
that are attached to real businesses. Yeah. Right. Whereas my wife could a job the opposite has happened. It has dropped 40 percent since the beginning of this year. Yeah. So I don’t think I could collapse all of that content that’s ranking into a category page, though. Correct. Right. Yeah. I was more talking about the user experience of someone landing on a blog and then having to click over to buy the product.

08:04
not necessarily the whole, like if that’s one strategy switching for the other. I see. I mean, one thing that’s popular right now is advertorials, right? They land on a blog post, which is really just an advertisement, a long form advertisement. Yeah. And I’m thinking about uh who do we meet that just did this? It was some beauty product. I thought Simon was talking about this. Oh yeah, yeah, Simon was talking about it. Yeah. It was some, I can’t remember, some male beauty product, right? Or something. No, hair product.

08:33
hair product. was, yes, to make your hair look fuller. Right. To make your hair look fuller. And it was just this page that like it didn’t review it, but it just kind of talked about the factors. And at the end, there was like an ad to cart. I mean, that still works very well, obviously. Yeah. So I think back when you and I when we talk when blog before video just took over, when we talked about like, hey, you should create a blog, you should be writing content, all that stuff. And I don’t I’m not we’re not saying that you shouldn’t right now, but.

09:02
We always recommended WordPress because back in the day WordPress was really far superior to Shopify. And when I had my jewelry business, I just didn’t want to deal with WordPress. So I set it up on Shopify. So I had all this WordPress experience and, then I was blogging on Shopify and there were a ton of limitations in Shopify of what you could do. You could basically just type.

09:26
You had minimal option, unless you could like HTML everything, you basically couldn’t do a lot of the things in WordPress, which then gave WordPress a lot of superiority to just the straight up Shopify blog platform. That has changed um over time. Also, I think back then, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, because I’ve never been an SEO guru, but

09:49
WordPress seemed to outrank Shopify even if the content was the same. WordPress just was more favored by Google. I don’t know if that’s true. 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,

10:16
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. 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. But I don’t think the Shopify blog platform has really come that long of a way.

10:44
Well, used to be you couldn’t even put alt text in your images, right? Like you couldn’t, you really could. Yeah, back in 2015, could really just text, picture, you know, H1, H2, H3 tags. Yeah. I mean, the biggest advantage of WordPress back in the day was the plugin library. Yes. Right. The vast plugin library. There’s a whole bunch of shortcuts for stuff that I was doing.

11:09
Like a table of contents is the example I always use. I could automatically put together a table of contents. And for that reason, it made sense to use WordPress because there was a plugin for everything. There was a caching plugin. There was an SEO plugin, a whole bunch of different things that automated a lot of stuff. Yeah, things like Link Whisper, um know, tools that allow you to. Yeah, just as I think there was a lot of streamlining available in WordPress that in Shopify, if you couldn’t code something,

11:38
you are pretty much stuck with their basic features. Yeah. Yeah. But the other disadvantage for Shopify in particular was that you needed to put a WordPress blog on a subdomain. Yes. You could not. the big one. And that was a huge disadvantage. But, you know, back in the day at the time, it was OK because WordPress had such a huge advantage. Yeah. With plugins. So but things have changed. Dun dun dun.

12:06
Well, OK, so first off, nature of writing, like not not even talking about advertorials, the nature of writing has has changed. Yeah. People are writing for robots now and for robots like nothing needs to be like pretty. Nothing needs to be. uh I don’t know. This this always this always like gets me because I used to spend time writing real posts. I remember that you go to Starbucks or the coffee shop.

12:33
Every Sunday morning, I’d pump out something that I personally wrote. was based on personal experiences and stuff like a uh normal person would like to read. then Google changed that. And now with AI, it’s like question, answer, question, answer, question, answer. So I mean, if that’s going to be the case, who cares what blogging platform you’re using now? Just go with the easier one. I don’t know. What’s your opinion? I don’t know.

13:03
I mean, I’m I’m I’m trying to remove myself from the thought process because I still read content on the Internet. Like I would much rather read an art like I consume a lot of travel content. I would much rather read a travel piece than watch a video because I don’t want to watch through like, you know, 22 minutes of something I want and I want the highlights. So I still there’s a lot of things that I still read on the Web. But I would say from a streamlined perspective,

13:33
But I don’t think there’s any reason to put up, if you’re starting out, there’s no reason to put the blog on WordPress if it’s an e-commerce business. I would just put it on Shopify. Let me ask you this question. When was the last blog that you’ve read? Probably like two days ago. From a smaller creator, not like a mainstream publication? Yeah, from like, know, traveling with the Williams or something. I don’t even know what the URL was. Yeah. Okay. It’s probably been like, I don’t know.

14:03
many, many years since I’ve read a blog post. I read blog posts all the time for travel and I also still read uh food content. All right, second question then. How do you find these? Do you find them through AI? Do you find them through Google or is it just someone you followed for a very long time? It’s usually no one I’ve ever followed. It’s almost always through Google search or AI search. um

14:28
But I just don’t want to watch a full video on something. I want to read about it. OK, so if you’re doing a search, like I don’t know what you use, Chachi BT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, but it rarely links to the article. So I found that to be not true. Huh? I was going to screenshot because I know we talked about this on another podcast. I was going to screenshot it the other day for you because I get links all the time, but I ask for links. So, for example,

14:58
I was doing some research on a possible summer trip and I put in all my information. Now, meanwhile, I’ve been doing this for a year and a half now, right? So like, and I use chat GPT for this in particular because it has all my information. So I put it in, I ask, I put my requirements and then I say, I would like to know the top five, this is the question I actually asked, the top five parts of town. So typically like just, for example, when you travel to like Budapest,

15:27
Budapest has neighborhoods, right? And each neighborhood is kind of its own personality and has its own safety issues or not. You know, like it’s different types of restaurants. So some is like a younger, more like tourists or more touristy or more like older established. So I was like, hey, I want you to evaluate the eight neighborhoods in Budapest. And then I want you to tell me where’s the best one to stay given the parameters that I put in and then give me links to any articles written about staying in those areas.

15:56
Right. OK, so you asked for the articles. I asked for the articles because I don’t I don’t trust chat to just be like, stay in the seventh quarter. Right. Or whatever. Like I don’t like I mean, it’s usually it’s pretty correct. But I like to read art. Then I want to click through and read. OK, who’s the person writing this article? Right. Is it a single female? Is it a family? Is it like, you know, what is their biased? And then I look through the article, I skim it and then, you know, move on to the next.

16:23
So, but I do request links when I’m doing that, which might be the difference between what you’re getting and what I’m getting. So that’s for travel blogs. When was the last e-commerce store blog that you’ve read or visited? Outside of people that I work with. Yeah, outside of people that you work with, obviously. don’t know, for a hundred years, I don’t know. A long time. I don’t know about you, but when I see something in Chachabee Tea or Claude about a product, I almost never click through.

16:52
you have to kind of hunt and peck for the link. Like it’s there, know, is there. Yeah, it’s also very small and like grayed out and hard to see. But plus even when I click it, it’s like a mound of text, right? I don’t want to read all that. Yeah. I’d rather just get the answer. so that’s why I was just curious, like if people even read blogs anymore. think they do. But I think they do. My blog traffic is actually up. Is it really? OK. Yeah.

17:19
So but it’s but it’s very specific posts, right? Like certain posts and the posts solve people’s problems. Like my top traffic post right now is beef stroganoff without mushrooms. So I’m sure. Pretty. Yeah. OK. Not actually. The pictures are terrible. I’ve actually talked about re since I’ve seen it like uptick. I’m like, need to make this again. But I haven’t eaten this in like 10 years. um

17:44
But it solves a problem, right? If you don’t like mushrooms, but you want the creamy beef and noodles, like you have to have a way to make it without the mushrooms, which is a fundamental part of that recipe. So I’m solving like a very specific problem for people. Another one of my posts, it’s backup and that is the ant post, right? Summertime people have ants. They want to get rid of them, right? So it’s all the problem solving posts. It’s not the let me, know, take a, spend a day with me as a.

18:11
person who works from home in marketing, whatever, you um So, yeah, but I think it’s that problem because people want to get the whole story for solving the problem. I think that makes sense. Like the posts that are kicking butt on Bumble Bee Linens right now are all the gift guides. Yeah, because wedding season, the gives to the groom. Yeah. Second year wedding gifts, which is cotton.

18:34
Right. As a second year like they’ve they’re on their second year of like, not second marriage. was thinking I was like, you’ve divorced like four times. Yeah. That’s a good article. You need to write that. What do I get someone who’s on their fourth marriage? So those are good because guess what the top three products are on that? On those? I wonder. I wonder what those would be. And so those steer people over towards the store. Yeah. Although, know what? Come to think of it.

19:01
I just haven’t spent a lot of brain power on the blog part of it, but I should probably make those like direct add to cart links that take you straight to the shopping cart. Yeah. In retrospect. So yeah, I definitely I’m not going to ever argue that like, oh, blogs are on the rise. Like, no, that’s not the case. I think certain things will weather the storm. But I don’t think it’s like, you know, in general blogging. No, make video like period. Actually, let’s let’s talk about that real quick, just in case. I still occasionally get questions about

19:31
blogging. So how would you prioritize the blog? if you, you have clients, right? Yeah. If you were to start today, how would you prioritize this client who now has a YouTube channel versus her blog? YouTube is the, is the highest priority for us. Okay. So where, where does blogging fall in that priority today? Cause you guys have been talking about it clearly.

19:56
Well, we just said this is why we’re having this podcast is that we’re actually not going to write any more blog posts on WordPress. They’re all going to be on Shopify. Oh, you’re switching over. Well, so we’re not migrating. You’re not migrating, not migrating. I so one of the things that’s making me very nervous about migrating, which I I’m I am probably overreacting. But so I’m going to preface this with that. But we have a blog that has 12 years of authority, right?

20:26
um hundreds of articles. The blog drives revenue, right? um But I have read enough articles about AI search not loving redirects that I do not want to move something and redirect everything on that site. Makes sense. Well, why switch to Shopify blog in the first place if you already have a WordPress blog? Because for any new post that gets written will be written on Shopify. Why?

20:53
because of the user experience and because AI is favoring everything consolidated on one platform and for tracking purposes. right now, if you’ve ever seen it, because the blog is set up on actually the blog, unfortunately for us, the blog is the main domain and the store is the sub domain. But so now, like when you look into Google Analytics, you’ve got to switch account, like not accounts, but you have to switch right from the store to the blog. So it’s not all integrated.

21:22
It’s very tricky. It’s hard to measure anything with meta, right? Like to get how the blog or you drive people to the blog post. We’re driving people to the blog post because our blog posts are like advertorials, right? How do I teach my kid to read? Right. Well, here are the 16 steps you need to teach your kid to read. Whatever it is, not 16. But and also here are all of our products that help you teach your kid to read. Right. Here’s because also

21:49
the client is kind of famous in the homeschool community, right? So people would want to know her opinion on how you teach a kid to read. You know what I’m saying? So kind of like if you’re Steph Curry, right? And you want to teach people how to shoot threes, like people are gonna be like, how does Steph Curry shoot a three, right? So the search would be like her feedback and her, she’s also got the credentials, right? A teacher, a degree in curriculum development, like all this stuff, right? So she’s got the authority.

22:19
the degree, the publishing company, you all the things. So we’re starting to drive traffic to the blog to get people, you know, either on the email list to click over them. Like at least we can hit them with the abandoned cart, you know, anything like that. But the attribution is terrible. Right. When you send someone to a blog and then to Shopify to the user experience, like when you land on the blog, it’s really clear you’re on a blog.

22:46
You know, like whereas if you land on a Shopify blog, you’re on a store and everything that I’ve read and everything that the ads company has read is basically like all the tools favor if everything is like in a unified, you know, ecosystem. So they land on a Shopify blog, the stores on Shopify, everything’s together. um You know, you can literally put ad to cart.

23:11
in the blog post basically, right? So you’re like, there’s less jumps for people to do that on WordPress too. You can’t, but it gets, that gets, that gets weird because it’s not like, then it, then it doesn’t look like a blog, right? Like you’re, just, the whole, the, I don’t know, the whole system is not great. So yeah, so that’s what they’ve decided to do. Okay. Are those advertorials on WordPress? Are those ranking? Yeah. Oh, they are. I see. And then

23:40
Yeah, I mean, I agree. Like all future advertorials can go and Shopify just for ease of tracking and stuff. Yeah. But I know for Bumblebee linens that hasn’t been. Oh, you know why it’s not a problem for mine? Because it’s in a folder. It’s not a sub domain. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So then you’re just going to have this WordPress thing that’s orphaned and then just going to leave it leave it alone. It’s not orphaned. I mean, we’ll see the posts that are like

24:06
on that they’re still gonna get traffic. They still get updated like, know, with, you know, if a new product comes out, we’ll update an old post. We’re actually seeing a huge uptick in Pinterest right now. And our, hate to say this because it’s very premature, but our ROAS with print Pinterest ads is like eight. Interesting. Okay. So Pinterest ads are back on. Like I have not, it’s been like,

24:33
Probably eight years since I ran a Pinterest ad. Okay, I feel like Pinterest ads and like do not do my caveat. Do not talk to anybody at Pinterest and let them tell you what to do with your ads. Like do run, run away um because they just want to sell you ad space. If you are in certain verticals, um it makes absolute sense. So we fall into the parenting and homeschool vertical, which obviously is huge. So we’re seeing a great return.

25:03
on ad spend right now. We’re not spending a lot. would like to ramp it up. But one of the things we want to ramp it up with is getting new content on the Shopify site so people land on the store and not the blog. I don’t want to diverge too much. But did Pinterest turn into a video platform? It is turning into a video platform. Yes. Which is great for us because we have a ton of video content now. Right. Like short form video, right? Yes. Yeah. I remember I was posting all of my short form to Pinterest and

25:31
getting no love whatsoever. I thought you were posting like my wife put her job short form. Correct. Yes. My not Bumblebee linens. That’s correct. You’d probably get a lot of traction with with wedding content, but that’s a whole that’s a whole nother podcast. That’s a whole nother podcast. anyway, so yeah, so I think if I was so my thought is if I’m a brand new e-commerce person and I’m just starting out, which it’s a lot of people out there. Right. Yeah. I would put I would put your blog on Shopify. I would not set up a WordPress blog.

26:01
If you’re already word pressing, I don’t think I would, I wouldn’t migrate. I would just keep doing what you’re doing. That’s my like, in general opinion. You know, it just depends because I have people come up to me and say, Hey, you know, I want to rebrand. Like, I don’t want to have to go through all this work. And then I look at their domain and I’m like, Oh yeah, go ahead and rebrand. Oh yes. Yeah. You know, I mean like your, domain isn’t, isn’t strong at all. So you can do whatever you want.

26:31
And so if you already have a blog and it has no traction, I would just keep things simple and just move it all over under Shopify. And I think the main argument for this really is that everything that I’ve seen will one the tracking. So I think that’s the reason number one. But the second thing is that everything that I’ve read is basically saying that AI favors everything in one spot. So they don’t like that.

26:59
You don’t know if that that’s like inadvertent. I think you think I mean, I, just know Google likes blogs that are like I said, right? If you, if you’re selling something on it on that domain, I don’t think that accounts for sub domains because like the main domain is still the same. So it’s probably okay. I mean, clearly it is right. Because that client’s blog is still doing very well. Right. likewise, my Bumblebee Linden’s blog is doing very well.

27:29
It’s just sites like my wife put a job that doesn’t sell anything, which may change soon. Actually, just I’m just going to do an experiment. What are you going to sell? No, I’m going to sell services. Right. Oh, yes. Yeah. So services on there and just see if anything changes there. Yeah. But yes, I would say if you if your blog has zero traction, that’s a different story. I’m thinking of people who have ever like want like if Bumblebee Lennon’s blog led.

27:57
lived on WordPress like in its own sub domain like a completely different experience than what you have right now because the problem is like one of the things that’s now on our list of things to do is make the blog look as much like the store as possible. Oh, it’s not. It wasn’t like that. Well, no, because it was the blog was before the store. So you didn’t make the store look like the blog? No, no. OK. No. I like a WordPress blog, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference like store blog. I mean, it looks the same. Yeah.

28:26
Pretty much. Yeah. And then I guess you could get rid of another hosting bill. Yes. Right. Yes, you could. Which would be nice. Speaking of which, just uh I don’t know if this is like the latest AI people using AI to try to break into stuff, but the number of like hack attempts on Bumblebee linens and my wife could her job has just multiplied greatly. Yeah. I mean, I track all this stuff and

28:56
And I’ve just been getting attacked left or right. So here’s something that’s been happening in my store lately, which I’m still trying to think of a way to solve this, but people come in and they add a whole bunch of stuff to the cart. And by a bunch of stuff, the car, mean like tens of thousands of items. And I track everyone’s cart, but then they’ll check out. Right. Like the bot will check out, which leaves all these abandoned carts all over the place. Also, which.

29:25
again fills up my Clavio. Yeah, at the same time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I know this has happened to uh other people on Shopify. Yeah, based on what I saw an ECF and my solution. I hope no hackers are listening to this right now. But like I spotted a pattern in like the emails that they’re using. Yeah. So I just block them right the source. Yeah. But like, let’s say they I mean, they could easily fix that and just use AI generate.

29:55
real emails and then I have to think of another way to block them. Yeah. By based on IP address or something. I mean, they’re all coming from Lithuania, China and Russia, although there’s a subset that’s coming from Europe and certain parts of the US too. So yeah, that’s not an easy problem to solve. Yeah, I agree. So I got off topic. We were talking about blogging. Okay. So here’s the other thing that we talked about this week with my client, which is

30:24
This is a little bit of a left field, but I think it’s also relevant is because she has a blog that’s popular. And I’ve seen this with other people, especially people who started blogging and moved into e-commerce. There’s a couple of people in ECF who have this issue. They have massive email lists because they offer some sort of lead magnet that isn’t a product. So for example, we’re looking at 200

30:53
80,000 people on the email list. Right. And half of those people are not customers. They’re just subscribers because they came in through some sort of lead or, you know, some of it’s abandoned cart and things like that. But primarily it’s through a lead magnet. One of the things and Cleo is expensive. Right. And it is. And like Omnisend, who was partnered with us for Seller Summit, you know, they are I think are they a third of the price? They’re 40 percent cheaper. 40 percent. OK.

31:23
So they’re definitely a less expensive option. However, email in general is expensive, right? So one of the suggestions that was given to us this week was to actually move all of our non-customers to like Beehive. And then when they make a purchase, they get dumped back into Klaviyo. So that way we’re not paying for and also.

31:48
not sending like those people like all the things that we send. And everything’s really segmented anyway. So those people don’t get a lot of stuff. But basically, because one of the things that I think is tough about Klaviyo is you pay based on the number of subscribers you have plus the aggregate sends. Right. Right. So like we we send so much, but our customers are low. So like we hit the send limit before we hit the customer sent limit. Right. So by like pulling all those people out,

32:17
it’s going to also decrease our sends because these people aren’t just going to be accidentally included. And then, you know, once someone makes a purchase, then they can go into the more expensive email bucket. I don’t know how I feel about that. that’s a tough one, because now you have two email platforms that you got to deal with. Management wise, terrible. Right. Like full full disclosure, like this is a like not a streamlined approach at all. This is a would be a cost cutting.

32:45
And then you would have doubles, right? So if someone bought and they were on Beehive, they would be on Klaviyo. Yes. So we’d have to remove them from Beehive in theory. Or leave them, I guess. Yeah. Right. In case they still want to get the blog content, right? Right.

33:03
Because I assume you’re not sending the blog content anymore to the people on Klaviyo. that would be the thing, right? Is then you don’t really send it. However, I do feel like our Klaviyo, like our customers love our blog content, like our once a week blog post or the once week content based post. It’s usually video now. Like people love it, whether they’re a customer or not, right? They love that educational piece. Here’s what I would do, because I know Klaviyo is really expensive. Like I have friends that are spending almost 10 grand a month on it. Yeah. Right. I don’t know what your bill is.

33:32
But I would use something for the blog. I’ve been considering doing this with my wife, clear job actually. In fact, I already have it implemented. just haven’t moving is a pain in the butt. Yes, it is. uh One, you can use something super cheap like Mailer Lite and Amazon SES. So all these email platforms, all they are like front end wrappers for like email services. Right. There’s like Mail Gun. uh

34:00
Amazon SES and it’s super cheap. Like Amazon SES, I think is like a buck to send it 10,000. Oh, my word. Yeah. And then obviously it’s free to store as many as you want because that’s on your own platform. So there’s an open source platform that I had installed called Motic. We actually use this for Go Brand Win. Yes, we did. 100 % free. Yeah. Very powerful. If you just want to run like a newsletter, it won’t do e-commerce well. But again, we’re writing my blogging here. Yeah.

34:28
So that’s free and the interface is really good. It’s got like a really nice, you know, email editor and all that stuff. you know, you can have, it does almost everything. You can track clicks, can track links and everything. That’s free, 100 % free, very powerful. A little too powerful, unfortunately, like, which is why I didn’t want to use it. Like it’s a little more complicated to get set up and everything, because it supports everything, like all the bells and whistles. Miller Lite,

34:55
is another one which I think recently started charging for, but I think way back in the day you could just pay a small fee. all it is is it, and Sendy is another one. Sendy is another one. A really small wrapper. You just pay for the sends, which is, you know, 10,000 for a buck. And if it’s just a blog, that’s good enough. How hard are those to set up though? Like for a regular person? Mailer Lite and Sendy is pretty straightforward to do. Modic is a little more involved.

35:25
Like it took me like a weekend to get that thing set up. Could you set it up using Claude or Chad as your assistant? Does that make it any easier? Well, Cindy and MailerLite are really easy. Yeah, I know MailerLite’s like we have people in the course use that. I don’t know. I’ve never tried. So I’m wanting is easy to supposedly it just there are just too many options for me to sort through, which is what the problem was. Yeah. Right. Like setting it up and everything, getting it up is easy. Getting it to do what you want. You have to sort through menus and menus and menus.

35:55
And I don’t even understand what half of the switches do, right? Which was the problem. Yeah. So I consider doing that because my my blogging email bill is actually still quite high. Right. And, you know, that’s one of the things is that if you are creating content and I mean, I think if you’re going to create any kind of content, you have to have a lead magnet of some sort. Right. You can’t just rely on like abandoned cart or browser abandonment.

36:21
So you have to have something and it’s like when you’re doing that, what do you start with, right? Because Klaviyo is so expensive and if your store’s not making a lot of money, do you wanna be putting all that money into paying for services? Well, would your client ever sell ads in the newsletter? Possibly. Okay, if that’s the case, I would go with like a Beehive. Yeah, Beehive integrates. That’s definitely not a core business though. Like that is definitely a…

36:49
Oh, yeah, maybe we try it, you know, kind of thing. Well, I mean, two hundred and eighty thousand subs. You could charge a lot of money. Yes, we could. Right. Yeah. That very quickly be a revenue stream that be on the radar screen, at least. Yes. Well, also, like, you know, do we would we sell ads to the people that are because we so I spent a lot of time this last weekend, like deep diving into the list and just trying to figure out like who we need to get off of it and.

37:16
I found a bunch of those spams, right? The abandoned cart bots. um And yes, they do have a pattern. uh Anyway. Oh, you guys had that problem? Yes, we do. Not to the extent that you do. OK, but I did. And it happened all on one day, April 15th of last year. OK, and I actually used uh Claude to help me figure it out. So if anyone wants to this, um I just suppressed everybody. But I didn’t mean that.

37:44
I mean, like how do you block it at the source? I’m not that level, Steve. That’s your Oh, okay, okay, okay. But it didn’t happen again. It happened on one day, which I thought was interesting. So on one day, we gained all these people, right? And which is what triggered me to dive into it. And then I was like, oh, and they all have very similar patterns in their email. So anyway.

38:09
It’s definitely something worth like throwing into like an AI and asking if there’s any like unusual spikes because that’s how I found it. You know what I found out from a friend also who works at Google? They actually Google sends out bots to go through checkout. Oh, interesting. To make sure that like they check, you know, they know, like they check your payment options, they check your shipping and whatnot and that information they use somewhere. Yeah. Somehow.

38:39
So not for a thousand of them. That’s definitely malicious. yeah. See, I it seems like Shopify should be the one trying to solve this problem. I agree. Not you guys. Right. I mean, you can easily fill up your whole entire Clavio quota. Yeah. In a couple of days. Right. If it’s malicious. Yeah. they’re very clever, too. Like every like I was blocking uh IP addresses. have this bank of like a million IP addresses. You can’t. Yeah.

39:09
You can’t block them. Yeah, that’s a whole that’s a whole other episode because I don’t know the episode. I don’t understand what the point is. Like you’re not monetarily gaining anything from this. OK, so the point is to try credit cards. Oh, never mind. So they bought like a huge bank of fake credit card numbers and they want to know which ones work. Oh, which opens up a whole nother can of worms. Another episode, but fake transactions. I don’t know if you’ve gotten that. No, but we had that problem. Do you remember with profitable audience?

39:38
Oh, yes. Yes. Like four or five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We put a squash on that. I don’t remember what I did now. But yeah. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. I was like, someone loves us. Just kidding. It was a lot of money. But then the chargebacks came. Yes. That was no fun. OK. So wrapping up our we went a little off topic, but I think it all is all about content and creating and audiences.

40:04
My stance is if you’re just getting started or if your current WordPress blog is like making no impact, right? You have no authority, you don’t have a lot of content in there. I would just start blogging on Shopify. um to me, and also I think it simplifies so much for people because I can remember a couple years ago, ah like one of the big hurdles for people was setting up the sub-domain, trying to figure out how to integrate WordPress.

40:33
Yeah, like and we would get questions all the time and I’m not sure how to do this, whatever. Like, so I think if this if this is definitely a hurdle for you, like it’s not a hurdle anymore because you will not, I don’t think, lose anything by putting everything on Shopify. um I think it’s actually I would almost say it’s better, especially if you’re planning on running ads and things like that. I guess the only thing you really lose is control because all that content is on Shopify. But I guess you’re probably going to be on Shopify anyway. So.

41:03
Yeah. Migrating is like another story altogether. But yeah, I mean, think blogging is kind of out. I it’s still a strategy that a lot of people use to be mentioned in AI. And for that respect, I think it’s still pretty important. Yeah. It just wouldn’t be in my top priority. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Blogging is not dead. It’s just changed and you’re going to have to adapt. For more information and resources, go over to my wife, quitterjob.com slash episode six forty three. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

41:33
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.