00:28
by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:55
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today, regrettably, we’re going to be talking about Google yet again. I’m a little tired of this topic, but they keep screwing up and things just keep changing. It’s the Doom and Gloom podcast. How many episodes have we done on Google in the last six weeks? Like three episodes, right? At least half of the episodes have been about Google, but that’s all people are talking about. When we were at Seller Summit,

01:23
multiple people came up to me and said, we’re listening to your podcast about Google. Should we just give up on SEO? What should we be doing? I mean, that is what everybody is talking about right now. So I feel like we can’t not talk about it. Yeah. So the latest news, and this is like literally hot off the press of yesterday, but so Google announced their AI search results. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, like if you ask a question now, like the first result is AI in the front and center.

01:51
But there was an internal document that leaked and it turns out that Google’s been lying to us all of these years about the ranking algorithms. Not surprising, not surprising. But I figured we’d break down what some of the changes are, what was in that document in this episode. See where it Yeah, so I’ve heard that it’s 2,500 pages. It is quite long. Have you read it?

02:19
Well, no, what I did actually is I had ChatGPT summarize a bunch of it. Okay. That’s a good way to use AI. Well, let’s talk about how the search results got even worse first. Here are just some examples. One person was reported as typing in, I’m depressed, what should I do? Then guess what the AI search result was. Oh, no. What was it?

02:48
It was, one Redditor suggests that you should just find the nearest bridge and jump off of it. No. Yes. Oh my goodness. Okay. Okay. These are all popular. Like these are all, these have all been, you know, broadcast. This is I don’t like to be on the internet. Another person asked, Hey, how do I prevent my cheese from falling off my pizza? And then the AI search result was

03:16
someone suggested that you should add a cup of glue to your sauce and that ought to thicken it up a little bit. What? Okay. And then another popular one that’s been making the rounds is how many rocks should I eat a day? And then the AI search result was you should eat one to two rocks per day or something like that. It was just a joke that someone wrote on Reddit. Yeah. So essentially it seems like a lot of these AI search answers are just

03:45
summaries of Reddit answers. And know how sarcastic people on Reddit can be. Yes, yes, I can’t stand Reddit. My dislike of Reddit has become even more, it’s growing, it’s growing by the minute. So what’s interesting is that I was trying to fix my podcast mic. We’ve been having issues with my levels. And so I’ve tried a bunch of different things. I did the standard, you know, start and stop, you know.

04:14
reboot your computer, all the basic stuff. And then I went into the internet archives to try to figure out, I can’t be the only person that’s having this issue. I do have a Mac. A lot of times there’s like compatibility issues with the Mac, this and that and the other. So I go on there and normally I’m very vigilant about not clicking on the Reddit answer because I know it’s gonna be garbage and I just scroll, but I was…

04:40
like frustrated and I was in a hurry and so I just click on the first thing that comes up and I start reading it and it takes me a good like 30 seconds to realize that I’m in a Reddit thread and the answer is completely wrong, right? Like it’s completely irrelevant, not what I need. And so anyway, super frustrating. This just happened to me the other day. But once again, I was like, this used to be something where,

05:04
A year ago or 18 months ago, I would have typed in this question about the Rode mic using a Mac, blah, blah, and Macworld would have come up. Or the other Mac website that’s really great with the, I can’t think of the name of it, but they literally are step-by-step tutorials on Mac compatibility. And either of those sites would have been first and second, not even on the first page anymore. Yeah, I think this was a topic, I think we actually talked about it at my round table. Okay. And people were asking me whether SEO was worth it. And I said,

05:33
from the perspective of an e-commerce store, it’s still okay. And I think that Google seems to be favoring content for business websites. Like if you have a real business attached to it, then chances are you aren’t gonna be spamming and just creating these dummy content pages. Whereas pure affiliate sites, review sites that don’t sell anything, don’t offer a service, those guys are getting penalized the most. I think because Google doesn’t know how to tell,

06:02
what good content is versus bad. So I think what they’re doing is they’re just penalizing everyone to get people to just give up altogether on these spammy sites. I mean, I would love for the spammy sites to be given up, but not all the other sites, you know? Well, here’s the thing. They’re also favoring the old school sites that have tons of domain authority, like Forbes. I mean, Forbes writes about everything now because they’ve been charging people to do guest posts.

06:31
I actually got an email just the other day that said, hey, would you like to be featured on Forbes? Hit reply for this opportunity. And then in small print at the end, says, you know, we’ll send you a price list. Right. Yeah. Or charges may be applicable to this. mean, mean, Forbes should be sticking with financial information or business information. You know, it’s interesting as I have noticed that Forbes has come up significantly in the search engine lately for things that have

07:01
nothing to do with. In fact, I think one of the searches I did this weekend was housing market in Orlando, right? Because I’m selling my house and Forbes was in the top and it didn’t have anything to do with the housing market in Orlando. It had to do with something. It had to do with the housing market, but like overall. So, yeah, I’ve noticed them coming up a ton in searches and once again, not 100 % relevant. mean, Forbes has articles on supplements now.

07:32
Yeah, right. That’s where I to my supplement information. I’d rather get my supplement information off TikTok. So, yeah, I think Google is shooting themselves in the foot. mean, maybe this strategy might work to prevent people from creating these spammy content sites. Yeah. But then by the time they decide to reverse it and there’s already been talks about them. I think I can’t remember. I always forget what the rep is who always talks with the public about Google.

08:01
They said they may have overdone it a little bit. But they keep screwing up. These AI search results are terrible. Like if you go to perplexity, the answers that perplexity gives is way better. Have you started using perplexity? I started using perplexity, but then when the AI search results came out, I started using Google and then I realized that they’re horrible and then went back to perplexity. They should just acquire perplexity actually. Yeah. I don’t know.

08:29
So you summarize the document. Yeah, we can go over it. Yeah, it’s funny. I was like, someone just messaged me with something about Google and it was our friend, Sonia from ECF. And she sent me a link to the article where it’s from Search Engine Land, the website, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. And it has all those examples that you just mentioned to me about the glue and all the kind of the blunders from

08:58
Google right now. she has some is just someone just sent me the link to that was pretty funny. The jumping off the bridge one was the worst, I think, of the three. Yeah, it’s just it’s here’s what’s scary to me about it. And this is probably because I have kids that are pretty impressionable. I still have a teenager and, she gets all our information from TikTok, which is concerning enough. Right. Because at that point, anybody can post anything.

09:24
But I also think of people that are older, right? And they’re searching for something and just the amount of disinformation that’s out there. And I know there’s always been disinformation, right? Even before the internet. mean, people would publish pamphlets and things like that. But it’s gotten to the point now where it’s concerning to me that someone who maybe doesn’t have all their mental faculties anymore or someone that is just more susceptible to things is just, it’s so dangerous.

09:54
Well, especially someone depressed being told to jump off a bridge. it’s like nobody. Google doesn’t even care about me, right? Like, I mean, you think about the logical progression of how that could go. Yeah, it’s it’s very concerning. Well, and then there are sites like character.ai. Have you played around with this at all? I haven’t. haven’t at all. It’s basically people think that it’s going to replace like boyfriends and girlfriends.

10:20
Because it’s essentially creating like an AI avatar of a personality that you might want to just hang out with and like why go through all the problems of dealing with the real human when you can have an AI person that you can talk with that always makes you feel better. But do they gasp up your car? Well, no, they don’t do physical things, but there’s more than acts of service, Tony. I know that’s what your love language is.

10:49
Well, that reminds me of how long ago was this? Remember where you could create the city and you could put yourself in the alternate reality? This is probably like 10 years ago and people were cheating on their significant others with people they had met in the alternate reality. like Second Life or something? I can’t remember what it Yeah, but there was something and it got pretty popular. This seems like just a better- You’re talking about World of Warcraft, are you?

11:17
Yeah, it’s one of my many video games that I play. But this sounds like just another progression of that that’s probably going to be even better, right? an even better as far as the quality, not better as far as how how it is for humanity. There was some graph I saw where it’s mainly people under the age of 25 using it right now. Yeah. And, you know, who knows, you know, train the next generation to not want to get married or actually have

11:46
real human interactions. Yeah. I hate all of this. I hate all of We need a new podcast topic for next week. Something happy, please. Let’s go back to Google. Every time I go down this AI rabbit hole, because I’m worried for my kids. really am. That’s one of the reasons why I’m keeping up with all this stuff so I can hopefully counter it before they go off to college. I don’t know.

12:12
Well, that’s a one more side note on this. Like if you are a parent and your kids are not out of the house, you can’t put your head in the sand on these things. You have to be paying attention to what’s going on. I feel like I meet so many parents that are just like, oh, I don’t even want to be bothered with these things. Like you can’t, you have to really educate yourself on what’s happening because your kids are educated on it and they are interacting on these platforms and doing these things. So little PSA.

12:40
for all our parents out there. But let’s talk about how Google is gonna ruin your business. On the flip side though, it has helped me help my child with math homework. Yeah. Because now you can just literally take a picture of the problem and it actually does a pretty good explanation. Yeah. And then it’s up to you to decipher if that answer is really correct. But it’s really helped me because I haven’t done a lot of these math things in like 30 years. What are you talking about? That’s your Sunday afternoon activity. Math problems for the whole family. No, I think there’s a lot of great

13:05
There’s a lot of great things that have come from AI. Like I think about your, haven’t been able to hear your talk that you did at Seller Summit yet, but from what I heard people talking about it with using AI to help you with advertising, there’s so much great things that AI will do for your business, help you. One of the things I’ve noticed a lot of people doing lately is using that AI assistant to basically transcribe meetings. So there’s so many great tools, but the problem is it’s like, I don’t know.

13:34
So you have a gas stove, right? your kids, gas stoves are awesome. They have the best heat, they heat the best, they cook the best. Like I love gas stoves, right? But I’m not gonna give my six year old a frying pan and tell them to make something on a gas stove because they don’t understand how to properly use it. I think that’s the important thing as a parent. You’ve gotta teach your kids how to use AI the right way and when it can help them and then when it’s gonna hurt them. So like with everything in life, you have to understand how to use it first. So you definitely educate yourself on all the.

14:04
things that are happening.

14:07
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.

14:37
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.

14:48
Yeah, we should just do an episode on AI and all these other things. Yeah, different one. Let’s get back to Google here. Yes. Okay, so basically there’s Google’s content warehouse API got leaked. It’s not really like a document that you read. It’s more of like an API document. So it’s kind of technical. Okay, basically the type of information that Google stores about search queries and authors and that sort of thing. But there’s some crazy people out there. This only been leaked for

15:17
like a day or a couple days. Yeah. And people have combed through the document. And basically, because it’s an API document, it actually exposed a lot of how the actual search algorithm works. Okay. Okay. All right. So this is what’s funny about all this stuff. And we it kind of gives us an understanding of how Google works. Google purposely lies to people to create because they don’t want people gaming the system, right?

15:46
So they’re giving out information that is contradictory to how they’re actually doing it to prevent other people from doing it. me an example. OK, so the first one was that internal documents have revealed that there actually is domain authority. So each website actually has a certain amount of clout, like a number given to it. And for years and years, Google has been denying this.

16:15
Google says that they don’t factor in the domain authority. There’s no number that rates like how strong a website is and everyone knew this one was BS. Right? Because, for example, Forbes can publish an article about something that I’ve written about and instantly outrank me. Yes. You within a day. Because they’re really like a 90 domain or something like that. Right. So clearly there’s some amount of authority, right? But Google’s always denied it. They denied it for the longest time.

16:43
but now the internal documents reveal that the actual variable is called site authority. Maybe that’s they meant. It’s not called domain authority. they weren’t technically lying. Exactly, like when your kid tells you, you know, I didn’t tell you everything, but technically I wasn’t lying. Exactly. I didn’t take a cookie, I took three. Yeah. Nice job, Google. The other thing that Google has denied for a while is ranking based on clicks. Okay.

17:13
So now they track click data for boosting, demoting, and then reinforcing of rankings. And incidentally, this is why they started the Chrome browser in the first place, back in, I can’t remember when they started. Was it 2008 or something like that? Maybe earlier than that. I’m not sure. But they realized in order to create a better search engine, they actually needed real click data. And that was actually the reason why they started Chrome.

17:42
So is that click data coming from the search results to the website or click data within the website? Click data, I believe from the browser. Okay, so when someone’s in Chrome, Safari, whatever, they’re tracking that click. Obviously they’re tracking Chrome. Yeah, so all the click data from Chrome and everything actually factors into how your website ranks. I didn’t know they said that didn’t matter. To me that would just make total sense of why it mattered. It does, but I think they…

18:12
They didn’t want people like, I don’t know, to that. paying people to click or setting up of something that would click automatically? Well, let me just tell you what’s going on right now in Reddit land, which I found really interesting. In fact, our mutual friend and Seller Summit speaker Spencer Hawes has been experimenting with getting traffic from Reddit. OK. And so what he’s done is he’s created a bunch of Reddit accounts, got them to about a thousand points of karma.

18:38
I don’t know how many people listening to this actually use Reddit, but basically you get karma points for interacting with various groups in Reddit and subreddits. And so you build up these accounts and then you go in and you share other people’s content in a bunch of different subreddits. And occasionally you, add your own, your own link to your own website. And last month he was able to build, I think 11,000 visits just based on this Reddit strategy alone because the Reddit

19:08
know, thread outranks, you the actual thing. And today, there’s actually companies that and industries have sprouted up in just like the last, I don’t know, three or four months that now have like Reddit farms. These are people that are just dedicated paid people that go in and post on Reddit, your links, your content and whatnot. And apparently larger companies are using services like this. My eyes are rolling so far back in my head.

19:38
I mean, it’s ridiculous. It actually hasn’t even been that long. It’s been what, six months and all this stuff is already happening. And here’s the other thing. Like I’ve never been a huge fan of Reddit, but this type of thing will now make anything good about Reddit stink. Yes. You know what I mean? So it’s not it’s not only ruining like the search results. It’s I mean, because there definitely are some things that I’ve seen in Reddit that I find interesting. But now that’s going to be ruined as well. Yep.

20:05
And the other second part of Spencer’s strategy is to create his own subreddit. Okay. Which is essentially like having your own Facebook group in a way. Yeah. It’s something that you control. You can post links as much as you want, but you got to build it up like a Facebook group and get people to join your subreddit. But this is where the marketing dollars are going now. Yeah. Right. Pretty crazy. There’s also a lot of people that are gaming Quora because Quora is kind of like right under Reddit.

20:33
And so instead of blogging on their own platforms now, they’re just transferring that content over to Quora and ranking that way.

20:43
I’m so annoyed by all of this. mean, it’s dumb. Like Google is shooting themselves in the foot. No one’s going to want to use their search engine after all this. It doesn’t make sense to me. OK, let’s see what else. they used to… Google was denying that there was a sandbox. So what is a sandbox for you guys listening? Brand new websites that are created. Google tends not to rank right away because

21:12
They’re trying to limit the amount of spam, people, their ability to just quickly put up spam sites. And previously Google has denied that the sandbox even exists. Well, here’s the thing, know, I actually, Bumblebee Linnon’s way back in the day was actually in the sandbox. I could not even rank for my own domain. I want to say for like four months, which is rare, right? Today, you your domain should rank right away. But back then I was clearly in the sandbox.

21:42
Google denied it, and you know how I got out of the sandbox? How? My sister-in-law who worked at Google just happened to be in charge of writing a blog post that no longer exists, but she referenced our store in that blog post about, I think, small businesses on Google or something like that. How convenient. And then I got out of it. almost the next day after it was published. And then all of a sudden all my pages.

22:09
or in the search results. So Google said that doesn’t exist, but we know it did. Because now there is a, yeah, there’s a host age parameter in this document. So it’s not called a sandbox, it’s called a host age. You know what’s so interesting about that strategy for Google is that if you think about TikTok, which I feel like is trying to take over everything, right, and doing a fairly good job of it.

22:38
when you start a new account on TikTok, it actually gives you juice, right? It’s like the opposite of what Google did. like hearing Google’s rationale of like keeping spam out, I actually think TikTok’s rationale is better, right? They give you juice initially, like they show your video to a lot of people, and then depending on the interaction, how long people watch, if people click, do they watch it a second time, right? All those factors, the engagement, that makes TikTok decide

23:07
you know, basically how you’re gonna perform in the algorithm. So as opposed to just saying all new sites are spammy, they actually give you a trial run, right, in front of a bunch of people. And if a bunch of people are like, because if it’s spammy, no one’s watching it, right? It’s gonna immediately die on TikTok. But if it’s great content, then you’re actually gonna get a boost and, you know, your content’s gonna perform, which is really what Google should have been doing. They should have been showing the new content.

23:33
obviously having some sort of filter if like it’s just obvious spam, right? But like showing it and then if people are like, nah, then it, you know, gets sort of relegated to the back row. I mean, I think the way that Instagram does this a little bit too, I’m not sure exactly how much so for Instagram, but I know for TikTok, this is exactly how it works. You know, I actually think that’s a great strategy. I think the difference is that TikTok content

24:01
doesn’t stay, it’s not sticky and no one’s really searching for it. No, people are using TikTok as a search engine. I think it’s like 27%. So do the search results constantly change? I guess that maybe that system would work actually for Google. So every time you do a search, you would get different content then depending on what’s been published. I think initially, right?

24:26
Obviously in your personalized search results, it’s similar to how Google works, right? Like you’re always gonna see, like if I’m searching for finance information on TikTok, two financial people that I follow would be Jim Wang and College Investor, right? So they’re probably gonna appear in those search results at some point because I already follow them, but then they’re gonna also broadcast new people for me to find and discover. And based on my interaction with them is gonna…

24:52
impact how those appear in other searches, right? So if like lots of people are clicking and interacting with that content, it’s going to rise to the top. Which I think Google could absolutely do. Yes, obviously TikTok content is not long lasting, but the accounts are, right? So it affects the account. You could get a lot of wrong answers that way, right? Depending on the time of day. Maybe. Whereas Google like search is supposed to give you the right answer or as close to it as possible.

25:23
I’m just, yeah, I’m not saying as far as search accuracy. I’m saying as far as, if Google’s whole point of the sandbox was to weed out spam sites, think, but what happens is you also weed out a ton of legitimate sites. A better way to do that is present it to the audience and let them tell you it’s a spam site by not interacting with it or immediately clicking off of it versus just Google arbitrarily deciding that it shouldn’t be on there. Yeah. I mean, in a way that’s how YouTube works, right?

25:52
YouTube’s the second largest search engine and when you post something, they do show it to a bunch of people in your subscriber base and if it does well, it shows it to more people. I suppose that could be applied in search as well. don’t know, whatever it is, it would be better than anything that’s out there today, seriously. Yeah, I just think Google needs to get with the times. People are doing things differently today than they were 20 years ago when they got started.

26:22
Yeah. Maybe it’s 30 years ago. I don’t even know. I’m so old now. I mean, you mentioned like this document is very long and probably the rest of the stuff isn’t as interesting. But one thing they did not lie about was expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. I was going to ask you about that because that would seem like something you could easily lie about to get people to focus on that. That’s true. But they do keep track of like the author and what they’ve published. So interesting.

26:51
I guess, and then YMYL, which is your money, your life, actually has a separate scorecard. Interesting. Because that data is actually more sensitive, right? It’s on health and your health and that sort of thing. So also there is a site focus score. So if you write all about the same topic and your Google will, I guess, peg you as the expert in that topic if most of your topic is within that focus.

27:20
I’m pretty sure this parameter is not working because Forbes now writes about everything and they still rank. But it’s good to know at least that they’re keeping track of that stuff. Well, it’s something that we’ve talked a lot about in the profitable audience course when we have people wanting to think about niches. Like going deep into a very specific niche is really a great way to get started these days. Like I would never recommend doing something like the happy housewife again, right? Because it’s too broad, too wide, too shallow.

27:49
But I still think there’s space for people to write about ultra marathon running in cold weather, right? Or where you just go deep. And the interesting thing is, if you’re really passionate about something, you will not have trouble coming up with lots of articles and information to create on that topic. Yeah. Here’s what something else I found kind of interesting. It has to do with building backlinks. It turns out that if you build a backlink

28:19
from a site that has a high domain authority, but that that post doesn’t actually get that much traffic, like no one’s reading it, that link is devalued. So you wanna get links from high traffic pages or ones that actually matter. But let’s just think about this for a second. When you take this to the like, does this impact us? So Forbes is like, hey, do you wanna be featured in Forbes?

28:45
pay us $500, right? You know they’re gonna bury your link on a post that doesn’t do well, right? They don’t want it on their front and center top post. So basically, you’re gonna pay 500 bucks to get a link on a page that has no traffic that’s not gonna impact you in a positive way at all. So don’t do it. Well, supposedly Google cracked down on that in May, early May. It’s called Parasite SEO. This is where you purposely put some content on a high authority site. Yeah.

29:13
I feel like they cracked down on this in 2012. See, I don’t really see that happening. I mean, there’s a lot of sites that got manually demoted. Yeah. But I don’t know if they have that in the algorithm yet. Maybe someone listening out there who follows this more closely than I do can comment here. as far as I know, they just manually penalized a lot of large sites, mainly the coupon pages of all things. I mean, they’ve been waiting forever to penalize them. Yeah. You know? I mean, I don’t know.

29:44
All right, so the real question that we want to get to, I guess, at the end is, is blogging worth it? Yes, because you just did an, I missed it last week, but you did a whole office hours on this. I did. That’s why we’re talking about, well, you weren’t there though. I wasn’t. You didn’t watch it. I haven’t watched it, no. But we got a lot of depressing emails after that. So what did you do to these people? I basically said that if you’re going to do a pure affiliate site,

30:13
or a review site, right now is probably not the right time to do that. Yeah, I mean, don’t think we’ve ever, I’ve never encouraged people to do like a peer affiliate or review site. Like that’s just not been my content strategy. So it’s hard for me to recommend that to people, but I know a lot of people have done it for many years and been successful. I mean, our friends. Yeah, all of our friends have done this. Multi-million dollar businesses, right? Doing exactly that. I mean, mixing, you know, content.

30:42
that helps along with affiliate stuff. So you told people to give up on their dreams and then what? No, here’s the thing. And then I purposely didn’t do my talk in my e-commerce course because I really don’t think e-commerce has been really affected. Like Bumble Bee Lens has been fine. It actually gained traffic during the last you sell, didn’t we start this out though by you saying if you sell products? Yeah.

31:09
You’re not excluded. That’s just anecdotal, by the way. Is anyone’s listening? I’ve just talked to a bunch of people in the e-commerce space. Didn’t really get affected. Whereas all of my friends, yes, the content affiliate space, all of them got negatively affected. So the question that we are going to get times 10 is, you know, a lot of people listen to this podcast are in e-commerce wanting to create that content, wanting to create that branding.

31:36
Can you put your blog on BigCommerce or Shopify or should you have your blog on WordPress as a sub-domain? I don’t really think it matters. I personally would always put it on WordPress because of the plugins that are available to you. I’ve actually never really have done a real blog on Shopify like you have, so maybe you can answer that question better.

31:59
I mean, I know this, Shopify blog has improved significantly over the past five years. So when I started in 2015, the blogging on Shopify felt very bare bones. Like you could write a post, you could insert an image, you could insert a link, and that was about all you could do. Now I know that it is far more advanced, but I haven’t had any experience with that in the last couple of years. I do think,

32:27
Overall, WordPress just gives you so much more flexibility of what you can do that I would probably still go with WordPress. If this is going to keep you from doing it at all, then put it on Shopify. If that is your hurdle that you can’t overcome, it’s better to have something than nothing, but it’s not too tough to set up the WordPress site. You could do it in a day or two. I would definitely put it on WordPress.

32:57
So what concerns me about all this is that Google owns YouTube. And I’ve seen this more more lately in just like the past three weeks. But almost all the YouTube videos that I get suggested on my homepage, I shouldn’t say almost all, but probably almost half are AI generated. Maybe that has to do with what I watch, but like there’s all these sports commentary videos now that come up that are just completely automated.

33:26
it seems. Are you getting that too in your feed? I’m in a feed I need to get out of on YouTube right now. I don’t know how I ended up in it. But so no, I’m not getting that. However, I wonder if it has more to do with them feeding that to you or the percentage of AI content on YouTube has gone up so much that that’s the natural repercussion of the percentage of that content. I mean, I’m sure it’s getting flooded.

33:56
Like even on my TikTok feed now, it’s very clear that there’s some automated way that they’re doing this. And I actually have a buddy who’s kind of automated video generation using 11 Labs. So he narrates the whole thing. And then he has these services go on and just pull B-roll. And so it’s just his voice or the AI version of his voice overlaid by a slideshow essentially. Yeah, I don’t see a lot of that on TikTok or YouTube.

34:25
But here’s the other thing, mostly on TikTok, what I see right now is like true crime. Which so it’s always like police camera footage, stuff like that. So I don’t think that’s in the AI space. Like I’m sure there’s AI true crime, but I’m not in that algorithm. I would say like for things like sports, 100%. I’ve seen it in your feed on YouTube. Like when I logged in this morning to set up office hours and I noticed that for your feed as well.

34:54
So I’m wondering if it’s a combination of you’ve watched some of it plus the amount of AI content that’s on there plus Google. Like it’s probably threefold, right? What you’re watching, the amount of it and Google trying to push it, which also to me is crazy because at the end of the day, people don’t love AI content and video. Not always. See, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true because some of these videos that I accidentally watched have a lot of views. Yeah.

35:24
So clearly it’s working for some people. Do the channels have a lot of subscribers? Have you ever checked I didn’t click on the channel. I would be curious about that. So to me,

35:39
my immediate thought is, well, this is why subscribers on YouTube matter, right? Because you want to make sure that your content’s at least going out to your people. It’s kind of like the email subscribers, right? That’s why on your blog, email subscribers become so much more valuable because even if Google starts decreasing the amount of people they show your content to in the search results, you still have the ability to email those people your content. I mean, if you look at my YouTube channel,

36:07
it’s really only about 30 % of people that are returning viewers. The other 70 % is brand new. So anyway. your content’s getting shown too then. It is, the only thing that worries me is like what if this AI spam gets so much where Google just gets fed up and starts doing the same thing that it’s doing in the search algorithms. There is a check box now which is really weird.

36:34
Oh, in the back end? In the back end that says, has your content been altered in any way with AI and whatnot? But what’s weird is you don’t even have to select anything. Oh, you don’t? thought you had to… No, you don’t even have to select it right now. You can just publish a video without answering that question. Oh, I didn’t know that. I I always answer the question. I do too. I didn’t know there was an option to not answer. that I… It’s by default. Because I published one the other day with it completely unchecked.

37:04
Oh, and it just went through? And it just went, yeah, published. Because I forgot. mean, it’s not like it forces you to. Yeah. It’s not pre-checked with anything you’ll notice. No, it’s not. Okay. This is such a sad We’ve kind gone all over the place here. But I think the core has been the same. So what did you tell people last week at the end of the day on office hours? Like, what’s your conclusion?

37:32
Is blogging dead should you start a blog in 2024? I think right now, if your purpose of is ranking in search for a pure content site, it’s gonna be tough. Unless you have like, unless it’s like a blog for an e-commerce store or something like that, where you have like a business. Yeah. If it’s just purely for to rank in search, affiliate revenue, reviews, that sort of thing, it’s so much harder.

38:00
especially the way Google is right now. It’s unpredictable. because we’ve done three episodes in the last six weeks. I’m sure more changes are coming. Google is grasping at straws right now. Yeah. So this is my final thought on this. So Google’s grasping at straws. Everyone’s unhappy. It’s like when…

38:25
people are like, don’t go to this restaurant anymore because they use plastic straws and it’s hurting the turtles, right? So it’s like, but if you love that restaurant, you’re still going, right? Are people truly just going to stop using Google to the point where they’re hurting to where they have to make things better? Are they gonna lose enough revenue? Is there gonna be enough of an impact for this to be changed? Or is it, they’re just so big that it doesn’t matter?

38:53
Well, I think the key here is that they own Android. And Android has the largest market share and the browser is the default app for browsing. Actually, I remember now in that other office hours, I also mentioned I had everyone pull up their apps. Like what is the most used app on your phone? Oh, you’re asking me? Yeah, I’m asking you. Hold on. Let me see. Mine actually is Gmail.

39:20
Yeah, mine would probably be Gmail. Second, obviously Tinder. The second most used app on my phone is probably either the Target or the Walmart app because I order groceries. I guess my point was Chrome is number five for me. Oh, yes. I don’t even use it. The only reason I use Chrome is to keep up with Bumblebee linens. I think I use it ironically to check Ahrefs.

39:49
Like in the car, I didn’t know this. And then you know, you don’t have an Android phone, so maybe you can’t relate. But in the past, I actually have the Google search widget on my phone. That has been replaced now by the chat GPT widget. So I can do chat GPT queries really quickly. Yeah, so I have a, since I have an iPhone, Safari is your default. So like anything that you click to open up opens up in Safari. That’s your default browser. I see, yeah.

40:18
So it’s a little bit different. All it takes is for Apple to not make Google the default search engine. Yeah. I think Google is going to be screwed. Interesting. Okay. Right. Like what if Bing gets so good and people want Bing? Yeah. Actually, you know what? I haven’t used Bing in a while. I should go give it a try again. I was thinking that earlier in this conversation. But anyway, all it takes is maybe like five points of more lost market share and Google will lose so much revenue.

40:47
I think their intention with the AI search results was to give people the answers and incorporate ads into that little block so they can maintain. So again, they’re trying all these different ways to make their search better while still preserving their revenue. But right now it’s like backfiring big time. Like a series of consecutive mistakes, in my opinion at least. Hope you enjoy that episode. Now it’s going to be interesting to see how all of this unfolds.

41:17
Because if the Google search results are this bad for much longer, people are just going to abandon it altogether. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 541. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:58
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter job podcast. Tony and I just got back from Seller Summit 2024. And what we’re going to do today is we’re going to give you a recap of all the events that happened last week. It was, I thought it was my favorite year yet. I don’t know about you. You know, it’s tough because I, last year was really special for me because I released the book and it was just magical. That video you put together to me last year. I still think about it sometimes.

01:23
You have it. cry. I still think about it, but I did not cry. You can watch it every night before you go to bed just to reminisce. But this year was probably a close second. So if you stop just thinking about yourself, I think this year our speakers knocked it out of the park for sure. I agree. Actually, this is the first year where I think every single talk was good. I shouldn’t say that.

01:51
I shouldn’t say that, but not say that we’re not going to go back and talk about the ones that weren’t in previous years. Although what was the what was the one nailed it? There was a guy many, many years ago, it’s like one of our first or second summits, and we we invited someone that we didn’t know terribly well, and his talk was adequate. But when he got done, he’s like, dude, I crushed that talk. I like, I was like, I.

02:22
But this year, I think everybody crushed the dog. I think it’s because our criteria for speakers has just improved over the eight years that we’ve done this to the point where I think we got it down now. Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know how we can get better. I literally like was on the way home driving. I was like, how are we going to find speakers to top this past year’s speak? Like, that’s how good I thought the speakers were. I’m already stressing out about improving on our speaker lineup.

02:51
Okay, see, I don’t usually stress out until like leading up to the event. I’m trying to enjoy this period now because the event is the most stressful thing that I do all year. I know it’s not the case for you, but for me, it’s very stressful. So I like to decompress a little bit right after the event. And you got sick. I mean, you weren’t sick. You just lost your voice this year for the first time it’s ever happened. So this is what happened. I made the rookie move of blowing out my voice kind of at the opening party.

03:21
Okay. And then it wasn’t that great even for the keynote, but by the second day it was completely gone. And in fact, I’m still not fully recovered. You can probably hear a little bit of my voice, but yeah, rookie move, rookie move. Yeah, it’s like, it’s not your first conference, Steve. It’s not my first conference. So a couple of things that we did different this year, which can we talk about the highlights first and then we’ll go into like the sessions?

03:50
Yeah, do that for me. Okay. So a couple of things that I thought we really got right. One, we had a photographer this year, which I saw the photos this morning. I think you saw them last night. Yeah. Shout out to Francesca. Yes. Holy cow. Like, why haven’t we been doing this? First of all, it’s like feeling like you’re back there, right? Because you get to see all the photos of things that were going on. Speakers are sponsors. It just felt very

04:17
I don’t know, warm. I had to say warm and fuzzy, but it totally was warm and fuzzy when I was looking through the photos. And she did an amazing job. I felt like she just captured people’s personalities so well in her photos. So that’ll be really, I think she’s putting together a little bit of a slideshow. think we’re going to put together something as well. Yeah, a little short film. Yes. So that was, I think, a really awesome thing to do just for our own memories and things like that, as well as for our attendees, because it’s a great way for them to remember all the people that they met.

04:47
The next thing we did, which I think was a game changer, was we had the closing party at the hotel, which we have not done for five years. It’s been longer than that, right? The last time we did it was in 2019 when were in Miami and we had it on the rooftop of the hotel. That’s right. That’s right. So five years and…

05:09
Typically it’s because we can’t get that space on the last evening. It’s like booked, they have to flip it for another group, but this year it was able to work out that way. And people, I got so much feedback from people that they loved having it at the hotel and we had it at the rooftop terrace. So beautiful views, you get to look at the ocean, you get to look at the bay or whatever the canals are over there. And I think that actually was a big bonus. You know the compliment that I kept getting?

05:38
which is not really under my control at all, was that all the attendees were just super open about everything. Yes. And very welcoming. And they were just telling me they’ve been to a lot of events and ours is one of the only ones where they felt very comfortable. And then they said, hey, Steve, you did a great job building this community. I’m thinking to myself. I hope you did not take credit for that. Yeah, I’m thinking to myself.

06:07
You know, maybe it’s just the nature of my content and how it’s like kind of family first that attracts those type of people, perhaps. I don’t know. What’s your explanation? I don’t know. Maybe you have a business partner that’s literally been cultivating that for eight years. But I don’t know. It is probably your content. No, but I mean, there are 50 percent new people this year. Yes. 50 percent of people. What was really funny is there were people there that had never heard of you. Yes. Which was kind of funny.

06:36
I mean, Jen and I find that funny. You probably don’t find it as as humorous as we do. No, I don’t care. But we got this. got the same feedback that I was nervous with 50 percent new people. That could be a disaster. Right. Because you don’t know anything about these people. You don’t know if they’re going to like embrace the culture that we’ve created. And not only did they embrace the culture, they literally I think about Brian, the new the new guy. I know I don’t know how to say your last name, Brian. So sorry about that.

07:04
but came from Pennsylvania, literally made the video in the Facebook group, was at the mastermind. Like by day two, he was best friends with everybody at the conference. And I got feedback from him specifically saying, you know, it’s so friendly, it’s so warm, everyone’s willing to talk about their businesses. So yeah, very, very good. I think that was a highlight for me. And Brian is just a very outgoing guy too. So by the end, I think he met everyone.

07:32
Yes, I’m pretty, I know he did not go to bed the last night because he didn’t have a hotel room. So he stayed up all night because he had an early flight, which I was not going to be a part of that group, but good for them for making it all night. I really enjoyed my mastermind group this year as well. I think we really helped a lot of the people in that group, at least in my group. That’s how it felt. How was the content group? The content group was awesome. In fact, we.

08:00
We had people begging to get into that up until the last minute, which was really nice, right? Because I think people see the writing on the wall with Amazon becoming harder and harder and the margins are slimmer. And so I think people were like, hey, I need to learn about content. I need to learn about building a brand. The variety of people in that group was really nice. A lot of different people doing different things, but overall very eager to work on that brand building thing.

08:29
Yes, that was actually one of the main themes of the event. Yes. I would say almost half of the of the sessions were content focused, right? I mean, really, the only way to build a brand is to get people exposure to your name over and over and over again. And really, the only way to do that is with content today. Amazon’s not going to do that for you. Yeah, I think that the perception for people is that if you go to the content thing, you don’t

08:55
qualify for the masterminds, right? Because our e-commerce masterminds have revenue requirements, but that’s actually not the case at all. We had people from the million dollar masterminds ask to transfer their ticket to the content masterminds. Most of the people in that group were already doing million plus, right? So I think there’s a misconception that that’s sort of like the, well, if you don’t qualify, you can just join the content one, but that’s not the case at all. There were a couple people in the group that…

09:21
were not in e-commerce yet, but they were building content with other businesses and wanting to move into e-commerce, but very successful in their current business. So that group is definitely a room full of very, very intelligent people that just haven’t cracked the content game yet. Actually, a question I get asked is, should I start with content first and then sell a product? And ideally the answer is yes. Cause once you have that audience, you can pretty much sell anything.

09:50
It’s really just a question of how much runway that you have is what I always say. What do you tell people when they ask you that? I say something very similar. I think personally, I would much rather start on content because I feel like the audience tells you what they want. And we’ve seen that from many of our friends in e-commerce. Like one of our speakers last year, Alicia, had a content site with fitness and I think it was like yoga or something like that. basically she was able to launch her water bottle brand.

10:19
due to her audience size, right? And her building that audience. One of our friends, Laurie from Passionate Pending Pinchers, built a brand and then was able to launch menu plan boxes and planners. And then I’m blanking on her name. I think it’s Alexis. She’s the travel girl. She was- Oh yeah, Alex, yeah. Yeah, Alex. She built that whole travel site and then went into e-commerce launching a line of travel products. All these things are very competitive, right? Planners are competitive, travel products, water bottles.

10:49
but they were able to generate seven figures because they had that audience loyalty. So I think if you do have time to build that audience, it’s a great way to go. Yep, but you know what’s funny is I would do the opposite. I would sell products first. Because I want to see money coming in. The problem with content is, and this is when I started my content, I always went into it going, okay, it’s going to take a couple of years for things to get going. It just depends on how soon you need the money.

11:18
There’s just some people out there that need some quick wins. Yeah. And others, you know, are more patient and willing to stick it through. So just really depends on your personality. Yeah, for sure. So I didn’t actually get to go to all the sessions, but I think between the both of us, we we got to see all the sessions. How did yours go, first of all? Well, I just want to say before we say we get started on that, I was for the first time ever was able to go to.

11:43
every session slot, right? Like we have two running simultaneously, so you can’t be at two at the same time. But I was able to attend every session because we had adequate registration staff this year. So I was very happy about that. I finally got to sit in in sessions and I was just really blown away by the speakers. Do you have a favorite session? I’m not gonna say that publicly. Let’s see. So the first session I attended was my own.

12:12
Which, you know, I did a bang up job. No, it was funny because I gave a talk on email marketing and you you get on that stage and there’s lights going at the stage. So you can’t really see out. You can only see the people in like the first two rows. And I look down and the entire Klaviyo team is sitting in the front row. Oh, that’s hilarious. And I was like, OK, because my whole talk I use, you we use Klaviyo. My clients use Klaviyo. So.

12:39
I was like, either I’m doing a great job or I’m really screwing this up. But there’s probably not gonna be a lot of middle ground here. So I actually started my talk saying, hey, I’ve got all of the Klaviyo team in the front row. So if I’m teaching you something that’s wrong, I want them to call me out and then you can visit their booth and they’ll show you the right way to do it. That’s too funny. So yeah, so my talk, I thought it went well.

13:02
I felt like, you know, just provided value for people. think email marketing is so important and you know, most of the people at Seller Summit that are already selling should be doing it. So just good to always reinforce things that are really core business strategies in my opinion. What did you cover specifically? I mean, just highlight. Yeah. So this year I covered the importance of your flows, right? Because to me, that’s how you, that’s like the most bang for your buck. You set them up one time and then they just run and you just monitor them, right? You might make small updates here and there, but

13:31
really easy to get them set up and get going. And then I talked about the importance of segmentation, personalization, and education. So basically segmenting your audience so that the right people are getting the right email. So you’re not just blanket sending to everybody. The people that are interested in certain things are getting emails about those things and not things they’re not interested in. It helps your overall email account health and increases your conversion rate and things like that.

13:56
The personalization part, I mean, that’s what Klaviyo’s strength is, right? Just the data, understanding what your customers, more about your customers. So personalizing things as simple as using their names and then, know, location-based things that they already bought. you you probably know in your company if you sell shorts, people also wanna buy sandals, right? They’re summer clothes shopping. So making sure that you have personalized experience for those customers. And then…

14:21
the education piece, is I think that overall most companies do a terrible job about educating people about their products. So, you they do a great job of blasting out sales and promos, but they don’t just talk about like the great things that their product does, whether it’s, you know, manufactured in the United States or patents, right? Like it’s a better built product or more sophisticated or the features it has.

14:47
People just don’t talk about that in their email marketing and it’s a great way to send emails to people without just pushing through sales. had a question for you. Yep. So with segmentation, it naturally means that you have to send out more emails. You have to actually draft more specific emails. So how do you balance the blast versus, you know, writing maybe three or four times the emails for different segments?

15:10
Well, the nice thing about segmentation is that a lot of that can be automated. So if someone buys X, you can segment them and then they automatically, so I do a lot of my segmentation in the funnel, in the flows. So if someone buys X and they’re automatically directed to email A, if they don’t buy X, they get email B. So a lot of that segmentation happens in like the post purchase flow or in VIP or those types of flows. So yes, you do have to write more emails on the front end.

15:40
but those emails perform so much better, it’s worth the extra time. And the core of the email is the same, you’re actually just using some dynamic codes like provided by Klaviyo, you don’t have to figure this out, right? To insert in there to give people the right information. 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

16:08
on how to get started in e-commerce 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 obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

16:37
Cool. Let’s see, the next talk that I went to was Mina’s talk on the three pillars of Amazon success. I think we tried to balance the sessions, Amazon versus D2C, although it was maybe slightly more skewed D2C, but we still had a bunch of good Amazon talks. I thought, and I hope Mina doesn’t hear this, but I I thought his session was amazing this year, much better than his session last year. Don’t you want him to hear that talk?

17:05
I hear that feedback. Well, I know, but that implies that last year, you know, it wasn’t as good, right? That’s why. But yeah, this year was fantastic. He did a great job. I think last year got into the weeds too much with the spreadsheets. This one was very actionable. And I think everyone left with with a game plan to improve their Amazon sales. Yeah. And another thing that Trivium did, which I thought was so genius. if you are a sponsor listening to this, is they actually did audits for people before the summit.

17:34
And then they actually printed them out in these nice little bound notebooks and basically had them spread out on their table. So people would walk by and like see their business name and stop, which great for marketing for them, right? But also providing those attendees a ton of value by doing that free audit. And then they actually, for most of the attendees stopped by and grabbed their pamphlet, you know, then actually walking through it with the attendee and sharing with them their observations and feedback. And this pamphlet

18:02
I mean it was a book. It was a book, yeah, pamphlets are, booklets the better word. Yeah, and I thought it was ingenious, their strategy. So literally they just went through the brands from the app and then just did a whole prep session on how they can improve PPC just all across the board. And it was just a great value. Talk about paying it forward. Yes. That’s the way you get clients. Yeah. The funny thing about that was that I saw other sponsors sort of like,

18:30
eyeing over, you know, like, wait, what did they do? So definitely pick that up for your sponsor playbook next year. And speaking of playbook session that I was bummed to have missed was Kristin Levine and her DIY PR playbook. I was actually trying to fix a couple of problems. That was the one I didn’t get to hear the either of those sessions fully at that time period. But that was a standing room only session. Yes. Yes, I didn’t get to I got the tail end of that.

19:00
because I think something happened or I needed to talk to somebody. But standing room only, I walked in and I was like, whoa. And then I missed the part where she made fun of me. She told me that she had made fun of me in her talk. I just missed that one part. I came in towards the end. But I heard lots of people talking during lunch that that was such a valuable session. They got so much out of it. Kristin’s been in PR for 25, 30 years. So definitely a huge value add for people. And something

19:30
that we have actually never had a PR session before. So this is kind of exciting. It was, it was. And clearly there’s huge demand for it. Just given that everyone was there. Getting PR has been really good for our store over the years. And I’m just thinking about our Today Show appearance where we got like seven XD orders just in like 12 seconds. And we’ve been in a bunch of magazines. It’s great for social proof on your website as well. Our friends at Quiet Light, Elaine.

19:58
gave a talk on how to get top dollar for your business in two to three years. And this is a talk, they’ve done a couple talks like this over the past several years for us. And I think the important part of this is when you decide you wanna sell your business, you’re probably a year behind what you need to be doing. And I think there’s so many little, I remember when Mike Jackness sold Colorit and he gave a talk about the process, like at the next seller summit. And…

20:24
there were all these things that I would have had no idea that you had to do or keep track of. One of the things that he, I think it was him that struggled with was the return accounting, right? How many returns they had. There was something in that that would have never crossed my mind as being something that was a very important factor in the deal. And so I think going to that session, whether you’re not even thinking about selling right now is really good because what…

20:49
that session always does is teaches you how to get your crud together before you wanna sell. Because once you decide you wanna sell, if you don’t have all that in a good space, you’re gonna delay the process by a year or even longer. Actually, there was a number of people at the event who were thinking about exiting in like three or four years actually. Yeah. And then I have to just shout out Chris Schaefer, one of our OGs.

21:18
every year shows up at Seller Summit, runs a mastermind, literally would like move tables for us if we needed to. Coming in now from Columbia, South America. So used to be a hop, skip, and a jump for him, not anymore. And he talked about basically content and how big brands leverage organic content. I mean, I just can’t say enough good things about him. His talks always deliver. They’re very practical.

21:46
I feel like that’s one of those talks where everyone is frantically taking notes, taking pictures, and he just does such a good job. And he’s done so many different things in e-commerce and content that I feel like he’s a great person to give that talk, because he’s always on top of the trends and what’s happening and really gave people a very practical strategy they could use to work on their organic content. I’m bummed I missed that one. I was in the other room. But I was at Angela’s talk.

22:14
which was how to grow your e-commerce business with just organic Instagram. She was a hit. I heard, I heard it was She talks like a boss. I can’t describe what, no she’s I see that about her. No, she’s got that like presence. Yeah, she’s got a lot of confidence and like she openly made fun of me on stage also. She retired her husband. Okay. So she was gonna register my husband quit his job.

22:43
And he just gave an overall strategy about how she grew her Instagram account. she runs a seven figure business and she hardly spends any money on ads whatsoever. It’s literally just all organic Instagram. And she laid out the playbook. So what I thought was funny is we had a few technical difficulties throughout the event and I was in Chris’s or I was in whatever talk and you were with Angela’s talk.

23:09
and you texted me and you said, Angela is the Riz. And I thought something was broken in the room. Like, and I’m like, literally like, what does Riz mean? What does Riz mean? And then I finally came back to you I was like, what’s wrong? And you were like, that means like, great, get with the times or whatever. I know that’s how my kids talk these days. that’s why Riz stands for charisma, by the way. I am not.

23:36
So I thought something was broken. Yeah, no, she just came out like a boss. That’s the only way to describe it. So then one of our technical difficulties meant that I got to advance slides for people in the back of the room. so thankfully, Brett Curry, once again, another Seller Summit longtime friend and alumni.

24:01
I had his talk and I was so thankful that it was Brett because he’s a very understanding guy and I was like, if I don’t get the cues right to advance your slides, because he was talking about like paid ads and Google performance max, stuff that I have very little knowledge of, like Chris Schafer’s I could have done pretty easily because I do a lot of the stuff Chris Schafer’s. So when he’s talking, I’m like totally like in sync with Brett Curry. I’m like, I have no idea what you’re even talking about right now. Like this is so foreign to me. So.

24:29
But as usual, Brett gave a very practical down to earth, basically the things that were working and then talking about the things that actually aren’t working anymore and things that I think probably in years past, we probably even did talks about them, right? Or things that you should be doing. And what I like about Brett is he’s always really honest about the state of paid ads, right? He never tries to sugarcoat anything for people.

24:55
And this year he had several examples in his talk of ads that were working. And to me, when you can show examples of things, it just becomes so clear to people. And one of the companies that he works with, they sell a hair color. And these are for people that wanna have like orange hair or purple hair or pink hair, right? So it’s like he showed these videos that were converting really well. And when you watch those videos, it was just so obvious why they were performing well, but just to see them,

25:24
And then he went through and talked about why those were doing well. So he basically showed you examples and then broke down all the components of why it performed. And then he showed ones that weren’t performing and broke down all the components of those of why they probably weren’t having as good of results. So I actually thought that was an excellent talk. Definitely a very advanced talk for people.

25:47
But even if you want to hire this out, you should have a really good understanding of what a company needs to do for you. And this is definitely the talk to listen to. I am looking forward to watching the recording of that one because I do run a lot of Google ads and Google is just honestly fighting for its life right now, I think. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Making all these changes. So I did want to bring up Annette’s talk because people literally came up and hugged her after hers. She covered profit first.

26:16
And the title of her talk was you made a product now make a profit. And, uh, I don’t know how many of you guys out there listening have read Mike McCallowitz is profit first book, but she is actually a certified profit first consultant. unfortunately I didn’t get to attend the talk, but she gave a similar one during office hours from my class and everyone just loved it. It’s basically a method so that you can guarantee yourself that you’re going to make a profit at the end of the day. Yep.

26:44
And we were joking with her at the end of the event that she measured her success, her talk success in hugs. So she had a four hug talk. And Dana Jean-Zima and I were like, nope, we will never measure our talks in hugs. But good for Annette. Good for Annette. And I heard a lot of people coming out of that session just basically saying it was a game changer.

27:09
in a way to think about your business. I am always shocked to learn how many people don’t pay themselves in their business. To me, like I couldn’t afford to just never pay myself, like, and just keep working. Like, I’m like, what are you all doing? You know, you don’t have to feed anybody or whatever. But anyway, I thought that was a great talk. And Annette always brings such great energy. And she’s one of the reasons why the culture of Seller Summit is amazing. Right. People like Annette, people like her, people like Natalie, people like Mike Barnhill.

27:38
People that show up. like Dana. Dana, yeah. I will say Lars, but Lars definitely doesn’t contribute to the culture, but he does contribute to the knowledge. But no, a lot of our longtime attendees, Brett, Chris Schaefer, right? They’re showing up every year. They’re talking to people, encouraging them, giving them really great business advice, all on their own time, right? They’re coming here. Eric Bandholz, these people are really great about being a part of the community.

28:08
Yep, absolutely. I have to mention Ritu’s talk. I think out of all the talks, I think I got the most practical, actionable stuff out of hers. She gave a talk on AI and just the way her and Bernie’s mind works, they’re always trying to automate little things. Like Bernie and I, we’re like brothers from another mother, right? Because we’re both electrical engineers and we love automation. then Ritu works with Bernie and Ritu just

28:38
started talking about the exact ways that she uses AI to automate stuff. Like for example, did you know that you can get ChatUbd to create a script that you can enter into your Gmail to pull out all emails of a certain type so that you can easily search through them? No. Like usually I go through my Gmail and I’m like looking for that email that someone sent. You can just have AI find the email for you by asking ChatUbd to write a little script.

29:07
Little tips like that that I didn’t even know to do. I’ve started implementing in my businesses now. I had people coming out of that session like basically game changer for their business, just completely blown away. Once again, Ritu and Bernie, another great example of fellow e-commerce friends that are just so willing to give back to the community and share all. mean, Bernie is like the godfather of, you know.

29:35
He sells electronic products, which are like the worst things to sell. He sold on all the different platforms, but always willing to sit down and chat about it. And I really appreciate both of them for they led masterminds this year and both of them gave talks at Seller Summit. Actually, Bernie’s talk was very good, too. So the title of his talk was how to basically fight back against Chinese sellers when you’re actually sourcing from like the same factories, essentially. Yeah, because he’s in the electronics space, which is

30:06
More competitive probably than like the garment industry. I’ve always actually wanted to start an electronics business. He said, don’t do it. But there’s a lot of strategies that he talked about in his talk that I probably wouldn’t have thought of doing. And these are the things that you have to do in order to compete. The best part about Bernie’s talk was that

30:29
in the middle of the session, the little plug to his computer that was provided by the AV company malfunctioned he whipped out his own branded plug and swapped it out. So like if you could not get a better commercial than that. Yes, the Chinese branded cable failed in the middle of his talk and he just happened to have one of his own branded ones. It was hilarious. I know that was that was awesome. So another longtime friend of Seller Summit, Spencer Hawes.

30:57
actually long time content creator, I feel like Spencer’s done a little bit of everything, gave a talk about basically what’s working and what’s not for ranking. And I think everybody hates Google right now, everybody’s mad about SEO. And he actually presented his case study for that he did last year where they published 987 blog posts in a year.

31:22
and the exact strategies that they used to do it. Obviously he didn’t write all those 900 plus posts himself. And once again, like this is why I think the talks this year were so great is like you were saying with Ritu, like very practical things that you can do. Like Spencer was like, well, hey, I can’t write all this myself. So here’s the exact process I went through to get writers. Here’s exactly how I.

31:44
taught them how to do it. Here’s how I checked to make sure they weren’t using AI. Like just went through the step-by-step process and showing screenshots of his traffic, showing screenshots of his revenue from ad network, basically just going through everything, teaching people, if you wanna do this, if you wanna try something similar, you have all the tools you need after that session. It was basically an SOP for content creation at scale. And this can be applied to anything. It could be applied to YouTube channel.

32:12
can be applied to shorts, reels, TikToks, or Amazon influencer videos as well. He uses the same exact process for all of his content. Yeah. And then I would say probably the favorite speaker at Seller Summit year after year is Tiffany Avinofsky. Yes. Because Tiffany is like a little miniature freight train coming through the conference. She’s what, like five feet tall and 100 pounds, but like, man, that girl packs it in.

32:41
She gave a talk on TikTok Shop and you know, think she was actually, she came up to me Wednesday night and she was like, I’m really nervous about my talk tomorrow. And I was like, stop, just don’t even come to me with that Tiffany. And she said, I’ve been talking to everybody and they’re all really down on TikTok Shop. She’s like, I don’t think anyone’s gonna wanna come. And I was like, whether or not they wanna do TikTok Shop, they’re gonna come to see you on stage so it doesn’t matter. Cause you’re gonna do something, say something, pull something that’s gonna, you know, blow people’s mind.

33:11
But what her session was packed, obviously, and she talked really about the strategy of, you know, how you sell on TikTok, how you use affiliates. She had her team there. So people, you know, her team actually ran the roundtable, too. So people could get like because one of her team members manages affiliates exclusively. One of her team managers manages ads. Right. So you could talk to individual people on her team about how each thing worked. And what I always love about Tiffany is she’s one not afraid to mess up.

33:40
And two, she shows like exact examples. So she had multiple videos, TikToks that were working, TikToks that weren’t working. She showed her monthly revenue for the past year, went through it month by month. Like this is why this month was down. We ran out of inventory. This is the month I got banned because I called someone a bad word in the comments. You know, and just going through exactly the strategies that they had this month, in the month of May, they are on target to do a million dollars on TikTok shop. Wow. In a month? In a month.

34:09
So not including their Shopify, their retail store, the live selling, like just on TikTok shop, they are on track. And I actually checked it yesterday. They’re still on track to do a million dollars in the month of May. That is nuts. You know, I don’t know if you can teach her speaking skills because she just pulls stuff out of nowhere. That is hilarious. will. So she showed they sell they sell apparel and they sell a lot of denim.

34:37
And one of the things about selling on TikTok is you have to be deep in inventory because all it takes is either one of your affiliates videos to go viral or your video to go viral and you will sell out very quickly. So they’re deep in denim. They primarily sell denim on TikTok shop. And she was going through all the videos that have performed really well. Well, all of the videos that have performed really well are definitely focused in on a specific body part on her.

35:04
And so she kept going through the videos and the audience is like in hysterics, right? Because she’s like, what do think it is? Why do you think everyone’s like, why is this video doing well? You know, and it’s like the same shot, you know, different tank top. And then finally, she’s like, whether you got them or you bought them, you better use them. I mean, and everyone is just dying laughing and, know, but she definitely gave a good good examples of like why things work, why things don’t, how to get people.

35:32
engaged on TikTok, which the crazy thing is, is that then we had Eugenia talk about organic TikTok, which literally it was like the two of them got together and were like, okay, you talk about this, you talk about that, but they’d never met before. But the talks literally, it’s like, if I was, if you’re, if you have the recordings, watch Eugenia’s talk first and learn about TikTok principles and then watch Tiffany’s talk and take those principles and then use them for your shop. Yes.

36:01
Eugenia has, I don’t know, six million subscribers or something crazy like that on TikTok. And she’s like, I want to say the opposite in personality to Tiffany. The opposite opposite personality of Tiffany. She’s a mathematician. Yes. You know, I can relate to her actually. She’s a mathematician, but she’s gotten down the TikTok success down to a science. Yes. Yes. And she once again gave people very practical, actionable steps.

36:30
to create content for TikTok and another seller summit first, we had a dog on the stage. We had Huxley. her cute little dog that does her TikTok channel with her. So Huxley was there. He presented for the first couple of minutes and then he went and sat with his dog dad and watched the rest of the presentation. But once again, I feel like I spend a lot of time on TikTok researching and trying to figure things out.

36:59
I could stop all of that and just apply what I’ve learned from her. Like the talk was so well done and just really practical strategies to succeed on TikTok. I mean, all these talks go hand in hand. I was thinking about Jake’s talk. He talked about headline and thumbnail hacks for YouTube. And Jake is someone who I’ve just followed for a very long time. He’s actually helped me out a lot with my channel. His newsletter is one of the few newsletters that I actually read religiously every single week.

37:29
I love him, he’s such a great, he has a mind to do this, right? If you say, I wanna make a video about XYZ, he will come up with five very great subtitles, subject lines for email, whatever it is, right? His mind just works that way and he works really quickly. What I liked is he went and showed like,

37:52
this line worked, this line didn’t, this worked, this didn’t, and then broke down why it worked and why it didn’t. And sometimes you don’t exactly know, but he gave his best guess about it. And so that’s what I always, and Jake does this every time he presents, right? It’s just very practical. And for people who have not created either video content and are working on titles or even email content, working on subject lines, this talk was really good because it just kind of makes you change how you think about,

38:20
subject lines and titles. mean, the tunnel and tunnel is everything in YouTube. Yeah. Literally once I started doing these things, my channel started taking off. Yeah. It is literally like 85 % of the equation. Yeah. So anyway, he always has a great talk. He didn’t bring a dog, so I was disappointed. Uh, but had a really great talk and I could tell people were like once again, frantically taking notes and actually he and I now have a, uh, an inside joke, but I’ll share it with everybody. So

38:49
Everyone wanted his slides, right? Because they were so good with examples and he had a QR code on his last slide for people to scan and get the slides. Well, all of a sudden I hear this like rumbling in the crowd, the QR code didn’t work. He couldn’t figure out why. I was like, no problem, Jake, email me your slides. I’ll put it in the app. You guys can grab it. Well, so then I was talking to him at lunch or after lunch or whenever and he’s like, yeah, I figured out what was wrong with the QR code. And I said, what was wrong? And he goes, well, I used one of those free QR code generators.

39:19
but it only allows you to use the QR code for two weeks or 13 days and then you have to pay. And he didn’t know that. So he was on day 14 of the 13 day trial. the link broke the link, right? And I was like, you know what? When I made the seller summit, like the slides that played during the break, I had QR codes for all our sponsors and things like that. And I used a free QR code generator. And after like the fourth or fifth QR code, I was like,

39:45
I wonder when they’re going to start charging me for the QR code. So I dug into the terms of service and sure enough, it was a 13 day trial, which would have expired on the Wednesday of seller summit. Hilarious. And I was like, I signed up. So we like literally Googled it, signed up for the same thing. And then of course he didn’t realize it till seller summit, but I realized it. was like, well, I realized it. I said the worst part about it was I was making these slides in Canva and Canva actually has a free QR code generator in Canva.

40:11
So anyway, now Jake knows he can use real QR codes from now on, but anyway, that’s become our joke about not being able to give See, this is one of those things that I would never, a QR code is literally just a URL that you scan in there. So they must be redirecting it. Yes, yeah. It’s like basically makes you a bitly. It’s not a bitly, but yeah. But yeah, was, and what’s crazy, just like side note about my irritation with this.

40:37
is that, know, so it’s like, okay, 14 day free trial, sure, I’ll just upgrade. What is it, like seven bucks a month? Oh no, it’s like 40 bucks a month and you have to pay annually. Wow. Like such, I’m like, this is, it’s literally a URL, right? And then- There’s a lot of tools like this, by the way, out there that it just bothers me to no end. Yeah. Anyway, I a little- I wanna make sure we don’t miss anyone. I did not get a chance to attend Andrea’s talk, but you were there, right? It was, once she actually like got, she had a little fan.

41:07
club in the front, one girl asked if she could be their best friend. I was like, sit down. But anyway, great. Once again, she talked about how to have a million dollar launch. And I don’t think the title was misleading, but what I liked about what she did was she actually talked about, she’s like, you don’t get to a million dollar launch on launch day. This takes a ton of prep. And these are all the things that you need to have to get there. And she basically took it.

41:30
from like, I think nine months out to launch day and everything that needed to be done, all the tools she used, the most important components. And it was really helpful. mean, people were taking mad notes in that lesson and she did a great job and she’s also not accepting best friends, just FYI. So Jungle Scout came in and did a pretty good talk, just kind of outlining what Amazon’s new fees are and how to find new products to sell.

41:56
One of the ways to combat all this is to continue to launch new products. And Jungle Scout basically went over the latest and greatest in niche research. Which everybody always wants, like that’s a staple. Yeah, it is. And then Brandon. Yes, Brandon’s always a hit. So I didn’t get to see that talk, but I saw him at dinner where he was literally like basically giving his presentation a second time and showing how he like was using AI to generate images, to test, to then add this, to add…

42:25
Like two minutes at dinner with him and I’m already like, you’re so much smarter than me. He just, he gets it, right? Like, and I think what Brandon does really well is he makes things all seem very doable for people, right? Like nothing seems like, well, that’s great for you, but that I could never figure that out. And then also, isn’t he also a seller? Like he’s a seller, Andy has the tools. So he’s got like all the different perspectives of things and is always testing and trying and.

42:54
Like I love that he’s just willing to share basically everything with people. Yeah, his wife I believe is an eight figure seller and so they base the tools that they sell off of actual data from their own Amazon accounts. Which is rare actually. Yeah, no I know which I think is why he’s always such a hit. Like we needed to get him in there because he just, people walk out of there once again with their minds blown.

43:21
And then finally I gave a talk on Facebook ads. Oh, that’s right. I forgot you gave it. I ended up redoing my entire talk. Yes, I know. Night before on Wednesday night because one of the members of my mastermind had not run any Facebook ads and it just so happens that her product is perfect. Perfect for Facebook ads. So I redid my presentation and I created some ads for her and I’m very curious when she starts running them, how they’ll perform.

43:51
Yeah, got a lot of people that weren’t her were very impressed that you redid your talk to include her. So you got big sums up from a lot of people for doing that. And I have to give a quick shout out to our friend, Steve Weigler, even though his nuggets did not make it to the Western Conference finals. He gave 30 minute legal sessions for like the entire event.

44:19
Which was crazy to me. Like, I don’t know how much he costs an hour, probably like 500 bucks, typical attorney. More than that, probably. I don’t know. But like the fact that like he just basically you signed up in advance and same with Liz from Fluencer Fruit. Basically, I think she filmed 32 product videos for people on Wednesday and Thursday. So UGC content for your Amazon listing. So a lot of our sponsors did carbon six, had a white paper for people. Yeah, like just

44:49
everybody had really great freebies for the attendees. Highbeam had an offer, I think it’s like 4.5 % on checking accounts. I’m moving all of my accounts over to Highbeam. Yeah. Because you can get high interest on your working capital. Like it’s different than moving it into like a fund or something because it’s instant. Yeah. And so imagine getting interest on the money that you’re using to run your business. It’s like a no brainer. Yeah.

45:19
So I love that our sponsors all pretty much came with like, we’re giving this to your attendees. So I always think that’s great because I think the attendees really make out with that. And once again, Pam from RPC taking photos just. And it was funny because we had the guys from Chanable there and I actually had no idea what they did. Wait, really? I didn’t. didn’t.

45:47
There’s a going you don’t run ads. I don’t run ads, right? don’t run ads, yeah. So they showed me the dashboard and it, you know, allows you to pull in from multiple, you know, sales sources. And like I was literally pulling people to their booth because I was like people that I knew were like selling on Shopify and Amazon and Etsy, right? And doing all these different platforms. The only thing they don’t integrate with is comment sold. I was like, listen, if you can get on comment sold, I could get you a ton more people.

46:16
But yeah, it was great because we had a lot of new sponsors there and were able to, you know, meet some new brands and just be able to give more more free offers to our attendees. Huge shout out to Klaviyo, who one, did not did not skewer me after my presentation, but also fed everybody tacos on Wednesday night. We had a mariachi band. Yeah, crazy. It was people loved it. I had so many people were like, you have to do this next year. I’m like, Klaviyo, hit up Joe.

46:46
But anyway, it’s just nice when the sponsors that are there can actually sit down with you and your computer and like help you with things right then and there, help you fix things, find things, show you how things work. And that’s the one thing that I love about the sponsors at Seller Summit is that they always send the right people.

47:06
Yep. then speaking of which, I always enjoy the Katita trivia. Yes. So every year what Katita does is they collect a bunch of statistics about Amazon. And then we have a little contest where we give away prizes at the end. I want to know how bad my score is every year. Lisa won’t tell me. I only got one right. I was going say, I think I got two, maybe. Yeah. I got everything wrong.

47:32
on Amazon. It’s amazing when you listen to that Amazon data too and then you think about how much they charge you for selling on Amazon. this year we had a tie, which I don’t think we’ve ever had before. And it was high stakes drama because Lisa was like, well, do we want to spin the wheel to like see who gets, it was a $300 Amazon gift card, which is, that’s a lot of money.

47:56
And the one winner wanted to spin the wheel to see who won it. And the other winner wanted to split the gift card. And it was like this stalemate for like when you’re on stage, like 10 seconds feels like an hour and a half. Right. And so you had lost your voice. So I took executive authority and I was like, sell or something. We’ll give the other gift card out. And everyone’s like erupting and cheering. You get a gift card. You get a gift card. You get a gift card. But anyway.

48:26
Course, Lisa’s like, you’re amazing. I was like, well, I didn’t really know what else to do. But I, you know, worked out great. I love that everyone plays. And what’s really funny is when, you know, they ask the question, you have an app, you answer the question on your phone, and then the answer pops up and the collective groan or gasp from the audience on some of these Amazon facts is pretty hilarious. One thing that shocked me just the fact that stands out in my mind.

48:54
is supposedly 30 % of sellers are sourcing from the US or made in the USA. I was like, there’s no way. I know. I think I put like 2 % or whatever the lowest one was. too, yeah. And then a final shout out to Linwerks, inventory management company. These days you have to be selling on all different channels and managing your inventory is really difficult unless you have a tool. Yeah. And we had, oh, don’t forget about Carbon 6 who

49:19
hosted our registration table this year. they had cookies for everybody when they showed up, which was awesome. And they raffled away, I don’t remember what it was, but they had a great raffle and also provided attendees with a lot of data. And then our friends at Helium 10, which is another product research tool. And once again, being able to sit at the booth, talk to people, understand how the tool works, learn how to better use it. Because you know what happens with people? They buy tools.

49:48
and then they don’t ever leverage them appropriately, right? They’re using like one fourth of the capability of what it can do. And so I love that like, you know, everyone’s sitting there with their computers open and learning how to maximize, because you’re spending money on this. You should know how to get the most money, your most value for your dollar. What I like is they brought someone from Healing 10 is actually a seven figure seller. Oh, awesome. So she knew everything about, I mean, she’s a user and she’s a seller. Yeah. And then

50:17
you know, our friend Pam. I mean, another OG. She had her OG t-shirt on at Seller Summit. Literally just logistics wonder. Always has great swag at the table and will talk your ear off about logistics. I don’t know anything about logistics. Don’t care anything about logistics, but Pam makes it interesting and simplifies it. And actually there were a lot of people there who have been using Pam because we’ve referred them, but they had never met her before.

50:45
So they actually got to meet her in person and they’re always a great addition. Very happy to have them with us for eight years. But overall, I thought it was a great event. Yeah. So what’s funny is this happens every year leading up to the event. I’m always stressed out. like, Tony, I think this is last year. Yeah, every year. Every year for the last five years. Every year for every year. Has it been every year? Yes, it has. But then I get to event and I have such a good time. I’m like, all right, fine.

51:15
Let’s do another year. do another year. The community is what makes the event. The people that attend are what makes the event great. The fact that our speakers, our sponsors and our attendees all hang out together, that there’s no like separation. It’s not like the sponsors run off at the end of the day, right? Like everybody is really there to help other people out. And I think that’s the thing that makes our summit special when it comes to e-commerce events. Most e-commerce events are very closed and very secretive.

51:45
And I heard multiple times from people this year, people that are in the industry, they are attending 10 to 15 to 20 events a year. And the consistent feedback we get is, I love how open everybody is at this event. I love how welcoming everybody is at this event. And to me, that means we won. Because if people can come learn things and feel welcomed by a group of people that are just like them, what else could you possibly ask for?

52:13
And then the recordings for all the sessions that we talked about will be available in a couple of weeks. And if you want to get the recordings, you can get them at the sellersummit.com website.

52:26
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now tickets for Seller Summit 2025 have not been announced yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as we’ve secured the venue and the date and time. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 540. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
I want to let you know that this is the last call for tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit over at SellerSummit.com. The Seller Summit 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 event 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 business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods

00:58
and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now 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 sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th May 16th.

01:26
And right now, this is your last chance to grab a ticket. Also, 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 grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

01:55
So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:07
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Annette Delancey back on the show. And last time she was on, we broke down her castcovers.com business where she makes millions selling orthopedic soft goods like cast covers and boot covers. And in that episode, we actually went over her amazing business model where she sells over 2000 SKUs that she manufactures herself on demand. And while she’s still running cast covers, that’s not going to be the topic of today’s episode.

02:37
Instead, we’re going to talk about her new business, which is in my opinion, way cooler than Cascovers and I am actually a customer. So in this episode, we’re going to break down her new venture, She Makes Products, where she helps other entrepreneurs bring their textile products to life in the United States. And with that, welcome back on the show, Annette. How are doing? Hi, Steve. Thanks. Welcome back to having me. And it’s great to be here and just talk business. Yeah. Before we talk about She Makes Products, just

03:05
catch us up on castcovers.com. There’ve been a lot of changes all over the industry since you were last on. So about two years ago, I was hit with the what I call the Chinese invasion. And I’m surprised it took that long for them to find my product on Amazon. And because I have the trifecta, I have a easy to ship product, basically about $20 and low entry to barrier. But because the way I had separated the SKUs and the reviews, it wasn’t just

03:35
my arms product, for example, which cover a cast, it was Arms Black and then Arms Red or Arms USA Pride or blah, blah. So it took a while for them to find me and all my different products. And I’m happy to say I’ve done a very good job of keeping on my toes. I’m not going to be cocky or complacent when I get competition. I want to make sure that I have the right product, the right messaging.

04:02
It’s all about USA made. It’s also about caring and it’s the quality of the product. The interesting thing is I do have a challenge, is it’s what gets me up every morning because people don’t, well, we hope our customers never come back and we don’t want them to come back because they’ve hurt themselves. And so we have to do a good job the first time. And so there’s no real repeat business except my B2B channel, which is a totally different channel.

04:31
And but my direct consumer, whether it’s Amazon or whether it’s on my website, it’s very important we do a good job the first time and that time. And if you’re in a cast, it’s a three to six week typically period of time. And if you’re looking in Amazon and you look at my products versus my competition, they may have six items in a package at a reduced cost versus my one at 20. So I have to really

05:00
really sell the benefits and features. And we’ve been able to keep them at bay. And they do nip into my market share, but it just keeps me challenged and the opportunity to show the customers the difference. The quality, our quality is substantially better. And it does make a difference. I can’t change the minds of those consumers that are really price sensitive.

05:27
but the other customers who really want to have a quality American-made product. So it’s been a really fun and challenging time and it keeps me, as I said, on my toes. So that’s very interesting aspect of the world we live in. How important is Made in the USA today, actually? I’m always curious. It has become more and more. And the reason I know that is because on my social media, when I’m not talking about it, people say, and this product is made in the USA.

05:55
And or we get some random phone calls and or email saying thank you for being the USA. Thank you. We just got another one where a woman said bless bless you for your business made in the USA. And it I mean these are random notes that we get from people. I have I did a test once where I had a separate page for a very popular item. One of our colors on our arm cuffs covers and it was.

06:24
did not say Made in the USA. The other page said Made in the USA. It was six to one orders. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that was That was the test. So in my gut, I know that it’s a positive factor that we promote that were made in the USA. We still have to rely on many other things like quality and timing and delivery and the messaging. But there’s no question Made in the USA makes a difference. I’m curious, Annette. So

06:53
Are most of your sales on Amazon now or do you still make a decent amount on your website as well? So it’s a good question. It’s a two factor question. I look at it as number one, top line revenue without a doubt. Amazon is still a majority of sales, which I am consistently trying to bring down. So it’s not such a big egg in my basket. However, my sales on my main website, CastCountriesWithaZ.com.

07:18
the margins are much better. So my revenue margins are better on my main website. So volume, you think commodity product is better with Amazon. That makes sense. Well, let’s switch gears and talk about She Makes Products because I’m actually really excited about this. First of all, describe what it is and then what were some of your motivations for starting it? So She Makes Products is primarily for women product entrepreneurs.

07:44
to break through that six figure revenue barrier profitably so they can grow in scale. And as well as helping anybody in the sewn products and the manufacturing world, just get profitable so they can create what their dreams are. And my tagline is you made a product, so make a profit. And it’s very important and it’s a foundation because I went through it with Cast Covers.

08:13
And I’m so glad we started with cast covers because I almost lost cast covers twice because I was having profitability issues. so once I understood and learned the system through Profit First, Mike Mikalowicz, who has endorsed your book, Family First Entrepreneur. I love that, Profit First, Family First. Nice connection there. It saved my business. So what I wanted to do was really short circuit, short circumvent. wanted to, I wanted to.

08:43
shut down the timing that it takes to learn all of this. And so, and I saw women particularly had an issue because they don’t have the resources. And I’m not talking about just financial resources. I’m talking about support and also just the facts and somebody who’s been down the road before them. So I had an opportunity to start, She Makes Products for a number of different reasons. People started coming to me. And so I helped.

09:12
women product entrepreneurs, and I’ve actually helped a lot of men because She Makes Products can also refer, well, I make products. And the men have really enjoyed it too, and they’re surrounded by women and they love that too. So it’s been a fun venture, but it’s more importantly, I’ve been able to save some businesses. They’ve been able to realize their dreams, bring home money, bring home what their worth is because you should pay yourself first.

09:38
And oftentimes we as entrepreneurs, it’s not just a woman thing, just entrepreneurs have a tendency to put money always back into the business. And we really need to pay ourselves first and remember that we are our key employee. Yeah. So what I liked about your business is you’re into textiles and that’s all we sell. And I’m curious.

10:02
A lot of people have to get their textiles from China because the of labor is lower. However, the minimum order quantities are a lot higher. And I’m just curious, how did you how do you run this business so that the costs are low? And as I mentioned to the audience, like I am a customer and I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised that the costs weren’t completely out of line. Just as an example, you know, our handkerchiefs from China might cost us like 50 cents.

10:28
But if we were to source not from you, but from someone else, it’d be like five bucks per handkerchief. But you your prices are reasonable. How have you managed to do that? That’s a great question. It is really cultivating the talent that I found my sewists and and being able to maintain pricing. I also am in a position because of cast covers where I have the volume to

10:57
get wholesale pricing, very large wholesale pricing. And so there’s some benefits there. I used to have a shop, production shop, and five and a half years ago, for a variety of reasons, I decided to pivot my traditional business model and outsource it. And it has worked really well. There’s a couple of hiccups, but what’s really interesting is I really miss having a shop. And so there’s a high likelihood I’m going to be opening a shop here in San Diego County.

11:25
which is one of the most expensive areas in the That’s why I’m asking the question, because the minimum wage here for fast food workers, I think is 20 bucks, right? Yes. Oh, yes. So I’m so glad you asked this question. So what I did, because I thought there’s just got to be a way to be able to open a shop and give people jobs. I believe very strongly in the culture of an organization and being able to provide jobs and training and possibly be a entrepreneurial

11:54
incubator lab for people that are interested in textiles, particularly for me, with my experience. And so what I have found, and this is really important for all of your listeners, is what you do is you go to the chamber and or your economic development council, local, and you find out if they have subsidies for payroll. And there are programs out there, particularly in high, high wage areas like

12:24
San Diego, they will pay up to, in some cases, up to six to 12 months, 50 to 90 % of their payroll. Because I’m training them. Yes. So check that out, Steve, for your own, because you’re in high rent desert too. Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, we’re in the same state, so. Yes. And I talk about this on, I have a podcast called The Profitable Manufacturer, and I have a colleague, and we’ve talked about this, and there’s…

12:51
There’s a number of different programs that are available. So that’s something else that I would. So that’s how I know that it would be profitable from the beginning. And what’s important is that you have an ascension ladder for your employees so that they can, whether it’s learning how to make patterns, whether it’s learning how to be in the supply chain, there’s a number of different areas that they could go and grow. And those are different career opportunities.

13:20
as well as working in my company or move on. And I like to create culture of where people are really proud and excited to come work and they feel that they’re valuable. Too often in the sewn products industry, it’s a cutthroat industry and they grind them out. And that’s just not how I want my employees to feel. Right. Yeah. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised, one, by the quality.

13:48
And I’m not sure if I’m getting special treatment here, but also the speed of production has been really fast. One, because you’re local and I don’t have to wait for something to come by boat and the minimum order quantities are significantly lower as well. Yes, that’s right. And that’s I think this is really important because as you said, MOQs could be 300 units and this is really hard to do. And I did this at the beginning. had to go. I understand that. And I’ve done it periodically where I have had to do MOQs for other

14:18
parts of my cast covers business. And then I just said, you know, plus not to mention there’s usually issues with the sewing contractors and always the, what do I call it? Unraveling. And I’m using that as a pun unraveling the thread of the dark side of sewing contractors. It is really important to you, if you treat your people well, they will respond in kind. And I have had the same sewing contractors for years. The business has been,

14:48
Cast Covers is 15 years old and I’ve had the same contractors 10, 12 years now. So Cast Covers allows you to have this network and meet the minimums, which allows you to bring people that are reliable because you’ve been working with them for a long time. Yes. So in effect, you’ve kind of parlayed all your work that you’ve done with Cast Covers into She Makes products. It’s like a symbiotic relationship. And that’s the benefit. There’s no question when I help a client of mine, it’s from my 15 years of experience.

15:18
with cask covers. Okay. All right. So walk me through the process of how this works. I’m not sure if I went through the typical process since we’re friends. Actually, it was it kind of the same. So when I find out, first of all, what your goals are, what you what you identify, I also find out what you’re currently paying and what your minimums are. Right. And then when I find out that you’ve high, high minimums, I get excited because I can do, you know, very low minimums and

15:44
You got to have some kind of volume. So if somebody’s listening and say, oh, I want to talk to Annette, there is an element of first a production sample will always cost you more, always, particularly if you’ve never had a product before. But Steve and Jen had products they could send me. And so I saw the quality. saw what they were used to. And can I either replicate it completely or even possibly elevate it a little bit? And so that was the important thing. So I talked about that with my sewist and I have one particular sewist I use for cottons.

16:14
And she’s very, very good. She and another gentleman are very good. And then talking about the costs and that type of thing. And what I’m hoping to do is once we have our run with Bumble Bee Linens, we’re actually going to be able come back to you and maybe lower the cost, which is completely different than most of my character.

16:37
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.

17:07
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.

17:18
Exactly. Yeah, you just define textiles and what what exactly you help with like do you help with bags or is it mainly just clothing or oh anything textiles anything fabric if there is a For example, I had a company that was a bag company. was a very involved bag company What I mean by that is the bag itself had a lot of components to a lot of different elements to it lots of labor involved and as a result it

17:47
was expensive, but they loved the quality and they decided to go with us. It was a pet company that also wanted to do accessory products. Those also can be the little or tiny products like Barbie doll outfits, things like that. Those are almost always more expensive, like newborn because of the little tiny intricacies that are involved. the fabric, so cottons, twills,

18:17
Spandex, Lycra, think stretchy bathing suit material. All of those, I can handle all of those. I even handle denier, think of backpacks, Do you do microfiber as well? Yes. So what I want to just address in this interview is let’s say I’m completely new, I don’t sell anything yet, right? But I have this idea, let’s say for a bag, and I come up to you, what are some of the questions that would make it

18:45
worth your while as well as mine. Great. Okay. So what I would do is find out A, what are your goals? What are your expectations? Do you have any drawings yet? Do you need tech specs? Do you need a tech pack? Do you need some of the specifications that are typically common in sewing goods industry? Okay. Are you looking for somebody to source fabric for you? Do you already have fabric? Do you have sourcing? That type of thing. So find out a little bit more about the foundational aspects of it. Then how many do they hope to sell? You know, what are they thinking of selling?

19:15
What is their target market? You know, is quality? Is it convenience? What, you know, what are some of the values that they want for their product? And then if we come to a meeting of the minds, then what I do is get a, if they have a prototype, me a prototype. Even if it’s, I’ve had people send me, it’s interesting, paper with tape. And it was a bag. It was supposed to be fabric. And they could have gone to Joanne Fabrics and, you know, picked up some fabric, but they sent me paper with tape.

19:45
And so I got an idea that’s a whole different product because project because you have to start from square one with the patterns and the pattern making. So that’s that’s different. And that would be like a one time fee because once the pattern is made, the pattern is made. Yes. And whether it’s graded and and and the pattern marking and if there’s any sizing elements, you know, scaling of a design, that type of thing. Do you want custom fabric? You know, some customers want custom fabric.

20:15
Let’s come up with a bit. Let’s say I want to manufacture some really simple like a t shirt, but it’s like a special t shirt and I have something I picked up at a store that I say, Hey, take this and what I do what I want is like a pocket here and a pocket there and whatnot. Does that require like a tech pack or visit great question. I just finished a contract with a upstart new apparel manufacturing company was it’s a family friendly so it’s mom and dad and their children.

20:45
clothing line and it’s a t-shirt and had very specialized fabric. They wanted the pocket, a very specialized type of pocket. And the fabric was the issue because it was bamboo and bamboo is very difficult to sew on a consistent basis. Very difficult. They have since moved on thinking, we may not be doing bamboo.

21:12
And just because it is so difficult to and have the pockets, the pockets had to have certain type of darts in it and that type of thing. So yes, I can do that. But that required in that particular situation, because this particular client wants to do really big and go big, they needed tech packs. we made sure my marker and grader, all of that came in, got them their tech packs, and they have it they have it forever now.

21:39
I’m just curious, so for someone who’s just trying to test the market, though, let’s say I just want like a couple hundred units. What is the process involved? Can you just give me a ballpark cost? I mean, it doesn’t have to be an exact cost, but yeah, just to get an idea. Yeah. So let’s forget fabric because fabric makes a difference. Of course. Just labor. Yeah, just labor. Yes. And depending on the size, it makes a difference as well, because you can imagine XXL versus a Tyler T. Anywhere between eight and $12 is the labor.

22:09
Per unit per unit. OK, yeah, and can vary depending on how much is on the T shirt. Maybe it’s without a pocket, you know, but this would be a standard T shirt with a pocket right and size properly. Do you need a tech pack to get started? Absolutely not. OK, no, you what you need is uniformity. So if you have different, let’s say different colors, somebody buys a color and then they like it and then they they come back and buy another color.

22:38
and then the consistency is different, that’s going to create a problem. So the important thing is to find a consistency. So what you want to do is have, you know, get testing done, have your sewing contractor provide some samples of what they’ve done, like at the beginning and at the end of a run without a tech pack. That’s the key. So in order to make, because I know you can get like a t-shirt from China for super cheap to make it worthwhile.

23:07
it has to be a special garment that’s maybe targeting like the mid to high end. Yeah, I that’s usually the way it ends up. Okay. If there’s a custom element to it, you can you can purchase t shirts, for example, in bulk, maybe you put a, you know, an insignia on the on the sleeve. Right? It’s as simple as that is just adding a little label. And because it maybe it goes with something else that you’re selling.

23:36
There’s a lot of things we can do to reduce the cost to get the message out there, to get you out there, to get the traction that you need. But the most important part is that you’ll help with the entire process, right? Absolutely. Vertical integration. I’m sure most people listening don’t even know what a tech pack is. Probably not. And that’s OK. That’s what I’m here for. And a tech pack is typically for larger volume sewing. But there are some sewing contractors that require a tech pack.

24:05
And tech is T-E-C-H. So it’s short for technical pack, P-A-C-K. And basically it shows all of your drawings and specifications. It tells the sewing contractor where to put what. It’s very, very, very technical. Let me just tell the audience, the reason why I brought up prices is because there’s a lot of things to consider where you manufacture stuff. I’ll just talk about my own experiences here. When you go buy something from China, you have to buy in much larger quantities.

24:35
And there’s often lead times. Sometimes our lead times are upwards of four months. And what that means is we have to buy at least four months worth of inventory, probably more than that, right? So that we don’t run out of stock. And that actually ties up our money a lot. Plus we have to pay for shipping, customs and all that stuff. Whereas with what attracted me to you, Annette, was that you can turn things around in weeks, not months.

25:01
And so that means we don’t actually have to outlay all this large amount of cash to buy these large quantities because lead times are significantly lower. Correct. And that actually makes a huge difference that most people don’t think about in their calculations. You actually have to buy 2X what your velocity is so you don’t run out of stock. Exactly. So for someone brand new, it’s actually much more palatable to

25:28
buy in smaller unit quantities with shorter lead times, then place this gigantic order with China that’ll tie up all of your cash for four months. Yes, absolutely. That’s the beauty of the way I am structuring the business. So people can come in and really make a difference, get the traction that they need, see what kind of volume they can do. And then I can help them find higher volume contractors.

25:57
Walk me through that process actually. So when does it make sense for you to look for higher volume contractors and reduce the prices? Depends on the project and the level of SKUs. So for example, I have a client that the one that was mentioning with the children’s clothing company, they have about 12 SKUs, but they have about 1000 units each SKU that they want. And that’s a different level.

26:26
and they can get better pricing different places. And so I help them and it they’re looking at Mexico. That’s a possibility as well as China. The concerns about the geopolitical tensions with China are always an issue. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. But in Mexico is closer to you can just one of my recommendations for my clients is go visit your inventory and walk the floor of your sewing contractor, wherever it is.

26:57
go walk the floor, visit, you know, and make sure they see who you are. Do it at least once a year. And if it means an overseas trip, it means an overseas trip because there have been so many times that clients have been burned. Yeah. What are some of the other trade-offs that you can think of actually between going outside versus local?

27:24
Because I can only talk about my experience, but there’s people that are contracting in Mexico. It’s fairly local, right? And you can still, you know, I guess, hop on a plane and go over there. What are some of the other trade-offs that you can think of? Well, an FYI, Mexico is considered near shore. Okay. Just FYI. I do have a client who’s actually looking into having the Amish community sell their products also. Here in the States. So that’s another option. They’re usually

27:53
in the, I would say, bags are a great place for them. Twills and cottons are very good, not so much in the stretchy fabrics. But the issue there is typically they don’t have a production floor. They have people in their home sewing the units. But if you have a product, like if you have a bag, let’s say the backpack, and it’s made out of different fabrics, and you give that to one sewist, you give that to another sewist, and

28:21
as long as the consistency and the quality is there, it should be a great way to do it. So anyway, Mexico would be considered near shore. So some of the other benefits and or obstacles, challenges that you need to consider is number one, as I mentioned, the exposure to you as the client, they need to see you in your face and you need to go touch your stuff every once in a while. And I also recommend even if you have inventory and you

28:49
you need to touch your inventory. I’m sure Steve, you and Jen go through and touch your inventory. You have to, you just have to make sure that you know your inventory. Plus if you’re not careful, they’ll slip in thinner fabric. exactly. That’s exactly right. And then you don’t know until you get your container full. So always ask for production. Always ask for production. Never, ever, ever, ever skip that step. You need a protection.

29:18
unit for them to send to you and approve that and then hang on to that. Don’t send it back. Let me ask you this, Gannett. If I’m brand new and I’m coming up to you for help, what are the materials I should already have ready? Ideally? What are the materials that you should have ready to make sure we’re not wasting time? It is to do a prototype.

29:46
So well, if to answer your question, if I understood it correctly, the client customer and their brand new, they really know nothing. They just have this idea. We create a prototype. And so we do that typically with just out of like black fabric or something like that. And then what do you like about this and start working through the different discussion about what are they looking for? That type of thing. And while I’m seeing in brighter colors, I was thinking of different color thread. was thinking, you know, and so this gives them something, something to hold on to and something to look at.

30:14
And then they start, okay, got it. Especially a lot of times people are so unfamiliar with the sewn products that my job is to educate them. My job, if I’ve done a good job, they know a lot more when they’re done and they can have the conversations with contractors when they’re done with me, if they’re ever done with me. Is there a unit expectation? Because I imagine it takes your time as well as the client’s time,

30:40
No, it just depends on the project. There have been projects I’ve turned down because either A, they weren’t formed well enough, the client could not articulate certain questions that I would ask such as, what do you want to do with it? Where do you see it going? How did you get this idea and why? Who do you want to serve? Things like that. If they can’t articulate that, then they’re not ready. That doesn’t mean that they can’t come back, but they need to articulate that.

31:05
This is what I mean by the minimum requirements. So you have to know who your target market is, what you want, and at least have some, it doesn’t have to be exact idea of what you want, but at least in your mind, maybe like a mock-up or a drawing of what you want. I love the one that I got. It was paper taped as a bag. That’s somebody who was really trying.

31:30
and just doesn’t know the industry didn’t know that they could go to Joanne’s or Walmart even and pick up fabric and you know, come up with something. And so I loved that that client, they decided to go a different direction and not doing a bad company. But I loved that client. Yeah, so in many respects, this is the way you operate is kind of like how how I operate, like I have to like the person they have to have make an effort to to do their homework before they come to you and and then you can help them.

32:00
There’s a lit I have a I have an internal litmus test. So for example, on cast covers, I have a b2b channel. And there are you know, I get a lot of inquiries, you know, all the time, but we do have a contact form. It’s wholesale. And it asks very specific questions to vet them, just like you do. And I so I think they might reach out and say, Hey, I’m interested in here’s who we are. And I just and then I wait.

32:28
I don’t respond right away, actually. If they return within another week or two and say, hey, I’m really interested, boom, I jump on it immediately because that means they’re very interested. And because I get too many looky-loos, then I ask them to fill out the wholesale inquiry. if they don’t fill that out, that’s the litmus test right there. And in fact, I had one from Canada.

32:55
And she said, well, I don’t have my business license yet. And I said, well, fill out the wholesale inquiry to the best of your ability. haven’t heard from her. And so I that’s how I let it go. Yeah, that makes sense. Can we talk about your slogan real quick? She makes products she makes profit. Can we talk about the profit side how you help people make a profit? So the slogan is you made a product excuse me, you made a product now make a profit. Right? Yeah.

33:22
So yes, profitability is my key foundation. You must be profitable right from the get-go. And that’s very hard to do when you’re getting started. And I understand money’s just flying out and you just don’t have anything. But the important thing is when you get a sale, your first sale, you have to set aside money for yourself, for the business and the profit. And yes, you’re gonna set aside some for the debt, to serve the debt. And so the profitability, if you’re not profitable,

33:51
You are not in business. And this is going to really set people off on, but it is considered a hobby if you’re not profitable after three years with the IRS. And to be profitable, that means you’re taking care of your financial obligations like your taxes, all the other financial obligations that you have, but you’re also paying yourself a market wage. And there were a few people who, let’s put it this way,

34:21
They were told to not to have a lot of losses and so they could offset that. But the point is, that then they started getting resentful of their business. Their business wasn’t paying them what they’re worth and it’s kind like, why am I doing this? To just offset my taxes? I mean, there are obviously benefits to tax planning, but that’s not what I’m talking about. So the profitability is the key focus and actually Mike McKellwitz has

34:49
coined the term eradicating entrepreneurial poverty. I love that. mean, cause we all, a lot of us when we get started and we don’t know what we’re doing. And I remember when I was making, when I made, I actually got over that revenue barrier of a hundred thousand dollars and then realized, oh my gosh, I’ve only brought $6,000 into the family coffers. This, I knew there was a problem. That’s a problem.

35:16
And I’m sure a lot of your listeners can understand and relate. And that’s what I help people get a handle on, get financial clarity. The system that I also teach is it makes it easy to make decisions in your business because of the way that you categorize your spending. It also allows a really good night’s sleep. So I’m familiar with the textile portion of She Makes Products. Does the profitability aspect

35:45
come also as part of the package? Yes, yes. Absolutely. does that work? Walk me through it. So if you’re an existing, which a lot of my customers come and they’re already existing, I go through their books with them and say, here’s where we need to, and the process is over. First I do the books, I look at the books, we talk about it, we identify what your cost of goods are and talk about the formula, which is ideally five times cost of goods should be your retail price. And so if you’re,

36:14
If you’ve got something, labor materials cost you 10 bucks, you should be selling it for 50 bucks if you’re going to be making profit. We look at everything. We look at redundancies and subscriptions. We look at everything and payroll, everything. And then we put you on a plan to get you to where you want to be. And it typically takes 12 to 18 months. But what’s the best part is once you start seeing the results after three months, you just become so intense about how to make it happen in your business. And again, it’s worth repeating. It’s saved.

36:44
my business twice. this is independent of the textile portion and how you help. Okay. Yes. So you on one end, you help people create their textile products. Yep. And the other hand, you also help businesses that are existing that may not be profitable and you help them become profitable. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I have a program called She Makes Profitable Products in 90 Days, and I get them set up so they already are they already have a business and it could be

37:12
jams and jellies or can be sewn products. And they learn how to become profitable because they just know something’s not right, but they don’t know even the questions to ask. I think you addressed this in the beginning of the interview. But it’s called she makes products, you do take men because I know a lot of people listening to this. Yes, I do. I love it. I love it. And so she makes products only because the focus was a lot of women don’t have the resources.

37:37
that men do and or there’s some other issues about mindset and deserve and what they the deserving element, the worth element there’s that’s different. But I also I am she makes products because I make products and so I do help men and I help men a lot. All right, let me ask you this question. And I know a lot of people listening are going to be interested in your services. And you only have a limited amount of time and it sounds like this is pretty high touch. So what can people do and we kind of

38:06
touched upon this earlier, what can people do to entice you, I want to say, to spend your time helping them as opposed to someone else? What are some things that you can do to get your attention? Well, the number one thing is come with an open mind and to see what the possibilities are. That’s the important thing. And the fact that you even come and ask, like if you go to my website and set up a 30-minute consultation, which is free,

38:35
The fact that you’ve done that again is another litmus test. It’s like, okay, there’s something there. But to answer your question directly, it truly is, are you passionate about your project? Are you willing to see it through? What do you see the long-term strategy to be? That can change, but the point is, what is your vision? What do you want to happen? And how can I help you make that happen? Because my…

39:02
Salutation on my emails, the way I end my calls with my clients on She Makes Products is your success, my support. That’s what it’s all about. Yeah, I love that. And I can just speak from my own experiences. If someone has like taken the effort to do their homework, for example, I do these one-on-one consults all the time. There’s some people that come and it’s not productive at all because they do any prep work whatsoever. But the people that do do the prep work

39:31
where we can have a really good active discussion about it. That student has become like already in the top tier. whenever they email, I’m always like just quick to answer them right away. Because I know they’re serious. I know they’re driven. I know they’re going to follow through on whatever they do. It sounds like you have a similar philosophy. In fact, sometimes people come to me and say, well, how do I start a business? OK, so that’s a whole different conversation I have.

39:59
do that generally with people. what I say is, number one is, what can you talk about for the next 10 years? With joy. I mean, that you’re really excited about. So for example, with CAS covers, it’s 15 years old. I can still talk about orthopedic, fun and functional products, and I love it. And so that’s what you have to be able to project. Can I talk about this for the next five to 10 years? That would be the number one thing that people can look at is.

40:28
Is this something that, and I understand things change, people change, circumstances change, currently, could you talk about it? Okay, so walk me through. So where should they go? They should go to shemakesproducts.com? Yes, go to shemakesproducts.com. And then my email is annette at shemakesproducts.com. And definitely just in the subject heading, something that gets my attention. Interesting. So you don’t have a form, it’s just send an email to Annette. At this point, that’s correct.

40:57
But after speaking on stage, who knows, maybe I might have a call. Yeah, I have this feeling that the people listening to this are going to be emailing you. And I just want to make sure they’re prepared so they don’t waste your time and they have the best chance of getting your help. Because I’ve known you for a very long time. You’re very thorough in what you do. And the quality of the samples that we’ve gotten for you for our aprons as well as the handkerchiefs have been top notch. Oh, thank you very much. Because of the headaches that I’ve had with China.

41:27
just make it very attractive. The lead times are lower, the minimum order quantities are lower, and it’s less of our cash being tied. Well, it’s also a great way to test a new design, a new style. so you don’t have a huge cash outlay. Maybe you do a test run of a totally different type of fabric or color or something like that. I talked to Jen about that today. Yeah. And even more important to me is that I know you, and if I’m happy with the quality, I know you’ll make it right.

41:56
which is way more valuable to me then. And these are things that I don’t necessarily have with some of my Chinese vendors over there. That relationship as I talked about is vital. And that’s why, you we only have so many hours in the day as you talk about in your book and you got to make it count. Might as well work with vendors and partners that you like. Right. And that you know, have your back. That’s the important thing. And that’s what’s really, really important for me.

42:24
particularly because the way I was treated by many sewing contractors and vendors. Oh, and I don’t want anybody to ever experience that. They can just hear my stories. So if you’re looking to produce a textile product, man or woman, go over to she makes products.com. Is it the same URL if you need a profitability help as well? Same URL? Yes. And I’ll just clarify. So my she makes profitable products in 90 days, which is my my foundational course can be you can make jams and jellies, you could make

42:54
jewelry, you could make Murphy beds and it applies. Absolutely. And then if you’re in the textile industry and you need help, I can certainly help you there. All right, Annette. I will definitely be telling my class members about you as well. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Steve. Thanks for having me. I look forward to seeing you soon.

43:20
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, if you are looking to make a textile based product in the United States, go check out Annette’s website over at shemakesproducts.com. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 536. And once again, this is the last call for tickets to the Seller Summit 2024. 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. Go to sellersummit.com.

43:48
If you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free 6-day mini course. Just type in your email and are sent to the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:24
The Settler Summit is Deconference 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, is a curriculum-based event 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 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. Now, I personally hate large events

00:53
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01:19
Also, 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 grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

01:47
Fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

01:57
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today we’re going to talk about Google search again, because they just rolled out. I don’t even know if it’s the same update, but they rolled out another update last week that that really rocked me for it took me on a roller coaster ride because I woke up one day and my traffic was half on the blog. And then three days later it was back to normal, but it gives me anxiety. My wife quit or Bumblebee or both.

02:26
My wife quit. Bumblebee has been pretty solid. I think e-commerce SEO is pretty stable or it has been pretty stable. Although I do have some terrible sites outranking me now for Bumblebee. My horrific sites that look like they were designed in the nineties. I’m mainly talking about my wife quit her job and the Bumblebee Linens blog actually. So, and you know, because this happened, I started talking to

02:54
a bunch of my mastermind buddies who blog. I actually had drinks with Todd Tressiter who’s in my mastermind group. Oh yeah. Cause I was in Reno this past weekend as you know, and that’s where he lives. I don’t think anyone has recovered from that first update. And if anything, things got worse. So that’s my question for you is I can’t remember, and I don’t track this as much as you do.

03:19
I can’t remember two updates so close together. Is this normal to like have the big update in March and then have another one, you know, four weeks later? There’s been a major update every single month since last, the end of last year. Okay. You just haven’t been hit until recently. I wasn’t hit majorly until recently. Okay. And this came up again, because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Reddit has become even more prominent than the last time we talked about it. And I don’t want to beat Reddit to death here, but

03:49
I figured out that Reddit went from the 80th biggest SEO site on Google to the sixth biggest SEO site.

03:59
I also found out, and I wasn’t aware of this, but Google’s actually paying Reddit 60 million bucks to access Reddit’s data. Interesting. AI training. And I’m wondering if there’s some secret side deal where they said, we’ll throw you a bunch of traffic also. You’re wondering. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, my biggest problem with all of this is that

04:25
The content that Google is serving up via Reddit is usually garbage. It’s usually three to four years old. It’s mostly irrelevant. And a lot of times the answers are wrong. it’s not even actually answering the question that you type into Google. You know, it’s funny, I talked to a bunch of other webmasters and I went on a bunch of forums. People are actually giving up this time. Like the SEO landscape is so kind of up in the air right now.

04:53
that people are debating whether to just continue investing in content creation because it’s random now, right? If you have Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn dominating the search results, and this is probably why most people haven’t recovered, right? They haven’t recovered and they continue to drop because those types of sites continue to rise. And I’m sure Google has deals with them because they want their content for AI, right? For AI training.

05:20
And there must be some sort of back deal. And this is all speculation, obviously, but. At what point do people, like not the content creators, but the consumers give up on Google? Because I feel like the search results are really poor. And people that I’ve talked to, people that are not content creators, that are just using Google as a citizen have also been unhappy with the changes. You know what? I remember this happening and maybe history is repeating itself.

05:48
When I was in college, when Yahoo was the de facto search engine, and then Google came, and then Yahoo was gone pretty much within a year and a half, I want to say. Google’s more entrenched because they own Android phones. And I think they’re still paying Apple a god amount of money in order to make search the default. But they’ve been getting a lot of heat. the main, yeah, I forgot his name offhand, but the forward facing guy on Google who replaced Matt Cutts,

06:18
He’s been on Twitter a lot, just answering questions about stuff. then Sundar, the CEO, actually gave a talk on what he views as the future of search. And Sundar didn’t mention anything about Reddit and LinkedIn being the future of search. guess I don’t understand how he could leave that out when it’s so much of what the search landscape is right now, though. Well, so this article that I read about his talk, I didn’t actually listen to his talk.

06:47
But I got the Cliff Notes and there’s so many people covering it. His response actually, basically the question that was asked was, how does he see Google search evolving with AI? And he basically said that Google’s results have been AI for a long time, since 2016. And people always like to think of Google as 10 blue links.

07:16
but it’s really evolved. And he mentioned that when mobile phones became pervasive, that’s when rich snippets came out. That’s when more images came out in the search results. So he claims that Google has been using AI for a long time. And I guess if you think about it that way, it’s true. But what’s interesting about what he said, and I think this has to do with just the backlash in the blogging community, is that he said that AI is not gonna replace traditional search. I don’t know about that though.

07:45
I was thinking about what he said. He said, role of websites remains crucial because it maintains the richness and the diversity of content. The role of websites remains crucial because that’s how AI is getting all their information. I know. AI is not coming up with this on its own at this point. Who knows in the future? It can’t come up with everything on its own. AI can’t cover events and all that stuff.

08:14
can’t remember the last time I actually used Google for information outside of researching what he said in this speech. I actually go to chat GPT now first, ask it for whatever’s going on or whatever question I want. And then I just kind of use search, guess, to double check. To fact check essentially. Yeah, I was actually watching a webinar this morning on, it was an AI webinar, but it was basically,

08:43
fact-checking AI. So it was a content creator who was getting ready to do a podcast interview with someone who’d written a book. And so they were on ChatGBT basically asking for like, what famous people have said things about this book and what, know, asking questions like that. And it came back with like, what if Paltrow said this and Jennifer Aniston said this. But then when they fact-checked that AI basically said, oh, I’m sorry.

09:10
this is what they would have said if they gave a quote for the book, but there’s no evidence that they gave a quote for the book. So anyway, I feel like stuff like that you have to fact check, right? Because basically AI took that to mean, and the prompt was good, wasn’t a prompt that would create a fake answer, but it gave a fake answer based on what someone would say if they did say something kind of thing. I mean, there’s a search engine out there now called Perplexity. Yep.

09:40
that I’ve been actually dabbling with for like the last month or so. It gives an AI response and then it cites sources. it’s kind of a combination of ChatGPT and Google. And maybe that’s what he’s getting at, but he’s trying to reassure all the content creators out there to continue creating content and that websites aren’t going away. The thing is though, when you think about search behavior,

10:08
If you’re gonna search for, like I think about the things that I search for just on regular basis, like how many feet are in a mile, right? Or how many steps do I have to walk to, know, walk, if I wanna walk five miles a day, how many steps is that? know, things like those, or how do I find the percentage of this by doing, you know, like things like that, which is typically what I Google search. I do all of that on ChatGPT because it’s like those things aren’t,

10:37
Like the number of feet in a mile is just a fact, right? There’s no perspective to that. There’s no color commentary. It’s just, it is what it is. Who won the Heisman Trophy in 1984? know, stuff like that. Like to me, that’s where Google’s gonna go away. Because I don’t need the history of the Heisman Trophy if I wanna know who won it in 1994. It’s probably because I got the answer wrong in trivia and I’m irritated or something like that. So in that way, I do think that AI will replace

11:06
some of Google, I feel like where it’s not gonna replace it is, and this is one of the things that was in this webinar that I was listening to this morning was about when you’re making like a purchase decision or you’re choosing to make like a time or money investment into something, people typically invest in people, right? Like why do people have such a loyalty to the brand Yeti?

11:29
Well, one, because they have like superior products, but two, they’ve created this like lifestyle brand, right? So people are connected to that. like when you are creating content, whether it’s for a product or a course or whatever, the content becomes important because that’s where you connect with the people, the brand story, the whole, like I got glasses at Warby Parker the other day, right? And for every glasses you buy at Warby Parker, they donate a pair of glasses overseas.

11:56
Same thing with the sock, right? Doesn’t Tom or Tom shoes does it with shoes? I think there’s another company does it with socks and bombas does it So I think that’s where like the contents not dead because you still need people to know your brand story or your content story But that general information stuff. I don’t know. I feel like that could easily be replaced I mean in the context of ranking and search and no one really knows what’s going on but

12:22
I actually looked at the top 10 and some people jumped ahead of me and I just kind of looked at their articles. There’s really no personal stories there. Yeah. At all. And there’ve been people who have done experiments where they just rewrote like their top posts that used to rank and included stories and really demonstrate their experience with whatever they’re reviewing. And maybe it’s still early, but so far no dice. Like it hasn’t really helped.

12:53
Don’t you think so, like, if you establish yourself as a brand, so let’s just take my wife, quit her job, you’ve established yourself as an e-commerce expert. If I, well, so we know somebody actually who wanted to put up a store website and they actually researched just based on your content, your videos and your blog posts, whether they should go with Shopify or BigCommerce. And they made a decision based on your articles and your videos, not on

13:22
like a wide variety of things. It’s kind of like when I wanna look for a better credit card, I always go to NerdWallet. I don’t Google search that, because I don’t want some random person telling me what credit card to get. Like I like NerdWallet, I trust them. I don’t know why I do, but I do, right? So I do feel like that is an advantage for someone like you, who’s built this expertise and this brand, that people won’t, maybe they won’t even go to Google, they’ll just go to your site directly and then search on your site for information.

13:54
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.

14:23
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.

14:35
I mean, it’s possible, but it’s funny you mentioned that article. It used to be like number six for Shopify versus Big Commerce. Yeah. And now it’s on like the fifth page. Really? I don’t know what happened. And that one actually has a lot of personal experience stuff in there. And that one, ironically of all my reviews, I think dropped the most, but perhaps it’s probably one of the most competitive ones. Yeah, I’m sure. Because the payouts are so high on that, right? Yeah.

15:02
So I don’t know what’s going on. I actually have not really physically talked to anyone that has benefited from this update. It seems, and maybe it’s because my colleagues are kind of skewed towards personal finance and business blogging, but I think all of them have been knocked down primarily because of the upgrades of Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, and those types of sites. Have you heard any chatter from like the lifestyle space? Yes, actually.

15:31
One of our friends, one of our frugal blogger, like coupon blogger got hit big time with the update. I want to say probably close to half the traffic. Wow. So yeah, I’ve heard I’ve heard little rumblings here and there. I’m wondering, though, like, let’s just take your big commerce post, right? Because you dropped to page five. Is the is the YouTube video ranking at all in search? YouTube video still pops up from time to time, actually.

16:00
Because I’m- that, you know what’s ironic? Is that YouTube video was back when I was practically reading the blog posts. Because it was one of my early videos. And I was just trying to put out videos the lowest energy way. That video is like the same content as the blog post. Correct. But what I have seen in like my own Google experience is that a lot of times the video will show up well before the blog post. So I’m wondering if, since you have a lot of video content based on

16:30
the very same topics you’re writing about. If your video now, even though you are on number five for that particular article, maybe the video’s coming up in the top, know, because video shows up in the top on the front page. Yeah, you know what’s funny is I haven’t, I didn’t do that search. I wasn’t paying attention to the video. I was just looking for my article and I just scrolled way down. In the old days, and when I say old days, I mean last year, I had the video and the post on the front page. Okay.

16:59
Because what I found, and this isn’t true anymore, but back when Pinterest was getting a lot of favoritism in Google search results, that sometimes I would lose the search result for the blog post, but my pen would show up within the top couple things. So I’m just wondering if the same thing’s gonna happen with YouTube on particular articles, right, where you ranked on the blog, but now you’ve lost that, but your YouTube is still ranking up there in Google search, not on YouTube search. You know what’s funny is,

17:28
I can’t see Pinterest at all. I haven’t noticed Pinterest at all in the search results. It doesn’t happen anymore. It’s not every once in a while. I probably see more than you do because I’m more of a Pinterest user than you are. But it used to be like before 2000. So, know, 2018, 2019. Like if you could get a pin to come up in Google search now, it’s on Pinterest, right? It’s not on your website, but that could really boost a pin pretty significantly. And then, of course, would boost your website traffic as well. So I’m just, you know, my thinking is maybe

17:58
Maybe the silver lighting in this is your YouTube stuff will continue to propel some of those articles that you aren’t on the first page for anymore. Yeah. It’s funny. I just realized how affected I am by Google because during that roller coaster ride, I was like, okay, I’m done. And then it recovered like three days later. It’s like a roller coaster ride. This entire, I would say, last two months. Here are just some other stats that I just kind of picked up. Bing is actually gaining market share.

18:27
on Google by 2%, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it hasn’t really happened. Bing has not gained market share in a very long time. Have you noticed they’re redoubling their efforts to reach out to content creators? I have noticed that. have gotten emails from Bing. When was the last time you got an email from Bing before 2024? I can think of maybe once when there was some announcement. I probably have…

18:56
three emails from Bing in my inbox right now that I’ve sort of just like, I’ll look at this later, I don’t have time. You know, what’s interesting about this is Bing is also, it also has like the AI built in. Whereas Google has not done that yet. And there was an article that I read that Google was considering charging for the AI experience. Interesting. the cost of an AI query is like an order of magnitude more expensive than just a regular search.

19:26
And it sounded like they didn’t want to fund that because it was like a losing proposition. And then here we have Bing just freely incorporating the AI search results. Not really caring about the money, but Google’s richer than Microsoft, right? Yeah. I mean, this is their entire business. So I don’t see what the issue is. So this is you and I are old.

19:53
I can’t imagine a world where Google is not dominating. It’s been such a part of the internet for as long as I can remember. Gmail, Google search, just everything. But then I bet there’s people out there that are like, I can’t imagine a world without Pan American Airlines.

20:17
Right, or some of these are continental, right, these giants in their own industry, or certain car brands, things like that, where it’s like, this was the top of the top of the top, and now it’s obsolete, right, for a variety of reasons. Could be poor management, it could be unable to keep up with the times, things like that. But to me, it’s like, I can’t imagine a world without Google, but that could very well be the case at some point. I mean, in tech, things fall fast, just like my Yahoo story. Yeah.

20:46
What’s funny is that so Google has SGE, which stands for search generative experience. I don’t know if you ever played around with it. It’s essentially like a chat bot. Okay. In the search results. In the interview with the Google CEO, he clarified that chat bots and SG was different. And that everything that they’ve been working on is there to enhance the existing search. But

21:16
I mean, if you’re just going to get the answer right away, why do I need search? Yeah, I don’t know how to read into this. Maybe he’s just I’m sure he didn’t really talk about anything related to SEO or anything like that. Yeah. But maybe bloggers are leaving in droves, which is why he felt compelled to to do this. I mean, if he really wanted websites to still be around, he wouldn’t be promoting like these user generated content sites, right?

21:41
Except for the fact that if you want to take a full circle, mean, not Reddit per se, but like forums were the original blogs. That’s true. Because I was like, I was a forum queen back before I had my blog. mean, like 2002, 2003, 2004, I was like, had my forum name and you you’re like, I mean, to me, it was like, I was writing blog posts in forums before I knew that you could use WordPress to start a website.

22:10
I mean, if you think about it, go back to 2004, 2005. That’s true. I wasn’t really a forum junkie, but you were posting like full on blog posts on there. Yeah. So I was in forums that were very specific to my life. So I was in a lot of homeschool and homemaking, homesteading forums. So someone would go on there and say,

22:32
I can’t find a math curriculum for my kid. They can’t seem to learn their addition facts, right? And so then I would go in there and I would write eight, nine paragraphs of like, well, I tried this and this is what I saw and then we did this and then this something, I have a son that’s dyslexic and this, and I would write basically blog posts. And that was what kind of fueled me to start the blog because I felt like I’m writing all this content in here in this forum and then it’s getting lost, right? Because in forums you get threads and everything just it’s.

23:00
Back then, forums are so much better now, for search, you know, to search in a forum for something, but like back then they weren’t. And I was like, well, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just put this article, you know, put these things that I’m already saying on a website. And then when my people in real life ask me these questions, I can just point them to the website as opposed to like going, well, I put it in a forum, you know, dig down three sub forums and you can find it. I mean, I think that’s how a lot of people like that got started when I did.

23:29
they were forum people before they were bloggers. know forums actually used to show up in the search results once upon a time. A long time ago. And I guess Reddit has displaced the forum, but I’m wondering why Google isn’t bringing forums back if real content is actually making a comeback, right? Here’s the problem that I see is that I feel like today, and I’m just gonna get so much hate for this.

23:56
Like I felt like when I was in forums, you know, 20 years ago, the information being shared was really good. And now I feel like anybody with five minutes of free time is in there spouting off some idiotic, you know, position on something. I just don’t feel like they’re the same as they used to be. I feel like before, and I think there are still forums, like my brother’s in some discord groups for like tech and AV. And I think there are still places like that where the information is really good.

24:25
But then I think you can get on, you know, some of these Reddit threads and it’s just like it devolves so quickly. And the information just isn’t the quality that it that I remember it being before. And there’s so many people being paid to post stuff. So this is what happened the other day on one of my team of videos. I’m almost positive now. I’m like 99 percent sure that team is paying people to leave comments, positive comments on videos and stuff. So this guy.

24:53
went on my Tmoo video and he said, I’ve been using Tmoo for many years now. And it’s been rocks. I’m like, Tmoo has only been around since 2022, the end of 2022, right? I’m like, okay, you screwed up on that one, buddy. Well, Tmoo is using AI to generate comments to have people post. So it’s probably like wildly inaccurate. I guess the real question that came out of this and this was a discussion among my mastermind group.

25:23
Is blogging still worth it? Like should you invest all this time and money into blogging with all these changes in AI? Google not even knowing what the heck they’re doing. The consensus actually of the guys, and we’re having a live Mastermind meetup at some point this year, the topic’s gonna be alternatives to Google. And we’ve just been realizing how reliant we’ve been on Google. mean especially in these, so the members of my Mastermind group,

25:52
primarily are affiliate marketers. So what they do is they just try to rank a review and search. And then whenever someone signs up for something, they get a huge cut. And that’s worked. I my buddies are making millions. Yeah, for like over a decade, millions of dollars every single year, putting out great content. And now that they’ve been getting pushed down by, you know, user generated sites, they’re like, what is the point?

26:19
And then there’s still some sites like the big ones like Nordwallet that you mentioned that still kind of dominate the search results. But for the most part, all the medium sized guys have been pushed down. So this is where I see the adaptability of people and the ability to pivot becomes such a valuable skill. So let’s talk about two of our friends that started out as bloggers. First of all, let’s talk about Tiffany Ivanovsky.

26:49
Right? She started blogging sometime around the same time I did with a deal blog, right? Telling people how to use coupons, know, how to shop the sales. Her husband had a blog, how to get deals at Walmart. They did that for probably six or seven years and made full time. You know, they both had quit their regular jobs, all that stuff. But then, you know,

27:12
at some point they pivoted, right? And they got into like a network marketing company, which they then sold clothing online, but they leveraged the audience that they built from the blogs to launch this network marketing with the clothing. that happened, that went on for a couple of years. They took what they learned selling clothing online and created their own brand, right? Their own shop, even manufacture some of their own clothing, right? And now they have a multimillion dollar business, more,

27:41
more successful than they ever were at blogging, although their blogs were very successful, right? Completely shifting. Another person, Jamreel, started as a, a homeschool site, right? How to get homeschool deals. Did that, sold that site, leveraged it, started writing about, she has a lot of kids, so she started writing about how to bulk cook, right? How to make all these things. Started a YouTube channel way before most people were taking YouTube very seriously, right? Now she has a whole suite of digital products. Her YouTube channel is wildly successful.

28:11
You know, so she pivoted from initially starting about talking about how to get homeschool products for inexpensive to now she’s this big time YouTuber. Same with our friend Leslie Samuel. Started out as a blogger, then was a business coach, then pivoted back to YouTube. And he wasn’t talking about business on YouTube, he was talking about science, because that’s his background. He’s built once again a wildly successful YouTube channel, been able to leverage that. So I think the ability to like leverage

28:40
what you build into something else is critical in if you live in the world of like internet marketing. So being able to take what you learn from one thing and leverage it into something else is how you can last for 10 to 20 years. And I was just thinking to myself, if I hadn’t started that YouTube channel, I’d be pretty worried right now. mean, YouTube has been really good. And I think the guys have always been reluctant. Did you see I sent you a TikTok this morning? I didn’t see it. I saw that you sent me one.

29:10
I sent you one because it’s our buddy who would never in a million years go on video and do TikToks. So now they’re doing TikTok. Ready to TikTok. OK, yeah. Right. And you know who I’m talking about? He’s been on the podcast before. yes. But he likes to just hide in the corner and just collect money. That’s generally his personality. But I do feel like I mean, there’s something to be said about I know a lot of the guys in this group, like there’s something to be said about that. A lot of them have sold websites. They don’t have to work again if they don’t want to.

29:40
But a lot of them are still, they’ve built a really great business, but now they’re having the repercussions of all these Google updates, their traffic’s not what it used to be. I mean, one of our friends didn’t build an email list, right, in your group? And it’s like, those things are so important because you just don’t know when, I mean, like,

30:04
We always talk about like, all these bloggers that build their entire business on social media, right? They’re just Facebooks or Instagram hacks, right? And it’s not much different than Google when it comes to it being able to be wiped away in a minute. It’s different in that when you try to build something on Instagram, it’s that constant cycle, whereas Google, it’s a slow burn, right? So you create something, it builds up, that sort of thing. So in that way, it’s different. But at the end of the day,

30:32
you can lose your Instagram or you can lose your Google search, your number one rankings, and you literally have zero control over it. I don’t know these people, but there have been reports of traffic literally going to zero. People posting their search consoles because of some slap from Google. What kind of irks me a little bit is, you know how they’ve been promoting EAT, which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Yeah.

30:59
I think that’s all gone out the window. I don’t really think it matters. I don’t think so either. Because it’s been promoting Reddit posts from people who have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. Exactly. So Google always says one thing and then they do the other. Yeah. And I think this last slap where they actually manually penalize a bunch of sites. I think that was just a statement to scare people into not using AI to generate the results because I don’t think they can really detect it.

31:29
Yeah, I think they would have trouble. mean, all these search updates that keep happening every single month are probably the result of the fact that they can’t control this and they don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re just flipping dials and whatnot. Yeah, I know. But to me, it’s like this is why having that email list is so important. Having that loyal fan base is so important.

31:55
Because then, even if Google’s not showing your stuff to new people, right, people that are just searching and they land on your site, which is, you know, obviously a pretty important component of this, you still have a group of people that like you, trust you, know you, will recommend you. I mean, I’ve seen people when stuff like this happens, send an email to their list and be like, hey guys, I got decimated by this Google update. Would you please share this newsletter with your friends? Right?

32:23
relying on that relationship that you built with your audience to help you weather these types of storms. Yeah, I agree. Email and SMS are both factors that will reduce the speed of the decline, I would say. Yeah. Because every time you send, you do lose some subs, and so you always have to be replenishing the ones that you lose. Yeah. But yeah, I absolutely agree. I guess even if the entire traffic

32:52
Spigot stopped, I’d probably be okay for a solid year or two, I think. You would be okay. Well, you’d be okay for a variety of but like your YouTube traffic isn’t gonna stop. I mean, what if, remember our buddy Leslie got hacked and lost his video? Yes, but that’s more of an anomaly versus like a global update, right? Correct, yeah. Reddit’s not gonna be at the top of YouTube ever.

33:23
Although all these AI videos seem to be creeping up into my feed that bothers me to no end actually. don’t think that most of them have staying power, especially about the stuff that you talk about. Yeah, they’re not competitors. I’m just saying like, I’m seeing all these AI videos pop up in my feed and I keep, you know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been marking them as spam, but I keep getting them. Interesting.

33:51
I didn’t know you could market video as spam. can block that. Oh, channel? You can suggest, yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully Google gets the point, but they haven’t. I don’t know. The key point here is I think everyone needs to diversify. Mm hmm. Right. And I think the key to ranking in Google search is really just a long term investment in brand and authority building. Mm hmm. Because there are sites that still rank like I’m still ranking for a bunch of stuff. Yeah.

34:22
It just pains me when I see some no name on Reddit outrank me for something, some person that has no authority and probably doesn’t even know what they’re talking about. Yeah, and I think that does a disservice. I mean, honestly, it does a disservice to the person searching too, right? Because they’re probably going to end up with bad information. It’s like it reminds me of back in the day, like on Facebook, and I’m sure this still goes around. I just don’t see it. like.

34:46
you need to repost this because so Facebook protects your data and if you don’t repost this on Facebook, like I feel like all the people that reposted that on Facebook are reading bad results in Google and getting the wrong information. Yeah, so I mean what I’m doing right now personally is I’m on social media. I actually have a method of posting regularly now both for Bumblebee and I’m gonna talk about this as soon as I get some more data to actually make a presentation of all this.

35:16
But I’m going to report on the results and I’ve, hated social media for a long time and desperate times call for desperate measures. When SEO goes down, it’s time for the tick tock dances. Something’s gotta go back up. I’m always bullish on email and SMS always. And I am staying the course on my content creation for the blog. I don’t think the strategies have changed. Right.

35:43
You want to answer the questions that people are asking online. Really, the only thing that’s changed, at least in my domain, I can’t really talk about yours in the lifestyle space, is that these bigger sites are basically displacing the smaller guys. And by bigger sites, I mean the Reddits and the LinkedIn’s and the Quarers. Like if you add all those sites in there, you’re basically getting knocked down like five or six spots. Yeah. Right. Because there’s always like another informational panel in between there too.

36:12
And getting knocked down five or six spots is actually a big deal in Google search. But in terms of ranking, like I just wrote another article just the other day that went live and it instantly jumped to like number 12 and hopefully it’ll continue to climb. So the strategies haven’t changed. What’s really changed is Google and what they’re favoring. And I have to think that this is going to be some sort of yo-yo effect, right? Like you’re already getting fed up with the Reddit results and whatnot.

36:42
And if it continues on like this, people just aren’t going to use search anymore and Bing is going to get even more market share. Which sounds crazy that we’re saying this, but also we were all using AOL. Yeah. And we talked about Bing a bunch of times already. I can’t remember the last time I’ve even used Bing, but I kind of gave it a try recently and I even fired up my Bing Webmaster tools. Are you even signed up for Bing Webmaster? Yes, I am. That was one of the emails I got. I thought to myself,

37:10
I’m signed up for Ping Webmaster Tools. Like I must have signed up years ago, but I am. Because the Bing search results haven’t really changed. probably like the Google of old. Yeah, yeah. Because they don’t have deals, I guess, with Reddit. I mean, hopefully it stays that way. It’ll be interesting. Like in a year, it’ll be interesting to listen to this podcast and see what’s changed and what stayed the same. Yeah. And actually, you’re not on Windows, right? I’m not. I’m not. No.

37:40
I’m on Windows and every time there’s an update, which probably happens like every month or so, they try to set Edge to be the default search engine. Oh yeah, I do remember that. default browser on the machine. Just for fun, because of all this is happening, I’m a little anti-Google right now. I started using the Edge browser just for kicks. It’s actually faster than Chrome. So Apple does that with Safari?

38:09
every time that’s the same exact, you know, hook. What’s interesting and probably the only reason why, although not every site’s compatible with Safari, which is annoying, but the reason why Chrome has my loyalty is because they have my password saved. That’s how they get you, right? I’m sure Kevin’s rolling over right now in just disgust. But no, like if you think about like the Chrome password manager is…

38:38
Probably, I’m not recommending it for anybody. It’s probably not secure, don’t use it. But for me, there’s no way I would remember my passwords. And so I got an email right before we got on from one of my doctors, like, you have a secure message? And I was like, I don’t even remember being on this site. I mean, knew that I had, but I couldn’t, I was like, thank goodness that Google has my password saved, because I haven’t logged into this site in six months. I have no idea what my password is. So yeah.

39:04
What keeps me on Chrome are the plugins that I use. Jungle Scout, the Helium Test. have all these helper functions. Fluencer Fruit, yeah, that’s all set up. Pinterest has got a plug in there that I use. Actually, those are my three. I’ve got Pinterest, Fluencer Fruit, and Jungle Scout sitting on my browser. So is Google going away anytime soon? Probably not. I mean, they this huge moat. But if they lose search market share continually,

39:32
I mean, that’s their revenue source, right? And once they have less money, and if, let’s say, Bing becomes the dominant search engine at some point, maybe they can pay Apple to displace Google Search. I don’t know. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, we’re just going to have to see how all this Google stuff pans out. But at its current trajectory, I think it’s not looking good.

39:58
More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 535. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are on sale over at seller summits.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. Go to seller summits.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

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01:57
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today we’re going to talk about Google search again, because they just rolled out. I don’t even know if it’s the same update, but they rolled out another update last week that that really rocked me for it took me on a roller coaster ride because I woke up one day and my traffic was half on the blog. And then three days later it was back to normal, but it gives me anxiety. My wife quit or Bumblebee or both.

02:26
My wife quit. Bumblebee has been pretty solid. I think e-commerce SEO is pretty stable or it has been pretty stable. Although I do have some terrible sites outranking me now for Bumblebee. My horrific sites that look like they were designed in the nineties. I’m mainly talking about my wife quit her job and the Bumblebee Linens blog actually. So, and you know, because this happened, I started talking to

02:54
a bunch of my mastermind buddies who blog. I actually had drinks with Todd Tressiter who’s in my mastermind group. Oh yeah. Cause I was in Reno this past weekend as you know, and that’s where he lives. I don’t think anyone has recovered from that first update. And if anything, things got worse. So that’s my question for you is I can’t remember, and I don’t track this as much as you do.

03:19
I can’t remember two updates so close together. Is this normal to like have the big update in March and then have another one, you know, four weeks later? There’s been a major update every single month since last, the end of last year. Okay. You just haven’t been hit until recently. I wasn’t hit majorly until recently. Okay. And this came up again, because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Reddit has become even more prominent than the last time we talked about it. And I don’t want to beat Reddit to death here, but

03:49
I figured out that Reddit went from the 80th biggest SEO site on Google to the sixth biggest SEO site.

03:59
I also found out, and I wasn’t aware of this, but Google’s actually paying Reddit 60 million bucks to access Reddit’s data. Interesting. AI training. And I’m wondering if there’s some secret side deal where they said, we’ll throw you a bunch of traffic also. You’re wondering. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, my biggest problem with all of this is that

04:25
The content that Google is serving up via Reddit is usually garbage. It’s usually three to four years old. It’s mostly irrelevant. And a lot of times the answers are wrong. it’s not even actually answering the question that you type into Google. You know, it’s funny, I talked to a bunch of other webmasters and I went on a bunch of forums. People are actually giving up this time. Like the SEO landscape is so kind of up in the air right now.

04:53
that people are debating whether to just continue investing in content creation because it’s random now, right? If you have Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn dominating the search results, and this is probably why most people haven’t recovered, right? They haven’t recovered and they continue to drop because those types of sites continue to rise. And I’m sure Google has deals with them because they want their content for AI, right? For AI training.

05:20
And there must be some sort of back deal. And this is all speculation, obviously, but. At what point do people, like not the content creators, but the consumers give up on Google? Because I feel like the search results are really poor. And people that I’ve talked to, people that are not content creators, that are just using Google as a citizen have also been unhappy with the changes. You know what? I remember this happening and maybe history is repeating itself.

05:48
When I was in college, when Yahoo was the de facto search engine, and then Google came, and then Yahoo was gone pretty much within a year and a half, I want to say. Google’s more entrenched because they own Android phones. And I think they’re still paying Apple a god amount of money in order to make search the default. But they’ve been getting a lot of heat. the main, yeah, I forgot his name offhand, but the forward facing guy on Google who replaced Matt Cutts,

06:18
He’s been on Twitter a lot, just answering questions about stuff. then Sundar, the CEO, actually gave a talk on what he views as the future of search. And Sundar didn’t mention anything about Reddit and LinkedIn being the future of search. guess I don’t understand how he could leave that out when it’s so much of what the search landscape is right now, though. Well, so this article that I read about his talk, I didn’t actually listen to his talk.

06:47
But I got the Cliff Notes and there’s so many people covering it. His response actually, basically the question that was asked was, how does he see Google search evolving with AI? And he basically said that Google’s results have been AI for a long time, since 2016. And people always like to think of Google as 10 blue links.

07:16
but it’s really evolved. And he mentioned that when mobile phones became pervasive, that’s when rich snippets came out. That’s when more images came out in the search results. So he claims that Google has been using AI for a long time. And I guess if you think about it that way, it’s true. But what’s interesting about what he said, and I think this has to do with just the backlash in the blogging community, is that he said that AI is not gonna replace traditional search. I don’t know about that though.

07:45
I was thinking about what he said. He said, role of websites remains crucial because it maintains the richness and the diversity of content. The role of websites remains crucial because that’s how AI is getting all their information. I know. AI is not coming up with this on its own at this point. Who knows in the future? It can’t come up with everything on its own. AI can’t cover events and all that stuff.

08:14
can’t remember the last time I actually used Google for information outside of researching what he said in this speech. I actually go to chat GPT now first, ask it for whatever’s going on or whatever question I want. And then I just kind of use search, guess, to double check. To fact check essentially. Yeah, I was actually watching a webinar this morning on, it was an AI webinar, but it was basically,

08:43
fact-checking AI. So it was a content creator who was getting ready to do a podcast interview with someone who’d written a book. And so they were on ChatGBT basically asking for like, what famous people have said things about this book and what, know, asking questions like that. And it came back with like, what if Paltrow said this and Jennifer Aniston said this. But then when they fact-checked that AI basically said, oh, I’m sorry.

09:10
this is what they would have said if they gave a quote for the book, but there’s no evidence that they gave a quote for the book. So anyway, I feel like stuff like that you have to fact check, right? Because basically AI took that to mean, and the prompt was good, wasn’t a prompt that would create a fake answer, but it gave a fake answer based on what someone would say if they did say something kind of thing. I mean, there’s a search engine out there now called Perplexity. Yep.

09:40
that I’ve been actually dabbling with for like the last month or so. It gives an AI response and then it cites sources. it’s kind of a combination of ChatGPT and Google. And maybe that’s what he’s getting at, but he’s trying to reassure all the content creators out there to continue creating content and that websites aren’t going away. The thing is though, when you think about search behavior,

10:08
If you’re gonna search for, like I think about the things that I search for just on regular basis, like how many feet are in a mile, right? Or how many steps do I have to walk to, know, walk, if I wanna walk five miles a day, how many steps is that? know, things like those, or how do I find the percentage of this by doing, you know, like things like that, which is typically what I Google search. I do all of that on ChatGPT because it’s like those things aren’t,

10:37
Like the number of feet in a mile is just a fact, right? There’s no perspective to that. There’s no color commentary. It’s just, it is what it is. Who won the Heisman Trophy in 1984? know, stuff like that. Like to me, that’s where Google’s gonna go away. Because I don’t need the history of the Heisman Trophy if I wanna know who won it in 1994. It’s probably because I got the answer wrong in trivia and I’m irritated or something like that. So in that way, I do think that AI will replace

11:06
some of Google, I feel like where it’s not gonna replace it is, and this is one of the things that was in this webinar that I was listening to this morning was about when you’re making like a purchase decision or you’re choosing to make like a time or money investment into something, people typically invest in people, right? Like why do people have such a loyalty to the brand Yeti?

11:29
Well, one, because they have like superior products, but two, they’ve created this like lifestyle brand, right? So people are connected to that. like when you are creating content, whether it’s for a product or a course or whatever, the content becomes important because that’s where you connect with the people, the brand story, the whole, like I got glasses at Warby Parker the other day, right? And for every glasses you buy at Warby Parker, they donate a pair of glasses overseas.

11:56
Same thing with the sock, right? Doesn’t Tom or Tom shoes does it with shoes? I think there’s another company does it with socks and bombas does it So I think that’s where like the contents not dead because you still need people to know your brand story or your content story But that general information stuff. I don’t know. I feel like that could easily be replaced I mean in the context of ranking and search and no one really knows what’s going on but

12:22
I actually looked at the top 10 and some people jumped ahead of me and I just kind of looked at their articles. There’s really no personal stories there. Yeah. At all. And there’ve been people who have done experiments where they just rewrote like their top posts that used to rank and included stories and really demonstrate their experience with whatever they’re reviewing. And maybe it’s still early, but so far no dice. Like it hasn’t really helped.

12:53
Don’t you think so, like, if you establish yourself as a brand, so let’s just take my wife, quit her job, you’ve established yourself as an e-commerce expert. If I, well, so we know somebody actually who wanted to put up a store website and they actually researched just based on your content, your videos and your blog posts, whether they should go with Shopify or BigCommerce. And they made a decision based on your articles and your videos, not on

13:22
like a wide variety of things. It’s kind of like when I wanna look for a better credit card, I always go to NerdWallet. I don’t Google search that, because I don’t want some random person telling me what credit card to get. Like I like NerdWallet, I trust them. I don’t know why I do, but I do, right? So I do feel like that is an advantage for someone like you, who’s built this expertise and this brand, that people won’t, maybe they won’t even go to Google, they’ll just go to your site directly and then search on your site for information.

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14:23
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.

14:35
I mean, it’s possible, but it’s funny you mentioned that article. It used to be like number six for Shopify versus Big Commerce. Yeah. And now it’s on like the fifth page. Really? I don’t know what happened. And that one actually has a lot of personal experience stuff in there. And that one, ironically of all my reviews, I think dropped the most, but perhaps it’s probably one of the most competitive ones. Yeah, I’m sure. Because the payouts are so high on that, right? Yeah.

15:02
So I don’t know what’s going on. I actually have not really physically talked to anyone that has benefited from this update. It seems, and maybe it’s because my colleagues are kind of skewed towards personal finance and business blogging, but I think all of them have been knocked down primarily because of the upgrades of Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, and those types of sites. Have you heard any chatter from like the lifestyle space? Yes, actually.

15:31
One of our friends, one of our frugal blogger, like coupon blogger got hit big time with the update. I want to say probably close to half the traffic. Wow. So yeah, I’ve heard I’ve heard little rumblings here and there. I’m wondering, though, like, let’s just take your big commerce post, right? Because you dropped to page five. Is the is the YouTube video ranking at all in search? YouTube video still pops up from time to time, actually.

16:00
Because I’m- that, you know what’s ironic? Is that YouTube video was back when I was practically reading the blog posts. Because it was one of my early videos. And I was just trying to put out videos the lowest energy way. That video is like the same content as the blog post. Correct. But what I have seen in like my own Google experience is that a lot of times the video will show up well before the blog post. So I’m wondering if, since you have a lot of video content based on

16:30
the very same topics you’re writing about. If your video now, even though you are on number five for that particular article, maybe the video’s coming up in the top, know, because video shows up in the top on the front page. Yeah, you know what’s funny is I haven’t, I didn’t do that search. I wasn’t paying attention to the video. I was just looking for my article and I just scrolled way down. In the old days, and when I say old days, I mean last year, I had the video and the post on the front page. Okay.

16:59
Because what I found, and this isn’t true anymore, but back when Pinterest was getting a lot of favoritism in Google search results, that sometimes I would lose the search result for the blog post, but my pen would show up within the top couple things. So I’m just wondering if the same thing’s gonna happen with YouTube on particular articles, right, where you ranked on the blog, but now you’ve lost that, but your YouTube is still ranking up there in Google search, not on YouTube search. You know what’s funny is,

17:28
I can’t see Pinterest at all. I haven’t noticed Pinterest at all in the search results. It doesn’t happen anymore. It’s not every once in a while. I probably see more than you do because I’m more of a Pinterest user than you are. But it used to be like before 2000. So, know, 2018, 2019. Like if you could get a pin to come up in Google search now, it’s on Pinterest, right? It’s not on your website, but that could really boost a pin pretty significantly. And then, of course, would boost your website traffic as well. So I’m just, you know, my thinking is maybe

17:58
Maybe the silver lighting in this is your YouTube stuff will continue to propel some of those articles that you aren’t on the first page for anymore. Yeah. It’s funny. I just realized how affected I am by Google because during that roller coaster ride, I was like, okay, I’m done. And then it recovered like three days later. It’s like a roller coaster ride. This entire, I would say, last two months. Here are just some other stats that I just kind of picked up. Bing is actually gaining market share.

18:27
on Google by 2%, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it hasn’t really happened. Bing has not gained market share in a very long time. Have you noticed they’re redoubling their efforts to reach out to content creators? I have noticed that. have gotten emails from Bing. When was the last time you got an email from Bing before 2024? I can think of maybe once when there was some announcement. I probably have…

18:56
three emails from Bing in my inbox right now that I’ve sort of just like, I’ll look at this later, I don’t have time. You know, what’s interesting about this is Bing is also, it also has like the AI built in. Whereas Google has not done that yet. And there was an article that I read that Google was considering charging for the AI experience. Interesting. the cost of an AI query is like an order of magnitude more expensive than just a regular search.

19:26
And it sounded like they didn’t want to fund that because it was like a losing proposition. And then here we have Bing just freely incorporating the AI search results. Not really caring about the money, but Google’s richer than Microsoft, right? Yeah. I mean, this is their entire business. So I don’t see what the issue is. So this is you and I are old.

19:53
I can’t imagine a world where Google is not dominating. It’s been such a part of the internet for as long as I can remember. Gmail, Google search, just everything. But then I bet there’s people out there that are like, I can’t imagine a world without Pan American Airlines.

20:17
Right, or some of these are continental, right, these giants in their own industry, or certain car brands, things like that, where it’s like, this was the top of the top of the top, and now it’s obsolete, right, for a variety of reasons. Could be poor management, it could be unable to keep up with the times, things like that. But to me, it’s like, I can’t imagine a world without Google, but that could very well be the case at some point. I mean, in tech, things fall fast, just like my Yahoo story. Yeah.

20:46
What’s funny is that so Google has SGE, which stands for search generative experience. I don’t know if you ever played around with it. It’s essentially like a chat bot. Okay. In the search results. In the interview with the Google CEO, he clarified that chat bots and SG was different. And that everything that they’ve been working on is there to enhance the existing search. But

21:16
I mean, if you’re just going to get the answer right away, why do I need search? Yeah, I don’t know how to read into this. Maybe he’s just I’m sure he didn’t really talk about anything related to SEO or anything like that. Yeah. But maybe bloggers are leaving in droves, which is why he felt compelled to to do this. I mean, if he really wanted websites to still be around, he wouldn’t be promoting like these user generated content sites, right?

21:41
Except for the fact that if you want to take a full circle, mean, not Reddit per se, but like forums were the original blogs. That’s true. Because I was like, I was a forum queen back before I had my blog. mean, like 2002, 2003, 2004, I was like, had my forum name and you you’re like, I mean, to me, it was like, I was writing blog posts in forums before I knew that you could use WordPress to start a website.

22:10
I mean, if you think about it, go back to 2004, 2005. That’s true. I wasn’t really a forum junkie, but you were posting like full on blog posts on there. Yeah. So I was in forums that were very specific to my life. So I was in a lot of homeschool and homemaking, homesteading forums. So someone would go on there and say,

22:32
I can’t find a math curriculum for my kid. They can’t seem to learn their addition facts, right? And so then I would go in there and I would write eight, nine paragraphs of like, well, I tried this and this is what I saw and then we did this and then this something, I have a son that’s dyslexic and this, and I would write basically blog posts. And that was what kind of fueled me to start the blog because I felt like I’m writing all this content in here in this forum and then it’s getting lost, right? Because in forums you get threads and everything just it’s.

23:00
Back then, forums are so much better now, for search, you know, to search in a forum for something, but like back then they weren’t. And I was like, well, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just put this article, you know, put these things that I’m already saying on a website. And then when my people in real life ask me these questions, I can just point them to the website as opposed to like going, well, I put it in a forum, you know, dig down three sub forums and you can find it. I mean, I think that’s how a lot of people like that got started when I did.

23:29
they were forum people before they were bloggers. know forums actually used to show up in the search results once upon a time. A long time ago. And I guess Reddit has displaced the forum, but I’m wondering why Google isn’t bringing forums back if real content is actually making a comeback, right? Here’s the problem that I see is that I feel like today, and I’m just gonna get so much hate for this.

23:56
Like I felt like when I was in forums, you know, 20 years ago, the information being shared was really good. And now I feel like anybody with five minutes of free time is in there spouting off some idiotic, you know, position on something. I just don’t feel like they’re the same as they used to be. I feel like before, and I think there are still forums, like my brother’s in some discord groups for like tech and AV. And I think there are still places like that where the information is really good.

24:25
But then I think you can get on, you know, some of these Reddit threads and it’s just like it devolves so quickly. And the information just isn’t the quality that it that I remember it being before. And there’s so many people being paid to post stuff. So this is what happened the other day on one of my team of videos. I’m almost positive now. I’m like 99 percent sure that team is paying people to leave comments, positive comments on videos and stuff. So this guy.

24:53
went on my Tmoo video and he said, I’ve been using Tmoo for many years now. And it’s been rocks. I’m like, Tmoo has only been around since 2022, the end of 2022, right? I’m like, okay, you screwed up on that one, buddy. Well, Tmoo is using AI to generate comments to have people post. So it’s probably like wildly inaccurate. I guess the real question that came out of this and this was a discussion among my mastermind group.

25:23
Is blogging still worth it? Like should you invest all this time and money into blogging with all these changes in AI? Google not even knowing what the heck they’re doing. The consensus actually of the guys, and we’re having a live Mastermind meetup at some point this year, the topic’s gonna be alternatives to Google. And we’ve just been realizing how reliant we’ve been on Google. mean especially in these, so the members of my Mastermind group,

25:52
primarily are affiliate marketers. So what they do is they just try to rank a review and search. And then whenever someone signs up for something, they get a huge cut. And that’s worked. I my buddies are making millions. Yeah, for like over a decade, millions of dollars every single year, putting out great content. And now that they’ve been getting pushed down by, you know, user generated sites, they’re like, what is the point?

26:19
And then there’s still some sites like the big ones like Nordwallet that you mentioned that still kind of dominate the search results. But for the most part, all the medium sized guys have been pushed down. So this is where I see the adaptability of people and the ability to pivot becomes such a valuable skill. So let’s talk about two of our friends that started out as bloggers. First of all, let’s talk about Tiffany Ivanovsky.

26:49
Right? She started blogging sometime around the same time I did with a deal blog, right? Telling people how to use coupons, know, how to shop the sales. Her husband had a blog, how to get deals at Walmart. They did that for probably six or seven years and made full time. You know, they both had quit their regular jobs, all that stuff. But then, you know,

27:12
at some point they pivoted, right? And they got into like a network marketing company, which they then sold clothing online, but they leveraged the audience that they built from the blogs to launch this network marketing with the clothing. that happened, that went on for a couple of years. They took what they learned selling clothing online and created their own brand, right? Their own shop, even manufacture some of their own clothing, right? And now they have a multimillion dollar business, more,

27:41
more successful than they ever were at blogging, although their blogs were very successful, right? Completely shifting. Another person, Jamreel, started as a, a homeschool site, right? How to get homeschool deals. Did that, sold that site, leveraged it, started writing about, she has a lot of kids, so she started writing about how to bulk cook, right? How to make all these things. Started a YouTube channel way before most people were taking YouTube very seriously, right? Now she has a whole suite of digital products. Her YouTube channel is wildly successful.

28:11
You know, so she pivoted from initially starting about talking about how to get homeschool products for inexpensive to now she’s this big time YouTuber. Same with our friend Leslie Samuel. Started out as a blogger, then was a business coach, then pivoted back to YouTube. And he wasn’t talking about business on YouTube, he was talking about science, because that’s his background. He’s built once again a wildly successful YouTube channel, been able to leverage that. So I think the ability to like leverage

28:40
what you build into something else is critical in if you live in the world of like internet marketing. So being able to take what you learn from one thing and leverage it into something else is how you can last for 10 to 20 years. And I was just thinking to myself, if I hadn’t started that YouTube channel, I’d be pretty worried right now. mean, YouTube has been really good. And I think the guys have always been reluctant. Did you see I sent you a TikTok this morning? I didn’t see it. I saw that you sent me one.

29:10
I sent you one because it’s our buddy who would never in a million years go on video and do TikToks. So now they’re doing TikTok. Ready to TikTok. OK, yeah. Right. And you know who I’m talking about? He’s been on the podcast before. yes. But he likes to just hide in the corner and just collect money. That’s generally his personality. But I do feel like I mean, there’s something to be said about I know a lot of the guys in this group, like there’s something to be said about that. A lot of them have sold websites. They don’t have to work again if they don’t want to.

29:40
But a lot of them are still, they’ve built a really great business, but now they’re having the repercussions of all these Google updates, their traffic’s not what it used to be. I mean, one of our friends didn’t build an email list, right, in your group? And it’s like, those things are so important because you just don’t know when, I mean, like,

30:04
We always talk about like, all these bloggers that build their entire business on social media, right? They’re just Facebooks or Instagram hacks, right? And it’s not much different than Google when it comes to it being able to be wiped away in a minute. It’s different in that when you try to build something on Instagram, it’s that constant cycle, whereas Google, it’s a slow burn, right? So you create something, it builds up, that sort of thing. So in that way, it’s different. But at the end of the day,

30:32
you can lose your Instagram or you can lose your Google search, your number one rankings, and you literally have zero control over it. I don’t know these people, but there have been reports of traffic literally going to zero. People posting their search consoles because of some slap from Google. What kind of irks me a little bit is, you know how they’ve been promoting EAT, which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Yeah.

30:59
I think that’s all gone out the window. I don’t really think it matters. I don’t think so either. Because it’s been promoting Reddit posts from people who have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. Exactly. So Google always says one thing and then they do the other. Yeah. And I think this last slap where they actually manually penalize a bunch of sites. I think that was just a statement to scare people into not using AI to generate the results because I don’t think they can really detect it.

31:29
Yeah, I think they would have trouble. mean, all these search updates that keep happening every single month are probably the result of the fact that they can’t control this and they don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re just flipping dials and whatnot. Yeah, I know. But to me, it’s like this is why having that email list is so important. Having that loyal fan base is so important.

31:55
Because then, even if Google’s not showing your stuff to new people, right, people that are just searching and they land on your site, which is, you know, obviously a pretty important component of this, you still have a group of people that like you, trust you, know you, will recommend you. I mean, I’ve seen people when stuff like this happens, send an email to their list and be like, hey guys, I got decimated by this Google update. Would you please share this newsletter with your friends? Right?

32:23
relying on that relationship that you built with your audience to help you weather these types of storms. Yeah, I agree. Email and SMS are both factors that will reduce the speed of the decline, I would say. Yeah. Because every time you send, you do lose some subs, and so you always have to be replenishing the ones that you lose. Yeah. But yeah, I absolutely agree. I guess even if the entire traffic

32:52
Spigot stopped, I’d probably be okay for a solid year or two, I think. You would be okay. Well, you’d be okay for a variety of but like your YouTube traffic isn’t gonna stop. I mean, what if, remember our buddy Leslie got hacked and lost his video? Yes, but that’s more of an anomaly versus like a global update, right? Correct, yeah. Reddit’s not gonna be at the top of YouTube ever.

33:23
Although all these AI videos seem to be creeping up into my feed that bothers me to no end actually. don’t think that most of them have staying power, especially about the stuff that you talk about. Yeah, they’re not competitors. I’m just saying like, I’m seeing all these AI videos pop up in my feed and I keep, you know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been marking them as spam, but I keep getting them. Interesting.

33:51
I didn’t know you could market video as spam. can block that. Oh, channel? You can suggest, yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully Google gets the point, but they haven’t. I don’t know. The key point here is I think everyone needs to diversify. Mm hmm. Right. And I think the key to ranking in Google search is really just a long term investment in brand and authority building. Mm hmm. Because there are sites that still rank like I’m still ranking for a bunch of stuff. Yeah.

34:22
It just pains me when I see some no name on Reddit outrank me for something, some person that has no authority and probably doesn’t even know what they’re talking about. Yeah, and I think that does a disservice. I mean, honestly, it does a disservice to the person searching too, right? Because they’re probably going to end up with bad information. It’s like it reminds me of back in the day, like on Facebook, and I’m sure this still goes around. I just don’t see it. like.

34:46
you need to repost this because so Facebook protects your data and if you don’t repost this on Facebook, like I feel like all the people that reposted that on Facebook are reading bad results in Google and getting the wrong information. Yeah, so I mean what I’m doing right now personally is I’m on social media. I actually have a method of posting regularly now both for Bumblebee and I’m gonna talk about this as soon as I get some more data to actually make a presentation of all this.

35:16
But I’m going to report on the results and I’ve, hated social media for a long time and desperate times call for desperate measures. When SEO goes down, it’s time for the tick tock dances. Something’s gotta go back up. I’m always bullish on email and SMS always. And I am staying the course on my content creation for the blog. I don’t think the strategies have changed. Right.

35:43
You want to answer the questions that people are asking online. Really, the only thing that’s changed, at least in my domain, I can’t really talk about yours in the lifestyle space, is that these bigger sites are basically displacing the smaller guys. And by bigger sites, I mean the Reddits and the LinkedIn’s and the Quarers. Like if you add all those sites in there, you’re basically getting knocked down like five or six spots. Yeah. Right. Because there’s always like another informational panel in between there too.

36:12
And getting knocked down five or six spots is actually a big deal in Google search. But in terms of ranking, like I just wrote another article just the other day that went live and it instantly jumped to like number 12 and hopefully it’ll continue to climb. So the strategies haven’t changed. What’s really changed is Google and what they’re favoring. And I have to think that this is going to be some sort of yo-yo effect, right? Like you’re already getting fed up with the Reddit results and whatnot.

36:42
And if it continues on like this, people just aren’t going to use search anymore and Bing is going to get even more market share. Which sounds crazy that we’re saying this, but also we were all using AOL. Yeah. And we talked about Bing a bunch of times already. I can’t remember the last time I’ve even used Bing, but I kind of gave it a try recently and I even fired up my Bing Webmaster tools. Are you even signed up for Bing Webmaster? Yes, I am. That was one of the emails I got. I thought to myself,

37:10
I’m signed up for Ping Webmaster Tools. Like I must have signed up years ago, but I am. Because the Bing search results haven’t really changed. probably like the Google of old. Yeah, yeah. Because they don’t have deals, I guess, with Reddit. I mean, hopefully it stays that way. It’ll be interesting. Like in a year, it’ll be interesting to listen to this podcast and see what’s changed and what stayed the same. Yeah. And actually, you’re not on Windows, right? I’m not. I’m not. No.

37:40
I’m on Windows and every time there’s an update, which probably happens like every month or so, they try to set Edge to be the default search engine. Oh yeah, I do remember that. default browser on the machine. Just for fun, because of all this is happening, I’m a little anti-Google right now. I started using the Edge browser just for kicks. It’s actually faster than Chrome. So Apple does that with Safari?

38:09
every time that’s the same exact, you know, hook. What’s interesting and probably the only reason why, although not every site’s compatible with Safari, which is annoying, but the reason why Chrome has my loyalty is because they have my password saved. That’s how they get you, right? I’m sure Kevin’s rolling over right now in just disgust. But no, like if you think about like the Chrome password manager is…

38:38
Probably, I’m not recommending it for anybody. It’s probably not secure, don’t use it. But for me, there’s no way I would remember my passwords. And so I got an email right before we got on from one of my doctors, like, you have a secure message? And I was like, I don’t even remember being on this site. I mean, knew that I had, but I couldn’t, I was like, thank goodness that Google has my password saved, because I haven’t logged into this site in six months. I have no idea what my password is. So yeah.

39:04
What keeps me on Chrome are the plugins that I use. Jungle Scout, the Helium Test. have all these helper functions. Fluencer Fruit, yeah, that’s all set up. Pinterest has got a plug in there that I use. Actually, those are my three. I’ve got Pinterest, Fluencer Fruit, and Jungle Scout sitting on my browser. So is Google going away anytime soon? Probably not. I mean, they this huge moat. But if they lose search market share continually,

39:32
I mean, that’s their revenue source, right? And once they have less money, and if, let’s say, Bing becomes the dominant search engine at some point, maybe they can pay Apple to displace Google Search. I don’t know. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, we’re just going to have to see how all this Google stuff pans out. But at its current trajectory, I think it’s not looking good.

39:58
More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 535. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are on sale over at seller summits.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. Go to seller summits.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
But before we begin, I want to let you know that this is the last call for tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit over at SellersSummit.com. The Seller Summit is an e-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, is a curriculum-based event 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 business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods

00:59
and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales in around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th.

01:28
And right now, this is the last chance to get your ticket. Also, 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 grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

01:56
So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:09
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Eugenia Chen on the show. Now, Eugenia is someone who I met through Kim Meckwood. She sells click and carry. And I interviewed Kim a while back and she introduced me to Eugenia, who’s the founder of Pandaloon, which is a store that sells these super cute costumes for dogs. She’s been on Shark Tank, where she got a deal with Damon John. And she has a gigantic TikTok channel with over 6.1 million followers.

02:38
And she uses this TikTok channel to drive traffic to her e-commerce store with one of her very first videos hitting over 140 million views, which is nuts. So in this episode, Eugenia is going to teach us how she applies her TikTok channel and her social media strategy to drive sales. And with that, welcome to the show. How are doing? Thank you. Wow. What a well-spoken intro. So I’m going to just say this right off. It’s actually pretty rare.

03:06
that I have an Asian on the show because just percentage wise, there aren’t that many of us that start e-commerce businesses for some reason. I’ve heard that it seems so one kind of strange because you think Asians like, you know, being like conservative with money or making money. And then but also kind of sad that it seems like maybe culturally Asians are like less likely to venture out there and and try to create a business.

03:33
Well, see, that leaves me my first question, which was, was starting Pandaloon like the original plan or when you were you going to be like an engineer, lawyer, doctor, original? Just curious. Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course, you you have to have a survival job, I guess. So my first, I guess, career was a math professor. a college math professor. it. So I was an applied mathematician in my previous life. I like to study in the

04:01
applied maths, I like to study in neuroscience. So I studied like how networks of neurons optimize in a mathematical model. That’s cool. Yeah. So So how did that lead to Pandaloon? And why did you start it in the first place? Yeah, it was, it was interesting, because like you go into your career, thinking that it’s going to be one thing. And so the economy of being a professor changed a lot for me at the time, like when I came out of

04:31
grad school, it was like, it was a perfectly fine like job, I guess, like income wise, and then I hope to also do other ventures alongside it. But the economics just got super bad. Like I started getting my pay cut, but then having like twice the workload. And it just got worse and worse to where I like did the math one day. And I was like, I’m getting paid about $12 an hour for teaching one of my classes. Wow. Okay, I’ve been seen. Yeah, it was horrible. So I just thought I have to do something for myself. So I thought, Okay, I’m gonna

05:01
try to create a website. And so I taught myself to like code a website and I created this little online store in the theme of pandas. And that was Panda Loon. And so the version of it where I have these like funny dog costumes came just a little bit by accident. I put my dog Huxley in a little panda costume and just took a video of him running through the park. And that’s what went crazy viral and people started emailing me asking me, can you

05:29
create a costume for my dog too. Did you make that costume? Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Okay, I cut up like teddy bear fabric and then like, figure it out what would make it work on a dog to give it that like magical running teddy bear look. Okay, so that takes skills. Is that just something you do for fun? You say, Okay, I’m not like a technical seamstress. But I have like, I don’t know, I have a love for like design and like,

05:59
the way and I kind of approach it from a mathematical perspective actually, of like there’s certain ratios that make something look very cute and like aesthetically pleasing. And so I just kind of rigged it to where it would have that right appearance and then took it from there. Interesting. So you you hand sewed that first costume? Yes. And then you just decide to throw it up on tik tok? Or did you just put it on? Like, where did you post it? It was actually Facebook, Facebook video.

06:28
that where it popped off just through I think a lot of shares and I don’t know to this day like if it hit like someone big on Facebook that who shared it but I know that like some celebrities tweeted it on Twitter to Wow, it just kind of had that virality by accident. then they found you was this before Penelun or was this after it already started? So at this time, Penelun was just like this little niche gift website.

06:56
Okay, online. And then I was also selling on Amazon, just like, anything I could get my hands on that I could sell for a profit. was trying to figure out how do I sell online, both on Amazon and my own website. And like, just learning as I went of just like, how do you create a page? How do you play the game of like, Amazon rankings and all of that? And then it was in the theme of pandas on my website, but a lot of general goods to on Amazon.

07:23
So there was no listing for this though when the video came out, obviously. Correct. Yeah, I had put it through a watermark that said, Pandaloon on the video, just thinking like, oh, well, I’ll put a little something on here. Maybe the theme of pandas will, you know, promote my site in some way. And that’s how they found me. And so they started emailing me. And then what? Obviously, you couldn’t make a whole bunch of costumes yourself, right? That would take right? Yeah, that would be

07:53
incredibly unpleasant. I’d probably go back to earning $12 an hour. So I figured, okay, like I wanted, was trying to get my way towards making my own products, but I just didn’t know what it would be at that point. So when I accidentally created this demand, I thought, oh gosh, like I wasn’t expecting this, but let me explore it. So I wanted to try to move fast because like people were excited about it. There was this video still circulating.

08:22
So I went to a local seamstress in San Diego and I asked if she could help me with making a pattern. And so like I paid the seamstress and she helped me kind of make a, approximate sort of pattern. And I explored trying to see if I can manufacture a batch in the U S just to get, you know, increased speed and to test this out. But it turns out that you can’t really, or it’s very difficult. I couldn’t find it at the time to manufacture something with furry fabric.

08:52
over here. Because I just be importing fabric and buying it from a middleman for one to get that type of fabric. And then the second thing was, the sewing company that was working with me said, actually, we don’t want this project. Yeah, they said that you needed a laser cutting machine in order to cut this type of furry fabric. Otherwise, they have to shut down all production, because there would just be fur flying everywhere. I guess that makes sense.

09:19
How much did it cost to make that initial pattern? Just curious. They charged me about $350 for it’s not much at all. Yeah, not too much for stateside. At the time it was like a little painful for it to, you know, to let go of the purse strings. But yeah, it kind of got approximately there. And then I realized, based on the prices that they were quoting me, I would have to sell these things for like $200 a piece. Oh, my goodness. Okay. It was like, it was pretty crazy. And so

09:48
I reached out to some people that I knew from like an Amazon seller network in San Diego. And they, you know, introduced me to a friend of a friend who had experience with plush. So through him, I found my current manufacturer who manufactures these overseas with the proper laser cutting machine. Right. Yeah. So that first batch, how long did it take you? Um, it took probably, like,

10:16
four months, I think, finish. Yeah. It was kind of a race to the finish line too, because I made this little prototype and I had always been a fan of Shark Tank. So I thought like, I’m just gonna stand in line and go, it’ll be interesting, I guess. And then I ended up getting called back for Shark Tank. So I went from, you know, being able to take my sweet time to, oh, I got to get this out because I’m going to film on Shark Tank.

10:44
Oh, wait, so back up. So sorry, your video goes viral, then you look for suppliers. And then before you have any product you decide to apply for Shark Tank. Yeah, I just had my one little prototype. So yeah, I stood in line at 4am at this like Indian casino out in Southern California. And just stood in line with all the people some some crazy some who had been auditioning many times for Shark Tank. And then you go in and you do a 60 second pitch.

11:13
for the casting directors of Shark Tank. And so I went in with just my one singular prototype and did it. And the response seemed pretty positive. They took a photo of my dog in costume. So I thought like, oh yeah, like I got their eye. And then just like a few days later, I got the call that I was heading towards actually filming. So during that time, I actually thought, oh gosh, I’m only gonna go on the show with one.

11:42
prototype, feel like I should probably have more to show for this. So I quickly created like five other styles and had my factory airship them. And those arrived like four days before I filmed. And so now I had a whole line of little pet costumes to show on the show. What were the minimum order quantities of this factory? Unfortunately, like

12:03
The feedback I was getting from multiple factories was they wanted 2000, a moQ of 2000. Wow. Yeah. it was like per size, not per style. Per size. Per size. like it got very, I needed Shark Tank at that point because it got so expensive to try to like consider making like multiple sizes. Yeah. So it was, was a bit of a stretch. Like I was able to fund my, my first panda costume run with the money I’d saved up just being an Amazon seller.

12:32
But in order to create all those other styles, I really did need like an investment from someone. Wow. Okay, so I actually did watch your clip. So all those costumes you only had one of pretty much. Yeah, like one of one. So after I filmed Lori, she’s the one with like blonde hair. She took my unicorn costume. And so we had to chase after her to get it back because it was my only prototype for that costume.

13:01
And you ended up signing with Damon, right? Yeah. Is that still going on? Yeah, yeah, he has, you know, he has equity in Panda land. So yeah, like, he really, like, lets me take the lead. So he’s not really up in my, you know, decision making, unless I want him to be like fast for his advisor input. But yeah, yeah, I last time I saw him was

13:27
think a few months ago, like when it comes to San Diego comes to California, we try to get together and have dinner or something. That’s cool. Yeah, I’ve had varying. I’ve had other shark tank people on the show before. Sometimes the shark is like, completely absent. And but it sounds like you and Damon, you know, you keep in touch and you actually see each other physically. Yeah, I have a hard time being like, I don’t know, is this an Asian thing? I have a hard time being a needy, like a needy, of course, person as far as like asking someone for help all the time.

13:57
So I probably should be more proactive in like pulling him in to like get his advice for things. But I can see how that can happen because at this point, I think each shark probably has a hundred plus companies. So it’s just too much. So I try to bring him in when I know that like, okay, this is an area where I definitely want his help. Like, yeah, like if there’s something like in a contract, can contact his team and get help with, you know, taking a look at something or licensing or things like that.

14:26
Are you still using those first factories? I am actually, yeah. They’ve been really good to me. Like they’re not the best with speed, but their quality has been like just such a huge thing to not have to worry about. The defect rate was been like near zero. it’s really great. that’s incredible. Yeah. Yeah. They really concentrate on like quality. rate is around 3%. And we’re just selling pieces of fabric. Yours is much more complicated.

14:55
Oh man, yeah, that’s true. That’s amazing. All right, well, let’s switch gears and talk about TikTok because your channel is ridiculous. So you started out on Facebook and you had that one video go viral. At that point, did you choose or did you just start posting on all the social media platforms? I was definitely trying to cross post. So I actually enjoyed Instagram more because it seemed like there was a sort of a pet community there where people

15:22
have a reciprocal relationship and they, you you can engage with each other. But it was, at the time Instagram didn’t have reels and it was a lot harder to build up an audience just organically. And then Facebook also went through a transition where it was also harder to get organic reach. And then this little app of TikTok just rose up there and really changed the social media, like video game for everyone.

15:48
Um, because now everyone, every platform is, is moving towards sort of this short form discovery algorithm. Um, so I started posting on, on all of them, but TikTok was a place where you could grow very quickly. Um, so it was rewarding to, you know, keep going and to join in, um, the structure of TikTok where, know, people would create trends, um, which would lend to creating a video format was very easy to jump in on. So was a lot easier at that time to create a lot of.

16:17
content at volume. Yeah. then did your early videos have success just like the one on Facebook? Um, there was a good amount of success. Yeah, I’ve had I tried to count it up recently. And it’s approximately a billion views on tech talk. So it’s like, it’s a lot of videos with, you know, millions of views or more. But then there’s like ups and downs. So you’ll have like one video with a million or

16:45
million, 20 million, and then you’ll have the next one, you know, much lower than that by far. Which is kind of an interesting thing with this whole movement towards a discovery algorithm where, you know, there’s no guarantee that you’ll reach the audience that you’ve reached before. It’s always like you’re trying to earn that view. Like it’s a brand new account or something. you correlate

17:09
those views to actual sales? Like do actually people go to your bio and click the link or do they just kind of go off and Google and search for it? There’s a lot of Googling. The behavior is changing over time. It’s really interesting. More recently, I saw one of my videos, I think it was like a million and a half views or something on my Pandaloon account. People did click on my website, actually even more than using TikTok shop, surprisingly. And then and more than out.

17:36
Amazon, I really expected them to be a demographic that would love Amazon. But to my surprise, pleasantly, they went to my website, which is nice. But yeah, I can correlate sales. But for to correlate it, it’s a lot easier to correlate it closer to like my peak season. When it’s in the off season. It’s it’s really hard to, to tell. There’s a lot of Yeah, there’s a lot of peak season Halloween and Christmas probably. Yeah.

18:05
Yeah, mostly Halloween, like September, October, which is a challenge to have a seasonal business for sure. Because that’s such a short timeframe to really hit it hard. So that can be a little challenging to create videos that pop off at that right time. So do you just kind of relax and then all of sudden Halloween coming up and you just pump out like multiple videos a day or? I wish okay, so because like there’s so much stuff to do just to like keep

18:34
the orders moving and customers happy during the peak season, I struggle to create videos at the same frequency that I would like to. So it’s a tough challenge. I’m just trying to keep things alive and running during the peak season. And then throughout the rest of year, I do a lot of video creation that I try to just continue to give the audience things that they find interesting or fun or storytelling. And then also

19:03
I sort of have a secondary business of creating video for social media with my dog Huxley. So like, we’ve done like brand deals with with companies and have monetization on like just as a social media creator as well. Right. Nice. Yeah. Are using a 3PL to deliver your stuff for I am Yeah, it’s I have a really great like family owned warehouse out in the Midwest. And yeah, they’re great. I have

19:32
you know, something I learned the hard way. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a nightmare 3PL. Everyone has had a nightmare. Yeah, they held my inventory hostage. They just stopped fulfilling one day. And like, for two months, they wouldn’t let me remove my inventory. I was like going crazy. It was a terrible experience. And so ever since then, I’ve been very cautious to like, have back it plans.

19:56
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.

20:25
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.

20:36
Yeah, I had a friend where their 3PL just decided to go bankrupt. And he had to rent a U haul drive over, look for all of his stuff in the warehouse, pack it up and leave. So everyone has a 3PL store. This is why we bought our own warehouse. The downside is we have to fill everything ourselves, which is another set of headaches. But yeah, I think about that all the time is like, do I want to

21:05
like head towards the direction of having my own warehouse, but then I don’t want to be running a warehouse company. You don’t want to, don’t. Okay. We do customization. So it kind of requires it for a lot of us. Okay. All right. So I am curious what it takes to go viral on TikTok. I’ve watched a number of your videos and they’re all very cute. I don’t think they can be mass produced because they’re very creative. A lot of them. They’re funny. Thank you.

21:34
So do you have like a process? yeah, definitely. I there’s, there’s things that you can do on TikTok that will, you know, increase your success rate for sure. So on TikTok, the biggest thing that people need to wrap their heads around is that you’re consuming content that just fed to you. It’s not like when you go on YouTube, and you have this intent of like,

21:58
oh, how do I open a Shopify store where you Google a question and you evaluate the thumbnails and I see, oh, I see Steve Chu’s thumbnail. It looks pretty great. Like think I trust that guy. I’m gonna click on his video. So by then you’re committed to hearing what that video has to say. Whereas on TikTok or YouTube shorts or Reels now too, you’re just scrolling through a feed of videos that this algorithm has decided that you might wanna see. So within like,

22:26
one to two seconds, people are making these split second decisions on whether it’s worth sticking around. And they’re very much ready to scroll as a default. So you have to figure out a way to stop their scroll to give you a chance to let your video be seen. So in that first few seconds, you have to get something, you have to get a hook out. So something that gives the audience context so that they have some idea of what you’re talking about. Something that’s grabby.

22:55
So it could be something like a visual hook where, you you’ll see videos where people are sometimes holding the camera and they’re walking and then they pan the camera up. It’s just giving us a little bit of anticipation of like, oh, there’s something coming. There’s something I want to see here just around the corner. And then often something that has like a little bit of like shininess or like emotion, something where people have a little bit of an elevated reason.

23:25
to stick around. Like, you know, oh, this is, you what happened when I accidentally, you know, married some, like crazy pathological liar, like it’s very like juicy, right? Yeah, makes you want to stick around. So obviously, in e commerce, you may not be talking about pathological liars as much, but you want to create something where there’s a reason for the audience to watch because the two things that make that signal to tick tock that your video is worth pushing out more.

23:54
Um, or most strongly the watch time or people watching it further into the video or all the way through, or even more than once. And then, um, also the shares and saves. So tick tock loves and all these social platforms. They really love it. If your video is something that people want to spread around, I guess that’s the sort of the base definition of virality is like, you know, does this, you know, have an exponential multiplier on it. So if you’re selling a physical product though,

24:22
what works? Like I know for you, you have a very cute dog in a costume and that by itself is kind of like a hook, right? Yeah, it definitely helps. But it’s really not enough these days. You have to like continue to work harder and harder. Okay. So my my product in some ways, it’s it’s challenging to create videos because it’s it’s something that’s fun. But it’s not like actually solving a problem. It’s not like I woke up one day and I like needed to solve something with a dog costume.

24:51
But most of the time like creating like expressing the problem and then solving it with your product tends to be like the most effective way to create videos short from videos on tech talk that You know show off a product I’m just thinking like I do watch some channels where the content really has nothing to do with the product But then they’ll mention that they have a product every now and then and I think it does very well for them. Yeah, so

25:20
you recommend for an ecommerce store to just kind of attract the type of people that buy or do you do product focus kind of tic tocs? I tend to advise people to lean into product focused tic tocs because usually they’re advising a lot of small businesses. Sure. And they want to see some kind of like signal that they’re headed in the right direction. You know, there’s have you heard of bloom? Bloom? Yeah, it’s like this greens powder.

25:50
They’re big on TikTok and they, they do what you’re describing as they, they inject their product placement, you know, with tons and tons of videos with tons and tons of influencers and gifted campaigns. So they’re able to like create that brand awareness that way. But I think for most entrepreneurs, they may not have that kind of ability to wait that long or to invest that much in influencers. So I would go straight to demonstrating your product as much as you can. Yeah.

26:20
I know you’ve helped several companies in addition to blowing up your own TikTok channel. Do you feel comfortable just using a product? don’t have to say the brand or anything just as an example on what’s Yeah, yeah, there’s a product that like solves a problem where if you like had a, if you had a bug bite and so like if you show the problem like the bug bite, you know, like a swelling or something like that.

26:48
The thing that’s been most effective has been just straight, you know, before and after type of structure video. So they show the problem, like, you know, sometimes there’s a kid crying or something like that. They show the, you know, the tool helping and then the after where it’s like a pretty good result. So that sort of problem solution, sort of like this is what you need. Creating that need is really seeming like the easiest way to get out there and get grabby.

27:18
I mean, it sounds like Facebook ads to a certain extent. What about apparel or stuff that doesn’t solve a problem? Yeah, I think it’s it’s harder in a way apparel on TikTok seems to be doing well in some cases because it has a broad appeal. So like if I’m selling cargo pants, like in theory, I can appeal to at least 50 % of you know, the general audience there. Yeah, so apparel, like

27:46
It is kind of nice when people are able to show it as like a online sort of dressing room sort of idea where, you know, a person can see and explain, oh, like it fits this way. Here’s what it looks like on a real body. Those types of things seem to be doing well on TikTok, but it is challenging because instead of, know, negative emotion is more grabbing than positive emotion. So when you’re doing something like apparel, it’s mostly just like you’re showing positive. You’re not really.

28:16
creating like a negative hook where, you know, a problem solution, you grab someone with something that’s interesting because you need to solve it. Your highest converting TikTok, what was the content in terms of converting sales, not necessarily just views? I would, it’s probably related to my shark tank story. And just like, yeah, so the origin story, that’s something I’ve noticed on social.

28:44
for a while now is that people don’t really care to hear from a brand. So, you know, like I love Sarah Blakely from Spanx, like, but I don’t really care to hear what Spanx has to say on a daily basis, but I will tune in to Sarah Blakely talking face to camera about, you know, some anecdote that she experienced. If you’re willing to be like a little bit self-deprecating or…

29:09
a little bit something that might be like a little bit embarrassing people really eat that up of you know, seeing what the real nitty gritty sort of experiences or stories that you have to tell as entrepreneur. Those things do really well on tech talk. if you were to just make it so here’s my dilemma. So we sell handkerchiefs and linens but my wife has no interest in doing any of the content for that. And we considered hiring someone to do it. And we actually had some employees do it for a while. But ultimately like

29:38
I think I would do the best job. So if I just did a behind the scenes of the, you think that would do well on TikTok? Yeah, actually, I think you should definitely do it. I mean, you’re used to telling your story and like how you got started. I think people would really like seeing like your origin story and you hitting on that over and over again. Probably it’s going to feel like you’re telling your story ad nauseam. But also just about the handkerchiefs itself, like,

30:08
Although you may not seem like the, what is it, the avatar of like a handkerchief. It’s fun. I heard you say once that like, you could imagine yourself saying like, hi, I’m Steve Chu. I make microprocessors and you know, here’s how you choose a handkerchief. It’s like a little bit of a cognitive dissonance, it feels very authentic if you show up and you’re not someone who’s like,

30:37
know, your typical influencer pushing something just to look pretty and make a buck. I think you come across very sincere and you’re going to be honest about what you’re showing. And I think you have a problem in your story, in your origin story of like your wife was trying to find handkerchiefs for her wedding. She couldn’t find one. She knew she was going to cry. So that’s why you sought out these handkerchiefs. I think that’s an interesting story to tell.

31:06
product is, I guess, the biggest thing I’d wonder. know? Yeah, I think it can. It may not be the easiest thing to see an immediate result because your audience is somewhat targeted, right? Like same with mine. You know, we’re not selling something that’s like, I guess, an impulse buy for like, you know, 50 % of the population. So I think that right now on TikTok, it feels like

31:33
it may not be the easiest thing to look at like, oh yeah, we sold a hundred thousand dollars this month or something like that. But I think that as far as like creating creative, that’s geared towards TikTok, but then taking advantage of it on other platforms too, on YouTube shorts, on your Instagram, I think that will move product. I think Instagram is probably the best removing product, just judging by my colleagues and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah.

32:03
I think the targeting is is definitely more mature over there. So that makes more sense. Yeah. So you mentioned TikTok shop and I have friends that are doing $200,000 a month on TikTok shop right now. And she says it’s just crazy. It’s like the wild wild west. Yeah. What do you have any tips for TikTok shop? Because I know you’re doing it also you have to go live to which takes some amount of courage as well. Yeah, I used to go live all the time. It’s just not

32:33
my personal thing, I know there’s some people who love to get on a live and talk if they’re, you know, one those like talkative people who, you know, enjoy an audience. I think you have to figure out like, what, what is it that you can tolerate doing? To what do you have capacity for? For me, like I’m more interested in short form video than I am in live. But also, I’m curious if you can say like, or hint, like what category? she’s, she’s apparel. Apparel, okay.

33:01
So I’m seeing that apparel and beauty are killing it on TikTok Shop. And I think from my conversations with certain people too is that right now the targeting is not super targeted towards your niches, like pets or perhaps people getting married in your category. So that’s going to be harder. But for TikTok Shop, if you have a product that can appeal to a lot of people,

33:30
Um, skincare, you know, the curling irons, have killed it. Um, apparel. Um, yeah, there’s like a whole live stream element to selling on a P with apparel where you can optimize by pushing out videos at volume. And they don’t have to be like, even like the greatest videos structurally. Um, but they push people towards your live stream and then they tend to convert.

33:57
either during the live stream or with the videos that they get served after the live stream because they were watching your live stream. Sorry, how do you push people towards the live stream? Is it just your subscribers that get the notification? No, so TikTok has been inserting live streams from people that you don’t follow a lot, like a disproportionate amount of lives have been coming across the free page. people, strangers are getting served the live stream just in their normal scrolling.

34:27
But then in addition to that, if you post before you go live, TikTok has announced it publicly that these things will get pushed out more so that they’re more likely to push your video that you posted approximately 24 to 48 hours before your live stream while you’re live so that people see your video, they see your profile has a little blue circle around it.

34:55
to indicate that you’re live right now. And what they’re doing is trying to attract people to go from that video to your live stream. Okay. And then once you’re there, you have products that you upload and they can just check out right on the spot, right? Right, right. So there you are on your live stream, you know, like showing the products, answering questions. I think for apparel, it’s nice because they can say like, oh, well, you know, this model weighs 150 pounds is five three, this is what it looks like on her.

35:23
Is it stretchy? Is, does it feel like? It kind of gives people that, that piece that they’re, they might be missing, like when they’re looking at, know, flat images on Amazon, you know, they can actually interact and figure out like, how would this fit on their body? You know, before we hit record, you mentioned to me that TikTok is favoring long videos now, not just one minute. Does that imply then that the sub one minute videos are getting less reach? Yes.

35:53
At least that’s my experience on my account and then accounts that I’ve seen from others is that it’s like there’s a lot of competition for the shorter videos. Um, and people are continuing to make the shorter videos so that it’s a little, it’s like disproportionately, um, geared towards one minute videos or longer, um, is what they’re trying to aim for. So I saw a statistic that said something like 70 % of.

36:21
50 to 70 % of videos consumed on TikTok are one minute or longer. So if can imagine like how, know, like if 90 % of people think that we should create short form videos just as a default because it’s TikTok, there’s so much more competition. So I’ve seen some of these longer videos and I can’t imagine people watching like a 15 minute video, for example, or even a five minute video, but maybe the overall watch time is just longer.

36:48
I feel the same way. Like I can’t imagine my content stretching out to 10 minutes. Like I don’t know. It would have to be like an epic movie at that point for the kind of that I make. Um, what I’m seeing is the longer videos, tend to be just like face to camera, FaceTime style talking, which is also kind of part of the culture of TikTok where people want to feel like they’re just hanging out with you on FaceTime. Um, it’s not such a like polished event sort of recording, like you might see on YouTube.

37:18
And that’s where the video tends to stretch to be longer and longer because for someone to kind of tell a story or to rant for three minutes, five minutes, it’s a lot more doable than these, you know, these videos that are very saturated or like very produced. know TikTok is going after YouTube directly, right? So before we got on, you mentioned, hey, yeah, just upload all of your horizontal long form videos. Yeah. Do they do they work? Do people watch them?

37:47
Yeah, yeah, they do. It’s a little bit too early to say what type of horizontal videos are getting a lot of traction on TikTok. There is a push towards it. They’ve sent notifications directly to users saying, hey, if you upload horizontal video, you will get pushed out. So right now, it’s one those areas where you get kind of like an extra boost from the platform if you do it. For your short form,

38:16
If you have an editor, because I know you’re busy, but like, if you have an editor who can create a little juicy moment from your long form video and put it to the front of the video, as kind of like, it’s like a quick teaser trailer hook. Right, I can see your videos being consumed for 10 minutes for sure. Hmm. Okay. Yeah, I guess it’s worth trying. And horizontal, I can’t watch horizontal video on TikTok.

38:44
I usually just swipe away. Yeah, I’d never want to turn my phone, but it actually serves it to you horizontal, but you are still holding your phone vertical. So you don’t have to turn your phone unless you want to. Right. But there’s the ugly big black bar. Yeah. Something I am curious about is I see like more movement towards videos on TikTok being rewarded for a very active comment section. And I’ve noticed that those videos, even though it’s kind of ugly that there’s so much black space,

39:14
it does allow you to see the video and the comments simultaneously. So I think it may lend to having a video that’s consumed but also discussed at the same time. Do you make an active effort to try to reply to all the comments? Maybe in like the first day or so? Yeah, I definitely try. When it gets, you know, to be too much, it’s, it’s a little bit hard to get everyone but I try I should do a better job. Ideally, if you have a video

39:44
you’re expecting that not all of them will go viral. So if you make 20 banger videos, you’re pretty lucky if you get one of them to go to the millions. And when that happens, that’s your of your moment to drop everything and continue pushing out videos. when you get, if you were to have your handkerchiefs, know, pop off, you tell your story and people watch it, they’re going to ask you questions about like your handkerchiefs. And so

40:11
if you were to get a video with a million views and you have all these comments, asking questions or, you know, replying to you, that’s your moment to also then reply to that comment with a video and continue that engagement. Yeah, it’s interesting. I know putting out viral videos is kind of like an art form. I know you mentioned, you know, the hook and whatnot, but it all just takes a lot of practice. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of structure and strategy and

40:39
Yeah, there’s a lot of optimization that I actually have been thinking about, you know, how much do you want to give someone, you know, as far as like the information about what can help their video versus not like feeling like they feel overloaded with information and they don’t get out there and try. I would say like, I think that the biggest thing that I see small businesses spin their wheels on is just not having a strong start to their video.

41:08
Um, a of times they’ll spend time trying to be funny or, um, you know, create some kind of concept, but all they need to do is concentrate on making like the first five seconds of their video really strong. And from there, you know, you can continue to incrementally improve. And it just takes practice. And you said one in 20, you’re lucky if one goes viral. So anyone listening to this, if you’re not getting a video that goes viral, just, you just gotta keep going and be consistent with it. Yeah. You learn with every iteration.

41:37
So, Eugene, where can people check out your cute costumes online and your TikTok channel, of course? Yeah, on pandaloon.com. That’s my company with the cute costumes for dogs and cats. And then also Huxley Media Group.com. I have some information there on a TikTok course that’s coming up. And yeah, feel free to hit me up there with any questions. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show, Eugene. I really appreciate it.

42:07
Yeah, thank you.

42:36
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuarterJob.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.

00:24
But before we begin, want to you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are almost sold out over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit 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, is a curriculum-based event 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 business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods

00:53
and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now 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. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th May 16th.

01:22
And right now, this is the last chance to get your tickets. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

01:51
So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now on to the show.

02:03
Welcome back to another episode of the My Wife Put Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the Pet Summit. I have no idea what that is, but I just know Tony spoke four times at this event and there’s a lot of influencers and e-commerce folks at this conference. Yes, it was a, you know, I went in there not knowing what to expect at all. We got connected through our friend, Kristin Levine, who is in, I think both the courses doing content and e-commerce with us, but she connected

02:34
myself and Liz with the Pet Summit folks and yeah, we ended up, I ended up filling in for someone at the last minute that got COVID. So my three talks quickly went to four the week of the event. So it was very interesting. I learned a ton about the pet industry, which I will say, you probably teach the opposite of this in profitable online store, but I think there’s still a big opportunity to get into the pet product world after being at this event.

03:02
I don’t, what do mean I teach the opposite? There’s so many students selling pet stuff. It’s super competitive, right? Like there’s, think there’s a lot of sellers. However, after being there and I listened to like state of the pet industry, I don’t know. State of the union for pets. It was given by this guy who’s, you know, on the board, but he’s former like CEO of PetSmart and stuff like that. But he said that the industry this year is projected to do $154 billion.

03:32
And what is that up from the previous year? They’re up 8%, I think. Year over year. And what’s interesting is their whole marketing strategy is to get people to own more pets. That makes sense. Yeah. Which I’m like, Bob Barker had his day. No more spay and neuter. Like, now we want to fill the earth with dogs and cats. But anyway, yeah, so that was.

03:59
the first eye-opening takeaway that I had was listening to that keynote and realizing that in my mind, the pet space was just really saturated, but. I’ve never considered the pet industry saturated, actually. I there’s a lot of sellers, there’s a lot of innovate. Like, there’s a lot of things you can do with it. Yes. So anyway, that was my first thought was like, let’s sell some pet products. Just because the amount and then the amount of money that people spend on their, especially dogs and cats.

04:29
Obviously, the pet industry is much bigger than that with all the reptiles and fish and the little rodent type pets, but the amount of money that people are spending in pet products is ridiculous. And the one area that had like, I think a decent amount of growth was pet food toppings.

04:49
No way. Yes. like I met. So and the thing is, it was at the convention center in Orlando. So like when you have an event at the convention center, when you eat at the restaurants around the convention center, it’s filled with people at the convention. Right. So you’re even if you’re off site, you’re still usually sitting next to someone who’s going to the same event, kind of like the Canton Fair. Right. There’s tons of people in that area at that period of time. And so I met multiple people and I was like, and usually they were on the manufacturer or, you know, product side. And

05:19
One guy was like, I sell gravy. Like their whole industry is like gravy that you put on dog food. Interesting. Yeah. OK. Anyway. Yeah. So I don’t and that’s not even like supplement stuff, right? That’s just like, oh, they can’t just have regular pet food. They have to have pet food enhanced by like when they said pet toppings. All I could think of was like an ice cream sundae.

05:43
We can’t just give our pet regular dog food anymore. In the refrigerated pet food space is also a crazy, where you can get your food custom made for your pet and all that. Anyway, nuts. I have never owned a dog before, but if my dog would not eat food without a topping, I would just starve him for a little bit. You’re going to get hate. Anyway, but it got me thinking about the whole

06:11
It’s not just about the one thing, right? How do you create that additional value add to something to sell, whether it be physical product or digital, but you know, it wasn’t good enough that we just sold pet food, right? Now we sell pet food plus pet food enhancers. Right. So I know. So pets are basically becoming humans. Yes. And I think their goal, I think they said that they wanted, I think right now it’s like 60 % of households own a pet.

06:38
and they wanna try to push it to about 70 because if they can get it to 70, the numbers tip as far as revenue like pretty significantly. I went into this keynote just wanting the lunch, I’m gonna be honest. I was like, oh, free lunch, sign me up. And I actually was just completely captivated by the amount of data revolving, just kind of like, holy cow, this is a huge industry. And I clearly don’t spend any money on my pets. I was like, I feel like a very bad pet parent.

07:08
There’s someone at ECF who sells iguana equipment or something like that. Yes, the cage people. Cage people, yes. In terraniums, yes, yes. And they’re killing it. Yeah, oh yeah. Not surprising after being at that. So the Pet Summit itself was basically attached to the Global Pet Expo, which that I would say is the Canton Fair for pets, for pet products. okay. So everything from like the…

07:36
You would have appreciated it because it was everything from the very expensive display setups for the big dog food brands and the big cat food brands to the Asian vendors, right, that it looks just like they picked up their booth from the Canton Fair and put it in Orlando to people that had invented pet products. So lot of people that had, there were a lot of inventors there. So the shark tank style stuff to,

08:04
And then like crazy stuff like you can buy hiking pants for your dog. I know, I know, it was crazy. So there were 1,100 vendors at the Global Pet Expo and then the Pet Summit was for pet influencers and pet businesses on the marketing side. So basically two events kind of held simultaneously working together. One was more about walking the floor, making the connections, talking about

08:32
you know, products, what’s coming to the industry. And then the sessions were definitely more business and then the whole influencer track. And it was interesting because the influencer track was all topics geared towards bloggers, right? Or content creators, not really bloggers. But then the bloggers wanted to be on the floor walking the expo to get the free product. You know what I mean? It was just like old school blogging conference. How are the prices? Did you talk to any of the vendors?

09:01
for like the pricing of their products. It’s probably wholesale. We didn’t talk to any, we didn’t talk to anybody. Now, probably wholesale for some of the stuff and you could see they have these little like cubes where they would be in there with like their calculator and their order sheets and stuff. So I think like big companies were actually placing orders. Some people that we met offsite were talking about how they were there. One guy was in London, he’s trying to break into the US as far as bringing his products over here. A lot of people on Amazon.

09:30
So a lot of pet people that typically would sell direct to like a store, like you’re selling at Chewy or PetSmart also are now on Amazon where they weren’t in the past. And I will tell you, most of the pet brands do not know how to do Amazon. That was a big takeaway that I got. So on the expo floor, it wasn’t factories, right? It was more like people’s products.

09:55
Yes, although I think there were definitely a couple of like there was some Canton Fair looking stuff there for sure. OK, yeah. But but it was such a I mean, 1100 vendors. That’s a pretty large expo floor. I don’t think we got I don’t think we walked the entire thing. So these Amazon sellers, if they don’t know what they’re doing, how are they being successful? mean, Amazon these days pretty much requires that you know what you’re doing. Yes. So here’s what they’ve all done. So anyone who’s out there and has like an Amazon business hit these people up.

10:25
They’re like, oh, we have a guy that does our Amazon. Like when we would talk to them about it specifically, it’s like, oh, we have three guys. And I was like, but if you look at your listing, you can see that this is all wrong. We were having like helpful conversations. We weren’t just walking up to brands and going, hey, have you checked your Amazon listing lately? But usually the people at the booth had no idea what was happening on Amazon. I think they feel like, like one people that we, a group that we talked to for a while, they actually sell hay.

10:55
on Amazon. Oh, okay. And so we actually talked to the owner, the owner’s son. We ended up just having a conversation about it. And he’s like, well, I, you know, we’re talking to the youngest son and he said, well, you know, my dad told me that I was in charge of Amazon and we needed to get our products on Amazon. So we pulled up his listing because we were looking at it from the UGC, you talking to him about working with influencers. And so we’re looking at this and Liz has said, you know,

11:23
do you know how much money you’re losing on every sale? And he’s like, what do you mean losing? She’s like, what’s your price point with Amazon fees? They’re in the size of the pack. Like there’s no possible way that you’re making money on these products. And he’s like, yeah, well, there’s some of our best sellers in the store. So we needed them on Amazon. So they just don’t really have a great strategy. And I think a lot of them don’t understand. It’s kind of like they got told to go on Amazon, but then no one has any Amazon experience. Bail ahead has got to be really heavy.

11:52
Yes, this is like chicken hay. So it’s not as big, the package was like a small bag of dog food. So they’re selling this for 10.99 on Amazon. Oh, OK. You’re not making money on that, right? But they did have one product. Well, he’s like, we have one product that’s our hero product on Amazon. And that one did make sense financially.

12:15
So anyway, but a lot of the companies are I think are in that squeeze of you know, we’re going to PetSmart, we’re going to Chewy, we’re in the little tractor supply, whatever. But you know, Amazon is another channel that we’re not utilizing. So they hire someone’s brother to get the listings up. I am curious, you spoke four times. Yes. You want to just tell the audience what your topics were? Yeah. So the first talk that Liz and I gave together was on the Amazon Influencer program.

12:45
and this was specifically to the influencers. And this was an interesting group of influencers because most of them actually had no website. They were strictly Instagram or TikTok or both, which to me is, it made my heart hurt because, I mean, and these people like just dwarf us, right? They’ve got a million followers on Instagram. Their dogs are famous. People are asking for photos, like legit internet famous people. However,

13:14
As I’m talking to them, I’m like, so how do you get people on your email list? Are you putting this stuff on YouTube? Most people weren’t even doing YouTube. And everybody that when I talked to them, and Liz and I had a lot of conversations, it was, I know I need to be doing YouTube. That was the… We get that a lot. mean, it’s kind of a hurdle to get started. It is, but these people are already creating videos every single day, sometimes five and 10 videos a day. That’s true. So that was…

13:42
That was like, okay, you’ve already done all the hard part. So the interesting thing is there was the one bucket of people that, know, just Instagram or TikTok. And then there was this other bucket of people that I feel like have such a leg up because not only are they on Instagram and TikTok, they have a website, they had courses, they were selling physical products. One of them, one guy that we met, he sells, oh my gosh, what was the name of it? Like puppy aid, it’s like Gatorade for dogs. Oh my God.

14:11
But he knew it, he’s like, yeah, I’ve got 100,000 Instagram people, but I need to make money from them. So he does virtual dog training courses, he’s got a physical product, he’s got brand. So there were some people that clearly understood the benefit of diversifying that revenue. So we went and told him about the Amazon Influencer program, because these people are already making videos about products on Amazon.

14:37
and they have no problem getting accepted to the program. In fact, many of them were already in the program, but were like, I didn’t really know what it was about. So that was a fun talk because everybody in the room was like, oh, I can do this right this minute. Like I can upload videos today. So that was exciting, because it’s always nice when you give a talk and people are like, oh, this is doable. And then what was interesting is there were some brands that came to the talk who immediately came up to us afterwards and were like, how do we work with the influence?

15:06
It’s like, how do we get these on our listings? Which was funny because we’re like, come to the talk at four o’clock or we’ll teach you how to work with influencers and get the content on your listings. So then the next talk we gave was basically the brand side of it. So what is that UGC on Amazon? How does it work? Most brands are very confused because they think it’s people posting on their TikTok or Instagram and driving traffic to Amazon. And that’s not what the Amazon Influencer program is. It’s where the, you know, the UGC from the content creators live on the listings.

15:35
And the big thing for brands, which most people don’t get is in order to be eligible for this, you have to put your own branded video on the listing first. And once the brand uploads their own video, you’ve unlocked that for influencers to then create the content. And so most of these brands had video content that they weren’t utilizing to get that unlocked. So anyway, so that was an interesting talk because the brands had no clue what we were talking about.

16:03
had never even heard of this, didn’t really understand. And then when we started going through people’s listings and they’re like, wait, how could they already, they had a video so they had unlocked that upper carousel video slot. But they’re like, wait, I didn’t tell this person to make a video. And we’re like, well, if you have a top selling product in pets, which is really crazy, and especially for the influencers, pets are really high commission rate. That’s 4 % on Amazon. So if a product is categorized correctly on Amazon, this is

16:32
like one of the sweet spots to make revenue with videos. And the brands are like, but wait, we didn’t tell that person to make a video. What is this? And we’re like, well, this is what happens. And when you have a hot product, influencers are gonna find it and make that content.

16:49
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17:18
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17:30
So I’m curious, those influencers that you talked to that didn’t have a website or an audience, how are they making money? Brand deals, all brand deals. Wow. Yeah. Okay. That’s like my least favorite way to make money. I know, brand deals and then some of that is also through like TikTok affiliates. So TikTok affiliates is really big. So any, and I don’t know if we’re even, are we talking about this? We are talking about it at Seller Summit. I think Tiffany’s gonna talk about it. Yeah.

18:00
But TikTok affiliates is actually really lucrative for the affiliates because I didn’t know this. They make 20 % of the sales.

18:10
So yeah, at ECF there was a talk where this woman had very few followers on TikTok, made $80,000 in the span of like a month promoting one product. Cause her TikTok went viral. Yep. And when I was talking, I was actually having this conversation this week about how much affiliates get. I said, so you make 20 % if you promote it on TikTok shop, right? As an affiliate. But if you promote something on Amazon, you get 2%. Yeah. So

18:39
It’s a huge difference. Shoot. Should I be hawking products on TikTok? Yes, you should. Start talking about the hair straightener. So yeah, most of the influencers are making money from brand deals and then some affiliate and then TikTok shop. Although I covered. So then the next talk I did was my fill in talk. And I don’t remember what the lady was supposed to talk about, I just did the diversifying your income talk.

19:09
And I had, basically pulled one of our webinar slides for it. And what Liz and I did was just switch out a lot of the graphics for pet type products, just doesn’t make more sense. And then after the first day, so the first day neither of us spoke, but we met all these people and we came back to the room and literally read it all of our slides because we realized who we were talking to. You know, it was like eye-opening. And what I realized with this group was that

19:36
None of them had that foundational property. None of them had the website. None of them had the e-bills list. Not none. Large percentage of people had no way to capture the customer. And there was a girl who talked the day before who talked about the Google update. Did that go over everyone’s heads? No, she did. gave a great talk on explaining basically why it was so bad.

20:02
But the point of her thing was basically like it decimated her site over the past like three updates. And she positioned it in this, and she blogs about like Docsens, right? So she has a very niche audience. And she basically was like, I had finally reached that six figure, which is sort of the pinnacle of blogging, right? Like content creator making six figures a year.

20:29
That’s when you kind of know like, okay, this isn’t a hobby anymore. This is a real job. And then she got hit with like three Google updates and basically just, her site just crap. Like she doesn’t have hardly any traffic anymore. And she can’t get it back. it’s, you I know of her. you know, I know she’s not doing shady stuff. Like she just got caught, right? Like in the updates and there was probably nothing she could have done. You know, she was doing all the things right when it was right. And then,

20:59
It wasn’t right anymore. I’m curious for all those people who have TikTok accounts in the event that TikTok gets banned in six months. What are they? Did that come up? Yes, people talked about it a lot and nobody really has an answer other than I don’t think it’s going to get banned. I am a little skeptical, too, that it’s going to get banned. think something’s going to happen. I agree, although they just banned it in Florida for 14 and under. Did they really? Yes. Wow. Florida. How about that? Yeah.

21:29
14 and under, it’s banned. All my kids are not 14 anymore, so lucky them. They aged out of the law. Okay. All it takes is a couple states to start that, right? Yes. I don’t necessarily think banning it for kids under 14 is that bad of an idea. Oh, no. I am fully on board with that. I would say 18 until they go to college. Yes. I’m not really for people things getting banned in general. It bothers me when I watch those hearings and like,

21:58
clearly the people in the government have never opened the TikTok app once in their life. It’s embarrassing to me. It’s like, at least know what you’re talking about. I’m not saying TikTok’s great. It’s not all great, but you sound like a fool. Did you watch that hearing with the CEO of TikTok? Lord. I was just embarrassed. I was like, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that you guys didn’t even like open the app and watch Pookie for like five minutes. Come on. So anyway, yeah, there was a lot of talk of that.

22:26
And so what I ended up changing my talk to was, hey, you’re making really, these people are making really good influencer money, which is hard because I remember when I was making tons of money doing influencer deals and it’s like too good to be true, right? You’re like, this brand wants to pay me $5,000 to do what? know, put my dog in a stroller and walk it around. And so I remember how that felt. And so,

22:51
I tried to craft this balance between, this isn’t a bad thing that you’re doing this. These brand deals, you’ve worked hard to grow your channels, good for you. But every time you take a brand deal, you’re taking a piece of work that takes you time. And these people are creating really great content, so it’s not like they’re just talking with a phone, walking down the street, which is fine too, but these people are doing heavy edits, really nice production value type stuff, and they have to include their pet.

23:21
You know, it’s complicated. sounds like pretty miserable, actually. If your pet’s not cooperative, you can’t put together a good video, right? OK, yes. And can I just tell like a side note story? Sure. the opening night. Well, so pets were allowed to come to this thing. Oh, God. So like there was some some pee and poop places and they had like SPCA there with like baskets of puppies that you could take home. I had to like drag Liz away from a puppy.

23:50
But there were dogs everywhere, not as many cats. But the first night they had this big opening party. They had entertainment and the big entertainment was this border collie group that did tricks in the night before one of the border collies passed away. They had to cancel the performance, which was like this whole huge thing. I mean, they’re telling us and they’re like, the border collies aren’t coming. And I was like, oh no, that’s too bad. And she’s like, one died. And I was like, oh, like, what are you saying?

24:19
I don’t even know they were, but I was just like, this sounds terrible. So you’re like tripping over dogs. And anyway, it was there’s a lot of dogs in strollers, which I have a whole other opinion. How are you able to even give a talk? Isn’t there like dogs barking in the background? There was actually one of my talks. I think I had more dogs than people in the session. I’m pretty sure it was. I was not prepared. Let’s just say that. So the talk that I gave once I sort of interacted with all these people was like,

24:48
Yeah, that’s great, you’re making $5,000 a deal or $10,000 a deal or whatever and getting free product, it’s great, but it requires you to do a piece of work every time you get that deal. So if you’re not doing deals, you’re not getting paid. You have no residual from this. And not only that, you don’t have the ability to turn on the money spigot, right? So you don’t, you,

25:13
We know all these people that are in either digital or physical products where it’s like, I’m having a low month, let’s run a promotion or let’s do a webinar, right? Or let’s turn on this lever and bring in some revenue. And if the brand deals aren’t there at the moment, then you don’t have any way to make money if this is what you’re relying on. So that’s sort of what I switched my talk up to. And I talked about our five different ways to make money.

25:40
But then I really hit on how do you make that all work together? So yes, get your brand deal. That’s your bread and butter. Do that. But why aren’t you putting all that content on YouTube? And why aren’t you taking your top content and turning it into long form video on YouTube? And then trying to figure out what your niche is going to be on YouTube. And several people there were doing that to the tune of millions of subscribers. Wow.

26:05
And I said, you know, here’s the thing. I said, you can make a lot of money just on ads on YouTube, which is completely passive, and you’ve already made all this content. So you have content sitting over here on Instagram or in your hard drive that you could easily publish on YouTube today and probably within a few weeks hit the monetization level on YouTube based on the fact that they have such huge audiences other places. And this could just be a passive stream of income for you with the content you’re already creating.

26:34
by just putting it in a secondary place. And a lot of people just, was like this mental, it’s like the mental hurdle that we see from everybody. It was just like, oh yeah, I should do YouTube. And I’m like, no, you should do nothing else but that until you do, you know, that like, that should be your next thing. You know what’s low hanging fruit that I’ve seen a lot of TikTok people do now? They just put together like 10 of their TikToks back to back in a YouTube video and that’s a long form video. I watched them actually because

27:04
they’re entertaining these people that I watch, right? And I can sit easily through a long form YouTube video and watch all those clips. Yeah. I think they’re just so, obviously if TikTok’s where your bunny is, then that’s where you’re putting your focus, right? Like that’s how you’re getting your deals. But the fact that they’re, to me, it’s like most people’s hurdle is making the video. So they don’t have that hurdle. Right. That’s the biggest hurdle. Right. And so I was like, if you do nothing else after this talk, please put everything on YouTube.

27:33
And then the next thing I talked to them about was like, how do you grab those email addresses and getting people, I said, even if you just literally put up a landing page on a WordPress site, I was like, you don’t have to design a fancy site, you don’t have to do anything, just literally get one page up with a place for people to opt in for something. Because right now, you have no way to like interact with people except for hoping that they see what you put on social media, which we all know a small fraction of your actual audience sees that content.

28:01
I mean, you don’t even need a WordPress site. No, you could use a ConvertKit landing ConvertKit has a landing page. I mean, it won’t be a nice URL or anything, but at least you I mean, they’re using cloaked links anyway on the… Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah. And I said also, there’s AI now that will take your videos and transcribe them into content. could easily create the content that you’re putting on video into print form just to fill pages up, right? Like you could create a robot…

28:31
bus system without having to redo much work. So that was, you and I felt like I was like- you were like the star of this place, I bet. I was probably like, y’all are sick of seeing me at this point. But it was just, it was interesting because I felt like these people have done, like so many people we know can’t grow their socials, right? They struggle with that. These people have completely figured that out.

29:00
But yet, it’s not like a long-term thing, and it’s funny. So I started my talk, I used a Pat Flynn hack. You know how Pat Flynn starts with the black slide? Like it’s just a dark screen, you don’t see anything. So he gets up there and starts talking, and the screen is dark. And then when he makes his first point, he clicks on that first slide to make the point, and the first slide’s always something like really interesting. So I was like, it’s a great technique to get people, so if you ever have to do public speaking, this is a great technique to like catch your audience’s attention.

29:29
didn’t work as great for the dogs, but people works really well. So I started talking and I got up there and I didn’t introduce myself or anything. I just went right into it and I said, I started talking and then I said, and this is my first website and I put the picture up of my very first website, which as we know is hideous. I mean, to be fair, I didn’t think it was horrific. I mean, obviously, but.

29:54
My point was what I thought I was making was, as we often make when we do this together is you need something. You have to start somewhere. And then the next point I made was I often joke that I’m a dinosaur in the blogging space. I said, but that’s actually not true because dinosaurs are extinct and I’ve managed to find a way to reinvent myself over the last 20 years. And then I found the, what’s it called? The horseshoe shrimp.

30:21
or something like that, which is supposed to be the oldest living animal that’s like prehistoric, it still exists today. And I was like, so instead of a dinosaur, I’m now a shrimp. And I had my big shrimp photo. But the point was like, yeah, you’re doing on, you’re on Instagram, you’re on TikTok, that’s great. When I got started, there was no Instagram, there was no TikTok, there really wasn’t Facebook and Twitter had just started. And it’s like, what you’re doing right now is going to look, there’s none of this is gonna exist in 10 years in the way that it does today.

30:51
And so how do you leverage what you’re creating today so that in 10 years you still have a profitable business? And that’s kind of how I started the talk. Cause it was like, this is all fine and dandy, but this isn’t gonna take you to, this isn’t gonna take you 20 years in the business. No way. And then, you know, talking about email, YouTube, websites, and then how to even leverage more out of what they’re already doing. like, cause I, so this is something that was interesting. I talked about what we share all the time.

31:20
If you have an affiliate that’s performing well, you need to go to that company and ask for a better offer for your audience and a higher commission. Or just private label that product. Well, that was my last. That was my last section. Yeah. Actually, I had a picture of me, you and Jen in China. But I was saying, I said, you know, these rates are all negotiable. You know.

31:44
you think you can only get 4%, not from Amazon, but outside of that, working with other, especially directly with the brand. I’m like, if you’re sending good traffic and conversions, you can get more money. And it was like, it never occurred to them that that was a negotiable thing. I’m like, you’re in the driver’s seat. They want traffic, you’re giving it to them. You’ve gotta negotiate for better rates for yourself. talk through a lot of affiliate hacks and then,

32:13
Finally, I was like, but listen, 10 % is great, but how about 60 %? I was like, you have everything that brands want, data and audience. So how about you just private label the products that sell the best? And like eyes are like, you know, and then I said, and let me tell you something, I put the picture of us up and I was like, if I can go to China and figure this out, anybody in this room can go to China and figure this out. I was like, it’s not rocket science. It’s a formula, right?

32:42
And you also already know what everyone buys, which most people don’t when they get started. And so they were just like completely like, wait, what? And then I showed a picture of my dining room table with all the jewelry and right. Right. I was like, that’s ups and downs. Let me tell you. But, you know, it’s like they had never, you know, the people there, obviously people that are doing that, like the guy who invented the doggy Gatorade. But there were a lot of people that weren’t. And I’m like, you don’t have to invent something.

33:10
you can just sell something that’s already out there that you know your audience likes. And right now when you’re probably have a lot of like kind of free money from brand deals, like this is the time to invest some of that into something that actually can make you like lasting revenue. I want to know, did you go to any sessions? Did you learn anything about how these people are growing their socials? Cause I know if you have a pet that instantly gives you a leg up on the socials. Yes. A hundred percent. Step one, get a dog.

33:40
Um, I’m literally texting my family the whole time, get videos of the pets immediately start making content. Like, um, so anyway, uh, I, so the one session that I wanted to go to so badly, but it conflicted with my session was SEO for Tik TOK and Instagram, which I didn’t get to attend, but that was the one that I was most interested about because I didn’t even know that that was a thing. Maybe for Tik TOK, I didn’t know for Instagram. was a thing. I know it is a thing for Tik TOK.

34:10
Yeah. I attended a couple sessions, mostly I was speaking so I didn’t attend as many. However, I will say, we talked about this, the social content is a grind. These people are creating multiple pieces of content a day. They’re constantly testing, putting stuff up. It does not seem appealing to me because there’s really no…

34:35
I don’t know what the right word is. There’s definitely a way to do it, but it’s like, sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not always clear why something works and why something doesn’t work. There’s just no real formula to it. It’s almost like you just have to see if it’s right time, right place. A lot of people are talking about the trending audio or the trends or even times of day that you’re posting, length of reels, just all these different things that people are trying and testing, but it just seems like it’s a constant.

35:06
cycle of try this, try that, try this, do this, this is working, do this, do this, do this, wait, not working anymore, now do this. I was just like, and I overheard a lot of conversations like that, and I was like, yeah, no, not for me. Yeah, this is why it’s really hard to teach a class in this stuff. Yeah. Because it is, maybe one in 20 is gonna get any traction, right? Yep. And it’s like throwing spaghetti on a wall. Although once you have a formula down, it’ll last for a while. Yeah.

35:35
It kind of reminds me of like the fashion industry. Not that I know anything about the fashion industry, right? But you know, it’s constantly changing, right? You have to constantly release new lines. I mean, I’ve spoken to people who sell and you know, the stuff from like last year, you can’t keep it in your store. Right, right. It has to go. It’s got to go and you got to try something new. Yeah. The one overarching theme was consistent content. Usually people are posting multiple times a day. This person I had on the podcast a while back,

36:04
she just made it a habit. Like the first thing she did as soon as she sits at her desk is to film three short form videos before she starts her day. And then that’s how she’s able to be consistent. But she’s also really good. Like she can just pick, you could probably pull this off. I don’t think I could, but she just picks up her phone and just, and then she throws it over and someone else makes it nice. Yeah. mean, these people, these people were good. And they had all the like,

36:33
hot video equipment, all the cool gimbals. None of them really were filming with anything other than a phone though. Oh, that’s good to know. But just the newest ring light that attaches to something. It was just that kind of stuff, right? Where I was like, oh, these are kind of cool gadgets that I definitely don’t need to buy. But yeah, the biggest thing that was overwhelming was just the consistency of content and the frequency of content. Everyone’s posting a ton.

37:02
We do know works, right? Like, I mean, that’s why we’re doing the 30 day challenge, because we know that if you consistently post content, you’re going to grow. But that’s that’s a grind. That is a grind that I don’t. But I mean, everything is a grind. This one’s just grindier. Yeah. In my opinion. So I’m curious, the proportion of YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramers, bloggers. Did you have like a rough idea? No bloggers. No bloggers. I mean, less than 10 percent.

37:32
Wow. Huge skew to Instagram and TikTok. And most people were doing Instagram and TikTok. Like they were basically just reformatting stuff a little bit. But there was a, I would say less than 50 % of people were doing YouTube, which to me is nuts considering they’re making all video content. That’s the part that I couldn’t get over. I got the whole no do a YouTube video. True, true. But these people are putting a lot of effort in already. But it’s more effort to put together a cohesive 10 minute video, right?

38:02
than it is to just pick up your phone and just talk for a minute. Yeah, but even that, not just put it on, you’re still gonna grow on YouTube. You’re talking about shorts. Yeah, I mean, why not just get it out there and then, you know, make one long form video a week? Yeah, no, no, no, I’m not arguing with you. I’m just saying like the hurdle, like for me to put out a short form, scripting that up or deciding what I’m gonna say might take me like a minute. Yeah.

38:30
but a long form takes me like a good two hours to put together something that I want to talk about. speaking for 10 minutes, now I’m used to it, but sometimes I’m recording and I’m like, good Lord, how much more is there? I’m so bored of myself. know, I am. That’s where I felt like there was this huge golden opportunity for people was in YouTube. To me, the contents, the website, to me, that’s just a

39:00
you have to do it, right? You have to get a landing page set up, nothing, don’t worry about anything else, but like, please, please, please do YouTube. You’re already making the video content, you already have all the video equipment, you already have a dog that everybody likes. And it was interesting, because it was people either were like straight up influencers, or they had completely gotten this robust, so they were influencers, plus they had a dog product, and they had courses or memberships, like.

39:26
There was very little people that were like, oh, I’m edging towards that. It was like, I do this or I do that. But there wasn’t many people in the middle. Yeah. mean, long form is where it’s at, right? I think TikTok has realized that they can’t make money off of short form content. Yep. Like outside of TikTok shop. so they’re encouraging people to upload like 10 minute videos now. Yes. I watch them all the time. Mostly true crime. But I do watch them. Do you watch them all the way through? Like I can’t last for more than like two minutes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I need to know what happens.

39:55
And they’re actually encouraging people to upload the horizontal version. So there’s black bars in the top of the box. I know, which I don’t love. But yeah. So then total wrap up. But the last talk I did was the email talk that I a similar talk that I gave at Seller Summit. But what I realized after this is the literally the last talk of the event, not a closing keynote, just the last talk. Four p.m. on a Thursday. I’m like, is anybody awake? There was a guy in the like second row who I’m pretty sure was falling asleep the whole time. I was like, this is really encouraging. I’m killing it.

40:25
But what I came to realize is I was basically gonna re-give the seller summit talk, but take out a few things and nobody’s on Klaviyo. And that talk is just all Klaviyo-centric. So I ended up having to redo the slides. So instead of showing like the Klaviyo flows, I would just put the definitions, right? cause when you get in the flows, it gets confusing for people that don’t use, or that aren’t doing it at all, right?

40:54
But that was interesting, because that talk was not well attended, not surprising, because everyone was on an airplane going home. But the people that were in there were frantically taking notes, taking photos. I was like, I’ll send you guys the slides. And I said, I’ll send you the Klaviyo flows, too, if you want them. I just took them out, because I didn’t want to just absolutely bore people to death. But most people that came to the talk were not doing email at all. Well, they don’t even have a website.

41:23
These are the brands. Oh, these are the brands. Got it. Yes. Because there was like a brand track and a creator track. So like when we did the Amazon UGC for brands, that was on the brand track. So was the email one. Although there were a couple of bloggers in there. The handful of bloggers that did have websites were in that talk. But most of them are not doing most of the brands are because I don’t think they’re really D to C for the most part.

41:47
They’re either selling on Amazon or they’re selling wholesale, but they have some small level of DTC that they’re not utilizing. So while I think that talk was really good, it just, there weren’t a lot of people in there and I pitched Seller Summit heavily. I was like, there’s not a lot of people in here. It’s mostly dogs. I can tell everybody to come to Seller Summit and get even a better talk. I was just thinking the whole time you were talking, I would have opened with like this video of someone throwing a ball and then a frisbee.

42:17
You got to get the dog’s attention first, right? Yes. Listen, it was it was definitely out of my comfort zone for sure. Yeah, but it sounds like, you know, you learned a lot also. Yeah, I learned a lot and it was actually really good. So we met several inventors, people. In fact, we met someone who lives in Fort Lauderdale. I think she’ll be coming to Sellers Summit. She invented this dog and cat feeder and.

42:45
She was such a sweet, she came to all of our talks, even though she was a seller, right? And she, it’s been three years in the making, she had molds done, it’s really clever, you don’t know anything about pets, so I won’t go into detail, but it’s way to keep, it’s better for the dog’s back, it keeps bugs out of your dog food, like very cool features on this thing. And she went from idea, mold, manufacturing, got a patent on it, everything, right?

43:14
and she launched in like December and she’s like, I’ve only had like, you know, a handful of sales on Shopify. And I was like, yep. I was like, you’ve done all the really, really hard stuff and now you have to do the hard stuff. It’s like, um, and she just was, you know, she’s like, I feel like I worked so hard on this and then crickets, right? Like this is your, basically gave birth to a, an invention. If her invention is pretty innovative, should be really easy to sell on Facebook.

43:40
Yes. we actually, and we took such a liking to her, we immediately group texted her with Kim Meckwood. We’re like, first of all, because this is a Shark Tank product, 100%. Right. We introduced her to a couple of people that were at the expo that do like brand launches and things like that. Like we hooked her up because I was like, this is a really cool idea and all you need now is an audience. Right. Like you have everything and you’ve made a defendable product, right? Like, cause she has the patent and all this stuff.

44:09
But anyway, was pretty, and it was also reminded me of old e-commerce days. She’s like, I have 4,000 units, know, like was the whole, I was like, oh yeah, I don’t miss that part of it at all. But yeah, so anyway, we met a lot of people like her who had invented really cool products and just now need to get them out in front of people, which obviously is why she was there. But yeah, she was super sweet and she lives in Fort Lauderdale, so you’ll get to meet her in a couple weeks, a couple months.

44:37
This is gonna be a yearly thing for you? I mean, if they have us back, they might be sick of us. Nah, I think they’ll have you back. You did four talks. One note that I learned that I think I’ve never, I don’t know how I’ve never thought of this before, like changing our slides to really talk to the pet audience, because that was like, usually you don’t have such a tight demographic.

45:04
but was really actually really helpful. Like on our intro slides, we put pictures of our dogs, not us. know, like just little things and like for any examples, we always tried to use pet products. It definitely made the presentations better. And it wasn’t that hard to change them out. You know, at first I was like, ugh, I don’t want them to do this. Plus I was also sick going into that week, but it really like, it kept people’s attention because they immediately could relate to what we were talking about because it was something more familiar. And,

45:33
I don’t, I mean, I guess I’ve never talked to an audience that was so niche down before, but that’s definitely, if you ever have to do a presentation, like switching out your images is actually probably a really smart idea.

45:47
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, pet products are great products to sell because people always tend to overspend and your customers are generally not price sensitive either. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecluderjob.com slash episode 530. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 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. Go to sellersummit.com.

46:15
And if you’re 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 the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:26
The Seller Summit is an e-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, is a curriculum-based event 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 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. Now, I personally hate large events.

00:54
so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off tickets at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250K or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, the tickets are almost sold out. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur Yet,

01:23
It’s available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

01:55
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. It is day two of, actually it’s day three. It’s day three. Day three of ECF Live where we’re covering Andrew Udarian’s eCommerce Fuel event. And Bo, Tony and I went to a number of talks and we’re just going to do a little bit of a recap today. Yeah. You said you’re exhausted and can’t wait to get home. I did so much talking today. Actually all days. Yeah. I feel like I’m at that stage where your throat’s just starting to like get that, oh, I need to shut up.

02:25
for a little bit. So let’s record a podcast. Our friend Noah lost his voice on day zero. Yes. Right when he arrived at the opening party. Yeah, he has it back a little bit today. He does. Yes. Yeah. So. So what, are some key takeaways? So I’m seeing a couple common themes. One of the things that we did this time at ECF, which I don’t think we’ve done to this level, is break into those small groups called houses. And I think we discussed that last time.

02:53
but today we basically did mini masterminds with our houses. And the one thing that I’ve noticed throughout the several days, just getting more of those one-on-one conversations and small group conversations is that everybody wants to talk about branding and marketing and content. Yes. Actually, my whole table was mostly about content. Yeah. And how to do it, the methods of doing it and the types of content. Yeah. So I think that’s a common theme. And it’s interesting because we see this a lot with Amazon sellers.

03:23
where people are like, oh, can’t put all my eggs in one basket. I need to get off Amazon. I need to start creating that brand. These people already have brands. They’re not really, I mean, some of them are selling on Amazon, but primarily they are selling on Shopify or BigCommerce. They already have a brand created, but they have trouble creating the content to go along with it. Which I find interesting actually, because if you’re already doing pretty well at D2C, usually you have one channel down, one or two channels down, I would say. And I would say the majority of the people least I talked to are doing really well on.

03:53
Facebook advertising still and that’s what I heard as well though people were unhappy. Oh, okay They were unhappy with Facebook ads. Yeah, they’re just okay, you know, it feels like a roller coaster Well Facebook did go down really recently and yes did so So one of the interesting talks I went to yesterday Was a talk on digital product, which I don’t think Andrew’s ever had a digital product talk And so I was mostly curious

04:21
as to what it was going to be about. from the amount of people in the room, I will say that people didn’t think that was a good idea to have that talk. people were in the room, just curious? About 15. Oh, wow. That’s really small. small. Okay. And it was unfortunate because I feel like that was the sleeper session of the event because it was taught by Julia. She owns a Barware brand.

04:46
which I was explaining this last night to people and one person thought it was club wear, like dancing, like stuff you’d wear to a bar. Pat from Pat, the CB radio guy, thought it meant things you wore to ballet on the B-A-R-R-E bar. And I was like, no, it’s like cocktail shakers, bar wear. Like, so anyway, just to clarify, that’s what she sells. And she actually got her start with digital products and then moved into the physical product space.

05:13
and the way that they are using digital products and they basically are talking about courses. So I think they have eight courses on their site and she shared her numbers for Shopify. So they sell on Amazon and Shopify. For Shopify, about 20 % of her sales on Shopify are the digital products. making up a huge chunk of the actual Shopify revenue. But not only that, they use that instead of a lead magnet.

05:41
So we talk a lot about lead magnets. talk about creating mini courses, PDFs, things like that to get people on your email list. They’re using it as an incentive to buy. So they have a beginner bartender type course, which is $150. It’s set up similar to our courses with person talking video, although they’re actually showing like demonstrating, creating the drinks and stuff. It’s $150. And they basically offer that if you spend over a certain dollar amount, you get that for free.

06:10
So if you spend $75 in the store, you get the course as the bonus, right, as $150 value, which is a huge value and it costs them absolutely nothing, right? It doesn’t cost them anything to mail it. So even though like we do a lot of like free gift with purchase, but this is a hundred percent free gift with purchase and it’s an unlimited quantity. The other thing she said that it worked really well with is

06:36
when people want to give corporate type gifts, which they have a product that lends itself to that, the fact that you can get it, you can also purchase the class. So just think about this. If you’re like in a big company and you want to give your top manager something, you give them all a fancy cocktail set and they get this bartending class. So it takes this product that it seems good and makes it great. And so they’re spending double the amount of money and Julia’s spending

07:05
zero double, you know, she’s spending just what it costs to get the barware and people are double happy. Right. So it’s really a smart move. I talked to Pat for a long time about it last night. He’s like, I need to create a CV. You know, I was like, yes, you do. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity in that for people to start creating digital products, courses to go with the products that you already sell and using that as your either upsell or your free with purchase.

07:35
or as opposed to just a straight up like put your email address in and get this for free. I like that idea. You know what’s funny is I think at least at this conference, just digital products and courses are kind of looked down upon. Yes. Right. They don’t realize that’s 100 % profit. Yes. And it’s like her course is $150, which is really reasonable for a tad to learn how to mix drinks if that’s what you’re into. That’s a very reasonable priced course.

08:02
And it’s all profit versus maybe her $75 shaker set costs her 10 bucks or five bucks. Plus she’s got to ship it. Plus there’s all these other added costs to it. So someone who was in that session sells a product to style. It’s for men. It’s like how to style thinning hair. it. You just see this teeny tiny comb. Comb with two T’s.

08:28
I think like some sort of like actual like gel or it’s a baby brush. Anyway, but he was he’s been doing digital products for long time. So he actually chimed in on the conversation was really interesting. And he basically sells manuals or courses on how to style and get haircuts that are is good for like thinning or fine hair, which like I’m like, that’s a no brainer, right? You already sell the product.

08:58
it’s not hard to sell somebody on and now we’re going to teach you how to do your hair in a way that makes it look better. Oh, and by the way, with our products, right? Right. And his story was actually funny. So he got into digital products because before he even launched this haircare brand, he has a course that teaches people how to dance. And he said, he said it’s not about his quote was interesting. It was basically, it’s not about the.

09:26
minute details of the course. He’s like, I don’t teach any dance moves that that you can’t learn anywhere on the internet. He’s like, but I target my dance course to older men whose kids are getting married and they want to be able to dance on the dance floor. Like that’s his market because that’s his market for the hair products. Right. I’m like, right. I’m like, give him a microphone. But it’s genius. Right. So it’s like you can take a very simple digital course or product.

09:54
and add the right marketing spin to it, right? Because all dance moves are the same. It’s not like a 60 year old man has a different dance move than a 20 year old girl, right? So they can all do the same dances, but because he’s marketed it in this very specific way, he gets a very targeted customer, which is exactly the type of customer he wants. So I think that’s important for people to think about when they’re thinking about the products they sell, or maybe they don’t sell anything yet, right? And like, I just wanna do something digital.

10:20
you know, what should I do? It’s not necessarily about reinventing some sort of technique. It’s just about putting a spin on that technique that makes it relatable to your demographic of people. Does he still sell that dance course? Yes. To the to the hair? I mean, I the market, I mean, I don’t think he’s like selling it on the same site or anything. OK, I got it. And, you know, if you already sell on Shopify, Shopify has some native integrations that allow you to deliver digital products. So it’s not like you would have to go create something totally new if you wanted to add this to your product suite on Shopify.

10:50
If you aren’t selling anything already, you can do it on WordPress really easily. So we talk about digital products a lot, but it was really cool to hear it talked about in the e-commerce setting and to see people’s like light bulbs going off. All 15 of them? All 15 light bulbs are going off. Anyway, so I thought that was kind of the sleeper session because I think people could really take advantage of this and it’s not hard to create that content these days, especially with AI and overseas, VA’s, things like that.

11:19
So that was my, that’s kind of my winning session as far as like an idea that’s been around forever, but people aren’t utilizing. So my session was the complete opposite of yours. It was packed. It was a Facebook ad section and it was Taylor holiday and her David Herman. I had David Herman on the podcast before, so I kind of knew him pretty well. The first half was about finances. Like, do you even have the numbers to even support ads?

11:47
And I actually had this issue in my class, people want to run ads and they just start doing it without, you know, watching any of the videos and then they fail and they’ll go, Hey, can you take a look? And I’m like, Hey, this product’s not going to work or the numbers don’t work here. Yeah. Cause the product costs 10 bucks. You’re not going to be able to get a conversion for like three bucks. Right. Or whatever. So he went through and what was nice is someone from ECF volunteered their numbers to do a full case study. so they’re.

12:17
there was OpEx operating expenses and then cost of goods. The operating expenses on its own was over 40%. And the margins just didn’t make sense. Basically, if you just added the numbers, there was a negative 10 % profit. Right? And so the whole point of that talk was, you have to get this amount, you have to be able to support the ads before you even think about running them. Right.

12:43
And then the sweet spot average order value is usually 60 to $80. And one thing that I learned that didn’t quite make sense to me, so I talked to David afterward about it. He said anything that’s like over that is actually harder to run Facebook ads for because the impulse buy amount tends to be in that $68 range or less. And any more than that, you have to spend a lot more money

13:10
to determine whether your Facebook ads are gonna work. So it’s a much bigger risk when it’s more expensive because the conversion rate tends to be lower. Yeah, because people, it’s easy to get people to spend a certain amount of money on this for the moment. I mean, I’m not buying a $200 product because I’m scrolling on Facebook. Yes, yeah. And the other funny thing was, you know, he talked about like the minimum budgets and he was just kind of throwing out, you wanna get to like $1,000 a day and you know, this is how you do it.

13:37
Well, what’s nice about this particular talk over other Facebook talks that I’ve been to is that they did it from the perspective of a complete beginner and they kept it really simple. One campaign, Facebook advanced shopping, and then just maybe like three ads of your best ads and just go from there. So was very achievable. And I think it applied to most of the crowd who either just dabbling in Facebook ads or just about to start Facebook ads.

14:07
And then last night we had a party. We, you and I didn’t have a party. We went to a party. went to a party. I’m trying to think who I talked to. I talked to so many people at that party. I talked, this is probably the most people I’ve talked to at a party in a long time. Like the variety of people, met a lot of new people and oh, I also went to the women’s breakfast on Thursday morning. I am curious. So at the women’s breakfast, are you guys like a lot more open because us Neanderthals aren’t around?

14:36
Is the atmosphere different? Yes, we all sing songs and get out our knitting needles and we all work on a friendship blanket. It’s really wonderful. I don’t know. I think it’s nice because you can like make connections. It’s sort of like if they had a breakfast for runners or people that were really into like extreme sports or it’s just sort of like puts you in a group of people that’s smaller and more like so it’s easier to meet people. Right. It’s hard to meet people in a room full of two. If you don’t know anybody.

15:05
Wouldn’t you rather walk into a room of 10 people than 200? Sure. So I kind of look at it that way. It’s interesting because I ended up at the Asian table as I as I often do. That was on purpose, right? Yes. I know. I was the first person to sit there. You’re like, for the second person. I was like, oh, these are my people. I’m going to get better at math this morning. No, brilliant, brilliant women. So I’ve never.

15:33
I don’t think I’ve been to a women’s breakfast before. So I went to the dinner, so I don’t have much to compare it to. But we were pretty intentional at our table. I think there were three tables in the room that had people sitting at them. And our table, everyone went around and just basically said what they sold or what they did and just a little bit about themselves. So I was able to meet everybody at my table and a lot of people doing some really interesting and cool things. Not all of them are in e-commerce, like the data. I think it’s Celine, Selena, Celine.

16:04
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 obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

16:34
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.

16:44
I don’t know if I think she’s speaking today about oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she was there the girl that sold the jumpsuits She was there a girl that I ended up talking to last night named Brooke who sells leather handbags Actually, you met her. Yes. Yes. Right next to me. Yes today. Yeah So anyway met a lot of interesting people learned a lot about their products learned a lot about what they were doing and It was nice because then throughout like all day yesterday and today

17:12
I saw them because it’s easy to stand out as a female ECF because there’s not a lot of us still. There’s more. There’s more than there were in the past years. So it was really nice because it just kind of gave you more friends. as some like there were a lot of people at my table, this was our first ECF. So, you know, they’re coming in probably not knowing a lot of people. And so I think especially for those people, it’s really nice because now they have people to find at the parties and find someone to sit next to and things where in a very like

17:41
easy environment to meet people, which I think the houses did something similar, right? It allowed you to connect with people in a very casual, not like what do you sell walking up and like barging into a conversation sort of thing. Well, that was my indirect way of asking, should what you think about doing that for seller summit or no, we have enough women. We’re half women. OK, OK. We that’s we don’t have a big enough room. So but no, it was great to meet a lot of them and find out what they were doing and.

18:10
It’s interesting because at my table, I believe they were all younger. OK. Like I was definitely the oldest person at the table, but I’m one of the older people here and or feels like I am sometimes. And so like a lot of them didn’t even have kids or weren’t married or anything like that. So they’re in a very different phase of life. Right. Which is also interesting. I’m like, go get it now. It’s your chance. It is right. You get weighed down. the kids start popping out, it’s game over.

18:35
But it was, I do think it was a good way to connect with people. And then I’ve been able to like have other conversations with the same people from my table throughout the last two days. Yeah. What I enjoyed is at our table, we actually just went around and talked about problems and you know, all the businesses have problems. Everyone has problems. Yeah. And this is something I talked about earlier. Whenever I interviewed someone for the podcast, we usually just talk about their successes.

19:02
And then once I hit the stop button, like the real conversation happens. I really wish I could record that part of the conversation. Well, it was like when we recorded the podcast two days ago or yesterday. And then after we were done, Andrew came into the room. And so it was the three of us hanging out for like 30 minutes. And we were all like, this should have been recorded. Like that was the. Well, that was for different. That was ammunition. Yes, that was ammunition against each other. But it was still a really interesting conversation.

19:31
So today we did those masterminds. I don’t know what else to call them. They called them problem solving pods. But for all intents and purposes, they’re masterminds. I was very nervous about this. Why? Because when I was running it, the instructions that I had were, let everybody form into their own groups. And I was like, absolutely not.

19:53
because this, gave me like flashbacks to like the kid in fifth grade that doesn’t get picked on the kickball team. And there’s like the one lonely kid standing on the sideline. And I was like, that’s not going to happen to my group. We’re not going to have the one person left out, like no way. So I just made people count off like one, two, three, four, five, and then listen. Okay. What did you all just get into groups? We did. just sat and you didn’t even pay attention that there was somebody that was without a group.

20:21
No, there’s only two tables. Only 14 people showed up, I think, out of the 25. Oh, really? We had all but one show up. Oh, really? Okay. Guess Ocean Group wins. So, so there’s one topic that came up. One of the entrepreneurs wanted to hire like a director of marketing. And this person made about three million ish, I would say. And he wanted to hire someone local.

20:51
and just outsource all the marketing because he’s like a product guy. And he’s like, the problem is where I live, it would cost like $150,000 a year. And I don’t know if I can like stomach that. then the whole discussion was why are you like, are you looking for like a magic bullet director of marketing? Or can since you’ve been doing marketing and clearly doing a pretty good job, could you just kind of document what you do and then hire someone to just kind of pick up where you left off and have a really strong set of SOPs?

21:20
And maybe you postpone that decision. Maybe you don’t even need a director of marketing, but you’re still growing and you’re the one in charge of doing it. You just don’t want to do it anymore. Right. And so I think he came away with perhaps outsourcing, maybe even someone from the Philippines or overseas, Columbia came up as well. Yeah. And save a ton of money and you wouldn’t feel bad. It would just take a little bit of time to train that person up. Yeah. So in my small group today, I can’t talk about our specific conversations because we had a, we had a blood pact not to share outside the group.

21:50
However, one conversation that we had that was definitely shareable was that one of the people in the group sells some sort of supplement. It wasn’t a supplement, but like an herbal, all-natural type product. He’s a product and manufacturing guy, of like the opposite of your person, right? Who’s like loves branding. He needs more marketing because the problem is they have a hard time getting people in. Once people are in,

22:19
they stay, they continue to purchase because it’s a consumable product, that sort of thing. But his issue was how do you get those people in initially? And because they are like a health product, there’s definitely a lot of things you can’t say and things like that. So when he starts talking, the first thing out of his mouth, and I felt like we were on a coaching call, like it just gave me, I was completely transported to my computer in a Zoom because he said, we bought the fifth largest winery in Colorado, but we don’t make wine.

22:47
That was his starting sentence and I was sucked in and then he could started to tell what he did. He had, was showing us on video and I was like, dude, like this is made for like Tik Tok, Instagram reels, YouTube, like just the initial sentence of I bought the fifth largest winery in Colorado and I don’t make wine. Like you think about that or was it just a casual? It was just, and you know how many people we talk to in coaching calls, right?

23:16
who say like three things and it’s like the best branded statement they’ve ever made and they have not thought about it for two seconds. That was exactly what he was doing. And as he continued to talk about his products and share, I was like, this should be recorded. Like it was all so good. But it just gave me that flashback to so many people, all they needed to do is tell their story, right? Because so many people have such interesting stories. And there were four of us in our little group.

23:42
And all three of us were like hanging on his every word because we were so fascinated by the fact that he bought a winery and doesn’t make wine and he uses the fermentation with the herbs and stuff. And he’s showing this video of like in like one of those wine vat things that normally they stomp on grapes, but he’s churning, who knows, parsley and whatever. I don’t know what it is, but it was just absolutely fascinating. And I was like, oh, people will watch this and they will buy in. They will buy into your product. They will buy into your story.

24:11
they will try it. And he had no idea that his own just talking about the brand was an absolutely amazing story. So what’s funny about that conversation is that occurred at our table too. And people were worried about being the face of their brand because they didn’t want like, if they were to ever sell the business, then they’d have to go with it, right? But I brought up the analogy like Ezra, boom by Cindy Joseph. Cindy Joseph passed away, unfortunately. And the way Ezra solved that problem is he

24:41
just kind of transitioned away to multiple influencers. I think the whole point of that is once you’re successful and you’re ready to sell, you can solve that problem. Like with money or, phase yourself out essentially. And I don’t even think he needs to be the face of the brand. I think it could all just be video shots and information from the actual process. Like just, it could be voiceover, right? Because the story is so interesting, almost like a documentary.

25:08
But anyway, so that was really interesting. And our group primarily did not talk about business. It was a lot of life optimization hacks, time management hacks. One of the people in our group is scaling a business right now, working a million hours a week, really quite unhappy. Like as anyone is in this phase, no one is happy in that scaling phase and just was looking for some like help getting more discipline.

25:36
in their life. so I just think that, those things, you know, oftentimes we get in these masterminds and people talk about their business, like true business, like I need a marketing person, or I don’t know how to do Facebook ads, things like that. But I think some of the conversations that were had in my group are probably even more impactful, because it’s about how you actually optimize your life.

25:57
It even got into like parenting hacks and really we didn’t have any conversations about and one of the people was like, well, I’m Eastern European. So we kind of believe in a pretty firm. Yeah. And I was like, I’m I’m a white girl. Like you’re I’m lucky if I can get him in time out like, you know, but anyway, it was just really interesting. It was really interesting the conversations that we were having about life in general, because I think

26:22
Life does affect business. Business does affect life. know, like if you’re in a growth period in your business and you’re working 80 hours a week and you have a family that affects your family, it affects how you treat them and all those things. And vice versa. If you have a new baby that like, you know, one of the guys in my house, not in my group, you know, he traveled here with his five month old, you know? And so I was talking to him in the elevator. He’s like, I’m exhausted. Right. I was like, yeah, because you’re sleeping with a five month old baby after being out till.

26:50
one in the morning. So I think all those things kind of work together. So it always makes me happy when people are comfortable enough to share those types of things, because those are really personal. Right. And it makes me happy that they’re willing to share and talk through it and, really be vulnerable, which I feel like we get a lot at seller summit, but that’s because we really put those groups together on purpose. And I made people count off to get in a group. you know, so it was interesting in our group also is someone had the problem where all their customers were asking for a very specific product.

27:19
that this person could make but she didn’t want to make it because she didn’t she wouldn’t buy it herself or she didn’t like that product and then she asked the group hey should I just make it is actually should I make this color is the same product just a different color of the product she didn’t like the color she didn’t like the color but everyone’s asking for it so her question was should I just do it anyway and everyone’s like yeah yeah it’s not about you it’s about yeah it’s about what people want yeah and so

27:49
Yeah, that was actually one of our main key takeaways. think she got a lot out of it just for that one question. Some people just need to hear it, right, from other people. And then the other thing that we did in our group, which was this was not a whole ECF thing. I just did this on my own is do you remember? I think we talked about this. Andrew made us write a letter to ourselves a couple of years ago. Right. And so I had people at the very end write a I just had little note cards and with, course, Ocean themed because we are Group Ocean, whatever Ocean House.

28:18
I know you’re rolling your eyes at me. I had them write something that they wanted their future self to remember. Because what I hear a lot from every conference, and we go to a lot of conferences, and I hear this from everybody, it’s like they leave really overwhelmed. They have some takeaways, but by the time they get home, they’re just like spent, they’re tired, they’ve been up all night, they lose their voice, all these things. And I was like, just write something you want yourself to remember in six months.

28:45
Because a lot of the key takeaways from my ocean house were stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. Work on the stuff that you think is a priority, not what other people think is a priority. Stay focused. There was a lot of that in the theme and I was like, this is a really good opportunity for people in six months to open up this letter that they get and remember what they told themselves the last day of ECF. So I was a little worried because it was off the script.

29:11
that people will be like, I don’t want to do this because I didn’t want to do it when Andrew had it to do it, but I did it anyway. And I was glad that I did. But everyone was seemed everyone at least told me they were OK with it. They probably are lying. But what you wrote, I didn’t write it. I’m done. You said you did it last year. It was like five years ago. We did it. OK. have no idea. No, I have no clue. What a cop out. I wish I did. I can’t remember. I honestly don’t. So after that, I went to a session on TikTok shop.

29:40
I was given by Paul and he’s basically doing a million a month on TikTok Shop and he just talked us through, you know, exactly what’s necessary. And here’s some of key takeaways. If you’re going to do TikTok Shop, you want to pick like one hero product that you promote and you want to start seeding the people right away. He’d already done a lot of prep work before he started TikTok Shop, which he attributed

30:09
know, partially to the wild success he had over the holidays. But here he had influencers that had the product and within the platform, there’s a built-in affiliate program. There’s a built-in influencer program where you can give out products, people can request products. And it’s just this glorious cycle because once someone starts promoting and making money, your store goes up in these ranking charts that TikTok proposed. And then the creators see this, that they’re making money promoting a specific product. So they jump on board.

30:39
which causes TikTok to show your product even more. And it’s just this glorious cycle that turns in this gigantic tidal wave. I was thinking how I could apply this to my store. don’t know if I could find a hero. You have to carry a lot of inventory. He’s like, if you’re doing this right, you’re gonna run an inventory. But as soon as you run an inventory, all the momentum dies on TikTok and you have to build it up again and again.

31:08
And the beauty of it, he said, is for the people that are requesting product through TikTok shop, you shouldn’t discriminate because he had this one girl who had less than 500 subs promote his product and made over $90,000 for him. And she got a $20,000 commission. That’s amazing. It’s crazy, right? Yeah. And then once word gets out about that, all these other creators jump in and then promote your product because that’s like the cash product.

31:36
TikTok makes that perfectly visible to everyone too. So there was a strategy, I didn’t go to that when I went to AI, which we can talk about in a minute, but there was a strategy in my small group time where basically at Christmas time, they seeded their product all over YouTube, sending it to creators and they basically did it with only an affiliate relationship, not paid to make videos. And he was saying the goal was that when someone went on YouTube,

32:05
it gave the impression that every person in the world was using this product, right? Because there were so many videos about the product. And I feel like that’s how TikTok shop works as well with the affiliates is that once that one video hits or the shop climbs up in the rankings, other creators see it and then they want to work with them. so it’s like, have you been on TikTok and not seen the athletic greens? Oh yeah. AG1 is everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s, that’s what they’re doing.

32:32
They want you to think that everybody and their grandmother is using this product. So you have to buy it right this minute and drink it every day and you’ll feel amazing. But it’s a strategy that can actually work for smaller brands because you’re really just leveraging commission and the cost of your product, which is usually pretty low. So it’s not like you’re paying people to make the content. I think your margins have to support it, right? Because a lot of that is heavy on the discounting.

33:01
In that example from the presenter, I think a $24 product was being sold for like six or seven bucks. Right? that, I don’t know, you have to have really crazy margins in order to support that to go viral like he did. Yeah, I think we bought some stuff off TikTok Shop for Christmas. So they seemed heavily discounted. It’s funny too, the negative about TikTok Shop, and I think we’ve talked about this, is like you don’t get any customer information. It’s just like Amazon.

33:27
You do have their address though. So you could take their address and get their email, you know, through one of those append services. The other thing is that, and I’ve heard this from people who sell a lot on TikTok shop is that it’s hard to get them to be a repeat customer because they don’t remember who they bought it from. Right. Which is maybe why you plug in all the address information you have into a service. Yeah. But the other thing that was talked about was the halo effect. So when it went viral,

33:56
the Shopify sales went up like 30%. And this person’s not on Amazon, but I would imagine Amazon would have skyrocketed as well. Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. I think TikTok Shop is very similar to Amazon as far as like the pros and cons of it. I think it’s different because it’s like a roller coaster ride. You have a wave, you’re probably gonna go out of stock unless you have some gigantic inventories.

34:24
And what was interesting was that the presenter had to weigh in his mind, do I put down a whole ton of money and just go all in on TikTok shop, which is a risk, right? Because you might not establish that wave again. But fortunately, he played his cards correctly. Yeah, I I know people making a lot of money on TikTok shop. So I know it works. It’s just hard because you don’t get the customer. It takes work to get that customer information. You can put as much flyers and stuff in the product as you want, though.

34:53
Unlike Amazon, there’s no policy against doing that. So the people I know selling on TechShop are putting like, you know, basically catalogs in the shipment for people. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So I went to an AI talk, which was, can’t think of Kevin’s last name. Williams. So Kevin, what is he like a fractional CMO? He’s kind of like a jack of all trades. Yeah.

35:20
Um, far too much to cover on a podcast and he used far too many specifics. So like, I’d have to go look through my photos of his slides, but basically he was talking about how, like all the different ways he uses AI and his company, uh, or in his companies that he works with and what the capabilities of it. And he actually walked us through a whole process of, um, how to, he was working for a dog food brand and they wanted a picture of a dog with the dog food and how there was all these iterations that it took to look.

35:50
And by the end, the end result looked amazing. And the one thing that he kept saying that really resonated with me was, this is the worst it’s going to be ever, right this minute, which was like so interesting when you think about that. and we were watching this video of golden retriever puppies jump around in the snow and it looked almost realistic. the dog, like everything looked real. It looked like an anim, a very realistic animation. And you’re watching that going, this is as bad as it’s going to be.

36:19
Like this looks pretty darn good, right? In three months, it’s gonna look 10x better and in 12 months, it’s gonna look 50 times better, right? It’s nuts. So it was a really interesting talk. He gave a lot of resources. He showed how different ways that they’re using it in the companies, the tools they’re using and kind of walked through all the different, not all the different resources, some of the main ones.

36:45
He talked about you should not be using Chat GPT if you’re not using the paid version. He was saying that the free version is pretty much garbage at this point. And also if you’re using it, you are the product if you’re using the free version. So he really discouraged against that. And he also talked about a company that I think it’s on Wednesdays. It doesn’t really matter what day it is, but basically this company has their entire workforce spend every Wednesday only on AI.

37:15
learning it, using it, playing on it, like all the different things because they are so confident that it’s sort of the future of everything. Did I tell you that the last website critique I did as a student in the class, I actually redesigned her entire website and I used AI images. It was a cat harness and it looked really good. And the missing piece was, you I had it

37:44
generate a generic cat harness, but then you can Photoshop the actual harness on there. It looked fantastic. Like the images look completely real. And I got this idea actually from another student who designed a purse and didn’t have the money to hire models, know, to model her purse. So what she did was she just had, you know, mid-journey, I think is what she used to generate the models and then carrying purses. And then she Photoshopped her own purse in there.

38:13
So it looks like she has this huge budget with all these models. and yeah that Sounds similar to what Kevin and he was he made a good point about like the video production side of things and he was saying that this is really gonna level the playing field because Forever the only people that could afford big video budgets were huge companies, right? Because video productions it’s very expensive. And so now it’s basically leveling the playing field for some of these brands because anybody

38:42
can has access to these tools and can create these images, use them. And a lot of what it seemed to me, was like, you need a couple tools to be able to do these things. It’s not like there’s one tool that does it all for you. Like one of the ones that we were looking at, it was the pet food one. kept iterating and they got the right image. And then the pet food itself was wrong, right? Because this was like a wet dog food as opposed to like the pebble-y stuff that goes in.

39:11
And AI couldn’t get that, right? Like they know dog food is what most of us think of dog food is. So they ended up Photoshopping the dog food in at the very end. you know, they’re still using Photoshop to do some stuff with it, but it was super interesting. And it was interesting to watch sort of the process of everything. Like he showed us a video from last year and it was like Will Smith eating food, but it was all AI and it was…

39:35
Terrible. Oh, yes. Yes. I remember seeing that Yeah, and then it’s like and then you look at what we have today and it was like he was showing this it was a girl walking through a field and she was wearing some sort of sundress and They’re like make this under us right the Sora demo, right? I asked before his talk. He doesn’t have access to Sora yet But really he was just showing the stock Yeah, the stuff that you can do or will be able to do very shortly is pretty phenomenal It’ll make YouTube b-roll so much easier

40:03
And then I’m going to cancel my Storyblocks subscription. Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting is, especially because we had all these people wanting to talk about branding and content creation and things like that, is that I think there’s still some really important fundamentals that AI doesn’t have yet. And that I think you still need to be very aware of. Like I think about in our course, how we have a whole content section. And a lot of it is in formatting and stylizing and things like that.

40:31
Right now, AI is just shooting out blobs of information and still having been able to organize those in the right way for online content is important. But I think anybody will be able to create content and create ideas. And the other thing is, his big thing was right now, the best use is you’ll never have a blank page. It will give you as many ideas as you can possibly handle to create content. So you put in, own a baby brand, I sell blankets and

41:01
you know, pajamas, our style is, you know, Peter Rabbit, whatever, you can put all that in. Give me 100 video ideas for this. Give me 100 blog post ideas. Like that to me is where it really is. Like today you can start doing this and it’s a great resource. Yeah, absolutely. mean, we part of our discussion at the roundtable also was where the world’s going for the next generation too. Yeah, not just ourselves.

41:29
I mean, I think we’ll be fine since we’ll be on kind of like the cutting edge, hopefully. Yeah. yeah, I do fear for the next generation. Yeah. I was 20 years younger and I was working, you know, just some regular job and I was one day wanted to do something else, I would invest my free time in learning, learning everything I could about AI. Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. Maybe the I want to go that.

41:58
talk later today since the conference isn’t over yet about that woman who you had lunch with. Yes, the data girl. I think that one’s targeted towards like 100 million dollar businesses though, right? That was just, she did another talk that was targeted to larger businesses. I think this is a more broad talk. Okay, yeah, because it would be interesting to see how larger companies actually handle all the data that’s coming out with AI. well and he talked a little bit about using AI to mine data and understand data better.

42:27
He actually used Klaviyo as an example. They have an AI tool to segment people where you can, instead of understanding how Klaviyo segments work and how to set them up properly, you can actually use AI to say, want a list of people who have spent over a hundred dollars in one transaction, you know, blah, blah, blah. And if you tried that, yes, it doesn’t work terribly well. Oh, okay. But here’s the thing. I tried it three weeks ago. It might work great today, right? Like that’s how quickly things change. When I tried it and

42:57
once again, a lot of this is about the information you’re giving it. And I tried it a couple different ways and I couldn’t get exactly what I needed. So obviously part of it’s me not being able to define it correctly for a clavio. Maybe I’m not using the right terminology or the terminology that they understand, but it gets it pretty close. But you can just massage it from there. Does it literally just use the pull downs after you say it?

43:22
Yes, it does. create the answer. So you can just massage it. It might be off, but then you can correct it, right? Yeah. OK. That sounds like a pretty good feature. I do think it’s good. It’s not quite there, but I’m sure it will get there very soon. And there’s lots of Klaviyo competition popping up also. Yes, there is. So, yeah, I guess once you start getting big, Klaviyo just went public. know, once you become popular, there’s going to be a lot of, I guess, copycats or competitors coming in.

43:52
Anything else you got? We have two, I have a couple more sessions today. Yeah, and I gotta hop on a plane, unfortunately. It’s hard to be away for four days. It is. My biggest takeaway, I think, in the conference isn’t over, but I would say this year I’ve tried really hard to meet new people. I went to a breakfast, I went to a dinner, which I normally never do. I have breakfast and dinner and lunch with all my friends, which is one of the main reasons why I come. So I don’t feel bad about doing those things.

44:21
but I was like, you know what, this year I’m just gonna put myself out there and try to meet some new people. I’ve met some great people. And so I’m really glad that I sort of pushed myself out of my comfort zone to do that because I do think it adds more value to your conference experience. I’ve still hung out with all the people I know. So it’s not like I’ve avoided my friends, but although we haven’t seen each other a whole lot at all. Not today, certainly. No, but most of that has to do with scheduling and wanting to go to different sessions and things like that. So I actually think if you’re,

44:51
going to a conference and you don’t know anybody, it’s really hard to do that. It’s really hard to put yourself out there. It’s not hard for me. I was a house leader. People know me from seller summit. But even if you weren’t a house leader, I was chuckling when you were saying all that because you can just burst into a group and just start talking. I can. That’s not in my bag. However, it’s still hard. Just because I can do it doesn’t mean that I don’t find it difficult. There’s a difference.

45:18
And so I know if it’s hard for me, it’s really hard for other people because it’s definitely something that I’m pretty okay with doing. But I think it’s so valuable to meet new people. I’ve met a couple people this time that I’m like, I think we’re gonna probably be friends to some extent, right? Like online friends. And so I’m really glad that I pushed myself a little bit this year. Because it’s really easy to come to these things and hang out with your four best friends. And there’s nothing wrong with.

45:46
wanting to see old friends, I think it’s really important and one of the main reasons why conferences like this can still exist because people do crave being able to see people once or twice a year. But meeting the new people has been really valuable for me. Yeah. I would say I’ve met the same amount of people as usual. All six of them? Well, no, no, no, I always just talk with random people, but I always make sure to have at least one dinner with

46:11
with the people who are my good friends who I met. The OGs. The OGs, yes, that’s correct. I did feel a little older this year. Yeah, I felt super old. But it’s more of, I don’t know, for you, I feel like there’s still a lot of males here. I feel like the female demographic is really young. Probably true. Because at my table at lunch today, two people were at the table were 49, I’m 51, and the other person was 59. Oh.

46:37
So was like, we must have been at the geriatric. That’s what it was. But overall, like I said, some of the people who’ve impacted my life the most I’ve met at events at ECF, fact, Lars and Dana, Andrew Udarian, of course, Bill, Brandon, Eli, and they all keep coming back. We’re one of the OGs. I’ve been to every single ECF. You’re one of the nine, right? One of the seven. Seven. Okay. Seven OGs. Yeah.

47:05
Can’t wait to hear what your takeaways are for today’s session.

47:13
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, if you missed Ecommerce Live and you want to attend a conference of like-minded entrepreneurs, then join me at Seller Summit. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 528. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 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. Go to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

47:43
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.

00:28
are almost sold out over at SellerSummit.com. The Seller Summit 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, is a curriculum-based event 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 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.

00:57
Now 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. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, this is the last time you’ll be able to get tickets, because they are almost sold out, so go over to SellersSummit.com.

01:28
Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away.

01:57
Now onto the show.

02:05
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit a Job podcast and a brand new segment to the show called Profit of Audience, where Tony and I riff about content, building an audience, all the above. So today we just happen to be in the same room at the eCommerce Fuel Live Conference, which is one of our favorite events. Yeah. This is actually year number 10. For you. For me, I’ve been here. I’ve been coming to this event for 10 straight years, which is pretty crazy. I think this is my ninth year. Oh really? It is. the first ECF was in Austin.

02:34
Yes. The second one was in Nashville and that is when I had just started selling, but I had such a crazy launch that I met the revenue requirements to join ECF. You told me to join. so this ECF was my second ever e-commerce event that I went to. Right. Outside of startup bro. That was the first one. was the first one. We don’t count that. I still think that that was my favorite conference of all time. Yeah. Cause you got, you were a speaker and you got the royal treatment. Well, no, it’s not that it was just.

03:01
They just spent so much money on it and lost so much money on it. It was so extravagant. My room was a suite. I think I had a two bedroom suite. They booked me at, was that the Ritz? was the Ritz. Ritz. So awesome. Anyway, we are going to talk about today, you kind of what we learned and I am actually curious because this is the first time at an event where we haven’t really been hanging out at all. I know. I feel like I haven’t seen you the whole time. So I’m curious what the chatter has been.

03:30
around the people that you’ve been hanging out with. Are we gonna be honest about the chatter? Of course we are. Oh, and Tony led a, I don’t know what you’re I’m still leading, I’m still leading. I’m not done. Tony’s actually working this event as one of the- House leaders. House leaders, yes. So she’s here to facilitate conversations, is that what you do? Yes, yes, and organize a bunch of e-commerce nerds. that’s it. I said yes, and that was January Tony that said yes. March Tony is questioning why she said yes.

03:59
So, Patrick, who is Andrew’s right hand COO, reached out and asked if I would be willing to lead a house. Having been in a house last year, I think last year was the first year they did it. And if you’re not familiar with what we’re talking about, it’s similar to masterminds, similar to what we do at Seller Summit with the masterminds, although there’s more people in a house. I think there’s 25 people in each house. And so your job as the house leader is to facilitate conversation.

04:27
organize people into smaller groups to talk about specific topics and just heard the cats, which I was actually pleasantly surprised with my group with Team Ocean. So I love this group. They actually were really great yesterday about not talking over each other because when you get in a group like this, the temptation is that everyone has so much to say and everyone wants to learn so much that everyone talks all the time.

04:52
and everybody loses their voice by the third day. I mean, if you’ve been to Seller Summit, it’s the exact same way. So I thought, you expect me to keep these people in line and actually have conversations and have them be quiet at certain times. As soon as I said yes, I was like, this was a terrible idea because I know what it’s like to try to get these people to do stuff. It’s hard. So give me the dirt I want to hear. I’ll share what I’ve learned too. OK, so the dirt from my ocean house is everyone is mad at Metta.

05:21
Really? Nothing’s really changed dramatically recently. I’m at a loss at this one, right? Because I don’t use it. but that is the it was funny because we went around in the circle and gave a quick introduction and then there were just a few pieces of commentary but everybody’s commentary was about meta and I need to figure out a way to stop relying on ads and I’m unhappy and every time someone would say that you could see the group like collectively nod.

05:48
So it was like, not only was the person speaking unhappy, multiple other people were in agreement. And as we went along, that was definitely an underlying theme. So we had two people in my group. One is in the high fashion industry and the other one is in some pet products. I can’t remember what she was complaining that Meadow was working so well for her two years ago. And then one of the iOS updates basically destroyed that. And she was just looking for some guidance on how to move forward.

06:18
don’t know if she was pissed at Metta. This is more Apple’s fault than anything. Yeah. Yeah. And I think maybe that’s where people are. That’s where their anger should be directed. I think the bigger issue in all of that was that people have realized with some of the changes in the ups and downs that their business is completely reliant on it. Without it, they would not have a business. They would not be able to pay people. That’s really interesting because that sounds like Amazon. Right. Right. Yes. It felt very familiar.

06:48
Yeah, which I guess it just goes to show that you need more than one channel just just in case something goes wrong, right? Yeah, the next one I’m hesitant to talk about but you said nothing was off limits. Sure. People are upset with Klaviyo. I was gonna that was mine. I’ll let you go then. Well, in my case, and it’s it’s weird because Klaviyo has sponsored Andrew, who’s the founder of ecommerce fuel. They sponsored me they sponsored my podcast for three years. They used to sponsor seller summit. Yep. But all of a sudden when they went public,

07:18
It seems like a lot of things went downhill and maybe they’re just focusing on their larger enterprise customers. So this is actually the first year that Andrew has allowed a non-Claveo email marketing company to sponsor the event. And that company is Sendlane. And I’ve been annoyed with Clavio for different reasons, but I’m actually going to go and get a full demo from these guys. actually chatted with them in the booth for a long time and they say they’re

07:46
going to be 30 to 50 % cheaper than Klaviyo for equivalent functionality. So I’m going to give them a shot. I don’t know what happens when companies go public or they get bigger, but I think they’re under so much pressure to grow, grow, grow. That like the smaller guys, and by small, mean like the seven figure sellers. These aren’t small guys. They’re not small, but small in comparison. Like I’m sure they’re going after like the huge companies, The hundred million dollar companies, the billion dollar companies.

08:16
I think in my group, people were upset about the pricing. Yes, exactly. And then feeling like they weren’t. It’s a weird positioning, right? Because people will say, I feel like I’m not getting my money’s worth. But let’s just say you’re spending $3,000 a month on Klaviyo to make $100,000 in email revenue. Those same people are spending $50,000 a month in ads to make $100,000 in revenue. So at the end of the day,

08:43
Any email is better than no email, right? Like anything that you’re doing. However, I think people who have been with Klaviyo for a while are frustrated because things have gone down a little bit. Even customer support time is longer. So remember if you ever get on chat with them, that takes a lot longer. They have changed some of what they do. So you have to go through the AI bot, which I know a lot of companies do that. But to me, it’s like if you’re a certain amount in Klaviyo, you don’t want to go through 10 minutes on a bot.

09:12
to get, because at that point, I already know the knowledge base. don’t, you know, I’m not going to find my answer there. anyway, there’s a lot of irritation at Klaviyo and it’ll be interesting to see how SendLane does. I mean, we won’t know, but- We’ll know for like another, I think my appointments were next week actually. Yeah. Yeah.

09:30
to see if people are angry enough to switch because as you and I both know, it is a pain to switch email service providers. It is. And I think one of Send Lane, what they were trying to explain to me is they have white glove onboarding service if you’re going from Klaviyo because they have to do that, right? So one of the interesting moments yesterday in our round group session was people were talking about affiliate marketing versus influencer marketing. And

09:58
there were a lot of people that hadn’t had great luck with affiliate marketing, but they were looking at affiliate marketing as influencer marketing. So basically they had reached out to an influencer and asked them to promote something for a percentage of the sale. So that’s really affiliate marketing, but I, know, we kind of suggested going through an agency and not really an agency, a service like share a sale or, um, something like that versus the one-offs, right? Trying to contact people directly.

10:24
then I dropped what everyone thought. I didn’t think this was a knowledge bomb, but everybody in the group thought it was a knowledge bomb. And it’s probably because you and I come from a content creator background. But I explained to them, I said, there’s two types of people creating content on social media and YouTube, TikTok, whatever. We have true influencers and we have creators and influencers are people that are telling you what they ate for breakfast, what they wore on vacation.

10:52
what they did on a Tuesday, what brunch spot they went to, those are influencers. And influencers actually don’t convert very well for most brands. So when you go out, we’ve had people that have had Kim Kardashian post their stuff and they didn’t see a lot of sales. I said, then you have creators and creators educate. So influencers entertain, creators educate. And I was like, think about it that way. And I said, if you find someone who’s educating people, and the first person that came to mind is our friend Jamerill, who does the large family cooking.

11:21
and she educates people on basically bulk cooking. If Jamerill talks about a bowl or a pot, it sells, right? And we know it sells. It’s because people aren’t just following her for entertainment purposes only, they’re following her to learn. And it was like, you could see the light bulb in everybody because they lumped all those people into the same category, right? To them, they’re just all influencers.

11:44
And so then I unfortunately had to use you as an example, which I I don’t want to give you any more credit than you already get in life. Okay. So you use me as a positive example. example. Yes. I use you as the influencer. There’s Steve again talking about his V-necks. No, but I talked about how on your YouTube channel, it’s solely for the purpose of educating people on e-commerce. And so people who follow you on YouTube and are watching those videos are coming to learn. And so when you do a video on using big commerce,

12:13
The chances of you converting people to big commerce are significantly higher because people are there with a purpose already, as opposed to just scrolling mindlessly on YouTube and be entertained. And you could just see the people’s, like the doors were open for them because they had all just been going after influencers. People who are talking about what they ate for breakfast or pictures of them driving around their neighborhoods, whatever it is. And those people we know don’t convert. But if you’re looking to find educators to talk about your products,

12:41
It’s a totally different ballgame and you can actually get your products to convert with those types of content creators. So for the people I talk to that say they’ve tried influencer marketing and it fails, the first question I always ask is how many people have you reached out to? Yes. And it’s usually like three or four. I mean, the hit rate is going to be pretty low. you got to, it’s almost like a shotgun approach and then hopefully you find one and then you press that relationship. Yeah. Right. I remember what I was going to say about Klaviyo now.

13:09
So we had this discussion at the table where I do my annual, I shouldn’t say annual, quarterly, you know, deliverability tests where I take Glock apps, which is this app that tests deliverability. Mainly I did this recently because that change just happened, right? Where you had to do DKIM, DMARC and SPF in order to get deliverability out for Gmail and Yahoo, right? So I did it for my Klaviyo account. And I noticed that on, I usually run the test like three times on two out of the three,

13:38
Clavio used an IP that was on a blacklist. And so I think I brought that up in office hours during Zoom. And it turns out a lot of my students who tried the test, because they just followed my directions, they was like, hey, these IPs are on a blacklist. Is that bad? I’m like, well, it’s not good. So I actually brought it up at the table I was sitting at. And one of the guys who does very high volume email, a very large company, he says that Clavio has three tiers, bronze, silver, and gold.

14:08
And if you’re on the gold tier, they pretty much guarantee the best deliverability and they’ll just kick out anyone who has emails that are that go to spam. So it’s very hard to get in that gold tier. You have to be a large company that does high volume. Yeah. And if you so much as send like a couple of emails and have a pretty high spam rate and by high spam, I mean over point one percent, you get degraded down a tier. And the lowest tier is what they call bronze. And there’s no knowledge about this, right? It’s not like they advertise this, but

14:38
If you’re small, and I don’t know if this is unique to Klaviyo, I’m sure all the email providers do it, but we were just talking about Klaviyo because everyone’s on Klaviyo, then their IPs might be on Blacklist. They don’t scrub those IPs as much. And so I don’t know what the solution is, because no one really knows the answer to this, but I think you have to be a larger customer in order to get on that list. And when you’re small, can’t really, it doesn’t make sense to get a dedicated IP.

15:05
I was going to ask you, is your client on a dedicated? No. Because we were talking about like, I think to make getting a dedicated IP for email makes sense. think you have to do like 5 million email sends a month or 5 or 10 million. can’t remember what it Oh, we might be able to get one then. It makes sense to get one. That way you’re in control of your own. Yeah. Because I think last year we sent 60 million emails.

15:31
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 obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

16:00
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.

16:11
So I did the same test on Drip, which is what we use for blogging. And the three tests, they were clear. So does that mean that they’re, I don’t know, maybe on a higher tier for Drip? I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, it’s funny, total side note about nothing, but I have like a win. So I went on Drip the other day to send something and I never checked my subscriber count. I just, I never look at it. And I gained 4,000 subscribers over Christmas.

16:41
I had no idea. Happy Housewife? Yes. Oh. I was like… Wait, are you not emailing weekly? I’m emailing like every other week. So I’m not emailing as frequently anymore. But now I’m upping it because I was like, oh, and I know exactly where it’s coming from because I get replies to the flow. So it’s a holiday-themed lead magnet. So the people start responding to me and then I get those in my inbox. But it happens every year, so I don’t even think about it.

17:08
And so I logged in the other day and I was having, I was having some issues. So I was having my tech guy work on stuff. So while I was poking around, I was like, look at that 4,000 people over, you know, a six week period. So get your lead magnet set up. work side note side. That was our, that was our advertising for the, the podcast back to our regular scheduled show. Yeah. So just the overall sentiment of several of the people I talked to was they were kind of not having the best year. Did you get that idea?

17:39
So it’s interesting in my group, either everyone people had a terrible 2023 or they were having a terrible 2024. So if they had a good year last year, this year has been terrible. Or if they had a bad year last year, they feel like they’re on an upswing. Like two people in my group very specifically were like, that was the worst year of my life. What business like business wise. Right. But I also think sometimes when stuff in business goes bad, personal life goes like everything tends to follow. Right.

18:08
If your personal life goes bad, sometimes you’re busy. So they kind of work together. And so two people were like, this was the worst business year I’ve ever had. And then a couple of people were like, we thought we had made it through, they made through all the Google changes and Facebook changes and all that stuff. And then this year has been absolutely terrible. I mean, we’re only two months in, but things aren’t looking good. Yeah. mean, Google just released another update while we were here. So I’m anxiously awaiting that. I think…

18:37
So of the people who are doing well, there’s a bunch of people who are doing well. The people who are doing well have kind of like a moat. So there’s this one guy who sells, you know those outlets that go in the drawer so you can plug in like your hairdryer in the drawer? No, I do not know about this. You know, instead of having like a cluttered bathroom counter, you keep everything in a drawer and the electrical outlets actually in the drawer. Yeah, I just never knew how it worked. Yeah. And then you install it and it’s all hidden, right? Yes.

19:06
his business is taking off because he has that proprietary design technology. And he’s got all these contractors that are rebuying and installing a bunch of homes. So he has that moat of the contractors. He’s got the moat of the design and he’s essentially pretty secure in his business. It’s going to be hard to kick him off that market. One of the things that I guess I’ve never noticed this before about ECF people, but

19:33
Most of them have multiple businesses. not the people, the people that are doing 50 million plus, I mean, there are some big time sellers here. But there are a lot of people that are under 10 million. And what I found in every conversation that I have, so last night I went to a women’s dinner, I was at the women’s breakfast this morning, led the house yesterday. So I’ve been in a lot of small groups more so than I probably normally would at event like this. Because normally I go to dinner with you, right? And we don’t even need to talk anymore.

20:03
So, a lot of people wouldn’t, because a couple of times we went around the circle and said, just, you know, who are you? What do do? And I would say 50 % of the people had at least two things, two completely separate things going. Whether it was like one girl sells compression socks, but she also had a secondary business. One girl does the data mining. Actually, I think she’s giving a talk, but she had another business too. Like all these people.

20:32
like our friend Blake who sells the face paint actually has four e-commerce stores. Really? He sells face paint. He has a store that sells flags like the decorative flags that you put up. Uh, and then two other stores. can’t remember what they are, but a lot of these people, people I talked to yesterday, Heidi, I can’t remember her husband’s name. They have a main business and then they, then they also sell odds and ends in a completely separate business.

20:58
So I’ve never, maybe either I’ve never noticed it before, I just haven’t had these conversations, but I was shocked at the amount of people who were running multiple e-commerce businesses or e-commerce businesses and other offshoots of those businesses. That’s interesting. Because I often am asked, like, why don’t I just start a bunch of e-commerce businesses? Yeah. And I don’t think I would ever start two e-commerce businesses, let alone multiple. I agree. Because it’s a lot of work.

21:27
And it’s much easier to just focus on one than just have to spare product lines, right? Yes. Although I felt good because I often come here and I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way because we’re sort of in the same boat. But I mean, for a long time, I had my jewelry business. So I had an e-commerce store, but then I also had my blog totally unrelated. And then we also had the course totally unrelated. Then I also had two conferences, one related, one not, know, podcast, whatever it was. Right.

21:56
And so I always felt like, oh, here I am, Mrs. I’m all over the map. And everyone else is here is like, I do one thing. I get up every day and do one thing all the time forever and ever. And then this year I was like, oh, like I can relate to you because I’m doing four completely separate things. But it was interesting to me how many people, and I feel like I would have noticed that before because I always felt out of place. And so that was really interesting to me. And I wonder if people are trying to…

22:22
protect themselves, right, by having multiple, so if something goes down, you know, something else will pick up for them. So I don’t know. I don’t know if you noticed that. I didn’t notice that in my group, but what I did notice in my group is that a lot of them are making most of their money from social media. Interesting. Right? So Instagram, organic Facebook reels. Okay. So Patrick’s wife, nail polish company.

22:50
had this one Facebook reel of her just mixing nail polish go viral. And she made a ton of money over the holidays just off that one reel. My group didn’t my group was like, we don’t get social. But also when I think about what the people sold in my group, it also matters what you sell. Correct. Yes. Nail polish is actually mixing nail polish. Awesome. Yeah. I had a lot of people in my group that did not sell products that I think would be amazing on social like one guy sells

23:19
tarps that you put on your furniture when you paint. Oh yeah. You know, it’s like a pure commodity. And so I was like, cause we were talking about, you know, branding and marketing and I’m like, I just don’t know how you market that on social media. Cause you’re just literally covering furniture and things like that floors. Yeah. That kind of reminds me too. There’s, certain products at Amazon that will not do well like tarps, example, I bet does pretty well on Amazon. Yeah.

23:46
But if you try to sell it in your own shop, unless you’re doing like an overall paint store, where you can cross all bunch of things, I think it’d be a little more difficult. Yeah, his main business, I think, is selling to hardware stores and contractors, things like that, which makes sense. mean, that’s a great… I’d rather sell to contractors than sell to individuals just randomly. But I feel like in my group, there weren’t a lot of people that sold those products that were real sexy for social media, except for Lindsay, who sells all those licensed rain gear and, you know…

24:15
basically art on umbrellas and things like that. Yeah, I had a conversation with a woman who sells fashion and they were just wondering what types of Facebook ads would work. I think just fashion is tough, right? I think it almost has to be an influencer play of some sort, right? I don’t know, have you talked to any apparel? Yes, I actually sat last night. So I sat across from this girl last night and she had on this fantastic jumpsuit.

24:45
And it was, I’m not even joking. I don’t know what a fantastic jumpsuit looks like. A jumpsuit is, I think it’s called a jumpsuit. It’s like a one, it was like a onesie. It was a onesie, but like really nice. And the colors were vibrant. Like it was just, it looked like a thousand dollar jumpsuit. And you know, like I like expensive clothes. So like I can, I can spot a $50 Amazon basics jumpsuit versus a, you know, designer jumpsuit. So I complimented her last night after dinner. said, I love.

25:14
your jumpsuit, it’s amazing. She’s like, oh, thank you so much. We were kind of walking in separate directions. So she ended up at breakfast with me and she was wearing another jumpsuit. And it didn’t even occur to me that she probably sold jumpsuits, which is stupid at ECF because everyone is usually wearing their brand if they have something like, whether it’s a handbag or a pair of socks. Anyone who sells apparel is wearing their apparel at ECF. And so she’s wearing another jumpsuit. So.

25:40
we’re going around the table. Everyone’s sort of talking about what they do and it’s her turn to go and she’s like, I sell jumpsuits. And I was like, you were wearing last night. I’m high end jumpsuits, high end jumpsuits. Wow. And they’re beautiful. The one she has on today’s really nice as well. And she does all of her sales from Instagram. Interesting. What’s it, did you get any hints of what her strategy was or no, cause was literally like they were digging the bell to come to the first session. I was kind of irritated because

26:08
She definitely has like a branded look and everything about her fits what she’s wearing. But when I saw her last night, I was like, that’s an amazing outfit. And then today, and she’s like, oh yeah, I use Instagram primarily to sell. And I was like, oh, this makes perfect sense because of what she’s selling. The fact that you noticed the jumpsuit means it would work well on social media, right? Yes. Just like one look and you know it’s high end. Whereas if you’re just selling kind of everyday staples for clothing, I’m talking about.

26:37
like Gap clothing, probably wouldn’t work as well on Instagram I would imagine, right? Right, but the girl next to me sold compression socks. See, I can see that working okay. Yes, because they’re designer, they’re designed, they’re not just the standard colors. But yeah, in the other thread that I got today, I didn’t hear this as much yesterday, was that one comment changes the trajectory of someone’s life.

27:03
And there were multiple people this morning at breakfast to the there was a girl who invented collapsible dog crates. Yes, I met her. Yes. She’s awesome. Yeah. But so she was this was like five years ago, I guess. And she had a dog and she was trying to collapse the crate and she smashed her finger trying to collapse the crate. And there was a comment like you should figure out how to make one that collapses easily or something like that. There was just like one random comment made. So she did.

27:32
And she developed this collapsible dog crate. Well, the girl in the compression socks sitting on the other side of me, she used to drive for work and she was in the car for like hours and hours and hours every week. And one of her friends is like, you should start wearing compression socks because you’re sitting so much. And she’s like, compression socks are for runners and old people, you know? And they’re like, no, no, no. And so then she ended up, but she thought they were ugly. So she developed stylish compression socks. And she even said, she’s like, it’s amazing how one random comment completely changed my life.

28:02
you know, gave her this business, made her all this money. And that’s kind of a thread that I’ve seen this week of, you know, one little spark, right? One little piece of information and people make a decision on it. You know, she invents a dog crate, right? She makes compression socks, whatever it is. And then they build these really successful, awesome businesses. Yeah, I had to make my wife cry in order to start my business, right? Start our business together. All it took is gallons and gallons of gems tears for…

28:31
So I had a highlight of my night last night as you know, I had someone come up to me. yes. Good old Ted if you’re listening. Thank you. I appreciate you more than you know. This is that we were at the party last night. Someone came up to me and said, hey, I listened to your podcast. And I was like, oh, thank you so much. And I was like, this is how Steve feels every time now. Like I’m getting it. And he’s like, he talked for a minute and then he’s like, yeah, you co-host it with some guy, right?

29:01
So anyway, I pointed you out. I was like, he’s over there somewhere. No, you didn’t say the second part of what you said. OK, so Steve was walking in with Kevin, who is also Asian. Another Asian guy, yeah. And I was like, yeah, he’s over there. I just waved at both of them. Like, I’m not even going to tell you who it’s one of those Asian guys. It’s one of those Asians guys walking through. Highlight of my week at ECF. So one thing I was actually kind of surprised about is the amount of people that I talked to that do not do content is

29:29
pretty high. Yes, right. It seems like they just sell and I always wonder how they get their business but it’s either through ads. It’s mostly ads actually. Yeah, it’s all ads. And they’re not doing any content. They don’t really know how to do the content or even short form or video. So I think that’s like a huge gap that people have to figure it out. So this was another aha moment that I had in at breakfast this morning because we were talking about that exact thing because most of people at my breakfast table

29:58
all were content create, like they all created content around their products, which is rare because most of the people that I’ve talked to before that were not making content about their products. And so we were kind of throwing around ideas on why it’s so hard for people to build the brand side of it. And I said, well, if you think about it, let’s just take selling on Amazon versus selling on Shopify or BigCommerce. You can basically outsource everything on Amazon. You can hire someone to do your listing. You can hire someone to optimize your listing. You can hire someone to do PPC.

30:27
And you can find companies that do really good jobs in all of those things, right? There are quality companies out there. So you don’t have to figure, like once you get a product idea, you can have other people do a lot of your work for you or help you along or get you started. But with branding, to pay a company to create a brand story for you, and first of all, there’s a lot of really bad companies out there. And two, if you get a good one, they’re very expensive. So it’s not as easy to…

30:55
create a brand around a product and a story without spending a whole lot of money. Most people don’t have a whole lot of money to spend initially. So I think that’s why people struggle because unless you’re naturally drawn to branding and content and in that storytelling, it’s not something that you can just, okay, let me hire a PPC company. Right. Right. And so I think that’s why people get hung up on it because it’s not something that comes naturally to everybody. And it’s really hard to outsource. Here’s some objections I heard at my table. They’re like,

31:25
how much content could I possibly make about this product? And what I was trying to tell them is that you don’t make it about the product. You just try to target the people who would buy it and just get them to like you and then just kind of casually mention your products. Because I was kind of outlining my social media strategy for Bumblebee, which hopefully will get implemented sometime this quarter or the latter half of the year. I’m just going to talk about the business, just funny things that happen and whatnot. And just over time, people will want to just follow the story or the day to day.

31:54
And whenever they think about buying a keepsake or something, they’ll think about my store. That’s the long-term strategy. Yeah. Well, so we met up with Anja, who came to Sellers Summit last year, sells first aid kits for moms. And she was talking this morning, we were talking about the branding thing, and she said, you know, content’s a huge part of our strategy. What they do is because it’s a first aid kit for moms, but it’s sort of a, actually, you’ve got one in your bag. It’s portable.

32:20
And so basically they create content for, yeah, there it is. got it. I got it right in of me. So look how small it is. It’s the size of, I don’t even know what that’s, you know. It’s like a coin purse if anyone carries coins anymore. If anyone has a coin purse laying around, that’s the, This is something that Jen would love because it’s kind of fashionable, right? Yeah. So they, so the, the, the selling point of her first aid kits is that they are fashionable. They are

32:49
portable so you can take them when you’re traveling if you’ve got your kids, you know, if you’re doing like around town playgrounds, things like that, they’re easy to take along with you. And so they do content on, you know, things to do with your kids traveling ideas. So their content is not about the first aid kit. It’s not about how to put a bandaid on. It’s all about

33:12
what moms who would buy that first aid kit are doing. So travel tips and it’s all seasonal, right? So right now they’re coming up on spring break. So what they’re doing now is talking about, you know, traveling spring breaks, travel ideas and the things you need to pack and stuff like that. And then they weave in obviously the first aid kit. And I think people don’t always think about it that way, right? They think they have to talk about everything in that first aid kit and how you use it. And, know, the difference in cotton balls or whatever it is, which no one cares about.

33:39
What they how they’re going to find her is through looking for travel ideas and then seeing this first aid kit and thinking, oh, I totally need to bring that with me on my trip. And it’s cute. And you can have there’s a bunch of different color options to for it. So are they doing video content or I did not ask her if she was doing video content. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is a it’s a really cute idea. And I guess unless she creates a it’s so essentially I know you guys can’t see it because the podcast, but

34:07
It’s a very stylish little bag and then inside is like antibiotic ointment, band-aids, and then like hand sanitizer and the balm and that sort of thing. It’s essentially just a stylish first aid kit. Yeah. And they sell refill packs. So obviously that’s how they get their customers back. Right. But yeah, I mean, think it’s a great idea. And I like that her idea around it is not to talk about like how to use the first aid kit, but what moms are doing in that phase of their life. Yeah. And absolutely correct. mean,

34:37
in order to make it work, you can’t really talk about your product because then it’ll come across as a pitch anyway. Right. Yeah. Unless your product is stands out in some way or or uncomplex and you have to explain the complexities of the product. Unless you’re you’re an IKEA furniture and you need to give people step by step instructions that have been together. Yeah. The other thing I maybe this is normal for UCF, but there’s most of the people here do not depend on Amazon.

35:06
Yes, for the revenue. They’re all D to C. So it’s funny because I was sitting at the table with Getita. Getita is a very well-known company in the Amazon space. Yes. But everyone at the table during lunch was like, oh, so what do you do? I’m like, you’ve never heard of They literally go to every single event. They do. They do. Yeah. So how can you not have heard it? So I think the people at ECF are just generally better off because they have their own brands in their websites.

35:32
What’s funny is, is in my house yesterday, there were a large group of people that wanted to get on Amazon. So they were, and this is, we talk about this all the time, but like, if you don’t sell on Amazon, you think you need to be on Amazon. If you sell on Amazon, you think you should be off of Amazon. No one’s ever happy. But yeah, there were several people that are like, I know I should be on Amazon because they know people are searching for them on Amazon. And I do agree with that. Like, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be selling on Amazon.

36:01
But that was actually one of the breakouts in my house was there were probably five or six people that wanted to know more about Amazon and getting on Amazon and how that would work. Well, I was sitting at lunch and someone was just kind of dipping their toes in Amazon. They were doing Merchant Fulfilled. And the question I was asked was, do you think I should do FBA? And I’m like, I think you’ll get probably three X to sales and much more visibility. If you do go FBA.

36:29
And he was like, so is it better? Like, is it easier? And I’m like, well, well, well, you know, that’s, a very loaded question there, right? Yeah. Cause FBA will introduce some other problems, but in general, it is better to do FBA. then again, there’s all these new fees that they introduced this year as well. it’s just funny how it’s completely different. Like, cause I go to Amazon conferences as well. It’s always the opposite. Like you said, everyone wants to have their own store and here people are just kind of dipping their toes in Amazon.

36:59
And the other thing that we get got here, which we get everywhere we go is, we thought you were an Amazon conference for seller summit. Oh, yeah. For seller summit. Yeah. Which I think is funny because we’ve never advertises in Amazon. We’re not an Amazon conference, first of all. And then, too, I don’t feel like any of our branding is around. We have Amazon sellers and we probably do Amazon Sessions because we do think Amazon is an important part of the e-commerce world. But we’re I mean, half of our attendees don’t sell on Amazon.

37:28
So it’s just funny that we’ve somehow been branded this way. is because I think we have sponsors that are Amazon sponsors. Whereas I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Amazon session at ECF. I don’t think I have either. Right. And I don’t think there’s any Amazon sponsors aside from Getita. Yeah. Here. You’re right. So when I went to the ECF Austin, like one day event, they did have an Amazon session. Oh, OK. It wasn’t like selling on Amazon. That was more like a strategy.

37:56
optimization sort of thing. But yeah, I agree with you. I don’t think there’s ever been an Amazon session here. Yeah. Actually there’s, are some people that I talked to who we’re all friends with that don’t really sell anymore, but they keep coming back to the event. Yes. That group is getting bigger. Well, one of, one of those people is what got me, who got me started on Amazon in the first place. Lars. Yeah, Lars. And you know, he’s getting off of Amazon and it’s just, I’m still very appreciative. Yeah. And, uh,

38:25
Who else? There’s so many people at this event that got me to where I am today and I never would have met them had I not gone to UCF. Yeah, I think it’s a great event. It’s fun to see people. I’ve met actually probably this I’ve met more new people this year or not new people, new to me people this year than I have in the last several years combined. And that’s because I won because I’m leading the house. So I was forced I was forced to be friendly, but also

38:53
I just, I made a decision because I’m like, well, if I’m leading this house, I can’t just sit back and listen. And so I went to the dinner last night, which I normally wouldn’t do. I went to the breakfast this morning, which I normally don’t do. I didn’t even eat breakfast. just sat there. I’m in my no breakfast phase right now. But yeah, it’s, it was interesting. I feel like I’ve met a lot of people and I’ve, it’s very interesting to like see the changes in ECF over the years. Like it’s changed a lot.

39:21
One of the ways I think in a very positive way is there’s a lot more females here. Yes, I did notice that this year. Dana and I joked that the first CCF, was, or not the first, the first one I came to, it was me and Dana and Miracle and Carol Reigns and we think one other person at that event. So it’s nice to see other female entrepreneurs attending because we know they’re out there. Right. And we know they’re out there because they come to Seller They do come to Seller Summit. And that was what was so funny is that

39:49
You know, I spend a lot of time with Dana at this event and she’s such a Seller Summit cheerleader, which I greatly appreciate. But every time someone would say, oh, there’s a lot of there’s so many more females here. And Lindsay said something like, oh, I think it’s up to 10 percent. And Dana’s like, Seller Summit’s 50 percent. Just like matter of fact, I was like, we might be over 50 percent at this point. don’t know. Actually, for this year, we might be. Yeah. Yeah. Which is strange. I guess it’s just.

40:17
by nature of the title of my podcast or our podcast blog and that sort of thing. We just attract more more females. You know what I discovered? Females is not politically correct. You have to say women now. Did you know that? No, I had no idea. So I got to watch myself. say women? Women. Well, you could say whatever you want because you are a woman, but I can’t say females. I can’t keep this. It hurts my brain. It’s too much. I agree. But I am excited about Seller Summit. And there’s actually a number of people here that

40:47
didn’t know about Seller Summit at all. It’s a shock and a travesty. Well, no, maybe because we’ve been doing it for eight years now, right? But there are a couple of people I’m pretty sure are coming now after I talk to them. One thing that… So I took this cooking class. Yeah, I have met everybody who was in the class with you. I’m not joking. Everybody I meet… Because one of the easy icebreaker questions at ECF is like, oh, what adventure did you do?

41:13
If you don’t really know how to start the conversation, that’s a good one because then they can tell you, I went kayaking and there was a gator under the boat or something like that. So everyone I’ve met is like, I took the cooking class. was like, did Steve do any work in the cooking class or did he make? Here’s what happened in the cooking class. There was three vegetables on a cutting board. There was an onion, there was a pepper and there was a celery. OK. And that’s the only thing we did. We cut that up and then we threw in the pot and outcome came jumbo and jumbo. That was delicious.

41:42
No, seriously, that’s the only thing that we did. Oh, no, I got to stir the pot. Oh, you stir, huh? How came delicious food? It’s like I have no idea how we are from this piece of celery to that. But I just like that we were supposed to record this yesterday. I run into you in the lobby and you say to me, I’m really hungry, so I’m going to the cooking class. And I’m thinking to myself, you do know that a cooking class requires cooking before you get to eat.

42:09
Like you’re not eating for two more hours Yes, I grossly misjudged how long how long we laughed about that all afternoon Brian was like you think Steve’s eaten yet. I’m like, nope Actually by the time I ate it was dinnertime I because I had a dinner with quiet light at five and so yeah, and we finished at five. In fact, I was late. Oh, that’s a quiet light, but um Yeah, I’m actually after going ECF. I’m really looking forward to seller summit now, which is in just

42:39
Two months. May 14th, May 16th. And I’m looking forward to the mastermind in particular. I am too. And I think the houses here at ECF got me more excited for the mastermind because with the houses at ECF, you’re breaking into these smaller groups. And that’s basically what our masterminds are, groups of under 10 people, 10 or under, and getting together for an entire day in a room. As we joke, we lock you in a room and don’t let you in until all your problems are solved.

43:08
And just the friendships that are developed. We actually heard this from a Seller Summit attendee this weekend or this week that they she formed a mastermind. Yes. Out of Canadians. So we’re not invited. But just seeing the friendships that are formed in those masterminds and then seeing how a lot of them carry on after Seller Summit, because we don’t facilitate that. I mean, that’s facilitated by the attendees. And to me, that made me so happy to hear.

43:36
because that means that they really did form those connections during the mastermind time. And those friendships will now become, it’s kind of like how you and I and Dana and Lars and Mike, like we’ve made these friendships years ago and through events like ECF and Seller Summit, the friendships just continue to deepen. And now like I see, I’ve seen everybody but Lars basically at other events or other things throughout the year or years, because it’s like a real friendship. It’s not just people you run into at a conference.

44:05
Yeah, and one thing that I’ve just realized also is that, you know, the houses that that mastermind part of ECF is only for like a couple of hours. Yeah. And it just made me realize that that’s the part I value. Yep. Chatting in a more intimate environment with other people as opposed to the breakout sessions. Yeah. Which we’re actually recording this during a breakout session right now that that that that we’re missing. So, yeah.

44:29
If you guys want to participate in a mastermind, make sure you go over to sellersummit.com. We’re almost sold out of masterminds. We are, yeah. So hope to see you guys there.

44:41
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, if you missed ECF Live and you want to attend a conference of like-minded entrepreneurs, then join me at Seller Summit. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 527. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 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. Go over to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

45:11
head on over to mywipequitterjob.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.

00:29
The Seller Summit 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 event 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 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.

00:56
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 8 years. Now if you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers, but as of right now we actually only have 5 of those tickets left. The Seller Summit is going to be held at Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th May 16th, and right now,

01:24
This is the last time you’re going to be able to get your tickets because they’re almost sold out. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifecoupterjob.com slash book.

01:53
So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now on to the show.

02:06
Welcome to the My Web Coder Job Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the phenomenon known as Tmoo and how it’s taking the e-commerce world by storm. if you’ve never heard of Tmoo before, Tmoo is an online marketplace that offers extremely low prices on thousands of products shipped directly from China. And the company is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings, a Chinese company which is publicly traded on the NASDAQ. And Tmoo is one of many Chinese companies trying to break into the American market and their prices are

02:35
Possibly low according to Wired magazine team who is losing hundreds of millions of dollars to send you cheap stuff from China in order to grab mass market share from US shoppers and it’s working their growth has been beyond Exponential in less than a year team who already has one-third the monthly active users of Amazon from $3 and 37 cents for a pair of shoes to just $4 and 50 cents for a woman’s sweater Their prices just seem too good to be true and it turns out that they are

03:05
An analysis of the company’s supply chain cost by Wired magazine, which was confirmed by a company insider, shows that Tmoo is losing an average of $30 for every order made. In addition to the U.S., Tmoo also operates in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and is estimated to be losing $588 million to $954 million every single year. But the real reason for this episode today is whether this is affecting U.S. businesses. Now, if you’ve listened to the archives,

03:33
Recently, I interviewed my friend Jerry Kozak on the podcast who runs an online store selling t-shirts both on Amazon and Shopify that makes over eight figures per year. And according to Jerry, he believes that companies like Tmoo and Shien are taking sales away from his company, especially on Amazon. Shien is one of these Chinese fast fashion companies. Ever since both Tmoo and Shien burst onto the US scene in 2022, Jerry’s business has cratered by nearly 50%.

04:02
Now granted, Jerry’s in the t-shirt business, which as you know is one of the most saturated and most competitive niches to sell into. So you should probably take his numbers with a grain of salt, but according to an Amazon representative, the entire apparel category on Amazon is down 30 % year over year. Meanwhile, other apparel and t-shirt companies and e-commerce communities that I belong to are down year over year as well. Right now, companies like Tmoo and Shien seem to be mainly hurting lower end apparel businesses

04:31
and companies without a powerful brand or intellectual property. And here’s why. Both Tmoo and Shien have two gigantic advantages that US companies do not when it comes to making and selling apparel. Now for one thing, they have a huge cost advantage over US sellers because of extremely low labor costs. Now according to the LA Times, products made in China’s western province of Xinjiang are being sold to US consumers through Tmoo in breach of a ban.

04:58
that forbids goods from being imported from the region due to links to forced and slave labor. The statements were former detainees and reports from an array of researchers and advocacy groups have alleged that the Chinese government put more than one million people in detention camps in that region and that laborers in fields and factories were forced or coerced to make cheap products for Tmoo. Now the Chinese government said the camps are for re-education purposes, but I don’t really believe them. And no one knows for sure.

05:27
but slave labor could be one way that Tmoo is commanding such low prices. Now just for some context, a blank t-shirt costs about two bucks and shipping within the continental US is about four bucks for a shirt. This is the rough cost for a business in the US and in order to make a decent profit after printing a custom design on the shirt, you gotta be able to sell the shirt for at least 20 bucks. Meanwhile, Tmoo is selling a printed t-shirt direct from China to a US address for less than seven bucks and that includes shipping.

05:57
so they can literally sell apparel at or below the minimum cost. Now the second reason Timo has an advantage is due to the de minimis loophole that allows Chinese sellers to not have to worry about paying taxes, tariffs, or customs duties. Now the de minimis loophole is that any shipment sent to the US that is valued at less than 800 bucks does not have to pay any taxes whatsoever. And because Timo is shipping individual products into the US, they don’t have to pay any customs duties or taxes at all. Meanwhile,

06:25
In order for a US apparel company to get low pricing, they have to import a large quantity of t-shirts into the US and pay both customs duties and tariffs on the products. Now whether this is fair or not is really up to you, but let me just put it in simple words to sum it up. A product on Tmoo is seven bucks, no import duties, and arrives in one week with free shipping. Now the wholesale cost for the same item made in the USA is 10 bucks, retails for 20 bucks, and this price differential is a problem.

06:54
because the math doesn’t work out for the consumer. Now at the same time, Tmoo is squeezing small manufacturers in China to cut prices to even lower levels that makes it even impossible for Chinese manufacturers to make a profit. Now one Chinese manufacturer who goes by Tai Chi was approached by Tmoo to sell on the platform when it launched in 2022 and he joined, but soon found out that he had little control over prices. Tmoo will often ask to lower prices and if you agree, the platform will decide what the lower price is.

07:24
You don’t have say over your pricing, and if you refuse to lower your price, you simply won’t be listed on the platform. This is their method of operation. Tmoo’s parent company, Pinduoduo, burst onto the scene in China by providing deep discounts to gain market share as well. And heck, Amazon did the same thing back in the day, and the formula works. Offer impossibly low prices to shut everyone out and lose a ton of money for many years, and then once you’ve become a household name, raise prices and turn a profit.

07:54
This is what Amazon did and this is what Tmoo is trying to do right now. But the difference this time between Tmoo and Amazon is that Chinese companies like Tmoo have the advantage of favorable taxation and impossibly cheap labor compared to U.S. companies. They don’t have to pay any taxes at all and they can get away with paying their staff pennies on the dollar. Now the real question though is whether they can keep this up. As I mentioned earlier, Tmoo’s low prices is costing the company a ton of money.

08:21
and they’re estimated to be losing $30 per order and hundreds of million dollars per year. Tmoo is also squeezing their suppliers to get the lowest pricing possible, and many Chinese sellers are leaving Tmoo. Meanwhile, Tmoo is also gathering data from millions of US citizens, which is attracting the scrutiny of the US government. So in my eyes, something has to give. And right now, TikTok’s about to be banned. Who knows Tmoo might be next. But on the flip side, we just happen to be living in a very interesting period right now. The average American

08:51
is carrying a record amount of credit card debt and the savings rate is at an all-time low, which makes for the perfect storm for a company like Timo to thrive. Now as a small business owner, what can you do to fight back? You all know that I teach e-commerce over at mywebquaterjob.com and I run a seven-figure store over at bumblebillindens.com. Is it all doom and gloom? And here’s what I have to say, and I’m going to be quite frank and honest with you guys. If you are selling commodity products,

09:19
that do not have a strong value proposition, you probably aren’t going to survive regardless of whether Tmoo and Shien exists or not. So for example, if you’re selling generic t-shirts that are easily copied by manufacturers from China who have a cost advantage over you, you’re just not going to make it. But if you can tap into the emotions of your buyer and establish a strong brand, you will survive regardless of pricing pressure. And since we’ve been talking about t-shirts and apparel so far, I’d like to talk about

09:47
one of my favorite companies, is called True Classic Tees. True Classic Tees is a company that sells generic solid color t-shirts, which is probably one of the most saturated and competitive niches out there. But they brought in over 250 million bucks since they opened in 2019. Now, how does a blank t-shirt company that sells plain t-shirts for 25 bucks a pop make so much money? Well, it’s all about the marketing and how they make consumers feel about their product. Now, if you’ve never watched one of their True Classic Tees commercials,

10:17
Basically, they show an overweight guy wearing a shirt with his beer belly hanging out and the shirt doesn’t really fit well at all. Then they flash forward to a picture of the exact same overweight guy in a true classic t-shirt and all of sudden he looks buff. The t-shirt emphasizes his biceps and hides his Buddha belly. Now, can T-Muscle a plain t-shirt for three bucks? Yes, but it cannot replicate the mind share that true classic tease has created. Selling online is all about triggering the emotions of your consumer.

10:46
and it’s not all about price. I’d much rather pay 25 bucks for a t-shirt that makes me look and feel good rather than a cheap throwaway $3 t-shirt. And incidentally, this is exactly how Dr. Squatch sells men’s soap. Now as a dude, I don’t really care about what soap did I use in the shower. When I’m in a hotel, I’ll use whatever soap that’s there. But Dr. Squatch hooked me with their commercials. Instead of telling consumers about how good their soap smells or how well the soap cleans and exfoliates, Dr. Squatch sells soaps

11:15
by catering to the sexual desires of men. Now in almost all their commercials, they show a woman smelling her man saying words like, man, you smell so good. I want to jump you right now. And as a guy, when you watch a commercial like that, you’re probably thinking to yourself, wait a sec, if I use Dr. Squatch, I’m going to get more action? Well, sign me up. Now can T-Mu sell a bar of soap at half the price? Definitely. But can they compete with Dr. Squatch? Probably not. Right now,

11:43
Tmoo is a junkyard that sells cheap generic products from China, and their rock bottom pricing is affecting the apparel industry the most because apparel is a commodity, and most clothing, especially on Amazon, is generic and unbranded. Now what I didn’t tell you about my friend Jerry Kozak earlier is that even though his business has dropped around 50%, he’s going to be just fine because the other half of his business does not depend on sales from Amazon or being price competitive.

12:10
The other half of his teacher business is where he custom prints products from NATO, college sports teams, and other organizations. The other half of his business is where he’s established a solid repeat customer base and strong relationships with his customers. And these are customers that he will never lose. His added value is his customer service, his attention to detail, and the loyalty he’s built over time. And this is what it takes to create a lasting e-commerce business.

12:38
So while Tmoo is probably destroying the low end apparel market, as a small business owner, you can succeed by niching down and going for the high end. If you were competing purely based on price, you’ve already lost. Now as for the other unfair advantages that Tmoo currently possesses, that’s up to the US government to decide. If you feel as though the de minimis rules that prevent Chinese sellers from having to pay US taxes sounds unfair, well then you should write a letter to your local representative in your state. And if you are against

13:06
possible slave labor practices in the creation of Tmoo’s products, then you can show your support by not buying these products as well. But for myself and my e-commerce store, I’m not really worried about Tmoo at all. Now, if you want to learn more about Tmoo, there’s a lot of episodes on my YouTube channel. And if you want to listen to Jerry Kozak’s episode, just go back and look through my archives at the podcast. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now with all the Google AI changes, Tmoo, Shein and TikTok Shop, e-commerce is going to change dramatically this year.

13:36
For more information about this episode, go to MyWifeCoderJob.com slash episode 526. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 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. Go to SellerSummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeCoderJob.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.

14:05
Thanks for listening.