The E-commerce Leader

We are Michael Veazey in London, England.

Jason miles in Seattle, Washington.

More importantly, you are the owner of a thriving online business and you want to become the best ecommerce leader you can be. We’re here to get you there. Let’s jump in.

Hello, Mr. Jason miles. How are you sir? Good man.

How you doing? I’m very well. Thanks. Yeah, it’s still resisting the urge after like 400 episodes to say welcome to Amazing FBA but it’s fantastic to be welcome to the e commerce leader which is

there Yeah, right. Surely

Yeah. I’m pretty excited about our episodes here because I know you just know loads and loads of stuff and very excited particularly talk about this nine mountains episode. So we’re talking about traffic. You mentioned this traffic framework for the nine mountain sounds very mysterious. So what is that?

All right. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think the topic of travel is top of mind for so many online sellers. I mean, it’s just it’s one of the, you know, first things that comes to people mind as soon as they think about selling online. And so, you know, I started blogging about Pinterest in 2011. And it turned into a book deal with McGraw Hill and through that exercise with my blog was about how Pinterest had revolutionized our business. And I was just it was called marketing on Pinterest, you can still go check it out. It’s ugly blog, disappointing old but but in that discovery process, I was just on my own kind of journey of discovery of traffic and how it worked. And I so you know, through that process, I started to really ask the hard questions of where does traffic come from online? Like, who pushes traffic around what were what are the sources of traffic? And so it’s probably over the course of two or three years I wrote books with McGraw Hill Pinterest power, YouTube marketing power in an instant manpower and, and. And in that process, I started to just organize the types and sources of traffic and, and that list is is turned into what we call in our coaching practice the nine mountains framework. It’s basically the in my view, there are only nine sources of traffic when you really categorize things as a framework. And those end these nine mountains, I’m happy to share each of the nine. It’s not like a secret or anything. It’s just a framework for organizing the content. And and most people don’t think about it this way most, you know, most internet users don’t think who is pushing traffic to whom, you know, who’s the recipient, who’s the sender. And but as a marketer, it’s critically important. And so anyway, so that’s the that’s the gist of it all.

Yeah, no, it’s absolutely critically important. And I love that it’s not a secret. I was just very tempted to say, and if you want to find out what they are, sign up for our webinar at e commerce leader.com for slash big secret.com But no, it’s not a secret. So yeah, I think it’s certainly interesting. A lot of people think about particular channels a great deal like Facebook comes very fashionable Pinterest, I think is you know, still actually it’s it was 2011. But for e commerce, I mean, Pinterest is a well kept secret. And I know somebody saying I’m actually pairs of future state videos, just give a shout out to him. He’s just a great stuff with Pinterest for Amazon. So but let’s, let’s get to the chase says you’ve got nine mountains, we better tell people what they are. What are they? They get typing the list? Yeah. So

let me walk through them and explain the concept. And then you know, people always say, Well, what about this? What about that, and I’m happy to sort of explain, this is my framework. If somebody tells me there’s a 10th mountain that I haven’t thought of man, I’ll be thrilled. I mean, I’m, you know, but generally, as I batted this around with people, I think I kind of categorize things properly into these nine sources, and some of them bleed over and touch each other a little bit in different ways. But let’s go through them. So, you know, the first one is email marketing. Email Marketing is the original and best marketing, in my opinion that you can do on the internet. It worked 25 years ago, and like 1994, it works today. And so that’s the first source of, you know, large, vast amounts of traffic. Second one is organic search, of course, that’s dominated by Google. But the Microsoft properties have their own search tools as well. And there’s a you know, there’s other search products out there DuckDuckGo and different tools that are trying to make their way in the world. And so but that’s a huge, huge area of traffic’s ending. Of course, we all think about Google. And, you know, we’ve all been on these journeys where, like, if I can get ranked, you know, number one in Google organic search result page, you know, I’ll be I’ll be made. So that’s the, that’s the second one. The third one is one, I coined this phrase that I use, called branded browsing. And that is just simply direct typing of the URL into the browser bar. So you know, maybe Many customers don’t they don’t search for whole foods.com through Google, they just type it straight into the browser when they want to go to that website. And so I refer that to that as branded browsing. You won’t hear that phrase used online anywhere else. I don’t think unless it be popular. But wait,

yeah, I was just gonna say so to study that, that shows the importance of getting whatever the hell your brand is.com because it’s the natural assumption if you’ve got dot e or.biz.uk, or some weird your, you know, would you call it top level domain? You’re in Super trouble because that won’t work.

Yeah, just as much Right. Exactly. Right. And so it ties right into branding and, but but nonetheless, so that’s the third one. The fourth one is organic, social. So organic, social, of course, and, you know, my original blogging was about Pinterest. And, and then of course, you know, Facebook came along and just, you know, just crushed it and, and then the other social media sites that allow you to post and can send traffic to you Your product or you know, your website. And I should mention, most of this applies to Amazon sellers, eBay sellers, you know, people who are selling on Walmart, I mean that, you know, there’s not necessarily a bifurcation between ecommerce on your own website versus, you know the marketplaces, but but nonetheless organic social organic referral. So organic referral is when you get excited or mentioned in other people’s blogs or articles, if you get an article in the Wall Street Journal, online, and it links to your Amazon product, you’re having a very good day, you know, that kind of approach. So that’s organic referral. And then then you get into the paid versions of these things. So paid social, of course, it’s all top of mind for people. But it’s very different than in organic social. There’s paid search, of course, right. So you have to search products that you can pay for, through Google and in other platforms. You’ve got paid referral where you’re you know, you You’re giving people money to put you into their articles. A lot of influencer marketing would fall into that category. You know if you’ve got a big, big shot influencer in your industry, whoever it might be, and you pay them 1000 bucks and they put you in there on their website and then they’re you know, various places and you get referral traffic you paid for that and then the final one, the ninth one is paid display. And pay display was sort of a leader in the early internet you know, like 1994 to 1999 kind of thing. Ilan musk made his first fortune making a display network and it kind of lost favor I guess lost lost its way a little bit but the big resurgence in the last few years of pay display is retargeting you know retargeting ads is a is a paid display strategy. So those are the nine that’s not that’s nine sources and I’m pretty sure when you just You know you think about anything in terms of traffic online they’ll fall into this. The only The only caveat I’ll just say is email marketing I’ve extended Now recently to say broadcast. I include things like Manny chat any chats kind of a weird a weird thing between somehow between Facebook and and email marketing I call it broadcast media. But anyway so that’s that’s the list no secrets

yeah but that done man that’s a great call to action to go to the webinar last there but what I would say by the way is if you want to get I’m typing away here so if you want to get the fruits of my labors sure implies seeing stuff in writing www dot ecommerce leader.com forward slash traffic all of our to come many episodes all about traffic, you’re gonna be there. So I can’t resist putting a call to action in there, but it’s free, not a paid webinar. So yeah, it’s coming back tonight matches that what I really like about this Jason and the way you think is really cool. I mean, I know you’ve got an end Ba and you’ve worked in corporate and you’ve also done the scrappy entrepreneur thing and it’s an interesting way of looking at life because you tend to think in big categories and put little things like in a little thing Pinterest, which is huge in itself within categories and that’s that’s really cool because otherwise what I think can be very big danger is that you get very channel fixated and I’ve seen this I think, you know, look on a quotes amazon seller that’s the channel fixation itself. It’s even more dangerous because it’s not just a traffic channel. It’s also an everything channel and sales and fulfillment. Let me just say

do you think that most Amazon sellers when they’re starting on Amazon realize that it’s a traffic strategy? I mean, because in bed if

they do exactly say better, no, I think you’re quite right. It’s like the fish don’t see the sea when they’re swimming it because it’s so damn big III think it’s just everything and of course, because most people don’t, I was the same I came from a music background. I’ve always had a great interest in, in internet marketing and taking a lot of courses and done various things over the years and I’ve always been interested in economics. But I Nevertheless, I saw Amazon as just a thing in itself. And I was pitched into private labeling on Amazon a very, very, very specific model on a very specific channel, but we did everything. So you kind of can’t see the wood for the trees until you, you go through a few rough patches and realize, you know, that you have to see bigger, which is one of I hope the services that we provide the community of e commerce sellers in general out there, for those who are very incented. I want them to see it for what it is. And yes, it’s a traffic place. It’s a sales mechanism. Its fulfillment. Yeah. And so let me know Yes.

Yeah, please. No. Okay. Yeah, I was just gonna say have you have you heard of the dot dash site or the spruce? I have never heard of

this, Bruce. What

is this? Is this reason? Okay. Yeah, we’ll a little story that set the set the The context for this we have a coaching client that I think they’ll probably do close to $5 million plus this year on Amazon and and our work is to help them get their other channels set up, you know, Shopify, etc and really scale beyond. And when we when we dug into when we first meeting with them, we really were just mesmerized by their story like, man, 5 million and you know, they’re relatively new to the category and to the industry, like, you know, three three year old company Well, let me say it this way they you know, they’ve been in the industry for a long time, but they’re new to e commerce and into a product sale. And so we started to explore with him, how did you do this? What you know, what do you what’s happening that’s making this work and, and one of the things they mentioned is that they’re, they’re in quite a good number of top level blog articles that are listicles basically, you know, product type focused blogs. That link to their Amazon product. And then when and then when they said that I was like, Oh, there you go. So if you’re not familiar with the spruce and spruce crafts, there’s a company you probably familiar with about calm fakie Yeah. And yeah, so it was a it was a thing for a long time. And in 2017 it was kind of a failing thing declining thing. And they revamped relaunched. And they turned themselves into a, basically a network of websites. And their value proposition originally was that they had like a million articles, all about different topics. And what they did over the last five years or so was they’ve really focused on what they call these authority articles. And if you look for any search term on Google, one of the things you’ll commonly see at the top of the search results now and then just the last couple years is the spruce or spruce crafts, or you’ll see other properties that are owned By this company, it’s now called dot dash. And these, these guys know what they’re doing in terms of Google organic search algorithm. And they create these authority articles. So let’s just say I’ll just pick a category, totally off topic, but let’s just say they’ll pick a category like up veterinary supplies, and then have an authority article like, you know, the top 50 of veterinary supplies, you know, every vet is using that you never heard of, or, you know, some random, like, clickbait article title. But these, these articles get massively massively trafficked by Google, they’re just they just know how to install them as the number one search result for these keywords. And these guys are data driven science type focus people. And so So anyway, so back to the client. So so when we discovered that, of course, what we looked at was the keywords related to their industry, their category are dominated by the spruce, and these these the site and, and they’re the number one link mentioned in these several of these articles, and it goes to their Amazon site, their Amazon product. And so they’ve gotten massive organic search that’s actually feeding their sales velocity and their outcomes on Amazon and to the to the newbie amazon seller, you don’t know what’s happening, you have no idea. You don’t know there was that that kind of basic blessing like fell into your lap until you start to research it. So anyway, so that’s that dot dash company go check it out go research it it’s a fascinating story and they are eating the internet. In fact there are articles about them that are titled like, you know, they’re eating the internet or whatever. So that’s, that’s something to really understand regardless of whether you’re on Amazon or Ebay or any of the platforms or your own website. So what

what are the lessons that we should take from this then? Let’s go gaming the humble amazon seller for the moment. I know you’re a Shopify fan person but yeah First of all, just to understand what you’re saying is going on is broadly speaking, there’s this sort of network of high authority sites. So they’re creating content that’s going to rank really, really well on on on Google, by the sound of it for quite commercially. So low funnel commercial, you know, words that people can actually click and buy at some point. So what should we take from this was with these guys, the spruce your clients? Your clients know that your plants aren’t the spruce? Are they? Or are they the spruce? I’m getting? No, no, no,

no, no. So the

spruce is the same as dot dash, right? Correct. It’s okay to some brand and that’s a sub brand and that’s the new version of the band on Comm. You got you. So your clients, did they consciously engineer this or was this just they like it was okay, what a blessing. Okay, total luck. So my question is, can we reverse engineer that engineer their luck into a strategy and by the way, this sounds like a specific podcast to me because that that’s going to be an episode all about me. Very specific version of, of, of, you know, Google. Okay, great. Well, that’s the date. Let’s do that. We’ll just use that here. Because that just feels like we’re, you know, we’re on a mission to look about these nine mountains of traffic. Yeah. Big Picture, and then driving. But let me just answer briefly the question that you’re asking. Can you reverse engineer This is that is the mountaineers question. Okay, you

know, like, let’s play with the metaphor a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. The The question is, can you go to that mountain? And can you fix the plumbing so that you get massive traffic from that mountain? And, you know, so that that’s a great question. And the first thing to do is you got to know the lay of the land. You got to know what what what are these mountains and organic you know, referral and organic search that were the two elements of you know, what this Bruce does, they’re, they’re technically the client is getting organic referral traffic to their Amazon listing from an article in the spruce and the spruce is getting it ranked in organic search. So you just have to learn this stuff before you can start to say how can I profit from it? You know, how can I benefit from it? And then that goes down to a rabbit hole of many, many, many tactics and strategies, you know, for every one of the mountains, there’s 25 tactics or whatever, you know, I mean, it’s that’s how I look at it.

So I guess it’s a bit like what we’re saying is okay, that mountain is mountain is Everest and, and the face of the Eiger is the the thing that we’re looking at. Okay, well, yeah, but so the general lesson from this reverse engineering know the lay of the land or what the elements are, and then I guess we should definitely dig into that one. Um, but I think we should leave that hanging because otherwise we’re gonna have an episode all about amazing result. I mean, listen, we all want what you just said. that’s a that’s a juicy nugget, but we’re going to leave that one there. So okay. Have you seen other Amazon sellers using external traffic for their listings? That is the other question I like to see.

That’s a good question. Yeah. I mean, in the first thing that comes to my mind is everybody using a ms of course is using paid they’re really using a paid What would it be called? paid? What would you category MSS? In my nine mountains? Is it paid search or pay? It’s paid something it’s paid display technically,

you’re gonna say these days on Amazon’s either got quite a few options that are suddenly available on Seller Central that used to be only available on vendor Central, which was for people who are foolish enough to sell directly to Amazon. Amazon is not a good client guys do not sell. I there’s so few people I don’t think I know anyone who’s happy with them. But anyway, yes, so I would say a paid search I guess you mean paid to rank in search results, I would say that’s that’s the products and classic Amazon sponsored product ads. And then paid display is is the new thing which I did an interview about recently. And actually there’s a lot coming out very swiftly from Amazon. You can do video, paid display ads now. So you’re almost like the Facebook kind of thing. You know, set that it’s it’s a blend between, you could still call it pay Search, though, because it’s really in response to search term. Yeah, I guess so paid search, I guess.

So I would say, you know, there’s a bifurcation between on platform and off platform, obviously, on Etsy you can do promoted, you know, listings on Etsy on eBay, you can do promoted listings. on Amazon, of course, you got the whole HMS platform to play with. So but then beyond that, of course, you’ve got all of the external off marketplace, you know, strategies as well, of course. And so, you know, I think the question and I like to say this to everybody, this can be super overwhelming. And so we must channel our inner Bruce Lee. And really think like, you know, Bruce Lee’s famous quote, Bruce Lee’s famous quote, I do not fear the man who knows 10,000 kicks. I fear the man who knows or whatever I’m messing up the quote, but you but I fear the man who’s practiced one kick 10,000 times and you know, like, so. You don’t have to, you don’t have to know all the nine mountains or all the tactics to really make just a fantastic living. If you’re an email marketer, for example, and you just know email marketing, you forget everything else. You know, I mean, make millions with email marketing, if you’re super good at organic social, and you just crush it because you’re an influencer and you know how to do content. And all you do is organic, social great. I mean, you know, you don’t have to dabble in all of these. In fact, most people probably do dabble and don’t really go deep into anything enough when they start to get into this stuff, you know,

so, so this is a very interesting question for me because this this is about I guess you and I both have a bit of an obsession with strategic thinking and that’s really cool. And I think I’m very happy to be putting that out there into the e commerce space because particularly for Amazon sellers, but not only everyone gets a bit obsessive to one particular chat channel and bit yen tactical but even worse, Channel tactical obsess, like, what’s the latest icon Shopify really gets your Amazon account on Amazon sellers do often have Shopify stores, they often they’re not necessarily always a big percentage of the business. We talked about how that can, you know, you work with clients to make it bigger. But you know, I guess the opposite extreme is the overwhelm that comes from looking at the entire mountain means that you’ve got near you. And I understand that that you you’ve got this because Seattle, I looked it up, I didn’t realize that my brain knew that this whole mountain range that you were inspired in. It’s like the Alps really for Europeans is huge. And I guess if I were looking at that, I’d be going shoot, where do I start? And I hear the opposite, which is okay, Master one thing. I guess the question is, which what how do you decide which mountain you should Master? That’s the question that I’m working towards. So that’s

a no, it’s a great question. And I think the answer depends on each individual person in terms of how they would prioritize them, and I would give you a few hints. One of the things that you’ll have to discover very, very quickly about yourself as whether you enjoy writing or you enjoy video work or photography I mean of those three disciplines you know some people say I hate writing I just I hate it it’s pain to write. Other people say that’s my natural communication style. Some people are super comfortable on camera. And you know what’s amazing to me is you know, because I know like all of us probably have really just gotten into finding my own YouTube channels that I like and you mind topics I’m gardening is my kind of big thing I like to I like to watch gardeners on TV and then avoid going in my own backyard. So anybody else’s like that, but yeah, like I’m trying. Exactly. So but you know, you get into this down this rabbit hole of video watching on YouTube and stuff. And what you realize is there are people who are just comfortable on you on video has nothing to do with their physical appearance or they’re not pretty people are necessarily you know, smarter anything to just comfortable on video. And, and they’re good at it. And so that’s one of the primary things you’ll have to sort out is, you know, are you good at one of those three disciplines? And if the answer is I hate all three of those things, then you have to decide how you’re going to approach the topic of traffic strategies, and maybe it’s team building. And you know, I mean, you have to sort out how am I going to go after this stuff?

So those three things were just to capture that saris writing video and being on camera and photography. Okay, so when you say photography, you mean? Sure? I guess you mean literally yourself taking photos of products. It sounds like a dumb question, but it’s not so hard to do. I mean, I’ve got an iPhone. I’ve even got an actual nice single lens reflex camera, but I very rarely do the actual product photography. So that’s why the question, I guess,

yeah, I mean, some people really obsess over photography and they love it. It’s kind of a hobbyist type approach. And so obviously with e commerce selling you get two core photography skill sets. You get product photography, and you get editorial or lifestyle photography, you know, the, the product out in the wild kind of photography. And you know, these are the core assets that you bring to the party in terms of traffic strategy words, video and, and pictures. I’m pretty sure that that’s all you get. Maybe you get something else. You get talking, I guess podcasting, but he’s

about to say that but I mean, I guess that we’re on camera right now and so yeah, some people are probably comfortable behind the mic but not on camera. So I would differentiate slightly as a podcaster. But having said that, for e commerce, it’s an insert question of can podcasts become more of a thing for e commerce? It certainly hasn’t been so far. Right. So I guess it’s a it’s a fair division. So yeah, you were saying if you don’t enjoy any of those things, then I guess there’s a kind of implicit full scale, which is hiring people to love those things. Yeah,

yeah.

Right. What have you seen in reality about some examples from your clients will yourself or anybody else that have a success and a failure? say,

Yeah,

well, we get a lot of people who have, we work with clients who are successful sellers on the marketplaces, and frequently they want to build or scale or, you know, fix up their Shopify work. I think the ones that I’ve seen that have failed,

have failed at the branding level.

In many ways, and and the brand is so fragmented, scattered and, and disorganized or not thoughtful, that it makes it almost impossible to create a traffic strategy that’s coherent. You know, and that’s a common problem. And it’s a problem for sometimes Amazon sellers who sometimes I mean, you know, some some examples come to my mind a category of example is people who have created a private label product that’s really a thinly threw brand for Amazon. It’s just a name really, and they haven’t worried about whether it’s legally available or you know, all that kind of stuff and so they You know, those people when they want to come off of Amazon have a real problem. And, you know, so those are the downsides on the positive sides. We have clients who just crush it when they know their product sourcing strategy and they’ve got that nailed down and then and they they’ll focus on a good quality you know, Shopify site is our use case that we bring people through the process for and, and really understand their audience because the first assets we ask them to start thinking on are a free how to guide or, you know, free ebook type product info product, but then also blogging content in association with their niche or industry and, and that triggers a whole set of traffic related, you know, opportunities. You know, once you get good blog content, and a few graphics or images associated with those blogs, that can then be posted socially. It can be promoted with paid ads. etc, etc, etc. I mean, it creates content for your email, marketing and all those kinds of things start to just galvanize around good solid resource, you know, content for your ideal customer and doesn’t matter what category it’s in, you know, it’s, if you’ve got a customer and they have a need, you’ve got they’ve got a problem and you’re part of the solution. Then you just think through holistically How can you add to that through writings or videos, etc, etc. Yeah.

Makes sense. Okay, so

we get from here.

Mind Blow. Yeah.

Yeah. So I guess what you’re saying is the amount is divided up. So this is I suppose in a way, what you’ve talked about isn’t so much a division of the mountains as

the

there’s another sort of division. Isn’t that in glasses? Yeah. between the different media so that the I don’t mean media as in, you’re on Google versus Facebook. I mean, is it written? Is it visual? Is it

a modality of the collegiality if you like, Yeah.

All right. So that’s one thing. But how does that I guess email marketing is writing. So that makes it simple. I’m just looking through and just thinking, organic social Pinterest. I guess it’s accounting social is interesting, because most of it is actually quite visual. When you think about it. Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, mean, Facebook, you kind of generally combined words with Facebook these days, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the whole topic of organic social is, I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s a good dozen topics in there that we should dig into one at a time, I would suppose. But um, yeah. I would just say one of the things that you’ll want to ask yourself as a top level question is not what organic? Why not what, you know, social sites are popular. That’s the wrong question. The question is, which social sites send traffic? And that’s a very different question, because, as an e commerce seller, you don’t care if it’s popular. As much as you care whether it’s willing to send you traffic, and really in a lot of ways, that’s where Pinterest becomes sort of in most people’s mind. They think a Pinterest like, man, not so much. Not really my thing. But if I said to you, Hey, man, Pinterest will send you literally truckloads of traffic to your website, your product if you sorted out, right? Better than Instagram, better than tik tok better than YouTube, better than Twitter. And if I start to say, Well, you know, how does this work? I mean, that that’s a very different conversation than just what’s popular, you know, because what’s popular is, you know, that’s, it’s so fleeting. But you know, and it changes and right now tic tocs all the rage and before that, it was Snapchat and you know, before that it was Instagram and, you know, the younger the demographic is the different you know, changes over time and then you know, if your audience is all 60 year old folks, and you want to be on Facebook and but you know, so that’s Different. Popular is different than traffic’s ending. And that’s I think the main question I would ask people to stew on, think about.

So I’ve seen

I’ve seen Ashley do some great work, just it’s kind of in quite early days, I think it’s fair to say but with Pinterest and his view of interest is that he treats it more like Google. So from that point of view, I’m I guess, naturally, I would put it in with organic social, but actually, he’s thinking of it more like I guess, organic search because he thinks that people treat treat you that way. And actually, you can kind of do Pinterest SEO that’s quite similar to Google SEO,

which is very interesting. He’s saying that because that’s what Pinterest says they are. Pinterest says they’re not a social media site. Pinterest says they’re a visual discovery engine. And they categorize themselves as being competitive with Google, not competitive with the social media platforms. And they so that’s a whole fascinating twist and in So yeah, I mean, I totally agree with Ashley that that perspective is right because and Pinterest just as context I mean, we’ll send monthly view our monthly viewers on Pinterest is about 1.4 million monthly views on Pixi fair, you can go check out what we do. So I wrote a book on this in 2011. And because it had just revolutionized our, our e commerce effort, and even to this day, it outpaces all the other you know, it doesn’t matter if you compare to the other social medias or not, it outpaces almost everything else. It’s on par with Google organic search for us.

So that’s how you discover that that I mean, obviously that’s an amazing result. And so obviously, you’re naturally in love with Pinterest and you’ve written that book about that but you’ve written books about many different channels. And I’ve seen you know, a number of channels I’ve had little plays at it myself, always successfully with e commerce and with Amazing FBA and my clients in 10 k collective but how does one come to that place? I mean you got there is now obvious looking back down from the top of the Mountain Oh, very near the top. 1.2 million is an amazing number. But how did you choose it?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I remember it very vividly. When we were in the early days of our business, we started on eBay in 2007 2008. And then we started on our own website in like 2009. And I would so you know, 2009 2010 2011, I would look at our analytics a lot Google Analytics for the back end of our website, and I was just looking. Every day I’d look what’s happening. How many visitors did we get? Where are people coming from? How does this work? You know, how do I make money? How do I make more money fast? And so I remember the summer of 2011, I started seeing this thing. referral traffic from pinterest.com hadn’t heard of it. No idea. I mean, it was like literally in your mind like the spruce like, what is that? I have no idea. back then. To me Pinterest is I’ve never heard of this. And so first month, and I was like, Who cares? You know, it wasn’t that much traffic. It was online. You know, shortlist made a top 10 or whatever. But I just figured it was a blogger or something like that. second month, it was like twice as much traffic. And this is like summertime, you know, 2000 2011 I believe. And so and then third, third month, it was like my second or third best traffic source. And I was and so of course, I mean, at that point, I was like, uh, what is this? So I go to it, check it out. I was like, What is this research and of course, discovered what it was. And and so how it had impacted us how that happened was nothing to do with me. It was just that I had a website that had nice photography. And the Pinterest community of raving Pinterest users started to pin items off of our website, and they started to get socially, you know, repin repin repend a million times. And, and that was the blessing or luck that we had was that we were early into Photography on our website. And, and it just fueled Pinterest. You know, as people would find Pinterest, they find their topics, they look at their, you know, crew setting their boards up, and they would find content and it would point back to our site. And we’ve lived off that now for whatever it is 10 years, whatever, almost 10 years. And and I’m not, I mean, literally liftoff. You know, it has helped us tremendously. And so, and then what I did in the fall of 2011 was I created a battle plan for Pinterest. And that’s what marketing on Pinterest comm was that blog was about and I shared my public marketing strategies that I started put together and wrote the book, I started blogging and got a book deal from McGraw Hill for that. And, and that book is still completely relevant in terms of this overall strategy. But of course, it’s very, very dated in terms of the stats and you know, all the all the details related to Pinterest, but The battle plan of just general marketing. Still still the same still works. And yeah,

so I guess what you’re saying is, you

took the what was Yeah.

Well, you got lucky, you notice that you’re getting lucky. And then you consciously, you know, when after what was working, he said to that? Yeah, so maybe that’s, I guess one of the issues Amazon sellers have that is different is that you can’t look at the analytics because Google Analytics is massive. Yep. Amazon doesn’t really show you where this is coming from, which is why your clients were agreeably surprised to find things just works. And maybe they thought it worked like that way. Everyone gets to $5 million within three years on Amazon, and some people do I know a couple people out but not many. And yeah, and I guess that you were the guys that then dug into the reverse engineering that but how did you reverse engineer that then did you because that is tricky. You know, if I

was Yeah, you know, I think it’s a little bit I know not to MIT. Not I’m not a doctor. Do I play one on the internet or in podcasting, but it’s a little bit but like a conversation with discovery, like, you know, just like, How did this happen? And they would say, well, there’s, we have these articles we have been ranked, but they just didn’t understand. I mean, I just had a framework that I brought to the party that explained to them what was happening more than they understood themselves what was happening, because they didn’t understand the volumes of traffic. I mean, like, you know, there’s, if somebody said, Well, I got mentioned by a blogger, I’m like, that’s cool. Well, who’s the blogger, Ilan musk? Well, I mean, you know, I mean, these things are, there’s orders of magnitude of difference between, you know, some blogs versus others. And so, so that was the only reverse engineering I was just I’m familiar with these topics. I’ve lived this for 10 years. I’ve tried to keep in my you know, my ear to the railroad tracks to understand what’s happening and many people you just go do this yourself and go to comScore Comm. If you’re not familiar with that site, and see what The largest properties on the internet are and you can see it doesn’t say what the rougher the largest refers are. It doesn’t have the rougher lens like you know, who’s sending the most traffic. But it does tell you the biggest properties and you’ll see Pinterest is, is in that top 50 list from comScore. The spruce or dot dash dashes there, they’re collectively and BuzzFeed and you know, other sites like that that are sending, you know, in a chat traffic type thing, Reddit, that kind of stuff. Yeah.

So, I guess the main thing that came out of this I mean, it’s sort of some juicy stories, some exciting you know, your experience with Pinterest, your class experience with getting ranked on blogs, kind of in both cases by accident by the sound of it, but I guess let’s let’s pitch it to two different audiences. Let’s say first of all, the Amazon seller who’s emerging Blinky into sunlight, realizing that Amazon has provided them lots of organic traffic up till now but it’s making them pay a bigger and bigger percentage gradually, like a frog being boiled. You know, it’s it, you don’t notice it. But if you look over the year, you’ll go right, my cost of advertising as a percentage of my revenue has gone from, you know, 7% to 12%. Next year, we guess 12 to 15%, that maybe your profit margin is being squeezed. So for that person, then how do they what’s the starting point, because this is a big area, you guys have stumbled into things more by luck in some ways, and then you accentuate that. It’s hard for Amazon sellers to reverse engineer in the same way. So what’s your advice to somebody in that situation?

Well, if you’re if you’re a big focus, if you’re a platform seller and Amazon, let’s just use this use case, I would ask yourself the question, can I create an off Amazon strategy that creates traffic that I can send on to Amazon and in that case made so the question is, are you brand on Amazon or not a brand or your random seller of random items are using have, you know sort of a collection that is cohesive, so topical. So you know, you have to solve these problems and then choose a strategy that you think will deliver on that outcome. It could be as simple as setting up a social media account where or my facebook group, for example, that is if it’s relevant to a topic that you can frequently address cohesively create a group around, then maybe that’s an angle, maybe it’s just setting up a Twitter account, maybe it’s setting up an Instagram account. But you have to think through how do I get off Amazon traffic onto it and and so that’s, that’s for somebody who’s focused on a mess maybe it’s just learning how to spend a little bit of money every month, 50 bucks 100 bucks on paid traffic strategies that you send to Amazon and you stack the traffic. And I that’s a phrase we like to talk to people about too is traffic stop stalking. And, and if you learn to do that, let’s you know, let’s say you learn to set To set your own traffic pattern, and you learn to send traffic to your Amazon listings and trap and stack it, then you change the game. And you take a little bit of control not away from Amazon, but you add a layer of control. Yeah. So that you can then of course redirect anytime you want to do and the main thing about traffic is of course, he who controls it controls the destiny of many many things in your business. I mean, it’s just you know, if you can control your own traffic, you control your destiny in terms of how you make money. So that’s, that’s for a marketplace seller for somebody who has their own Shopify site. It’s really struggling with traffic, I would have a different sequence and happy to share that one too.

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