Making Decisions with Data and Tech | Cameron Blake
Today I speak with Cameron Blake of Ashford Creative.
Cameron Blake has worked in the digital marketing space for more than 8 years and is the Founder of Ashford Creative, a digital agency that helps clients generate business outcomes and accelerate growth for clients through creative solutions, innovative strategies, and marketing campaigns.
As part of leading Ashford Creative, Cameron has worked hard to build long-lasting relationships with clients and partners.
With over 300 projects and campaigns managed, Cameron and his team know how important it is to let the data guide design and strategy.
He lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his wife Brittany and their two children.
Reach Cameron Blake at https://ashfordcreative.com.
You can always find more at https://amybiddle.me, including training, blog posts, and all of the podcast episodes (go to the website for full podcast transcripts) as they're released. Make sure to opt-in for emails when you're at the site so you get the exclusive content as it's released.
Mentioned on today's episode is a book I wrote called, "Retailer's Email Playbook: The 67-Point Master Plan You Can Start Using Right Now to Add 30% or More to Your Bottom Line". Available now in paperback and Kindle versions here: https://amzn.to/3lY2U97
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Full transcript of the episode:
It can't be a guessing game because otherwise you're going
to just waste money on thinking that this is the
best thing for the business when in reality the data
is showing this and this data is correct.
Welcome to the Traffic Handler podcast.
We're about getting new customers, making more
sales, and growing your ecommerce retail business.
I'm your host, Amy Biddle.
Today's episode features the conversation I
had with Cameron Blake of Ashford Creative,
a digital agency that helps clients generate
business outcomes and accelerate growth through creative
solutions, innovative strategies, and marketing campaigns.
With over 300 projects and campaigns managed, Cameron
and his team know how important it is
to let data guide design and strategy.
We had fun having these conversations today.
I've worked with Cameron for a number of years now.
It was good to kick back and throw
ideas around about projects that we collaborated on.
Enjoy today's episode.
Let's have some fun.
Let's do it. All right.
So everybody, I want to welcome
Cameron Blake to the podcast today.
This will be a fun episode for me,
particularly because Cameron and I work together.
And one of the things that I like to offer in the
business is... you can be a fly on the wall, watch other
businesses take off and learn a lot on the way.
So every time I talk to Cameron, I
learn tons because he's the WordPress guy.
And when I go to Ashford Creative and I go and
talk to Cameron, it's because I'm out of ideas on tech
and he's got all the answers and all the resources and
it's WordPress solutions and a whole lot more.
So we're going to cover a lot of that today and
whatever else comes up because really now you're a fly on
the wall and you're listening to a couple of tech people
who know how to move the needle for big businesses.
So Cameron Blake, welcome to the podcast. Great.
Thanks, Amy.
I'm happy to maybe give some people some insight
on some of our conversations that we always have.
We have quite a few of them and a
lot of it is good ideas and solving problems
and I think we're a good team at that.
So excited to chat today for sure.
Yes, it's really going to be great.
And you're right, it is all about the
solutions because business is about solving problems.
Any kind of business, whether you're big in health care
or you're big in retail or you're big in some
of the other ones that we've worked on.
I mean, a lot.
It's about solving problems.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think another one would be brick and mortar.
Yeah, we've done a couple of those
and it's really just kind of stepping
back and understanding what the problem is.
We talk a lot about everybody thinks they know
the solution, but they don't really know the solution.
One of your big things is asking
why do you want to do that?
And we've kind of added that into our aspects
of our business, too, is trying to really understand
it because pushing just a service or something like
that, just because that's what they think they need,
it's not necessarily the best thing for the business.
That's right.
And so just kind of taking a step back and let's
look at all the options and see what's going to generate
the most revenue, the most ROI for the business. Yeah.
To kind of go through these
because every project is different.
Every single one. Yeah.
And I'm really glad that you started there,
too, because so many people think, let's just
start running ads and let's go.
How many people have you and I worked with?
How many businesses of all different sizes where
they're not necessarily ready for paid traffic? Yeah.
No, I mean, the technical side has to be set up.
The analytics has to be installed, the
Facebook Pixel has to be installed.
All that stuff has to be set up
before you're ready to start doing that.
And ideally months before you're
ready to start doing that.
Because you want to be able to gather that
information and use that to create the ads.
That's right.
Or make decisions based on the data
that you receive in Google Analytics.
Because otherwise you're just kind of guessing. Right.
And we all think we know what the best option is.
But the data is going to tell us every time.
Every time I tell people all the time, listen, we're
not going to make decisions based on things that you
and I like, because our opinions matter little.
It's the market that will tell us it's the
customers and clients and, you know, the people who
want whatever it is that we're selling, those are
the people whose opinions we want and we want
them to vote with their wallets.
That's right.
Data metrics dollars. Yeah.
When you break it down like that, it's pretty simple,
but it's just a process that needs to be followed.
And it can't be a guessing game because otherwise you're
going to just waste money on thinking that this is
the best thing for the business when in reality the
data is showing this and this data is correct.
Yeah. Really.
The numbers tell the story for sure.
You could lie with numbers, but if you're looking
at raw data, you're looking at a story.
And there have been many times when you and I
have been looking at, let's say we go into Google
Analytics or Google search console and we're looking at all
the information that the traffic or lack of traffic in
some cases gives to a business.
And it tells you what the next
step should be all the time. Yeah.
It's right there for you.
A lot of fun.
So one of the things I'm looking at, my
notes over here, one of the things that you
and I run into a lot is platform specific.
We've had some clients that have custom websites.
But for the most part we're looking at Shopify
or WordPress and we've worked on a couple of
projects even just in the last year about are
they going to choose WordPress or Shopify?
And you're the guy with the WordPress chops.
But I've also brought you in on some
of the more technical things with Shopify.
Let's jam just for a minute on how
to choose which one you're looking at. Sure.
I think that there's actually a
couple more than that as well.
You have your WooCommerce, which is WordPress,
and then you have your Shopify.
Square is another one that can
be used as an online store.
It's not nearly as intuitive as Shopify
WooCommerce, but that's definitely an option.
Then another one would be BigCommerce.
I don't know if you've done any work with
them, but I would say that they are probably
more of a wholesale type ecommerce platform.
They can do all kinds of stuff.
Of course they're a big competitor to Shopify, but I
think every e commerce platform kind of serves a purpose.
If you're looking at Square, I would say
it's probably very small brick and mortar boutiques
that just want to get online.
They just want to get online, have something there,
be able to manage inventory effectively in selling store.
Shopify, in my opinion, is more geared towards
people that are focused on selling online.
And then the great thing about Shopify is that you can sign
up for the point of sale and also sell in store.
Or maybe you're at a convention and you have
all this product that you can sell at the
convention too, and everything kind of goes together.
Inventory is managed and all
that, and then WooCommerce.
I feel like it's more of a kind
of an extension of a core business.
I don't know if you're an ecommerce first store.
I don't think that WooCommerce is the best option.
Don't get me wrong.
Like you can build it.
You can build any kind of store on WooCommerce.
It's a fine platform, but if you're
holding me against the wall, choose one.
I'm going to pick Shopify
if we're running something through.
If you have a main ecommerce business selling spices or
something like that, and that's your brand with WooCommerce, it's
kind of insane what all you can do.
I've actually built a ticketing
platform off of WooCommerce.
I love that that actually integrates into Square, and we
use Square point of sale at the event itself.
So all the reporting is in Square.
All the tickets are handled through WooCommerce.
They actually send emails with the tickets and prints them off,
and then we scan them in at the ticket booth.
Or if they want to purchase
tickets, they do it through Square.
But then all the reporting is right there.
So you can use multiple platforms
based on what your needs are.
It can get complicated.
You can keep it very simple.
It just kind of depends.
Another thing is the inventory management aspect of
it, which I mean, once you get into
that, that's a whole another ballgame.
If you're selling on multiple channels, on Amazon,
on Shopify, Etsy, whatever, there's a lot of
channels you got to handle multichannel.
So that's a different ballgame.
So it kind of just depends on where
the company is at that point in time.
How much money they have to spend
is another big part of that.
What are they trying to accomplish?
How easy are they going to want to make
it on themselves or do they want to make
it a little bit harder but cheaper?
So it just kind of depends.
It's usually not quite that simple either.
It's like, okay, if I have ten grand
to build a store, figuring out also the
cost of goods, profit margins, after marketing costs,
any overhead, are we drop shipping?
Do we have to manage a warehouse?
Are we using 3PL for
fulfillment, Facebook, FBA, Merchant fulfillment?
Yeah, I was trying to keep it simple
and you just, oh, no, I'm going to
throw the whole thing against the wall. That's it.
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today at Schemaapp.com. So I think for listeners
specifically, it's choosing a platform just based on your
capacity for the technology, your team's capacity for technology
and building systems around all of that.
Is that kind of what you're yeah, I
would say from a core business standpoint, like
you said, like a content writer, a copywriter.
Maybe you want to sell ebooks, maybe you want to
sell some T-shirts or hats if you have that
sort of a brand, but it's not your main business.
So maybe you have some type of service that you do.
Maybe it's consulting and then
you have these additional packages.
So it's just kind of like being able to
plug it into the website where it's all on
the same domain and it's just very clean.
Everybody... there's a smooth checkout
experience, all of that.
One thing I see with people sometimes with Shopify is
they'll have like a main site that's built on WordPress
and then they have their Shopify store and it's like,
you know, it's not even a clean domain or URL.
It's like my Shopify URL and it's just little
things like that that I think you can improve.
You can just do and it improves the whole experience.
Even if you do have your store on Shopify, just
make it shop your Domain.com to make it cleaner.
And you can kind of link back and forth
between the two to give them a clean experience
and really understand your business and all that.
So I don't know. Did I answer your question?
I kind of realized. Absolutely.
And you opened up like eight more doors.
So the one that I'm going
to walk through is customer experience.
User experience. UX.
And so looking at the domain or the subdomain.
So the subdomain in that example that
you just gave for anybody who's not
familiar, shop is the subdomain. MyStore.com.
So MyStore.com MyStore is the domain.
And just looking at details like that as
part of the elegance and putting together the
whole project, one of my favorites is favicons.
Every time I look at a website and I
see just that little 16x16 pixel picture
on the tab in the browser that tells me
that whoever built that actually knows about the details,
they can go into a store and store branding.
Branding isn't where we start, but it certainly is
an important part of the journey, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's funny, I had a partner of mine that mentioned that
as we were reviewing a site to get ready to launch,
she was like, I saw you put the favicon up there.
That's awesome.
It's just little things like that are super important.
When you talk about customer experience, I think
it's important just to not overdo it.
Just keep it simple.
We always talk about the customer journey right when they
lay on the page, whether it's a store, whether it's
a corporate site, whatever it is, it's got to guide
the user from point A to point B.
Like, you guide them, you tell them where you want them
to go to take an action, if it's fill out a
form, if it's a phone call, if it's to purchase a
best selling product, maybe only have two or three products, get
them to where they can make that decision very easily.
There are some sites where it takes you
twelve clicks to get to where you want
to go, and that's just terrible.
I always tell members in my group, you got to make
it dirt dumb simple and make it stupid easy for people
just to empty their wallets into your shopping cart.
Yeah, but I will say, just because it's simple
doesn't mean it needs to look simple, too.
There are very important things that you can do, such
as adding imagery in to give it some life.
Choosing the right font.
That is a big thing for me.
Choosing the right font, like,
let's not do Comic Sans. Oh no!
You know, it's got to be a clean
font that matches the brand and the product.
There are some premium fonts that you can choose
that can change the entire look of a website.
So that goes into user experience, too.
And then just the difference of colors.
Choosing colors is also big because a super bright red
button that says Buy Now is not necessarily going to
be the best choice in a lot of regards.
You know, there's all kinds of things
in user experience, and it really just
kind of depends on what they're offering?
Yeah, absolutely.
I was just thinking of product descriptions.
If you're looking at an e commerce
store, product descriptions, collection descriptions, alt Tags,
meta Tags, some of my favorite things,
they're hidden and they're not optional.
Structured data, not optional.
I think the product descriptions.
I know that other stuff is important, too.
But from what people can look at, if they go visit
a site, maybe they listen to this and they start browsing
sites and like, okay, I'm kind of getting an idea.
How does Amazon do it?
How does Best Buy do it?
Even I'm trying to think of some other non
large retail store, but just look at it.
How do they lay out the product descriptions?
What kind of icons do they use to draw attention
to some important things that they want to highlight?
How are the images laid out?
Is it clean?
Is it clean on mobile and on desktop?
Because those are two different experiences, too. Right?
And making sure that it all kind of
flows together is super important every time.
And things like not just the words, but are
you saying enough about what the product is?
Here's another one.
How your competitors are doing things.
Are they doing something that we should (I'm never
going to say steal) but you could appropriate some
aspects of how your competitors do things or you
want to do the polar opposite to stand out. Sure.
I'm thinking back to just kind of something simple
that we did for back probably two years ago.
She had this jewelry site, and she was pretty successful
with it, but she needs some help, like just kind
of cleaning it up and making it easier.
And so what we did was we got our
new theme, we reorganized the site, map, the menu
up top, and we added some of those little
circle color selections and just kind of reorganize it.
And her sales went through the roof.
It was like 250% after that.
It was crazy, but it's just small tweaks like
that can make a big difference every time. Every time.
And those decisions that we were making about the
store and the process, this was based on data
that wasn't based on we think it would be
nice to do whatever this is.
We think it's cool to add this thing.
In the 90s, it was flashing banners and
stupid looking, and that ship has sailed.
That doesn't work anymore and just turns people off.
But back to the beginning of our conversation,
when we make decisions based on real data,
how people are using the site.
There are tools like you can look at Lucky Orange or
Hot Jar and look at heat maps on how people are
using web pages on the site and get real data.
I was working on a project with
another partner a few years ago.
We installed, it was Hot Jar we used on that one.
And it turned out that people were clicking
on a thing that wasn't even a link.
No click, hundreds of clicks on
this one image that wasn't even.
So guess what we did.
We installed a link on that thing
because everybody wanted it to go someplace.
So that was right.
That's how you make that's how you let the data talk.
Who knew that people wanted that to be a link?
It's wouldn't have guessed it, but there it was.
So we just put a link there,
makes people happy, and then the store
owners happy because they're making more sales.
So it's always a helpful thing.
Let's talk for a minute.
I think the next thing is it's kind of a leap, but
also part of something that we have to put into design.
But it's compliance issues.
So compliance means things like GDPR, which
is the European cookie disclosure, CCPA.
There's another one coming out of California this
summer, and other States, I think Virginia is
lined up to go live with theirs.
Puerto Rico is lined up to
go live with their Privacy disclosure.
And Puerto Rico is supposed to be pretty stiff also.
But other things like Privacy policy, terms of service,
physical address, copyright information, all these things have to
be incorporated into the site and the site still
has to look good and work properly. Yes.
No small feat. No pressure.
All those things are definitely important.
I'm sure anybody's gone and seen the cookie things
pop up on the sites now, along with all
the other things that pop up on the site.
Yeah.
Making sure that it's still a decent user experience.
Using that. Right.
For the privacy and the terms depends on where you are.
I would definitely recommend purchasing
that from somebody or lawyer.
If you're making some money, it's better to be
protected by somebody that knows what they're writing about
or there's companies that will write it for you.
How many times do I meet someone and right
at the beginning of the association between them and
us, and I'm doing the audit on the business
and I look in the footer of the website
and, oh, none of the required information is there.
So the site is out of all kinds of compliance.
But again, it has to look pretty. Yeah.
And those should be like standard items
that you add in on every site. Right.
So the developer if you hire
a developer, that should be standard.
That shouldn't be a thing.
After the fact of we forgot about that.
It should be very clean.
You can still make it clean, but
the details have to be there. Right.
Compliance is a huge issue.
I don't want to spend a whole lot of
time on it because it's not as much fun.
Let's talk about inventory for ecommerce businesses, because that's
something that when you're going, for example, from a
brick and mortar store, which may have two or
300 SKUs, and then you go to an online
store, one of the biggest questions is do you
want to put the whole offline store online?
I've had clients who did very well with one
product stores, and they had one product and they
push it out there and they're making five figures
a day on this one product store.
But then I've had others that
had tens of thousands of SKUs.
And it's only because what they're offering, they
haven't removed stuff that they're either out of
stock on, which, by the way, creates a
nightmare problem for running catalog ads.
So that's a matter of housekeeping.
But it's also like, how many
products do you want to offer?
And one of the other questions that I always run
into is if you're going to leave your digital marketing
campaigns with, say, two or three of your best products,
is that going to get you the result?
Because you always have to think forward.
Is that going to get the result that you
want to be able to say, okay, these sales
represent our customers, and we're going to sell to
them for an infinite amount of time.
So you always have to think of
the lifetime value of the customer.
There's an inventory question about that.
Like, what are the best sellers?
So am I going to sell them this
particular cargo bag, whatever carry tote whatever it
is, and does that purchaser lead me to
selling them something else down the road?
So the digital store, the online store, may
be managed differently than the brick and mortar.
Anyway, it's just part of the planning.
You and I spent a lot
of time talking about planning with.
Yeah, I think in that example, there's a boutique that's close
to where we live, and my wife goes in there and
I just kind of go in there and I'm like, okay.
But it seems to me like there's 87,000
different products, little trinkets and things like that.
I don't think you should put
all of that on the website.
You know what I mean?
Pick out maybe some higher ticket items,
choose some of your best sellers.
I mean, still fill out the site.
But like you said, you don't have to do the
entire catalog because then that just becomes a nightmare.
If you have one off items and stuff like
that, just sell them in the store or if
they've been in the store for three months, then
put them online and just keep them online.
You just got to kind of play with it a
little bit just to see what's going to work best.
But sell the products, you know, are going to sell
online and then just kind of you have that little
middle range area of products that sell okay.
Or maybe not sell okay.
So trying to piece that
together, of course, is challenging.
Not everybody has the correct result, but yeah, we
could test we could say, okay, we're going to
feature these two products for three months, a quarter
or across two quarters, and say, okay, we're going
to aim to sell X to this audience because
products are always about who we're selling to. Right?
Yeah.
So are we going to feature these
two or five products in the store?
And how are we going to do that?
If we get good results, what are
we going to sell them next? Right.
So that's a robust marketing. Yeah.
How do you keep coming back?
Yeah, exactly.
Good customer experience on the site,
quick shipping, they get the product.
Another thing, too, is packaging. Packaging. Yeah.
That's super important because that's
your first impression with them.
Realistically.
First, hands on impression whenever
you buy something online.
I mean, Amazon has the custom tape.
That's about it.
But Amazon doesn't necessarily need it.
I've seen quite a few that just they have some
really nice either bubble wrap or if it's in a
box and they have a card, it may seem pointless
to spend that extra money to do that.
But in the long term, like
you said, we're looking long term.
We're not just looking for one sale.
We're looking for a long term customer
and building that relationship through the packaging.
It's very important.
It's huge. It really is.
And it doesn't have to be super expensive.
If you're at a point in your business
where you can only afford white boxes, just
make sure they don't feel like cheap boxes.
And you can get, I don't know, the cost
of this little maybe a three inch gold foil
sticker with your business name on it. Yeah.
Get a roll of those and stick it on
the box and throw a little bit of confetti
packing in there, some ecologically responsible shipping padding.
And it's not expensive. Yeah.
And I would say even like, you can
get a postcard done and just like a
handwritten note, something easy, go to Instagram, share
it on Instagram or Facebook or whatever.
The speaking of packaging and postcards, if you're selling on
Amazon and we've got a way of helping with that.
So if a business is let's say you're
running your own store, but you also should
have some component of your business on Amazon.
Because Amazon is the largest shopping search engine in
the world, there's just no way around it.
If I do a Google search, I want information.
If I'm on Facebook, I want to watch
Baby Panda videos and just leave me alone.
But if I'm on Amazon, I'm buying something, right? Yes.
So every business should have some component on Amazon.
And we've got probably off the top five
different ways to help companies get there.
So if you're selling something, even if
it's information, it should be on Amazon.
But the thing is the packaging.
Amazon keeps all of your customers.
They say, no, you can't contact these people.
But what businesses are doing is
putting an insert in there.
You put in a postcard or a letter or a
business card with a website and then push them from
Amazon over to your website, grab the email, opt in
or the SMS text contact and go from there.
You're not going to get 100%, but you
are going to get more exposure adding Amazon
as a revenue stream than leaving it off.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think offering a discount code is enticing
for them to go to the site.
One thing that we've talked about quite
a bit recently is the newsletter collection.
How important that is. Right.
Because of all the Privacy changes and all
of that, having your list is gold, right.
What did you compare it to?
Something the other day, like we were going back
to 1994 or something with all the emails.
I don't remember what it was.
It's cyclical. Right.
Like it's coming back around, just
like trends come back around.
It's always been there, right?
No, it's most certainly not dead.
We're starting to do custom
HTML newsletters for automotive dealerships.
It's still a thing and it's probably growing even in
more popularity because of the way that social media is
going and has been going and just not allowing us
to even reach the people that go to these stores
or sign up for this stuff.
Right, exactly.
So when you get somebody's email address and you have
permission to email them on commercial communications, whatever it is
you have to say, I mean, your automotive people, they
want to sell cars or sell service to cars or
sell leasing options, whatever that particular client is, if you're
just relying on one touch to the sale, it's just
not going to happen. Right.
But email is a fantastic way.
In fact, put in a plug.
I've got a book coming out next month about email
for e commerce and that will be on Amazon.
So I'll put that in the show notes too.
Look forward to that one.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing
it and getting it out there.
Today's episode is sponsored by Bold Apps.
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for Shopify and Shopify Plus to help you
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So I guess the last thing that we wanted
to touch on was traffic and what's possible.
I've worked with clients who are boutiques and businesses of
all kinds in tiny little towns, 4000 people, and it
would be unwieldy to try to build enough residential like
300 unit apartment building to try to bring people to
the area to make more sales.
Going online is the next and far
more viable option to do that.
We were just talking about email
marketing, SMS, text messaging, content marketing.
Every business can have content, whether it's
blogs, books, courses, and reach people in
a huge variety of ways.
So one of the things that we notice, I've
got one particular client who's in a very small
town and sells women's clothing and accessories.
She wanted to get more business.
She wanted to find more people.
I'm in a town of 25,000 people.
How do I find more people?
Nobody's driving here accidentally.
How do we find more people?
So we went online and just with some really
minimal effort and very basic marketing, increased her store
volume by, I'm trying to remember the percentage off
the top, but we're accidentally making
an additional $10,000 a month.
But the numbers are different.
So she's not going to have half a million people
extra walking through the store, nor would she want to.
The cleanup would be horrendous, but adding
500,000 impressions or 500,000 reach in the
store to be able to collect people.
And then the magic of
advertising retargeting is beautiful.
I love that.
If somebody came on the store once, we can grab
them again on the same ad platform or another.
Well, another thing, too, is collecting the
people's email addresses that purchase in store.
Obviously, you can use that data
to find look like audiences. That's right.
There's a lot of different ways to do things.
But like you said, for these smaller companies in
these really small towns, it's hard for them to
reach people that would definitely like their product.
They have no idea about it, right? Yeah.
And one of the things that I grew up
in the 70s, so we didn't have the Internet,
we had telephones, but we didn't have the Internet.
And I used to be able to go downtown and see people.
I knew the shopkeepers.
I could go into the Butcher shop, I could go
into the toy store, I could go into the bicycle
store and know people and see what they were selling.
Main street today, especially in
the current... it's January 2022.
How many businesses have we seen go
out of business in the last two
years with all the lockdowns and everything? Too many.
Way too many.
And it's not a requirement when you've got access
to the Internet and almost everybody does now.
And doing business online is a very inexpensive proposition to
start, and it can get as big as you want. Yeah.
I think you can actually kind
of tie those two together.
So you're talking about getting to know
the shopkeepers and stuff like that.
One way the shopkeepers can kind of make people
feel like they know them is through podcasting, through
videos, Facebook Live, like, get their personality out there.
And I'm sure a lot of them do a lot of that
already, or maybe they don't, but having people kind of know you
before they get there, and then that kind of helps with that
small town feel of, oh, this is so and so that owns
the shop and look at all this great stuff.
And then there's that personal connection that's kind
of, I don't want to say built, but
kind of fabricated a little bit.
But it's still a connection that the
customer feels with the shop owner.
And maybe it's the story that they relate to.
Maybe the shopkeeper went through a lot to open
the store and they survived covet and all that.
But I think there's so many different ways
to get out there and form that relationship
without having to go necessarily shake their hand.
Right.
But it is the next best thing.
You can add 100 million people to your
reach in a very short period of time
and still live in a tiny little town.
So it's really the best of both worlds. Yeah.
Still have your store how you want to.
You're able to reach more people that can
make buying decisions and increase your revenue and
make it easier on yourself or harder, I
guess, depending on how much you're selling. Yeah.
I mean, it's extra you're not necessarily.
So it's not like flipping a switch.
And whoever started that myth, I'm mad at them.
Just for the record, it's recording here.
I'm mad at them because you don't just build
a website and have people come and you don't
build a website, throw up some ads and have
people come and revolutionize your store.
It just doesn't work like that.
But with the proper information, the right set
up over a little bit of time, certainly
not like what it used to be.
Yeah.
I think time is going to be dependent
upon the audience, too, and the ticket price.
So there's all kinds of things that go into this stuff.
But yes, I agree.
You can't just build a completely new website and
then all of a sudden expect to be showing
up number one on Google for a certain keyword.
That's not how it works these days.
No, not anymore.
And unfortunately, we can't control it necessarily.
We can do things to improve it.
But there's no way for everybody to
be number one for a keyword.
It has to rank somehow. Right.
So that's the work that has to be put in
the long term through SEO and stuff like that.
But then short term is paid ads and
Google ads and getting people in that way.
I think maybe Facebook ads is probably
a better way of targeting an audience.
That is probably a cold audience.
Google ads is definitely people with search intent
that are looking for that specific product.
So as we kind of send it all back to
data, it's looking at where people come from and are
they looking for something or are we telling them that
they're looking for something that they need?
There's a lot to it, but it's fun.
So before we go down that rabbit hole
of discovery in search of time and interest
and stuff, we'll save that for another conversation.
I'll have you back.
Yeah, we'll do a part, too.
But Cameron, I want to thank you very much
for being with me today, having this conversation in
front of all of our new friends.
I'll put your contact information in the show notes
and people can reach out to you to me.
You and I work together.
They've got all kinds of options for help. Awesome.
Well, I look forward to that.
And definitely thank you for having me on.
And yeah, let's go do some more work.
Do some more good work. All right.
Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.
You've been listening to the Traffic Handler Podcast.
We're about getting new customers, making more
sales and growing your ecommerce retail business.
I'm your host, Amy.
Get more at AmyBiddle.me.
And until next time, go sell more stuff.
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Podcast music by Dan Lebowitz.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC38A5qHrlc_Zgua7vL4b96w
Post production by Melinda Fries.
Production Assistant Laurie Carnes.