The Simple Shift That Could Transform Your eCommerce Business
Today’s Guest: Travis Zigler
Meet Dr. Travis Zigler, a visionary in more ways than one! From optometrist to e-commerce whiz, Dr. Travis, alongside his wife Dr. Jenna, soared to new heights with Eye Love, turning it into a success story before selling it in 2021. Not just a business maven, he's a philanthropic hero too, using his skills in Amazon PPC and Google Ads to support nonprofits and fuel his mission to bring vision to a billion people in need through the Eye Believe Foundation.
Here’s a summary of the great stuff that we cover in this show:
The Simple Shift That Could Transform Your eCommerce Business
In an era where the digital marketplace is saturated with an endless array of products, standing out can feel like an insurmountable challenge for eCommerce entrepreneurs. However, a fundamental shift in perspective might just be the catalyst needed for transformation. It's not about the myriad of products you offer; rather, it's about focusing on the problems your customers face. This profound insight came to light during a riveting conversation with Travis Zigler on the eCommerce Podcast, where we delved into the essence of building a business that resonates deeply with your audience.
Products Are Not the Solution
The crux of our discussion revolved around a pivotal distinction: building a problem-based business versus a product-based business. In a marketplace where everyone is selling something, the key to differentiation lies not in the products you offer but in the problems you solve. Zigler's journey, from optometrist to eCommerce whizz, underscored the power of centring a business around solving specific customer problems. The narrative isn't new, yet it's profoundly overlooked. By shifting focus from what you're selling to why you're selling it – that is, to solve a problem – you're more likely to engage customers on a level that transcends the transactional.
Embracing Authenticity Through Content
Another gem from our discussion was the power of authenticity, particularly through live streaming and creating long-form content. In today's digital age, consumers crave genuine connections. They're drawn to brands that not only understand their struggles but also communicate in a way that's relatable and real. Zigler's approach to live streaming, sharing not just product information but personal stories and insights, is a testament to building a brand that's loved, not just recognised. It's about letting your audience see the faces behind the brand, hear the stories that shape your mission, and feel that they're part of a community, not just a customer base.
Building a Business You Love
Perhaps the most compelling takeaway is the notion of building a business that you're passionate about, rather than one you're looking to sell. This mindset shift from profit to passion can fundamentally alter the trajectory of your eCommerce venture. When you love your business, you're more invested in nurturing it, solving real problems, and making a difference in your customers' lives. This doesn't mean profitability isn't important; rather, it's about recognising that true success comes from creating value that goes beyond the bottom line.
Conclusion
In essence, the journey to transforming your eCommerce business begins with a simple yet profound shift: focusing on problems, not products. This approach not only sets you apart in a crowded marketplace but also builds a deeper connection with your audience. By embracing authenticity and prioritising passion over profit, you create a brand that resonates, inspires, and endures. Remember, in the world of eCommerce, products may fill carts, but solutions capture hearts.
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Matt Edmundson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the eCommerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. This is a show all about helping you deliver eCommerce wow. And to help us do just that, today I am chatting with our special guest, Travis Zigler from Profitable Pineapple about lead generation and no doubt about his rather interesting cap that he is wearing if you're watching the video.
Before we jump into that, let me tell you that eCommerce Podcast has its own newsletter. Of course it does. Why would it not? And if you're not signed up, why not? That's the big question. So go check it out, eCommercePodcast. net, put in your name and email address and we'll email you once a week. All the show notes, all the links from the guests, they all come straight to your inbox.
Automagically, all for free, all just using the magic of the worldwide web. So just go check that out ecommercecohort.net. Now this episode is brought to you by the eCommerce [00:01:00] cohort, which I absolutely adore and love this is our monthly membership group, which you can be a part of. Come join us as we have eCommerce training on there.
Every month we have people delivering workshops, usually from people who have been guests on the show. I'm not going to lie. They come and deliver some amazing workshops for us where we can learn all the nuances and intricacies about eCommerce plus. You also get the livestream version of the podcast, when we record the podcast, like I'm recording now with Travis, we just livestream it into the group, so you get to watch it earlier and sooner than anybody else.
You might even want to put your questions in the comments, just putting that out there. So do come and check that out at ecommercecohort. com. And actually whilst I say that Travis, I need to make sure that I can see the comments going into the group. So check it out. Like I say, ecommercecohort.
com. Now that's the show sponsor. Let's meet. Today's guest, a [00:02:00] doctor, Travis Zigler, a visionary in more ways than one, from optometrist to ecommerce whiz, Travis, alongside his wife, Jenna, soared to new heights with Eye Love, turning it into a success story before selling it in 2021, the same year I sold my business, ironically.
Now, not just a business maven, He's a philanthropic hero as well, using his skills in Amazon PPC and Google Ads to support non profits and fuel his mission to bring vision to a billion people in need through the I Believe Foundation. Travis, welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. Loving the hat, loving what you guys are trying to do with reaching a billion people.
It's really great to chat to you.
Travis Zigler: Matt, thanks for having me on and looking forward to giving a lot of value to your audience. And yeah, let's jump in.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Tell me about the, before we do jump in, tell me about the, I believe, thing that you've got going on.
Travis Zigler: Yeah. So I'm pretty fortunate in [00:03:00] the fact that I discovered my purpose and my passion back in 2006 when I was still in school. And I went on a mission trip in Ecuador to help people in rural Ecuador, people that can't afford nor obtain eye care. And I was a third year optometry student. And just had some life changing experiences meeting people there.
And what we noticed is that you can put a pair of reading glasses on someone. And these are reading glasses that you and I can just go to the corner store and buy for a dollar. these people don't have access to that. And these are people that thought they were blind. They couldn't read anymore. It's been 30 years since they've read a book.
And you throw these reading glasses on them. Their life changes forever, they start crying, they think you're like a miracle worker, and really it's just a pair of reading glasses, it's just physics. And I had that experience back in 2006, and when I first did that we saw about 1200 patients that week, and helped them get glasses, and I was forever changed.
And the I Believe [00:04:00] Foundation was started back in 20, I want to say 2017, as a result of we get donations, mostly from ourselves. And then we get to tax deduct them when we donate to our own foundation, but then we use that money to fund third world clinics. And we've done about 14 clinics total in our life now, and about 60, 000 patients have been helped so far, as far as getting glasses, surgeries that they need, cataract surgery.
Eye exams. So I was lucky to find my purpose and my passion very early, and everything I do now is to either help other people find their passion or their purpose, or to help them realize that they're not in this for the money, they're in for what the money can do. And so I show that and we do it by action, and that's what the, I believe foundation's all about.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic. It sounds like a very noble cause and obviously something that you're deeply connected to. Is your wife connected into that as well?
Travis Zigler: Yeah, so we're both optometrists and she was on that trip as well on that very first mission trip. And we've done 14 mission trips [00:05:00] together. We've never done one separate. And just to go into it one step further, what most people don't realize is that there are 1 billion people, 1 billion with a B, people that are blind due to lack of glasses.
Like I just saying that story, putting a pair of reading glasses on someone. There are 1 billion people that are blind just because of that. And so they just can't obtain eye care. And so that's what we're trying to do is create more sustainability in these areas. But right now we just do what are called like mash style clinics where we jump in there, see two to 3000 patients, and then we're out of there.
We're trying to create more sustainability. And so teaching people on those islands, how to fit glasses, how to fit readers. And then if they have trouble and they can't figure it out, then they can refer to a doctor if needed.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah that's great, man. That's great. I've come across a number of these charities where you can, and tell me what you think to them. I appreciate it's nothing to do with ecommerce, but I'm just genuinely curious. Where you wear glasses, you change your prescription or whatever it is.
I've got a bunch of old glasses and cause I had the laser eye [00:06:00] surgery done. So I had a bunch of old glasses in the drawer. Are they of use to anybody or is it not really of any use to anyone?
Travis Zigler: It is, so you can donate to the Lions Club and Lions Club is an international organization, so it doesn't matter where you are in the world. And what the Lions Club does is they clean them up and they organize them and they tell us what the prescription is. And then on some trips, we'll actually take a bunch of glasses with us and then we'll look at somebody's prescription, figure it out, and then we'll go try to find glasses for them.
Now, with our mission trips, we're a little more sophisticated than that, just cause we've been doing it for so long. We actually get labs in the U. S. to partner with us. And so we'll actually do custom glasses for almost everybody. We'll go back to the U. S., we'll have all the glasses made, and then we'll go back down to the country, wherever we saw the patients, and then we'll dispense all the glasses to people.
And you'd be surprised by, you'd think that we'd lose a lot of patients in that regard, but we actually still see, probably dispense like 95 to 99 percent of the glasses. Still, even though we're coming back at a later date,
Matt Edmundson: wow. So you're still [00:07:00] involved with this? You're still doing this on a regular basis?
Travis Zigler: we try to do two to three trips a year. The organizations that I work with, we do four trips a year. My wife and I try to do two a year. We have two young kids though, so it makes it very hard. So right now in our young kids stage, we are just doing one trip a year. And so we lead for Todos Santos in about three months or so.
And that's in Mexico.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic. Keep up, it sounds very cheesy, doesn't it? Or corny maybe is the right word, but keep up the good work. Sounds amazing, to get involved in something like that and using the skills that you've got for good.
Travis Zigler: I get to see the world, so it's selfish too. I get to see parts of the world that no one will ever see.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's true. You get to see different parts of it. And I suppose it's a beauty of mission trips, isn't it? And aid trips and things like that. And getting off the beaten track a little bit and seeing maybe a different side to people, a different side to the world that you don't see in the tourist brochures, which is always quite.
But alas, let's carry on the conversation about ecommerce, and let's start with that. So we're talking about lead [00:08:00] generation. This is what you guys do. And I know in the prequel to the show, you talked Sadaf about the sort of the five step process that you guys have. So why don't we start there and jump in.
Bearing in mind, obviously, we're all ecommerce dudes, or dudettes, or, I call myself an ecommerce dinosaur, Travis, I'm not going to lie, I've been around a little while. So I'm really keen, really curious to hear what your process is for lead generation and then I'm just going to ask you a bunch of questions as we go through it.
No doubt.
Travis Zigler: Yeah. So the mistake I see that most common like ecommerce entrepreneurs make is they build a business based on product selection. They say, that product looks like a great opportunity, so now I'm going to build a business around that product, and that's the wrong way to look at it. And I constantly beat this.
Every show I go on, every video I make, it's not about product selection. It's about people selection. People is where it's all about. And when you focus around a problem that maybe your product will solve, and you [00:09:00] build your business around a problem, a very specific problem, that's how you build a real business.
That's how you build a real audience. But if you don't have a problem to base your business around, it's going to be very hard to build that audience. And this is the case for any business. It's not just an ecommerce business. I've grown a brick and mortar store. To multi six figures, we got that to about 600 before we sold it.
I've built a physical products ecommerce store to multi millions. I've built an agency to multi millions, and now I'm building a software. We're only at about 60, 000 in annual recurring revenue right now, but we just started it in June. And every theme for all these businesses is the same theme.
I focus it around a very specific problem to a very specific person and all my messaging is towards that person. And that is step one of lead generation, that is step one of business startups, that is step one of building a business and scaling a business, [00:10:00] is focus everything around a problem. My ecommerce business was all around dry eye.
Everything we did is we spoke to the post menopausal female that's suffering from dry eye due to hormonal changes. And then we came out with products that she used on a daily basis for her dry eye and for her face cleansing, eyelid cleansing routine. So we had a face wash, we had an eye cream, and then more specifically, we had eyelid cleansers.
We had eyelid wipes. We had warm compresses. These are all things that a person that is a postmenopausal female that has dry eye uses. And so we identified the problem being dry eye. Our YouTube channel was called The Dry Eye Show. Our podcast was called The Dry Eye Show. Everything was dry eye. And people are like, dry eye, like, why would you do it around that?
It's a very specific problem that gets a lot of searches a month. And that's what we dove into. And we were optometrists as well. And the funny thing is we moved from Ohio working for someone else to South [00:11:00] Carolina to start our own practices. And we wanted to be a pediatric clinic, a clinic for kids. And God had other plans for us.
And he threw all geriatrics at us. Like it was old person after old person. And it took us down this path of okay, we need to do a dry eye and a glaucoma clinic because it's very common to see that in that post menopausal female, older geriatric crowd.
And then one day we were selling a bunch of products on our shelf.
And someone was, I was at a, I was actually at a conference and there was a doctor on stage and they were drilling him with questions and he was talking about his practice and how he was selling these products and this product. And someone was just like, you're the expert, sell your own products. And that's when a light bulb went off that I'm selling all these other people's products, building other people's brands.
I need to build my own brand. And that's how the dry eye product business started was I started just. Literally everything that we sold on a shelf for dry eye, we started coming out with it and that's how we started it. And then we started selling it [00:12:00] online, but it all started going back to step one, the problem.
What was the problem?
Matt Edmundson: So the, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I was talking about this on a previous show, where we're just talking more about entrepreneurship than ecommerce, but how entrepreneurs are very good at spotting problems and fixing them. I don't know if we're very good. At marketing the problem, if that makes sense, as in telling people this is the problem that you are suffering with.
And I'm gonna show you how we solve it. I'm curious though, 'cause you said for you this is the number one mistake everybody makes, so it becomes product focused rather than problem focused. Does starting with the problem of dry eye. then coming up with a product differ from going, this is a really interesting product for dry eye.
I'm going to take that. I think there's a community over here, which I think I can reach if that makes sense.
Travis Zigler: Yep. So it does make sense. [00:13:00] And the key differences are you looking for an opportunity to sell and make money? Or are you looking for? Something that you can become passionate about and go into that, because products come and go, problems usually don't.
The problem is always going to be there, and it's how you solve it.
Products will come and go, and usually when you have, and I'm talking about a very specific physical product. Let's, actually let's zoom out a little bit and talk about a big problem right now, is the lack of education in the AI space. There's all these AI tools out there, but we don't know how to use them.
And so what you're seeing pop up are all these courses on how to use AI. That is an opportunity. That is a very specific prop, product for a problem right now. But when you focus on just the product, it's only going to be around for about 18 to 24 months. And then it's going to be so diluted because you're going to be able to find anything you want on YouTube to [00:14:00] be able to educate yourself on whatever AI software you want to use.
I don't know how I can take this to a problem, but if we focus it over to a problem, the problem's always there. So let's say I want to learn lead generation. There's always going to be problems in lead generation and people are always going to be seeking that specific problem
Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Yeah.
Travis Zigler: And so if we just focus around that problem, we can come out with different products for whatever comes up.
So four years ago, I had a system around how to build an audience. And I still use that same system today, but the solution has changed slightly. The system is basically the same, but how I utilize the system has changed a lot. I don't have to go out and hire writers anymore. I can use Chad GPT.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Travis Zigler: I don't have to go out and think anymore because I can use Chad GPT.
No, I'm just kidding. But [00:15:00] it's
Matt Edmundson: only you were.
Travis Zigler: But the point is like, when I focus my business around a problem, I adjust the products for what's new and what's coming out. So my lead generation system used to take four weeks to come out with an article and I'm sure we'll get into it here in just a little bit, but it used to take me like four weeks to write an article, start advertising for it and start generating leads for it.
I can do it now in 30 seconds. Because of ChatGPT, and I don't have to hire people. I don't have to manage people. It's all through ChatGPT. And so the problem remains the same. The product has changed. So when you focus on product, you're focusing on an opportunity. When you focus on problems, you're building a real business that's focused around that.
And you can be flexible and change. And I'll give one more quick example. Were you in the physical products space?
Matt Edmundson: Yeah. I still am. Yes. Yeah.
Travis Zigler: Okay, so you [00:16:00] still are, so most people teach how to select the perfect product, like I talked about earlier and source it and sell it. The problem is everybody finds that product and everybody sources it and everybody starts to sell it. So it's a race to the bottom. That was great back in 2014 and 2015 when I first started, you could throw up a product, you could buy a hundred reviews and sell a bunch and make a lot of money. What I noticed in 2017 though, is that it wasn't sustainable because my products would shoot up. 12 months later, they'd start to drift down and I was like, this isn't sustainable. I'm just selling a piece of plastic on Amazon. I need to focus on something real. And so we came out with what was called the dry eye syndrome support community on Facebook.
We just went live every week nobody, by the way. And eventually after about six months, people started showing up and we built that. I think it's 22, 000 people now. We don't own it anymore or anything, but it's still going, but we didn't have anything to [00:17:00] sell them. We just wanted to serve a person. We saw it a lot in our practice.
And we just wanted to say, Hey, we're going to focus around dry eye and we're going to treat it a little differently than what most doctors do. Cause we had something happen in our life where Western medicine failed us and Eastern medicine succeeded. We were told we could never have kids. And then we tried Eastern medicine.
We got pregnant in six months. And so I was like, why can't we do this for dry eye? And so we found the dry eye problem. We took a little bit of a different approach to it. Taught people just simple, replace your breakfast with a green smoothie. And drink more water. That was it. That was more effective than all prescriptions out there.
We actually did a study on it. It was crazy because it was this different mindset, and that's what drew everybody in. But we were focusing on the problem, and our solution changed as we came out with more products. But at the beginning, we didn't have any products. We were just focusing on the problem. And there's something powerful about being able to focus on a problem without having to sell a product.
It's actually fun. Because a lot of your [00:18:00] listeners probably listen to Alex Ramosi and he says it all the time. I have nothing to sell you. Cause he doesn't. He knows his demographic. He wants somebody that's, what is it? Like 5 million in EBITDA or higher, or 1 million in EBITDA, I think, either that, and that's his target demographic.
And he knows that one out of every. Probably a hundred thousand people that listen to his podcast are going to be his target demographic. So he has nothing to sell them. And it's very powerful when you can solve a problem when you have nothing to sell. And that's the difference. And I rant a lot.
So if you need to cut me off, just cut me
Matt Edmundson: Why? Yeah, I'm no, it's good. That's good. This isn't a lot of things you said there, Travis. I'd love to jump in and ask you about. Firstly, let me, you mentioned that you did a podcast, so you livestreamed a new podcast, and you livestreamed for six months and nobody turned up. Now recently we had Sarah Williams on the show who mentioned something similar, and I am curious why podcasting, why livestreaming, and would you still do that today?
Travis Zigler: I do still do it today. And but [00:19:00] the mechanism has changed slightly. And so back then we did long form. And so we focused on long form content. It was usually like an hour livestreaming. We loved going live because it was authentic and real and people love authenticity. They don't love, you don't have to have perfect videos.
You don't have to have great editors. They want authenticity. That's why TikTok took off because it was all this raw video footage that was edited by people that didn't know what they were doing. And that's what made it fun and real. And that's what people loved and it was entertaining. And so it's, I still do it today.
I actually do it slightly different. So we can talk about that a little bit. But back then we usually focused on 30 minutes to one hour show once a week, we got it up to three times a week, but we didn't notice anything different as far as lead generation. So we just went back to once a week and now the way I've changed it is.
So we built our audience up to about maybe 150, 000 people across YouTube, across [00:20:00] email lists, across Facebook. And now what I do differently is we now do content. I do one long form every Monday. And so I go live every Monday on my channel, and then we just do two shorts a day. And so short form video is the way to get your reach out there.
But people say long form is dead. Long form is not dead. People do not have short attention spans. You're just too boring. Not you specifically, but it's more like if people aren't paying attention to you, you're just too boring. You're not giving them content they want to tune into. So what we're doing now with YouTube is we're doing this.
It's one, not, it's like usually like 10 to 30 minutes of live every Monday, all our short form videos, two a day. And then we do this across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, but we do one mashup every month. And what a mashup is we take a bunch of our videos that are similar topics.
We'll put them all together and we'll come out with a three to four hour long [00:21:00] video.
Matt Edmundson: Wow.
Travis Zigler: And those are crazy. And they, what YouTube loves is when you have a three hour plus video, and this is something that an expert taught me. I just met with the YouTube expert. He said three hour plus videos are killing it right now.
And this is, his name is Drew Hitchcock. So shout out to Drew. He's great. He's an amazing person. And I did my first one and my average view hours, cause I'm in a very specific niche, Amazon PPC was 10 to 20 hours. 10 to 20 viewing hours of YouTube, and it spiked all the way up to 360 hours a day. And so we more than, I think 20X'd our watch hours just by doing one three hour video.
So now we're doing one three hour video or longer every single month. And if you can do more, kudos to you, but it's exhausting because I still do it live. I still do it live.
Matt Edmundson: So you do the whole three hours live.
Travis Zigler: So what I do is I do a mix. So I pick my best videos in [00:22:00] that topic and I'll go live and I'll talk and then I'll go into a video and I'll play the recorded video.
And then once that recorded video is over, I'll talk and then we'll play the next video. So I preview what's coming up in between and just answer any questions that come up in the comments. As we go, and that shoots up your viewership, which then the more people watch you, the more they're going to trust you, the more they're going to like you.
And that's why a podcast is so effective. And what you're doing is because you're in somebody's ear every single day. And that intimacy is huge. And so they learn to trust you and they learn to know you and they know more about you than you sometimes, because when they meet you in person, they bring up all this stuff and you're like, I don't know who you are, they've been listening to your podcast for years now.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah. It happens quite a lot now, actually. It's quite funny. Yeah, really quite funny. And three hour long videos is quite an interesting idea because, and you're right, long form is not dead. Andrew Huberman show, which is one of the best listened to podcasts is normally two and a half hours, three [00:23:00] hours long.
Travis Zigler: Tim Ferris, Joe Rogan, all
Matt Edmundson: yeah, all of those guys. And it's just them chatting away. But you're right, it's got to be interesting, right? And the temptation on this show has always been, should we go to 20 minutes? Because everyone was talking, short form, you've got to get it down to the commute time. And no, we don't, we like where we're at.
I feel like actually we're a short form show now when we're an hour long, when all the other ones are like two, three hours, but yeah, interesting. So we've got phase one Identify the problem. Where do we go from there?
Travis Zigler: So I'm going to speak specifically, actually no, you can use this for anything, but I'll speak specifically on like dry eye just because that's the example we've been going off of what I do then, and this is a very specific tactic now, is I'll take, I'll think of a list of all the problems that my product solves.
And so dry eyes, blepharitis, It's just inflammation of the eyelids, styes, which is a bump on your eyelids. And I'll think of all the problems that my products can solve, or all the problems that I'm focusing on, and I'll put them [00:24:00] into Google Keyword Planner. And I just search for those keywords and, Google Keyword Planner comes up with a bunch of different keywords for you.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Travis Zigler: what I look for on there is words that have a high search volume. It can be anywhere from 50, 000 and above a month to 300, a million a month. But the higher, the better with low competition score. And so Google Keyword Planner gives you a competition score and that competition score and it gives you the bids as well.
But that competition is how competitive is it on Google Ads and how expensive is it on Google Ads? And the key thing here is when you focus on product based keywords, everybody's going after those. And so your bid is going to be a lot higher when you focus on problem based keywords, your bids are a lot lower.
And so the last year I was with my company in 2022, cause I still work for them for a year and a half. We drove millions of clicks to our blog, an average [00:25:00] of 6 cents a click.
Matt Edmundson: Okay. That's pretty
Travis Zigler: because it's very cheap. It's because we focus on the problem versus the product. And so we'd write an article, three steps to eliminate a sty.
We target STI and the solution was our product. Now you have to be careful with FDA structure function claims. So I'm not giving you advice on that, but it's problem number one or step number one. Clean your eyelids. Use this. Step number two, spray your eyelids. Use this. And it was just this problem based keyword going to a blog post, an advertorial, if you will. And it talks about the problem first and then the solution second. And then your product is in the solution. So we're getting six cent clicks to our blog, and then we're converting them to buy over on Amazon, on our Shopify store. We mostly push to Amazon because Amazon loves external traffic, and so it boosts you up in the organic rank when you do that.[00:26:00]
And so you're sending millions of clicks to your blog, and that blog article is almost like it helps increase your conversion rate on Amazon. Because not everybody's going to click through. But here's where the magic happens. When people come over to your blog, and they sit on your blog and they read it for a long time, we usually put a video at the top too so they can watch a video about the same topic, and when they sit on your blog for a long period of time, your SEO increases. And so you have these six cent clicks going over to your blog, but then as your SEO increases, You're going to start getting organic traffic as well. And then your ROAS goes through the roof. Your return on ad spend just shoots up because you're now getting organic and paid to these blog posts, plus we can get further into the strategy.
Plus we have pop ups where we're trying to get their email address as well. So then you can further market to them as well. I'm going to stop there just to kind of
Matt Edmundson: I'm making lots of notes, Travis, as we [00:27:00] go through. I'm intrigued by this because you're right. We sell on our site, and we sell on Amazon, and Amazon loves it if we send traffic. Using something like Google. It's problematic in a lot of ways to send from Google direct to Amazon for a whole bunch of reasons I won't bore people with right now.
But this idea of sending them to the blog and then using the blog to send them to Amazon is actually, is an idea that's been around for a while. And I think it's one of those things that people have forgotten about for a little. Time they years ago, we did the blogs and it's let's do the blogs.
And then all this other stuff came along like TikTok, and Instagram. And it's we'll forget about the blog over here. And we'll focus on over here. And actually what I like about the strategy is it's a bit old school if you don't mind me saying but we all know it works right.
And the simple stuff works. What I'm curious about is. You're sending, say, a million people to your blog post. How many of those million people are then going over to Amazon? Do [00:28:00] you, is it a bit like I know that if I send to my landing page on my website for that product, I'm going to send how many, 7 percent of people going to click through and out of those 35 percent of people are going to buy, whatever the stats are.
Did you notice that it was significantly lower or higher when you did the blog post to Amazon strategy?
Travis Zigler: So conversion rate stays anywhere from that one to 5 percent range. Just like it would whenever you drive to your website, if you get up to 5 percent that's great as but the reason we send to Amazon is because our conversion rate on Amazon is so high and frictionless buying experience.
Amazon has just perfected the buying experience, makes it very easy for the person to buy it. Now going back to something that you were concerned with, sending Google ads direct to Amazon, we still do that a lot for product based keywords. Just to get them right over there, and your concern was conversion rate.
It decreases your conversion rate, but, however, it does not penalize you. So Amazon wants you to send that external traffic. So if you're sending Google ads direct to Amazon and it's only converting it like one to two percent. [00:29:00] That's okay, because you're sending Amazon a customer and they love it, so they will still boost you in the organic rank, even if your conversion rate is lower for those and it will take that into account, it won't penalize you in that regard, and same thing here, when you go to the blog and you're sending external traffic, it's just another source of external traffic, another outside signal, I call it my moat around your Amazon listing, so we have Google Ads Direct, we have Google ads to a blog post, then to Amazon.
Then we do Facebook ads to Amazon. And even though these are lower converting things, and then TikTok ads now to Amazon. Even though they're lower converting, Amazon still rewards you because they know their lifetime value of the customer. They're going to get them on Prime, they're going to sell them videos, they're going to sell them products, they're going to sell them everything.
And so they won't penalize you because you're sending them a customer. And we've done it through countless clients and shown the data it's crazy how fast you can rank something by sending that external traffic. Now, with regards to the blog post, I love how you called it old school. [00:30:00] And that's what I love about it, is because Every entrepreneur gets distracted by the new shiny object
Matt Edmundson: Signing objects. Yeah.
Travis Zigler: Shiny object syndrome is just you realizing what you're doing right now is too hard to keep going. So you're going to jump over here to try this over here because it's brand new. It's fresh. It's shiny. And most entrepreneurs are quick starts. So they hate the monotony of doing the same thing over and over again.
And they want to jump over here to do this because this is now getting too hard. So I'm going to jump over here and start doing this and I've been doing this strategy since 2017. And like I said, I've built a practice with it, a brick and mortar store. I built our ecommerce physical products brand, I built our agency, and now I'm building my software with the same exact philosophy.
It's so old school, so awesome, and it works so well, but the cool thing is. You can add TikTok to this strategy. Like I said, you can add a TikTok video to the top of your blog, and then you can have a little [00:31:00] follow me on TikTok right below that video. And then you can gain subscribers with this. You can use it to gain subscribers on social media.
You can use it to build your email list. You can build it, use it to sell digital products. It works for absolutely anything. You could do it for a restaurant. I could do it for a restaurant down the street and we could make the five best places to have dinner in Columbus, Ohio. And then you can target just the people in the five mile radius with that article and you're number one.
It's so easy to use this strategy.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sold, man. I'm sold. So we've got the problem. We've made a list of our problems, we've created posts, we're sending traffic left, right and centre. Is there anything else to this strategy that you have that we need to think through or think about?
Travis Zigler: Yeah. So when we've talked about it briefly, but like when we're on the blog post, we then want to get their email address. We're going to get them as a lead, and once you get them into your email sequence, you then have a welcome sequence. Most [00:32:00] people will do short form email, then just welcome them and try to sell them.
I like to do longer emails in the welcome sequence to really go and hit and agitate the problem a little bit more and show them, tell them my story on how I fixed it. So Amazon PPC, I was frustrated with it. I hired, I had six different softwares. I hired four agencies, they all sucked. And so what did I do?
I came out with my own agency. And it was because the problem just was irritated more and more to the point where I was just like, I know how to do this. I just need to do it. And so then I hired my best friend. We became co founders in the agency. We onboarded 10 clients. And the rest is history.
Now we have a team of 13 and we're not a big agency or we still are very small, but we're a little higher price because we do a little bit more. We do this whole process for
But getting them on that email sequence, they [00:33:00] read my story, they learn the problems I had and why I came out with it.
I do that over the course of seven emails and those long emails are the same as your long form content. 60 minutes in someone's ear, 20 minutes of them reading an email. If they read every single word of that email, they're yours for life. Dry eye. My wife had dry eye. This is what we did to solve it.
We tell people the story of our fertility journey. People know everything about our lives because we share intimate details. It's authentic. It's real. And I don't do it to sell more products. I do it because people want genuine connection. We're going to be talking about email marketing with the people they're doing business with.
People want to do business with people, not businesses. We actually, we don't do a lot of email marketing for clients, but we do for a couple. And the one was like, Hey, I want to switch it. So instead of saying my name at the end of emails, I want you to start saying the brand name. And we're like, absolutely not.
And I was like, we are not doing that. This brand is personal. This is
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Travis Zigler: the business name. And that goes the same thing with like [00:34:00] your channels. So if you guys go to follow me on social media, If you look up Profitable Pineapple, you'll find me, but you're not going to find many channels around Profitable Pineapple because it's around Dr.
Travis Zigler. You look up on YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, it's Dr. Travis Zigler. I have made the brand me personally, and that does two things. It makes it personal, like we just talked about, but when you're ready to pivot. And maybe move into something else, like with me with software, I have the agency still, and that's not going anywhere, but I'm pivoting to the software.
I can use my personal brand to help with that. And let's say in 10 years, I don't know if I'll be doing what I'm doing now, I still have my personal brand. To pivot to that. And a great example of this is Mike Dillard. If anybody follows him out there, he's gone from magnetic marketing to a list grow list building course to a health because he battled for his life [00:35:00] and he told everything he learned from that for three years.
He almost died and now he's doing richer every day. And then he's back to audience growth. And so like through all those pivots, I bought every single one of his products. Because I trust him and he's a great person and great human. So that's a great example of personal branding. Another one, Elon Musk has 160 million followers on X, whereas in Tesla and Tesla has I think 22 million, SpaceX has 32 million.
Tesla is the second most valuable company in the world at over a trillion dollar valuation market cap. Apple, I think is more right now, but I think they'll swap soon. But Elon has 160 million followers, almost eight times more than Tesla, the second most valuable company in the world. So think about that when you're creating this is make it personal.
And so when you're building that email list out, don't be afraid to share. Your struggles, your wins. I was open and honest about what we went through in Q4. Last year we fired our COO and five [00:36:00] other people. The COO was one, one of my best friends from college, and it was probably one of the hardest decisions I made, but it was necessary and I shared that with my audience.
Yes, our agency was in turmoil. We had to let go of five people, but we were fine. We're better off now than we were then. And we were honest and people are like, that's what I love about you is because you're so authentic. You're so real and you're so transparent. And so you're going to get trusted listeners.
The more personal you go. So to answer your question, email list is the next step.
Matt Edmundson: bringing it back round. I'm curious on the personal brand, I'm aware of time, Travis, so I don't want to monopolise all the time, but you talk about building the personal brand, and there's always this interesting dilemma, I think, because you take someone like Elon Musk who is a classic example. He is, like you say, is You know, there's Elon Musk, but he is in sort of some ways inseparable from Tesla, right?
And Tesla is built off the back of Elon Musk. Would Tesla have been as [00:37:00] profitable without Elon Musk? I don't know. And so you there's sort of these questions, isn't there? But if I bring it into the fact that we're not all Elon Musk and probably the circle of people we'll influence will be hundreds, not millions in a lot of ways.
If you How do you balance building your personal brand? So let's go back to your e-commerce site that dealt with. Try eye that you sold. So if you build that around you and your wife, the people coming in to buy it have then got a problem, haven't they? Because it's built around your personality and your wife's personality.
But of course you are exiting the bus, the business. So how did you manage that?
Travis Zigler: Yeah. Great question. So if your plan, everybody's plan maybe is to exit eventually. And if you build it around you personally. That part of the business is gonna be less valuable, and that is true than if you did a brand. But if you build it around your personalities, it's gonna grow faster. So what you can do is as you [00:38:00] start to grow and as you're getting ready to pivot out of it, maybe sell it, plan for that, and then you can start bringing in other doctors into the space.
So what I'm doing right now is bringing other people on my channel that are on my team. So people are getting used to seeing other faces on my channel. It's still branded towards me, but if I were to ever pivot, I would just change the name to the brand name or whatever you want to do and start bringing other people on.
And that's what I would do. I never build a business to sell it. I build a business because I love to build that business. I fall in love with the process versus the end goal. And that's, I think, one of the biggest problems entrepreneurs have is they're so focused on the end goal and getting there.
There Payout and their exit that they forget to fall in love with the whole process. And then they're miserable the whole time I love what I'm doing. I love coaching entrepreneurs. I love [00:39:00] agency life, like it's very hard to manage lots of clients only because when something's wrong, they come to me when something's not wrong.
They stay with the account manager, but it's. No matter what you do for them, they're never happy. And that's the we've, we have some very happy clients, but like we had a very happy client. We grew them over 300 percent over the course of a year and a half, and they almost dropped us. And it was just like, I got on the phone and I was like, what's going on?
And he told me everything. And I was like let's just fix that. And no matter what you do, you're building other people's brands. And if you don't continue to do that, they'll turn on you like that. And that's what the agency life is hard. I don't know what I was getting at with this.
Matt Edmundson: We were talking about personal brand and swapping over, and bringing other people in,
Travis Zigler: Yeah. So that's what I would do is just switch my channel to my brand and then have other people on it if you're going, getting ready to sell. But yeah, going back to how I make a [00:40:00] business. I don't look to sell it. When I sold Eye Love, it was a strategic sell. It was to somebody that was already in 6, 000 doctor's offices.
They're in 6, 000 eye care doctor's offices. They didn't know how to do direct to consumer. So they brought us on to do all their direct to consumer. They have nine brands and we scaled all their brands direct to consumer. And then they took our products to wholesale. That was the dream. didn't work out that way.
But that was the whole dream of what we were trying to create. And 18 months later, they ended up, we ended up parting ways. And unfortunately the brand's on the downswing, like always. But it's one of those things like build a brand you love so much that you never think about selling it. That's just my
Matt Edmundson: It's a really interesting point because, again, I'm going old school here because when I started in entrepreneurship. There was a chap that everybody was raving about called Michael Gerber. He wrote the book called The E Myth and the whole premise of that book at the time, which [00:41:00] everybody read was you build a business to sell it.
And if you're going to build a business to sell it, you need to systemize the crap out of it because it needs to work really well in the hands of a teenager. And he used the Grey Croc McDonald's example, as a, as. And how you've built a business around teenagers which someone could then come and buy.
So he's a big fan of franchising and all kinds of stuff. But the basic premise was, you build a business to sell it because if you don't sell it to someone you're in effect buying it with your time. And I love what you've talked about there because that's actually, it's the opposite spirit.
It's no, just focus on doing something that's gonna solve a great problem for people that you can be passionate about and you'll And just deal with that, and face that. I think it was it's quite an interesting, thing. Flip to the script for one to a better expression.
Travis Zigler: it. So you are out of it. You're out of the system the day to day and build it. So it cash flows for you. Build it so that you love it and then it spits out cashflow as much as possible. We worked with a brand for a while. They eventually brought their [00:42:00] advertising in house because they got so big, but we were with them when they were doing about half a million a year.
They're now doing close, they'll hit like 12 to 15 million this year. And we just trained their in house team and then they took it. And I was like, so what's the goal with this? And they're just like, we're having too much fun. We don't care about selling it. We're just trying to create so much cashflow that it pays us all.
And they're spitting out a ton of EBITDA because it's a consumable. It has high profit margins. They're buying it for a dollar, selling it for 15. It's just absurd what they're doing with this brand. And it's so cool. And they don't want to sell it because they're having so much fun. It's four best friends.
They met at the beach like five years ago and started this brand. And something might happen eventually, it's spitting out so much cashflow, it's like. Why sell it? And if it's spitting out that much cashflow, hire yourself out of the position, which I think is the scariest thing for most entrepreneurs.
But it's something that I'm working on hiring an operator for my agency because I want to get the agency work going without me. [00:43:00] So I can focus on the software and I want to be the dancing monkey on stage like here. And I want to be the CEO
Matt Edmundson: to see the dancing.
Travis Zigler: and I want to be the leader and not the day to day guy.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah. That's very good stuff. And on that bombshell, Travis, we'll end the conversation there because. I'm aware of time. How do people reach you? How do they connect with you? How do they find out more about Profitable Pineapple or get a cool hat like you're wearing if they want to?
Travis Zigler: Cool Hat is compliments of Amazon, so just type in Cool Pineapple Hat, Amazon. But thanks for allowing me to do this, number one I'm on all the socials, except for Snapchat, but I'm on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok just look up Dr. Travis Zigler and you should be able to find me, I think there's only one channel that I'm not that name, I think it's TikTok.
Yeah, so you can find me there, follow me on any socials we do have a free Amazon pay per click masterclass that, absolutely free, no strings attached, it's at ProfitablePineapple. com and yeah, [00:44:00] feel free to message me, any of those platforms, it comes to me, I don't have an assistant that checks all that stuff, so feel free to message me and it comes to me and then on the masterclass, when you get the emails, you'll see our sequence and if you reply back, that comes to me as well.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic. We'll check it out. We will of course link to all of those Links on social media for Travis and for the free Amazon training on the website as well They'll be in the show notes If you're listening to this on your favorite podcast app check out the links in the show notes and of course if you've signed up to the email Check out your inbox because they are going to be in there.
Travis, listen, thanks, man, for coming on the show. Really enjoyed talking to you and just hearing your heart and passion for what you do and real interesting journey, that you guys have gone on from doing the iCharity to the business to now the agencies and all the things that you're doing.
Really fascinating. And thanks for sharing your insight and value with us. It's been fantastic.
Travis Zigler: I appreciate you having me on, thanks Matt.
Matt Edmundson: No problem. No problem. [00:45:00] Brilliant, eh? Also, remember to check out eCommerce Cohort, the amazing membership group that enables us to bring you things like this podcast. Do check them out, ecommercecohort.
com. Be sure to follow the eCommerce Podcast wherever you get your podcasts from because we've got yet more great conversations lined up. And of course, if no one has told you yet today, let me be the first person to tell you, you are awesome. Yes, you are. Created awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear.
Travis has got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now the eCommerce Podcast is produced by the team at Aurion Media. You can find their entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The team that makes this show possible is the beautiful, talented, wonderful, and amazing Sadaf Beynon and Tanya Hutsuliak.
Theme music was written by Josh Edmundson. And as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript or show notes, just head over to the website. ecommercepodcast. net. They're all there. They're all there. You know where it is. Go there. [00:46:00] ecommercepodcast. net. So that's it from me. That's it from Travis. Thank you so much for joining us.
Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.
