The Simple Shift That Could Transform Your eCommerce Business | Travis Zigler

Matt Edmundson

00:00:00.240 - 00:03:13.400

Foreign. Hello and welcome to the E Commerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmondson. This is a show all about helping you del deliver e Commerce. Wow.

And to help us do just that, today I am chatting with our special guest, Travis Ziglar from Profitable Pineapple about lead generation and no doubt about his rather interesting cap that he is wearing. If you're watching the video. Now, before we jump into that, let me tell you that E Commerce Podcast has its own newsletter. Of course it does.

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All just using the magic of the world wide web. So just go check that out@ecommerce cohort.net now. This episode is brought to you by the E Commerce 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 E Commerce training on there.

Every month we have people delivering workshops, usually from people who have been guests on the show. Not gonna lie, they come and deliver some amazing workshops for us where we can learn all the nuances and intricacies about E commerce.

Plus you also get the live stream version of the podcast.

When we record the podcast like I'm recording now, Travis, we just live stream 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 atecommerce cohort.com and actually, whilst I say that, Travis, I need to make sure that I can see, I can see the comments going into the group. So check it out. Like I say, e commerce cohort.com now that's the show sponsor. Let's meet Today's guest, a Dr. Travis Ziegler.

A visionary in more ways than one. From optometrist to E commerce. Where's Travis?

Alongside his wife Jenna, soared to new heights with I 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 nonprofits 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

00:03:13.880 - 00:03:19.000

Well, Matt, thanks for having me on. Looking forward to giving a lot of value to your audience and. Yeah, let's jump in.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:19.400 - 00:03:27.960

Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Tell me about the, before we do jump in, tell me about the, the I believe thing that you're, you're got, you've got going on.

Travis Zigler

00:03:28.610 - 00:05:16.490

Yeah.

So I'm, I'm pretty fortunate in 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. But 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, 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 so the I believe 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 it 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 is all about.

Matt Edmundson

00:05:17.050 - 00:05:25.850

Wow, fantastic. Well, it sounds like a very noble cause. Obviously something that you're Deeply connected to. Is your wife connected into that as well?

Travis Zigler

00:05:26.010 - 00:06:14.200

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 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 say in 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 2 to 3,000 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

00:06:14.440 - 00:06:43.410

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 nothing to do with E commerce, but I'm just genuinely curious. The, you know where you sort of, you wear glasses, you change your prescription or whatever it is. So you've got a.

I've got a bunch of old glasses in because I had the laser eye surgery done. So I had a bunch of old glasses in the drawer. Are they of use to anybody or is it, is it not really of any use to anyone?

Travis Zigler

00:06:43.730 - 00:07:34.190

It is so you can donate to the Lions Club. And Lions Club's 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 because we've been doing it for so long, we actually get labs in the US 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 sell the patients and then we'll dispense all the glasses to people and you'd be surprised by. You think that would. We'd lose a lot of patients in that regard.

But we actually still see, probably, probably dispense like 95 to 99% of classes still, even though we're coming back at a later date.

Matt Edmundson

00:07:34.670 - 00:07:39.150

Wow, so you're still involved with this? You're still doing this on a regular basis?

Travis Zigler

00:07:39.550 - 00:07:58.450

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 leave for Toto Santos in about two, three months or so.

And that's in Mexico.

Matt Edmundson

00:07:58.770 - 00:08:09.170

Fantastic. Well, keep. Keep sounds very cheesy, doesn't it? Or corny maybe is the right word. But keep up the good work. Sounds amazing.

You know, to get involved in something like that and using the skills that you've got for good.

Travis Zigler

00:08:09.730 - 00:08:14.290

I mean, I get to see the world, so it's kind of selfish too. I get to see parts of the world that no one will ever see.

Matt Edmundson

00:08:14.770 - 00:09:10.270

Yeah, that's true. You get to see different parts of it.

And I suppose that's, I mean, you know, it's, 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, you know, 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, which is always quite nice. But alas, let's carry on the conversation about E commerce and let's start with that. So we're talking about lead generation. This is what you guys do.

And I know in the pre call to the show you talked sadef about the sort of the five step process that you guys have. So why don't we start there and jump in.

Um, bearing in mind, obviously we're all E commerce dudes or dudettes or you know, I call myself an E commerce dinosaur. Travis. I'm not gonna lie.

I've been around a little while, so I'm really keen, really curious to hear what your process is for sort of lead generation. And then I'm just gonna ask you a bunch of questions as we go through it. No doubt.

Travis Zigler

00:09:10.750 - 00:09:37.060

Yeah. So the mistake I see that most common like E commerce 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:09:37.380 - 00:09:37.940

Okay?

Travis Zigler

00:09:37.940 - 00:12:03.080

People is where it's all about.

And when you focus around a problem, a problem that maybe your product will solve and you 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 e commerce business. I've grown a brick and mortar store to multi six figures. We got that to about 600 to 700,000 before we sold it.

I built in physical products, e commerce store to multi millions. I 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, 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 is focus everything around a problem. So my e commerce 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 is called the Dry Eye Show. Our podcast is 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 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 after old person.

Matt Edmundson

00:12:03.320 - 00:12:03.880

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:12:03.960 - 00:12:56.600

And it took us down this path of like, okay, we need to do a dry eye in a glaucoma clinic. Because it's. It's very common to see that in that postmenopausal female, older geriatric crowd.

And then one day we were selling a bunch of products on our shelf and someone was, I, I was at a pant. I was actually at a conference, and there's a doctor on.

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's just like, you're the expert. Sell your own products.

And that's when, like 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 our shelf for dry Eye. We started coming out with it, and that's how we started it. And then we started selling it online.

But it all started going back to step one, the problem, identifying what was the problem.

Matt Edmundson

00:12:57.560 - 00:13:53.870

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 e commerce, 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're suffering with.

And I'm going to show you how we solve it.

I'm kind of curious, though, because you said, you said, for you, this is the number one mistake everybody makes, so it becomes product focused rather than problem focused.

How does starting with the problem of dry eye and then coming up with a product differ, I suppose 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

00:13:54.430 - 00:14:33.110

Yep. So it does make sense.

And the key differences are, 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, like physical products.

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.

Matt Edmundson

00:14:33.510 - 00:14:33.990

Okay.

Travis Zigler

00:14:33.990 - 00:14:43.830

So 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:14:43.990 - 00:14:44.490

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:14:44.800 - 00:14:56.320

That is an opportunity. That is a very specific 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:14:56.640 - 00:14:57.120

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:14:57.120 - 00:15:26.840

And then it's going to be so diluted because you're going to be able to find anything you want on YouTube to be able to educate yourself on whatever AI software you want to use. Whereas in. 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 out.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:26.919 - 00:15:27.920

Yeah, yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:15:27.920 - 00:15:54.860

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. Yeah, I can use ChatGPT.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:55.260 - 00:15:55.820

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:15:56.220 - 00:15:59.820

I don't have to go out and think anymore because I can use ChatGPT. No, I'm just kidding.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:59.820 - 00:16:02.060

But it's funny. You were.

Travis Zigler

00:16:04.450 - 00:16:59.790

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 Chad GPT. And I don't have to hire people. I don't have to manage people. It's all through Chat GPT.

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, real business that's focused on that, and you can be flexible and change. And I'll give one more quick example. Were you in the physical products space for E Commerce?

Matt Edmundson

00:16:59.950 - 00:17:01.670

Yeah, I still am. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:17:01.670 - 00:17:26.120

Okay. So you 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. Yeah, that was great. Back in 2014 and 2015, when I first started, you could throw up a product.

You could buy 100 reviews and sell a bunch and make a lot of money.

Matt Edmundson

00:17:26.360 - 00:17:26.920

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:17:27.000 - 00:17:35.640

What I noticed in 2017, though, is that it wasn't sustainable because my products would shoot up. Twelve months later, they'd start to drift down.

Matt Edmundson

00:17:35.880 - 00:17:36.440

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:17:37.080 - 00:18:21.260

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 and to 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 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. Because 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:21.500 - 00:18:21.980

Wow.

Travis Zigler

00:18:22.220 - 00:19:33.780

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, and 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 kind of fun because I mean, a lot of your listeners probably listen to Alex Hermosi and he says it all the time, I have nothing to sell you. Because he doesn't. He knows his demographic. He wants somebody that's. What is it, like 5 million in EBITDA or higher? 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 him. And it's very powerful when you can solve a problem when you have nothing to sell. And that's kind of the difference.

And I rant a lot, so if you need to cut me off, just like cut me off.

Matt Edmundson

00:19:33.780 - 00:20:02.570

Well, yeah, ask me questions. No, no, no, that's good, that's good. This is 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 live streamed a new podcast and you live streamed for six months and nobody turned up.

Now, recently we had Sarah Williams on the show who, who mentioned something similar. And I, I'm kind of curious why, why podcasting? Why live streaming? And would you still do that today?

Travis Zigler

00:20:04.090 - 00:21:30.520

I do still do it today. And so. But 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 live streaming. 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 like 30 minutes to one hour show once a week.

Yeah, 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 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:21:30.520 - 00:21:31.120

No, it's not.

Travis Zigler

00:21:31.120 - 00:21:53.480

People do not have short attention spans. You're just too boring. Not you, it's, it's, 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 one. Not it's like usually like 10 to 30 minutes of live every Monday.

All our short form videos. Two a day.

Matt Edmundson

00:21:53.920 - 00:21:54.200

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:21:54.200 - 00:22:10.560

And then we do this across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. But we do one mashup every every month.

And what a mashup is 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 video.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:11.120 - 00:22:11.600

Wow.

Travis Zigler

00:22:11.680 - 00:22:56.260

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's Drew Hitchcock. So shout out to Drew. He's, he's great. He's an amazing person.

And I did my first one and my average view hours, because 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 our watch hours just by doing one three hour video.

So now we're doing one three hour video or longer every single month.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:56.500 - 00:22:56.980

Wow.

Travis Zigler

00:22:56.980 - 00:23:00.900

And if you can do more, kudos to you. But it's exhausting.

Matt Edmundson

00:23:01.539 - 00:23:01.979

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:23:01.979 - 00:23:04.340

Because. Because I still do it live. I still do it live.

Matt Edmundson

00:23:04.740 - 00:23:06.420

So you do the whole three hours live.

Travis Zigler

00:23:06.980 - 00:23:11.380

So what I do is I do a mix. So I pick my best videos in that topic.

Matt Edmundson

00:23:11.800 - 00:23:12.080

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:23:12.080 - 00:23:56.229

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 kind of preview what's coming up in between and just kind of 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

00:23:56.230 - 00:24:13.910

So it happens quite a lot now actually. It's quite funny. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, really quite funny. And three hour long videos is quite an interesting idea because.

And you're right, long form is not dead. I mean, Andrew Huberman show, which is one of the best listened to podcasts, is normally two and a half hours, three hours long.

Travis Zigler

00:24:14.310 - 00:24:16.030

Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, all those.

Matt Edmundson

00:24:16.030 - 00:24:45.790

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, you know, short form, you've got to get it down to the commute time. And it's like, no, no, we don't.

We kind of like where we're at. I feel like actually we're a short form show now when we're an hour long, you know, when all the other ones like two, three hours.

But yeah, interesting. So we've got phase one, identify the problem. Where do we go from there?

Travis Zigler

00:24:46.830 - 00:24:55.390

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.

Matt Edmundson

00:24:55.550 - 00:24:55.910

Sure.

Travis Zigler

00:24:55.910 - 00:25:10.400

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, just inflammation of the eyelids. Styes, which is a bump on your eyelids.

Matt Edmundson

00:25:10.400 - 00:25:10.800

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:25:10.800 - 00:25:25.680

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 into Google Keyword Planner. And I just search for those keywords and you know, Google Keyword Planner comes up with a bunch of different keywords for you.

Matt Edmundson

00:25:25.920 - 00:25:26.400

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:25:26.400 - 00:26:18.800

And 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 300,000, 500,000amillion a month. But the Higher the better with a 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, your bid is going to be a lot higher. Yeah, 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, because I still worked for them for a year and a half. Yeah, we drove millions of clicks to our blog at an average of six cents a click.

Matt Edmundson

00:26:19.200 - 00:26:20.400

Okay, that's.

Travis Zigler

00:26:20.400 - 00:26:56.080

And it was 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 sty.

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 kind of this problem based keyword going to a blog post, an advertorial if you will.

Matt Edmundson

00:26:56.240 - 00:26:56.800

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:26:57.040 - 00:28:15.360

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. 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 gonna 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 could watch a video about the same topic. And, and when they sit on your blog for a long period of time, your SEO increases. And so you have these 6 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

00:28:16.640 - 00:29:47.230

Well, I'm making lots of notes, Travis, as we go, as we 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 like 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 sort of years ago we did the blogs and it's like, well, let's, you know, do the blogs.

And then all this other stuff came along like TikTok, you know, and Instagram and it's like, well, 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?

Is it a bit like I know that if I send them to my landing page on my website for that product, I'm going to send however many 7% of people are going to click through and out of those 35% 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

00:29:47.790 - 00:30:43.670

So conversion rate stays anywhere from that 1 to 5% range, just like it would whenever you drive to your website. If you get up to 5%, that's great, as you know.

But the reason we send to Amazon is because our conversion rate on Amazon's so high and frictionless buying experience. Amazon has just perfected the buying experience. Yeah, 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 1 to 2%.

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.

Matt Edmundson

00:30:43.830 - 00:30:44.230

Right.

Travis Zigler

00:30:44.230 - 00:31:25.610

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, 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 like it's crazy how fast you can rank something by sending that external traffic.

Matt Edmundson

00:31:25.770 - 00:31:26.250

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:31:26.330 - 00:31:42.610

Now, with regards to the blog post, I love how you called it old school. And that's what I love about it, is because every entrepreneur gets distracted by the new shiny object. Shiny object syndrome. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:31:42.610 - 00:31:43.050

Yep.

Travis Zigler

00:31:43.690 - 00:32:59.610

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 E commerce 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 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, physical 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 like 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:59.850 - 00:33:00.250

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:33:00.250 - 00:33:02.250

It's so easy to use the strategy.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:02.569 - 00:33:19.510

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 center.

Is there anything else to this strategy that you have that we need to think through or think about?

Travis Zigler

00:33:19.990 - 00:33:25.750

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.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:26.070 - 00:33:26.470

Right.

Travis Zigler

00:33:26.630 - 00:33:39.430

We're going to get them as a lead. And once you get them into your email email sequence, you then have a welcome sequence.

Most people will do short form email, then just kind of welcome them, then try to sell them.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:39.670 - 00:33:40.150

Yep.

Travis Zigler

00:33:40.150 - 00:34:41.960

I like to do longer emails in the welcome sequence to really go in, 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 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 you know, it's, we're not a big agency. 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 people.

But getting them on that email sequence, they read my story, they learn the problems I had and why I came out with it. I do that over the course of like seven emails.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:42.330 - 00:34:42.570

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:34:42.570 - 00:34:46.570

And those long emails are the same as your long form content.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:47.050 - 00:34:47.570

Okay.

Travis Zigler

00:34:47.570 - 00:34:55.130

60 minutes in someone's ear, 20 minutes of them reading an email. If they've read every single word of that email, they're yours for life.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:55.450 - 00:34:55.970

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:34:55.970 - 00:35:34.100

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 like sell more products.

I do it because people want genuine connection 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 emails, I want you to start saying the brand name. And we're like, absolutely not.

I was like, we are not doing that. This brand is personal. This is you.

Matt Edmundson

00:35:34.100 - 00:35:34.700

Yeah, yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:35:34.700 - 00:35:35.840

It's not the business name.

Matt Edmundson

00:35:36.230 - 00:35:36.430

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:35:36.430 - 00:36:50.980

And that goes the same thing with like 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. If you look up on YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, it's Dr. Travis Ziegler.

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 Diller.

If anybody follows him out there, he's gone from magnetic marketing to list grow, list building course to a health because he battled for his life 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:36:51.220 - 00:36:51.660

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:36:51.660 - 00:37:24.770

And he's a great person, great human. So that's a great example of personal branding. Another one, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has 160 million followers on X, whereas in Tesla and Tesla has like 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:25.080 - 00:37:25.400

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:37:25.400 - 00:38:09.960

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.

Yeah, I was open and honest about like, what we went through in Q4 last year. We fired our COO and five other people.

The COO is one of my best friends from college and it was probably one of the hardest decisions I made, but it was, 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:38:09.960 - 00:39:21.470

Is the next step, bringing it back around? I'm curious on the personal brand. I'm aware of time, Travis, so I don't. I want to monopolize 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, like 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 profitable without Elon Musk? I don't know. And so there's, 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 you know, probably the circle of people will influence will be hundreds, not millions in a lot of ways. If how do you balance building your personal brand? So let's go back to your e commerce site that dealt with try 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're exiting the business. So how did you manage that?

Travis Zigler

00:39:22.350 - 00:40:05.840

Yeah, great question.

So if your plan, I mean everybody's plan maybe is to exit eventually and if you build it around you personally, that part of the business is going to be Less valuable. And that, that is true than if you did a brand, but if you build it around your personalities, it's going to grow faster.

So what you can do is as you 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:40:06.080 - 00:40:06.640

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:40:06.640 - 00:40:12.410

But if I were to ever pivot, I would just change the name to the brand name or whatever you want to do.

Matt Edmundson

00:40:12.490 - 00:40:12.850

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:40:12.850 - 00:40:14.650

And start bringing other people on.

Matt Edmundson

00:40:14.970 - 00:40:15.370

Right.

Travis Zigler

00:40:15.370 - 00:40:48.060

And that's what I would do. I, 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, 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 their, their 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.

Matt Edmundson

00:40:48.060 - 00:40:48.420

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:40:48.420 - 00:40:57.060

I may not love agency life. Like, it's very hard to manage lots of clients only because when something's wrong, they come to me.

Matt Edmundson

00:40:57.140 - 00:40:57.500

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:40:57.500 - 00:41:03.870

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.

Matt Edmundson

00:41:04.030 - 00:41:04.470

Yeah.

Travis Zigler

00:41:04.470 - 00:41:34.290

And that's the, that's like, we've, we have some very happy clients, but, like, we had a very happy client. We grew them over 300% over the course of a year and a half and they almost dropped us.

And it was just like, I got on the phone, I was like, what's going on? And he told me everything. And I was like, well, 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. That's what agency life is hard. I don't know what I was getting at with this.

Matt Edmundson

00:41:36.290 - 00:41:41.890

We were talking about personal brand and swapping over, you know, and sort of bringing other people in.

Travis Zigler

00:41:42.370 - 00:42:16.120

Yeah.

So that's, that's what I would do is just like, switch my channel to my brand and then, like, have other people on it if you're going get ready to sell. But yeah, going back to. I make a business, I don't look to Sell it. When I sold, I love. It was a strategic sell.

It was to somebody that was already in 6,000 doctor's offices. They were 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 had. They have like nine brands and we scaled all their brands direct to consumer and then they took our products to wholesale.

Matt Edmundson

00:42:16.360 - 00:42:16.760

Wow.

Travis Zigler

00:42:16.760 - 00:42:39.320

That was the dream. Yeah, it 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 brain'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. Yeah, that's just my opinion.

Matt Edmundson

00:42:39.320 - 00:43:43.680

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 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, you know. And he used The Ray Kroc McDonald's example, you know, as a.

As how you built a business around teenagers which someone could then come and buy, you know. So he was 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 the opposite spirit.

It's like, well, no, just focus on doing something that's going to solve a great problem for people that you can be passionate about and just deal with that and face that. I think it was quite an interesting flip to the script, for want of a better expression.

Travis Zigler

00:43:43.680 - 00:45:13.590

Build 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 cash flow as much as possible. We worked with a brand for a while. They eventually brought their 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 like 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 cash flow 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 like 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 but you know, it's spitting out so much cash flow. It's like, why sell it? And if it's spitting out that much cash flow, 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 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, I want to see the dancing and I want to be the leader and not the day to day guy.

Matt Edmundson

00:45:13.910 - 00:45:28.640

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 your wearing if they, if they want to.

Travis Zigler

00:45:29.120 - 00:46:18.500

Well, 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 Ziggler 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@profitable pineapple.com and yeah, 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

00:46:18.970 - 00:47:04.100

Fantastic, 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. You know that you guys have gone on from doing the I charity to the business to now the agencies and all the things that you're doing.

Really, really fascinating. And thanks for sharing your insight and value with us. It's been fantastic.

Travis Zigler

00:47:04.420 - 00:47:06.180

I appreciate you having me on. Thanks, Matt.

Matt Edmundson

00:47:06.420 - 00:48:18.580

No problem, no problem. Brilliant, eh? Also remember to check out E Commerce Cohort, the amazing membership group that enables us to bring you like this podcast.

Do check them out ecommerce cohort.com be sure to follow the E Commerce podcast wherever you get your podcast 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 E Commerce Podcast is produced by the team at Orion Media.

You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The team that makes this show possible is the beautiful, talented, wonderful and amazing Sadaf Bain on and Tanya Herzlak.

Theme music was written by Josh Edmondson. And as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript or show notes, just head over to the website ecommerce podcast.net they're all there.

They're all there. You know where it is. Go there. Ecommerce Podcast. 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.

Travis Zigler

00:48:40.260 - 00:48:55.250

Sam.