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Category: E-commerce
Tags: businessdropshippingecommercemarketingSEO
Entities: 1% Ecom ClubJaden ClarkJared BowmanNBC Universal GroupNiche Pursuits podcastSkyYardcraft
00:00
It's hard to get a business off the ground. It's hard to do it while you're working a full-time job.
It's hard to grow it and it's hard to sell it. You did all of them.
So, congratulations. >> I sold this business to a private wealth fund.
We ended up like getting a valuation of about 700K, which was really cool. Why not just focus on the bottom of the funnel keywords?
Why not
00:15
just focus on paid ads at the very bottom of the funnel? It's better for finding those keywords that allow us to grow a bigger bigger pie.
Essentially, this thing's working on paid ads. Like, why put all the time?
Why put all the effort in to SEO and organic ranking? Paid traffic is great when you're
00:31
starting a business because it's the shot in the arm, but it also makes it more volatile. >> You got to stop telling everyone all these good secrets here.
>> What pages did you find were making money from organic? Were you able to track that?
Were you able to get any data? It tends to be the longtail type
00:46
and by that I mean product type. >> Are you optimizing the product pages for longtail keywords?
>> There are like two types of keywords that are valuable to us. There are All right, welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast.
My name is Jared
01:02
Bowman. Today we are joined by Jaden Clark with the 1% Ecom Club.
Jaden, welcome on board. >> Thanks for having me.
>> It's great to have you. I'm glad we're able to make this work out.
We've got a really cool kind of, you know, journey in the life sort of story today. Uh I'm
01:18
excited to hear about um something that you built and then uh cats out of the bag went on to sell. Uh but uh before we get into all those details you're going to share with us, maybe give us some backstory and who you are, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll get into today's subject.
>> Of course. Yeah.
So I guess these days I
01:35
am an e-commerce business owner, entrepreneur. Uh I've got a few businesses these days.
I'm sure we'll come on to that later. But I guess principally what we're going to talk about is that not that long ago, maybe three and a half years, I was living a life that I guess is probably similar to a lot of your listeners.
Like I was working a 9 toive corporate job that I
01:52
didn't love. That's probably an understatement like bordering on hated like you know I think it was like a lot of things a lot of people rather where there were things I was like it works for me but god I wish I was not doing this right so that was where I was uh I was living just outside of London cuz
02:07
that was where the office was commuting in you know and luckily now my life looks very different I now live in Barcelona with my my wife I get to run e-commerce businesses I am heap heaps happier than I was there so I guess that's that's me in a nutshell I suppose and yeah probably what we're going to dive into
02:23
>> I mean I think given that intro is perfect. So many of our listeners are in that spot are fearful of getting in that spot or have a story similar to yours where they got themselves out of that spot.
Um I mean let's let's go back to to when you started this business the
02:40
first one. What was the impetus?
Uh I always like to ask that question. Oftentimes it's something random like you know you're on a on a metro or on a train or something like that.
Like what was the impetus for it? where what what were the building blocks to get you off the ground?
>> Yeah. So, I kind of did everything on
02:57
the timeline that I thought I was supposed to in my life. So, like I went to university, then I went and got a job at like a big corporate.
Uh any of your like UK listeners will know of Sky. It's like kind of like Verizon or you know, it's part of the NBC Universal Group.
So, it's like this big corporate. They look after you brilliantly.
You know,
03:12
nice office in the city. I went there as a graduate and I kind of worked through, right?
And that was what I thought I really wanted cuz that's kind of what my par my parents are like that they have like stable jobs they value like stable income all that sort of thing and they were like oh look at this you get all these benefits vacation you're well paid
03:29
you get progression you work for this cool brand and you know for years I bought into that and then it started to get to the point where I was thinking actually am I that happy or is this just like I've been taught that life is a bit miserable and this isn't that miserable
03:46
you know in the context of miserable, they kind of do some things to make it not super miserable. And then suddenly the cracks started to, you know, I started to question it and that sort of thing.
And then almost as I gave myself permission to question it and started seeking out those things, like I read the 4-hour work week, I did like the same sort of thing that a lot of us do,
04:01
right? And I started to almost get permission because this was not my upbringing in terms of like going outside the box and taking these risks, etc.
I started to get permission to think actually I could maybe I could seek more. And me and my wife, we've
04:16
been together since we were at university. So, we've been like we've kind of been each other's best friend and we love going on holiday together, all that sort of thing.
And we went on holiday for 2 weeks. It was brilliant.
And at the end, I was like, aren't I supposed to feel energized here? I'm supposed to feel excited to go back to work, right?
I'm supposed to think, I
04:32
had a nice break and now I'm going to go do it. And I felt really down about the fact that I was going back.
And I thought, how sad that I'm looking at probably 40 working years more of this, of living for my little two week rest bite where I get to do what I actually
04:48
want to do. And then I kind of grapple with, well, that sounds a bit entitled.
Like, we've all got to work, Jaden. Like, come on.
Um, and then suddenly I was like, but maybe I could make this better. And luckily my wife was super supportive of that.
And she could kind of see the vision as well. She was like, how amazing would it be if we could, you
05:04
know, kind of be a bit more on our own schedule, that sort of thing. And so, you know, kicked it around a bit and was like, can I even is it even okay to seek this route?
And then almost once we discussed it, it was kind of like a a switch was flipped and I was like, no, no, no, okay, I have to do this now. And
05:20
luckily, it was, you know, didn't have a family. So, you know, I I am there are other people trying to make this jump where they've got, you know, all these things.
For us, it was just a case of, you know, house, mortgage, you know, stable income. And and also, as we'll come on to, like it wasn't a case for me of burning the boats.
It was a case of, right, I'm going to build in tandem with
05:35
the job. So, it's like it's a time and a commitment risk.
It wasn't a financial risk, but once I'd kind of made that decision, it was like, "Right, we're going." And and that was kind of So, it wasn't one trigger point, but it was once it had happened, it was no, it felt like no going back. Hey guys, Jared here.
Just a quick break
05:51
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06:07
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06:40
snapshot. Again, that's 2011creative.comshot.
All right, now back to the episode. You started with the vision perhaps it sounds like rather than the idea.
You're like I got to I got to not keep doing this for 40 years. So what am I going to
06:57
do to not do this for 40 years? A lot of people start with like maybe they're doing something that they're passionate about turns into a side hustle and all of a sudden they're like oo now should I turn this into a full-time business?
You started with a vision. Where did you get the idea to you know it's one thing to be like I don't want to do this for the rest of my life but where do you get the
07:13
idea on what to do? >> For sure.
So yeah, like you say, it wasn't a case of I never had any intention of side hustling. That was like a necessity cuz I was I am quite riskaverse and I needed to keep an income.
So it had to be a side hustle, but I was desperate. Like my finish line
07:29
inverting commerce was when I could go full-time. So I kind of knew I wanted to do e-commerce.
I don't know why. Maybe just in my mind the the like nature of selling a thing to a person made sense.
You know, some people can't and you know, I was clearly there. I probably at
07:45
that time wouldn't have been able to wrap my head around the idea of like affiliate marketing or something like it was very basic in my complete novice online business space. It was like well you sell a thing the person buys the thing that's you in the value chain.
So I had that in my head but I was mainly looking at you know kind of like
08:01
physical products holding inventory that sort of thing and it scared me again as I said risk averse person the idea of having like minimum order quantities all that and I was speaking to factories trying to come up with ideas all that sort of thing and I couldn't pull the trigger because I just didn't feel like I had the tools nor the appetite for the
08:17
risk and then I heard about the idea of high ticket drop shipping because I considered low ticket drop shipping and again I was put off by the idea of like a business that I would probably not feel super proud to own. I was scared of the volume of customers.
How am I going to do this on the side? Dealing with
08:32
maybe thousands of transactions, all that sort of thing. I was like, that's a non-starter.
Was introduced to the concept of high ticket drop shipping, which kind of worked for me because it removed the inventory risk, but also meant that I could kind of work with reputable domestic suppliers that I was kind of proud to serve. I could probably
08:49
make a full-time income off 30 transactions a month, not 3,000. And I was like, "Right, okay.
So, I just have to get really strong at marketing, traffic acquisition and conversion rate optimization in order to make this thing happen. Yeah, I think I can get on board with just that learning curve.
And that
09:05
was kind of the point where I felt right, that's going to be the vehicle. That's how I'm going to do this.
>> It's interesting to hear you process through all that. I I love all the stuff that went into what you were thinking because for someone who's never kind of run a business before, for someone who's never like you kind of had a lot of
09:21
really good things mentally that you were checking off as you went. So anyways, just we could explore that, but I want to get into some of the meat and potatoes here of how you grew this.
Um, uh, talk about the first year or so or the first time period. I don't even want to put a year on it.
Whatever it is,
09:36
like getting off the ground is always difficult. Um, uh, talk about how that how that first little bit went, especially with someone again who I I don't want to, um, I don't want to assume, but, you know, it doesn't sound like you have a lot of business experience at this point.
>> I had absolutely zero business experience at this point. Um, it would
09:52
be fair to say other than like working in one, but we had 30,000 employees at the business I worked in, right? So, that I was a lifer there.
That's the only job I ever had. So, no, I had almost no experience of uh, running a business.
And but I did I am a nerd and
10:08
I did have experience of deciding I'm interested in something >> going deep on it and then kind of leveling up my own and that's something I get really addicted to like I've always like whether it's like golf or chess or whatever and it sounds stupid to equate the two but that is how I see
10:25
business is like it's uh it's something that excites me I find something I want to kind of chase after and I want to level up in and then I just kind of like acquire the skills the abilities the to put the reps in. And that's kind of the way I approached this journey.
Um was
10:40
okay, I've chosen my business model, which is high ticket to get drop shipping. And I know that in order to be successful at that, I need to get really good at essentially acquiring customers in a way that's profitable, converting them at the best possible rate, and operating like a good healthy business
10:57
in like which is kind of a wrapper. And I was like that's not and I sort of realized over time the amount of strategies and disciplines that could go into that but as a core focus I was like right okay that's something I can just go into.
So the first year essentially looked like uh building the business in
11:15
terms of getting suppliers on board and a website up probably took me about 60 days and and I say building the business which probably you know you're you're building the business to grow it the whole time but that's when you feel like you've got skin in the game once you've got a website live which I had no experience in but luckily like Shopify
11:31
and tutorials makes that for e-commerce businesses it makes life really easy and then getting suppliers on board which is essentially the brands that you sell on behalf of, you're a retailer. These guys are great at product manufacturing, product design, etc., but they have
11:46
absolute phobia of things like paid advertising, of things like organic search, etc., right? So, you're sort of their distribution arm.
So, getting those on board like every time you get that, that's like a big win. You're like, "Wow, another access to another set of like 30 40 products that I can
12:01
sell." And getting the website is like the physical thing of you feel like I'm in the game now. I've got something that represents my business.
So, that was probably like the first 30 or 60 days. And then at that point, you're like, okay, here we go.
And then there's the massive nervousness of you turn the taps
12:16
on in terms of well, it's paid traffic really because you're right at the beginning on a fresh domain and then you just uh desperately want to see the sales start coming in for proof of concept, right? And I was fortunate that in the first three months, we didn't like do anything incredible.
We did
12:31
about 100k in revenue, which I know that sounds crazy, but on high ticket, like our average order value was about 4K at the time. So, it wasn't, you know, it's not heaps of transactions, but it was enough for proof of concept, right?
I'd covered setup costs for this business because you're not holding inventory
12:47
relatively low. So, it was like, okay, we've covered our ad spend, we've covered our setup costs, and there's a little bit of money in the business to reinvest.
So that was like okay awesome proof of concept like enough for me to feel confident to keep plowing every waking hour outside of my job into this pretty much. Then I would say about
13:03
month four or five things got really exciting. So we like I think month five we for the first time the profit of the business covered my salary and that was another big moment for me of like okay now I must just replicate this and I knew that obviously just doing that one month meant nothing because I needed a lot more than one month's worth of
13:19
consistency >> but that felt big and then we did our first 100k month in month six and then from there it was a bit of a a massive kind of progression to we just about hit seven figures by the end of the first 12 months which and we were about at the
13:34
time we were about 15% net profitability. So that was kind of like that was when and the nice thing is because you're not buying inventory, you're not pumping those profits back into scaling.
So it was kind for me again riskaverse person. I basically had a year's worth of income in the business
13:50
bank that allowed me to say right now I'm going full-time because this business could essentially not make another penny from tomorrow and I've still got a year's worth of runway here. Now, obviously, I knew that was very unlikely and actually, if anything, it was going to grow faster because I could commit those whatever 40 hours I was
14:06
spending before into it. So, that was basically the the road from no business at all, no experience to going full-time and being a full-time operator in that 12-month period.
>> So, it took about a year. You are doing high ticket drop shipping.
And just to
14:22
give people an idea, like you said, like a $4,000 product, could be like a couch, could be like, you know, something outdoors, could be something expensive. uh you're not having to buy it, you're not having to store it, you're not having to uh get a warehouse, you're not having to deal with the logistics, you and and so you're able to put all your
14:39
cash into marketing, which you did paid ads. We're going to get into all this.
I think I'm looking at my agenda here. Um and you know, on on on ecom, like a lot of people who maybe are affiliate marketers or other types of online marketers, they'll hear $100,000 months
14:54
and stuff and but you made sure to be clear. I'm just repeating this so people can really kind of lock it in and understand the business model.
You know, your margins are, I think you said, 15% or so. Um, and so the takehome's still very good, especially on the high ticket stuff, but um, you were at seven figures by the end of the first year.
15:11
>> Yeah. And you know, to put it into a real example, we were selling things for so you sell to a niche kind of like avatar.
So for us, it was people who love entertaining in their backyard, in their garden, right? So it was things like outdoor kitchens, gazeos, pergas, fire pits, all this sort of thing,
15:27
right? And that was what we sold.
And so we partnered with well by the end probably about 20 different manufacturers across these different product sets. And so you know someone might come and buy a gazebo from us and the partner of ours, this was in the UK,
15:43
but you know, I now work on a US version of this business as well. The model is essentially the same.
You know, let's say we've got a company who their bread and butter is we they design wooden and aluminium gazeos and perglars and they're all focused on, you know, essentially working with the factory,
15:58
making sure build quality is good, the design features are good, they're getting the right amount of stock in. They're handling all of that.
It's warehoused in the country by them. And then we're essentially focusing on right how do we acquire someone who's looking for that product?
How do we convert them? And then let's say someone comes to our site and we do that job well and
16:14
they come and they buy a gazebo for $5,000. Depending on our arrangement with the supplier, they might invoice us, let's say 3750, for example, because that's our trade price that we buy it off them at.
That's essentially our margin for being their distribution arm. So they
16:30
can just focus on building great products and we can focus on how we sell them. And then eventually that kind of like 15% net margin that's kind of what's available for take-home and income once we've paid for our advertising costs you know any team all that sort of thing.
Um so that's essentially the mechanism by how which
16:46
it works. >> Okay.
Okay. Good.
Uh thank you for explaining that. Uh I think it gives people a very clear picture of exactly how this kind of business works.
So take us to the end and then we'll get into how you did it. Um where uh you mentioned um kind of that you're working on a US version of this now.
uh what
17:04
happened with this business, take us maybe through the final steps of the timeline, and then then we'll get into all the nitty-gritty of how you built this thing. >> Cool.
So, we kind of did the first year. I go full-time around the same time as well.
My wife was pretty unhappy in her job, so she comes full-time as well. That was a pretty big moment for me.
We
17:21
were on holiday. She was like, I'm really not enjoying it.
I get where you were. I was like, well, just come.
So, she helped me out. She did the customer service for a little while.
Ran it for another about a year and a half. Um, and then one of the great things about these businesses is they are they're an asset that have value and it's a value at a
17:37
multiple of your net profitability. Um, I'll be completely honest, like I sold this business to a like a private wealth fund, bought it off me.
Um, we ended up like getting a valuation of about 700K, which was really cool. It was about a 3.7x multiple in the end on our 12 month
17:54
rolling net profitability. Um, and they kind of graded me as a business owner on like the mechanisms in terms of like traffic, conversion rate, sales, excellent, and then basic sort of operational like slightly disastrous.
And like that's not really surprising,
18:09
right? Because I did all this geeking out on how to do a good job in terms of getting good paid traffic, good organic traffic, converting it, and kind of forgot that then when you have a seven figure business, there's also some an operational layer that comes with that.
Um, and almost the business had kind of
18:25
grown too quickly for me to go on that learning curve. So, it somewhat overwhelmed me and I kind of was staring down the barrel of either wading into this operational kind of machine that I'd built and trying to unpick it or potentially selling to someone who
18:40
already and this fund buys e-commerce businesses. That's what they do.
So, they had the customer service team ready and waiting, the sales team, everything else. I just had to show them how I did marketing for this specific business.
So it was quite a nice natural fit. They were happy to give me, you know, kind of almost four years worth of payout.
Um,
18:58
sure it was on a heavy growth trajectory, but it kind of worked for both sides. So yeah, we took that exit and that kind of gave me a big, you know, kind of mid6 figure sum to decide what I wanted to do next, which was was cool.
So that was kind of the the end there of that business. >> Heck yeah, man.
That's awesome. It's
19:13
hard to get a business off the ground. It's hard to do it while you're working a full-time job.
It's hard to grow it, and it's hard to sell it. You did all of them.
So congratulations. Thank you.
Um, so ultimately what were the big levers that caused uh the revenue to increase? And you mentioned it at a pretty sharp rate.
I
19:29
would agree with that. I mean um you grew this business very quickly.
Like you've talked about paid ads. Um maybe if that's the spot to start like I want to hear how you grew it, the different levers you ended up using and leveraging and then kind of maybe some of the details on how you how you pulled it
19:44
off. >> For sure.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, I think it does make sense to start with paid ads because that is well that's where you do start, right? Because it's for almost everyone who runs his business, including myself, has a brand new domain that's basically in Google sandbox.
And so, paid ads is your shot in the arm of
20:00
traffic early doors. And um yeah, so I ran a paid ad system that I learned from a few different sources uh but essentially have kind of adapted from there.
And it's a three tier funnel of shopping ads. And essentially how that
20:17
works is you assign by the search term intent its value to you as a business. So if I give you an example with our product set, you would have your top offunnel campaign where you're happy to be really uncompetitive.
You are happy with you know getting say 10% 20%
20:34
impression share. There's way more traffic out there than you are realistically serving for.
But that's okay because you're managing the fact that a search like fire pit or gazebo or you know even maybe something slightly more specific like wooden gazebo that
20:50
ultimately they have some value to your business but the propensity to convert there is fairly low. Those people are at the top of the funnel high ticket buying cycles are long right that person's got a long way to come down to be able to purchase or to be ready to purchase.
Then you've got a middle of funnel campaign which is where you start to
21:06
assign a bit more value and you might want to be getting let's say 30 to 50% impression share. So you know one in two one in three times that someone makes a search of this nature of this intent.
You want to be showing up and having an opportunity to win that traffic. That might be where they start to put like a
21:22
slightly longer tail keyword on. So they might search a specific brand that you sell.
So like Yardcraft for example is a relatively big brand of gazeos in the US. So someone might search Yardcraft gazebo.
So fine, they've got more intent to convert. They've done a bit more research.
They have a bit more of an
21:37
idea of where they're going. You kind of know where their price sensitivity is, for example, what sort of type of product they're looking at, but they might still have 15 models to work through.
They might still have a load of objections to overcome, all that sort of thing, right? And then you've got the final bucket, which is where we want to
21:52
be hyper hyper competitive. We're aiming for like 80% plus impression share.
We want to try and hoover up as much of this traffic as possible. And these are our really high intent bottom of the funnel search terms.
And these are where we get really long tails. So it might be, you know, 12 foot by 18 ft oak
22:08
gazebo, right? Or it might be brand name product name, uh, you know, 48 in concrete fire pit bowl, these sorts of things, right?
And obviously the amount of traffic available goes progressively downwards and downwards. Um,
22:25
>> exactly. hence the funnel, which is why we want to be hyper competitive on those search terms at the bottom because the propensity to convert there and the conversion rate is that much higher.
Now, the reason this works so well is because 95% of your competitors are kind of being funneled down a route by
22:41
Google, which is to run one shopping campaign. Um, we kind of have to almost hack the system.
We actually use something called negative keyword lists inside Google to form this pushing down of keywords to make sure that I can bid 20 cents on gazebo but $3 on 12t x 18t
23:00
oak gazebo for example. And essentially that means that we are hyper hyper competitive on those highv value keywords and then you know deliberately uncompetitive on the low value so that our rorowaz and our profitability on
23:15
that ad spend is because Google wants to wants to spend and it wants to get the impressions you've essentially asked for right and so what mo most people kind of see and I see this inside ad accounts all the time is that their budget is being hoovered up by those sort of generic terms and they're like oh I
23:31
think I've got to conversion rate problem because I've got all this traffic I'm not converted. It's actually you've got an intent problem.
Sure, there is work to do on conversion as well. But if you haven't got the right intented traffic in the first place, it's going to be really hard anyway.
And if you're paying a dollar a click for generic keywords that you need 2,000
23:47
visitors to convert, no matter how good your conversion rate optimization is, you're always going to struggle to be profitable. So that was kind of the first I guess um unfair advantage or cheat code or whatever that my sort of nerdiness and geeking out on this system gave me was that I could very quickly
24:03
those are the results we talked about earlier of like the first month where it covered my salary that was all entirely reliant on paid traffic because in month five you're not getting organic traffic. So the ability to make sure that you had the return on ad spend to cover that ad spend and make profit from there was
24:19
kind of all based on that system. And then we also, without going too deep into it, the winners we find from shopping, we then also double down and run text ads to hyperoptimize landing pages as well.
So we'll like build a landing page all around that keyword or cluster and we'll try and dominate it in
24:35
shopping and dominate it in text ads so that we kind of have as much of the real estate of pay ads covered as possible. And then the final kind of wraparound is is retargeting as well and making sure that because buying cycles are long in high ticket as many people as possible who have kind of put their hand up and come to our page that we're putting them
24:52
back into the funnel as they go through that process because the amount of people you're going to convert in session is really really minimal. So that was kind of the the flywheel of paid advertising that kind of gave us the initial shot in the arm that we could build on.
>> With your uh with with the experience
25:09
that you gained quickly in paid ads, let me ask a bit of a devil's advocate question. Um I understand long-term the value in focusing on each phase of the funnel, top, middle, bottom, but when you're starting a business off, at least for you, why not just focus on the
25:26
bottom of the funnel keywords? Why not just focus on paid ads at the very bottom of the funnel and skip all the rest of it?
>> It's a it's a good question. Um, honestly, if someone came to me and said, "I have really limited budget and I need to make it work." That is the approach I would say to them.
I'd say
25:41
like, "Right, let's get behind a couple of brands that we know there's search demand for that we know you have good margins for, and if we need to really get tight on profitability, let's do it that way." Optimally, if you want to grow the biggest pie as quickly as possible, you still want to be putting some of that top and middle of the
25:57
funnel traffic in because you can estimate what these keywords are going to be. But to an extent, when you first set up your funnel, you're using a bit of keyword research, but primarily uh kind of common sense and like slight business owner lens of okay, that looks longtail, that looks that looks high
26:13
intent, but ultimately there are going to be keywords over time that we see are in the top of funnel or the middle of the funnel, but they're actually converting at a bottom of funnel rate. And they might not on the surface look like the same as others, but actually we learn through through that that they
26:29
belong um in a in a in a lower campaign type, basically a bottom of funnel campaign type. So if we don't pay for the data, even though it's slightly suboptimal for return on ad spend, it's better for finding those keywords that allow us to grow a bigger bigger pie
26:45
essentially. How important is the top of the funnel and middle of the funnel keywords, queries, phrases you're targeting?
How important are those for retargeting? Because you talked about retargeting being a big deal.
Uh and I can imagine that retargeting would be something that would play itself out
27:02
because you're able to target all the different terms from broad to super specific. >> Yeah, definitely.
And you know, ultimately some of those top offunnel uh searches will become bottom ofunnel searches or like almost everyone starts at the top of the funnel, right? So yes,
27:17
some sometimes and there's different types retargeting will run. Some of it is bid adjustment based on factors that customers shown.
And if you know, obviously we do this at a larger scale. But if we just take one customer to try and break this down, let's say someone's search gazebo, they've therefore fallen
27:34
into our topfunnel campaign, they've come, they've spent some time on the site, we might then continue to retarget them and as they move down the funnel, we might show them one of our articles in terms of like which gazebo is right for them, for example, as part of our retargeting. So we get to play a role in their progression down the funnel
27:50
because obviously when they start to search more longtail it's because they know more what is the right type or they know what they want etc. So the bigger role we can play in that and to an extent the earlier we can capture that traffic the better.
That's also where organic starts to come in because whilst
28:06
it might not often be profitable for us to get a large share of the traffic at the top of the funnel, particularly um in paid advertising, the more top of the funnel organic we can get, the better because we have these mechanisms set up to essentially retarget to them to bring
28:22
them down the funnel and keep that relationship with them. >> You mentioned organic.
When did organic start to play a role? I mean, again, devil's advocate would say like, ah, this thing's working on paid ads.
like why put all the time? Why put all the effort in to SEO and organic ranking?
28:37
When did it become something you looked at? Why did you look at it?
>> Yeah. So, I I essentially wanted to bring organic in because I wanted to try and build the biggest moat around the business as possible.
Right. So, I've gone full-time and longevity is one of
28:52
the which is ironic having sold after like two and a half years, right? But equally, I would not have got the multiple I got.
the the buyer were quite keen on we by the time we sold our first point of acquisition was around for for our converting customers was around 5050
29:07
between paid and organic right and that was quite important to the buyer because you know ultimately paid traffic is great when you're starting a business because it's the shot in the arm but it also makes it more volatile uh ultimately I could come into you know or sort someone with these this sort of
29:24
existing knowledge and can kind of make your life more difficult in a market at some point because it is a competitive landscape whereas it's more of a moat inside organic. Not to mention actually for this business because the buying cycles are so long, the two work together so nicely.
And I'll be
29:39
completely honest, this was a bit of a happy accident, but I used to have uh an analytics report which I don't know if you've ever looked in analytics of like a touch point report. And it would be really common for a customer to buy from us having come to the site like double figures amounts of times.
And it's so nice to watch a conversion touch point
29:56
report where you can see like first point of contact was you know a Google shopping ad for example. Then they read an article that we created for organic.
Then they came to like a longtail keyword collection page. You know maybe let's like try and draw this out.
So they searched gazebo for example. They came to one of our pages via paid ads.
30:13
Then they searched how they how they're going to install their gazebo and they came to look at one of our articles that told them everything they need to know about how to install their gazebo. Then later they started looking at uh 12 foot wood gazeos and we had a collection page that was targeted that term.
So because
30:29
they started to know what they wanted, they then came back again. Then they came back, they now knew that they wanted a 12oot oak gazebo from yard street and they came back in our bottom of funnel via paid again.
And it was like the two work so nicely together. And that omniresence of us having and I
30:46
kind of started to think of it as the more touch points we own, the higher our chances of getting the ultimate sale, the more we're establishing ourselves in the mind of that customer as the people who are the experts that know their stuff and are the right people to buy to. And so the two not only did it create a defensibility to the business,
31:02
but they also complemented each other. >> Super smart.
Yep. Makes sense.
As soon as you said a buyer's more interested in it, you're right. To some degree, like a lot of buyers would consider a paid ads business exclusively not even really a business they're buying.
Um, agree. I'm not trying to say that that's the case, but you could I I've heard businesses
31:18
make that argument before. As soon as you layer on >> SEO, you've got the beginnings of like a brand there, you know, and so interesting.
Good, good, good to hear. So, how did you grow it on on on organic?
What what were the kind of the levers you pulled with SEO? Um, when did you start SEO, by the way?
Was I think I
31:34
don't know. I have my notes month five.
Did I get that right? Like when did you start investing in SEO and what what were some of the things you you did?
>> Yeah, that's correct. So yeah, about sort of month five, month six, like almost the concept was proved.
And the nice thing about this sort of ad setup is you do a lot of the hard yards early
31:51
and then after that it's small tweaks. So it sort of freed up the room now to sort of make that a little bit more set and forget and start to go big on SEO.
So, I started withformational content um because I'm a big believer of sort of like avalanche SEO and essentially like
32:07
earning your stripes and your topical authority with Google. Um, I am I mean I'm by no off- page SEO is my least favorite type of SEO and I you know I'm just one of those things I don't enjoy backlink building and I also had no experience of it going in and so I had a
32:23
brand new domain that was 6 months old that you know ultimately had next to no opportunity to rank for the sort of commercially very very valuable keywords I wanted to. So I was like right let's earn our stripes first earn our topical authority.
So we I started writing blogs
32:39
manually like I you know I sort of learned on page SEO I learned how to do keyword research and I started writing manually and then sort of as this business grew so did the kind of evolution of starting to kind of automate and then I I essentially did all of this manually myself and then I started to look at okay could the
32:54
heading structure be generated via an AI with the right prompts could some of the content be generated with the right prompts all that sort of thing. Um, and I started to layer on different sort of parts of the process being automated while still retaining that control over
33:10
and that layering to try and create like a a really strong end product. I would say arguably even better than I could copyright myself.
And then I kind of systemized that to the point where it could be outsourced to a member of the team with my own review. And that's when we started really being able to create
33:27
blogs at a high enough quality and a high enough velocity to be able to sort of get our first probably 10K or so in traffic for these different product types that allowed us to rank for enough keywords, get enough topical authority, and also start to be able to push some
33:42
of that authority internally to some of our commercial pages to make it realistic that we could start going after some of those commercial keywords. And then I guess I'll caveat all of that because I'm sure you have some sort of like niche site owners who are thinking like, you know, the and I'll be completely honest, the bar in e-commerce
33:58
is completely different in my opinion. Like I I do think e-commerce SEO is probably and don't like my partners Sean Buckles and Jesse Cunningham like forever remind me that we have it a little bit on easy mode in in ecom and like ultimately the bar is that bit
34:13
lower. Uh so that was another factor as well.
>> Good. Well, it's it's the bar is lower, but you know, it doesn't mean that um it's a it it does not mean that it's a uh it's it's an easy execution, right?
And and so um you know, you can you can sail that. I would also say it's more
34:29
complicated though, you know, like there's a lot more page types, collection pages, these types of things to manage. So you you know, you you have other complexities that you don't have in maybe affiliate SEO and these kinds of SEOs.
So for >> sure. >> Um okay.
So, I'm just curious like uh
34:45
and this is an ecom question. Um what pages did you find were making money from organic?
Were you able to track that? Were you able to get any data?
Um you know, I'm just curious like what are the the quote unquote money pages in ecom SEO?
35:02
>> Yeah. So, quite consistently across like a number of businesses that I've either now run or been a part of as a consultant, etc., It tends to be the kind of like longtail type.
Um, and by that I mean product type. So people who
35:18
are aware they want and like let's continue using the original site because it will hopefully make it clear. Someone knows that they want an aluminum sorry an aluminum pergola.
>> I'm learning my American here. aluminum perglar and they know they want
35:35
it with LED lighting and they want it to be, you know, 8 foot by 12 foot, right? That is the sort of term that is different enough that typically Google will like to serve a either product page or collection page that is hyper
35:50
relevant or as relevant as it can ultimately find. It's it's too specific almost to fall into the product category page with the parent keyword.
It's too specific for really to serve like an aluminum perglas collection page for example. So if there is a product page
36:05
that screams this is exactly what the customer is after here or if there's a collection page and that nuance essentially varies slightly by the type of search that your ability to dominate those keywords if you create and you know kind of do all those onpage SEO signals of like this is exactly matching
36:22
that search intent that you can start to and then also if you can start to do this at relative scale and I'm not talking about hundreds here I'm probably talking about tens of pages that run, you know, for for a domain like mine that was, you know, sub 10 DR,
36:38
it's in its first year, for example, maybe it's 18 months in. For us to go after a parent keyword that's got 20,000 searches and rank in a position that got meaningful traffic, it just wasn't going to happen.
But for us to maybe rank for a 500 monthly search volume commercial term that almost no one has really
36:55
created a page that signals to Google that it's for that intent. If we can stack 10 20 of those pages, that's where we start to bring that commercial traffic in.
And actually these are further down the funnel higher intented keywords because this customer knows
37:11
exactly what they want and there's no nothing really out there to serve them. someone who's just searching aluminum perlas and landing on that generic sort of pairing keyword.
We've got a lot of work to do to help them understand what they want to buy. These customers, we just need to put in front of them, oh, you want a 8ft x 12t aluminum pergola
37:27
with LED? Well, here it is.
And Google also, here it is in terms of the page that's right for that. >> I like to ask e-commerce guys this and gals this question.
Are you optimizing the product pages for longtail keywords and then optimizing the collection pages
37:43
for more broad keywords or is it not that plain and simple? So the nuance in high ticket drop shipping comes in the fact that there are like two types of keywords that are valuable to us.
There are u product and brand name keywords
37:58
that have there's like equity often in some of these brand names. So like I'm trying to think like yard that I've talked about or Yardcraft it is rather Yardcraft have a Westmont gazebo right there will be people who search for the Yardcraft Westmon gazebo.
So like first
38:14
and foremost that product page is going to be optimized to rank for that. Um and it's going to be trying to hoover up the traffic of people who know what product and brand they want to buy from but they don't yet know who they want to buy it from.
And we want to get you know that's ultimately a very bottom of the funnel
38:29
high intent to convert. So, we want to rank for that, but that product might also be the right product to serve for someone who wants an 8 foot x 12t oak gazebo.
Right? They're two different keywords.
And that's where sometimes we need to work out, okay, is it the right
38:45
thing with this product page to go after the brand name, product name, or is it the right thing to go with the product identifier, product type, or actually should these be two completely different pages where the same product might sit behind, but outwardly to Google, it's two different pages with two different
39:00
optimizations that are actually completely different because someone who searched for this product wants to know about the reviews for this product. They want to know about the benefits.
They want to know about this one that, you know, a customer bought from us recently, how they found it. This one over here wants to know maybe which is the best version of that product type
39:17
that they've searched. And it might be that we still point them at the product page in the end, but there is a bit of a nuance there.
as you sort of said, despite the fact that to some extent the the bar is lower in e-commerce SEO, sometimes the site structure and trying to work out which pages are there for
39:34
which keywords. You know, the first step is identifying those money keywords and then the second step is making sure that we've got the right pages to cater for them.
So, that's kind of yeah, where the nuance comes in. >> Great.
Great. I love it.
Love it. Thank you for diving into that.
Um, so you talked about content on the SEO side.
39:49
Did you at any point ever do link building? you know, you you can win with like a DR9 ecom site.
I know I run a I run a an SEO agency and I see it all the time, but um uh did you do any link building at any point to help drive
40:05
authority to your domain and did you see that have any impact? >> I did.
Yeah, I did. We started to work firstly with an agency on some paid backlink building.
We did that right at the end. But to be honest, the biggest I suppose success I would say we had with
40:21
link building was actually building local SEO term directories which firstly allow again I would probably say local SEO is the other in that sort of like uh I don't want to call it easy mode but like ecom and local SEO. >> You're dropping all the good ones.
You got to stop telling everyone all these
40:37
good secrets here. >> No, giving it away.
There's plenty to go around. Well, no, I'm probably just offending some people who are like, "Well, actually, I'm a really good local SEO." And it's harder than you think, Jaden.
But no, >> imagine for us, we're a national site. Let's hypothetically say we sell in the
40:52
US. We can sell a gazebo to any one of the states.
Doesn't really matter, right? They're warehoused in the US.
Sometimes they'll have different different distributors. So, there's in theory no reason for us to go after aluminum pergola in insert name of town or, you know, whatever it is, right?
But
41:08
actually sometimes creating content for those terms because you know some people do search in that way. Some people think actually they don't think oh I want to buy this and I can buy it from anywhere geographically.
They think I want to buy this locally. And so creating content
41:24
for example, you know, we and we'd often go either like best, for example, gazebo installers in and then insert town or um best, you know, showrooms to go and see them, right? And people are probably thinking, well, you don't make money off
41:39
installing these things and you don't make money, you don't have a showroom, so like how is this benefiting you? But actually, if we these there are businesses behind this that are relevant to our niche.
So if we create something that firstly ranks for this local SEO term because on our weaker DR it's a
41:54
lower competitiveness term that we can rank for. Let's say we choose the 200 most populated towns in the or you know cities whatever in the US and we create a directory of the 10 best installers of wooden gazeos in each of these 200 most populated towns.
Right now we do we do
42:12
our on page SEO properly. We now have a really good chance of ranking for these keywords because it's a low competition, underserved space.
We now have a proposition to reach out to these small businesses. And luckily with AI, our ability to do the research to find the 10, you know, the 10 installers with the best reviews or the most pro, you know,
42:28
projects or whatever, so that we have some authenticity about why we've ranked these and listed them as thus. Um, we can now reach out to them and say, "Hey, great news.
Like, we have 30,000 people who come to our site every month looking at gazeos. We've recognized you because of your 1,00 reviews and successful
42:44
projects as one of the best installers in this town. Um, you know, hopefully you want to shout about this on your site that we've recognized you.
We're kind of like an authority in the space. Here's a link to where we've recognized you.
We'd love if you put something on your site. We normally try and make it easy for them.
Like we'll give them a snippet of code, a bit of copy,
43:00
whatever. you know, a badge, something that makes it really easy for them to get some value to put it up on the because we can do it at scale.
If we've got, say, 200 pages with 10 businesses, we've got a large enough pool with a value give to be able to reach out that, you know, that might generate us 40
43:17
backlinks, 60 backlinks, etc. from businesses that are in the space.
They're landscapers, they're installers, they they also talk about the same topics that we talk about. They're inherently related.
it was quite a strong way of organically building back links in a profile that looked really
43:33
natural and increasing our keywords that we ranked for. So that's a strategy and it works very well across all niches.
You know I did it recently for a site where it sells uh you know sauners cold plunges that sort of thing and we just did best wellness facilities in all these towns and got them to link for us
43:49
for example. So it's quite a versatile um tactic for for backlink building which worked well for us.
>> Love it. Okay, cool.
Um we're coming up on time. I want to ask you about selling the business, why you chose to sell it.
You you did allude to it earlier. You kind of talked about the plateaus that
44:05
come in business and they come and then you've kind of almost got to uh I've found in business over the years like you do kind of almost have to start over again in terms of how you're going to get to the next plateau. That's that's a bit of an over dramatic over dramatizing it, but it is a bit like when you hit a
44:21
plateau you have to make a decision because you kind of have to break a bunch of stuff to go to that next plateau. Um, I'm curious if you could unpack just from a high level of the sales process, you know, um, how it was, maybe anything you learned along the way where you looked back and you're like, man, I wish I had known this because I
44:37
could have done something about this a year ago to make this easier or more profitable or not get dinged on it. Like anything you learned along the way through selling it.
>> Yeah, definitely. So, I guess the first thing is when you say, you know, the things you find that are broken, I I was the thing in this case that was broken.
44:53
Um, and I think because going back to earlier, because I had this intense desire to just get out of work as quickly as possible, I kind of pushed to breaking point and that ultimately caught up with me, right? And exactly like you say, I just needed that fresh start to be able to kind of like take
45:09
stock and look at all the things that I'd done to make it a success and all the things that I would have ideally done maybe foundationally to because in an ideal world, I wouldn't have sold that business. I would have kept that business for probably four or five years and we'd have probably been talking about uh you know multiple seven figure
45:24
exit rather than sort of like a mid to high six figures. That said, I don't regret it because I think at the time it was the right thing for me.
Firstly, I worked in a consulting agreement with the buyer. So I got to see a really sound operational business take what I'd
45:41
built in terms of a marketing you know and kind of like sales driving machine and show me what the right sort of operations underneath needed to be to support that. So I learned a hell of a lot as part of it and I got that headsp space to then sort of consolidate and go.
So I think ultimately
45:59
the the first thing is like the biggest learning I've taken from all of this and that's mainly from having the space to be able to dive into a load more businesses and now do this with you know tens of clients and now I've got three of my own is it's like obviously there are nuances to the strategies with every
46:15
single business and and a business owner lens that needs to be applied but ultimately it's kind of affirmed in my mind that the game is essentially the strength of the strategies and executing um to the highest possible level at the greatest speed possible within reason of
46:31
course like in a sustainable way and so now I kind of feel unleashed it's like anytime I'm a part of a business it's like right we know the playbook we know what needs to be done and we know the results are predictable it's just a case of getting that done in the right way and obviously keeping those strategies
46:47
updated as things things move and progress so that's probably the most valuable in terms of like a learning for sale I would say I regret not building the business as a sellable asset from day one. I kind of like built a business as a vehicle to
47:03
get out and as an income machine then realized I wanted to sell it and obviously you know >> you are going to have at least sort of 18 months of your books and practices and everything interrogated and there are things where the business could have been leaner tighter etc if I'd been
47:18
preparing it for sale. So there's also some fundamentals just about general bookkeeping, about general tightness, about you know just the SOPs that make sure that you're not allowing for 20% of unneeded wastage in that ad budget that could have you know because when you're getting paid a 4x multiple a,000 you
47:34
know dollars a month that comes off your net profit because you've got some ad spend wastage you know that's 12k a year times four like that's a material amount that's come out of your payday right so and and you there's not just one example of those things so that sort of like tightness of the SOPs and and making sure that you're not allowing leakage
47:51
was also a big learning too. >> Super smart.
Um, you kind of hinted at it. You What are you doing now that you've sold the business?
It sounds like you're keeping yourself pretty busy. Um, what are you up to these days?
>> Luckily, I found a seat I love, which is
48:07
essentially just trying to grow high ticket ecom businesses as fast as possible. So I I have one that I I fully own which um you know we only started in October.
Uh it did almost 100k in its first month which was really really cool and it's it's growing quickly which is
48:23
awesome and contra and you know has the actual operational systems in place this time which is awesome. So I'm excited to have a kind of hopefully another quick path.
I'd like to try and beat the 12 months to uh to seven figures if possible. And then I also sit in sort of like a fractional CMO or like growth
48:40
seat for two other businesses um which both have brilliant operators and I love sort of rolling out the strategies there as well. And then also myself and then Jesse Cunningham who I'm sure some of you people know and then also Sean Buckles we have a community where we also teach people to build these
48:56
businesses from scratch. So, we have some people in there who have already got one and they're just looking to sort of progress it and take it to essentially seven figures as quickly as possible because that's sort of the point where you can confidently take a six-figure income out of the business.
So, we're trying to help as many people kind of get there as quickly as
49:12
possible. Um, and then we've obviously got brand new beginners who are literally going through the process of like I talked about right at the beginning, you know, choosing the niche, building the site, getting the suppliers on board, getting those paid ads set up.
So that's been really fun as well, like seeing >> I I hopefully you can probably tell I'm
49:28
incredibly passionate about what this business model has done for me in my life. My life looks radically different and better than it did three years ago owing to this business model.
So seeing, you know, people make their first sale, hit their f the first time they cover their salary, etc. It's super rewarding.
So yeah, that's what I'm up to at the
49:44
moment. >> James, it's been awesome.
I appreciate you coming on and sharing a lot of detail, too. you know, you like you didn't pull any punches um in terms of what you shared about and some of the details.
So, I really appreciate it. Where can people um kind of connect with you, follow along with you, got a lot of
50:00
things going on. Sounds like your community would be a good place.
Maybe talk about that where people can go for that. Maybe LinkedIn or any other place they can get get in touch with you.
>> Yeah, for sure. I mean, if people are interested in building a seven figureure ecom business, we have a school community.
Um, so I'm sure people are
50:15
aware of, but SK k um, and essentially all of myself, Jesse, and Sean live in there in terms of like our own expertise and advice. We have weekly calls, but we also have the program which sort of essentially shows you the how of all the strategies we've talked about today and of course more.
50:30
And that's the 1% ecom club on school. Um, so yeah, that's the best place.
>> Cool. We'll include a link for that in the show notes.
Jaden, thanks so much. Um, best of luck in your continued success.
Thanks for coming on sharing. And until we talk again, be well.
Thank
50:46
you very much.