How Ecommerce Leaders Can Capitalize on Crazy Market Demand & Build Sustainable, Thriving Businesses

Today, we're talking about the e-commerce fundamentals, the principles that you have to know to be able to drive and increase traffic conversion, this, that, and the other, there's a lot of stuff we're going to talk about, but that's the high level, John, how are you? Great. How about yourself? Doing well, man. I have my copy of kind of the book that you wrote in front of me, and there's this law that we're kind of this chapter that you have and it's chapter five. And as I'm saying that my book actually is off screen. So I'm looking at you. We talk about chapter five. What's the title of that? That one really caught me and kind of caught my attention. Yeah. So you can't read the label from inside the jar. What in the world does that mean? You've got my attention. I can see why it grabbed your attention. Well, the big idea behind this chapter is that you as an e-commerce store owner or manager can't understand what a new to file customers experiences like you're too close to your brand, right? Luckily, there's a few ways that you can look to approach and fix that. But the reality here is you think of it like being in a jar, right? And it's really hard to read the label if you're inside that jar because you're so close to the product. And it's really hard to get out of that jar too, right? You can try to climb up the sides, but they're really slippery. And you know, the chance of you doing that effectively is, is hard. Or you can have someone kind of lower you in a ladder and you can get a little bit of help and they can help you see that perspective perhaps and get out of that jar, but the reality is that in 13 years of optimizing e-commerce websites, we have had, have seen time and again that brands are just so close to their site that they don't understand what that new file customer that they spent all this money to acquire and get to their site. Uh, what their experience is like. Wow. Okay. So that is just a quick kind of expert from one of the chapters and you have what, 12 or 13 chapters kind of this new book coming out, right? Right. Crazy. Talk to me about it. Why, why'd you write a book? Like you have a lot of other things going on, right? You run a successful agency. Why'd you write a book? Well, it's one of those things where having done this for 12, 13 years now, I have found that there are some fundamental truths in e-commerce optimization. And, you know, I wrote a book about six years ago, uh, called stop marketing, start selling that was super tactical. It was all about how, once somebody gets to your site, how to convert them, how to do customer research, what you should be thinking about for customer experience on your site, the different things you could deploy, AB testing, heat mapping, all that kind of stuff. So as an e-commerce manager, you could kind of take that and that could be your, your manual for how to optimize your site and how to think about it. But this one I found is, is really necessary in the sense that there's so many books on tactics out there and there's so many blog posts on best practices and everybody's, you know, doing, talking about you should do X, Y, or Z, but nobody talks about why you should be thinking this way and what you should be thinking about. And I find that when brands come to the good and start working with us, they've tried all these best practices and nothing works for them, but it's not that they're trying the wrong tactics, that they're not thinking about why they should be doing these things to begin with. And so there, these are the lessons that we kind of bring to the table with our customers and say, here's how you should be thinking about all these things. And this guides how we're going to optimize your site. So I felt like it was really necessary to get this message out there. And, you know, as well as our mission at the good is to remove all the bad online experiences until only the good ones remain. It's impossible for, for our team to touch every e-commerce website. It's just not going to happen. Right. And I'm at peace with that, but I'm also conflicted in that I want to eliminate these online experiences that are horrible. And so my whole thing was, let's just give away the farm. Let's just tell people how we think and hopefully that eliminates more online experiences. Yeah, dude, that's awesome. So obviously you get a sense of, you know, wanting to give back time and some altruism. What are some of the other kind of byproducts you think of this book? Like, you know, is it, is it, are you gonna make money from it? Is that your goal? Is it clients? Um, is it potentially finding people to work for you? Like, what are some of the other byproducts you think of, you know, doing good and creating great content? I think that there's a lot of byproducts. Look, if we make money off this book, um, okay, great. I hope we cover the costs of doing this. I mean, it took a year plus of, you know, a lot of effort. Uh, if you put my hourly rate into this, I'll never recoup the cost. Right. But that's not what it's about for me. It's about. Again, uh, spreading the message, but also, you know, I now have a manual that I can hand off to new clients and we can hand off to new team members and say, this is how we think here. So it's kind of our, our, um, you know, training asset for that. Um, I think it's also something that e-commerce managers or VP of e-com roles, when they want to start optimizing their site internally, whether or not they work with the good. They can now take this and share it with the rest of the executive leadership and say, this is how I want us to be thinking, right. And I've noticed there's a big conflict happening between the marketing manager role and the e-commerce managing role. And I've noticed this conflict happening for a couple of years now where the marketing manager really wants more influence on the site and the e-commerce managers keep saying, Hey, you know what? Back off. Like this is my terrain. And one is focused on sales and one is focused on brand and, and overall messaging and traffic. And our belief that the good is once that marketing manager gets the traffic to their site, their job is pretty much done. It's now the e-commerce manager's job to make sure that that person converts from a visitor into a buyer. And so we wanted to equip them with, here's all the things you should be thinking about, and here's the messaging you can, you can share with the rest. That's awesome. Well, let's talk about the book as if it's a business and let's focus in particular on the marketing piece. What are the things that you're going to do to promote this book? And not necessarily about making the money, but what are you going to do to get this book in the hands of the most number of people? Well, I'm on your show for instance, right? I've been doing several of these a day. Um, in addition to that, um, you know, there's, thankfully I have a great partner in this with James Sowers or who's our marketing, uh, head of marketing here at the good. Um, he has put together an amazing plan that we've been enacting and this week has been a whirlwind as we're getting ready to launch the book soon. And, you know, we've done everything from, um, giving advanced copies to folks so that we can get some advanced praise for the book and start getting out the word a little bit, right. Uh, you know, you were part of that, right. And so, you know, who, the idea there was, who could we go to that? You know, we really looked up to that. We feel like our experts in e-commerce that could, you know, essentially provide social proof for this. Right. So that was the first step, um, beyond just writing it. Right. Second step, uh, obviously, uh, is getting a bunch of, of initial, uh, word out to, we have a massive email list here at the good of where we deliver content in the whole Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, jab, jab, jab, right hook way. We've been jabbing for years. This is one of our right hooks. It's saying, Hey, you know what? We give you great content for free every week for years. You know, help us out by this book, spread the word. Leave a review. Right. So we're really hoping within that first week that we can get 50, a hundred reviews on Amazon. That's really our goal is like, how many of these reviews can we get on Amazon to really show folks that this book is valuable? It's not just another business nonfiction book that, you know, could have been five pages, 10 pages. Um, that there's a lot of value packed in here. Interesting. And what is the price and how did you come up with the pricing strategy? Great question. I was aided quite a bit by the publisher. Um, you know, they came with some recommendations on what we should price that, uh, one of the promo pieces we're doing is the first week of book launch. We're making the Kindle book 99 cents. Um, that's a pricing strategy along with marketing strategy where. That first week let's eliminate any barrier to people buying it. And you know, that is playing the whole Amazon bestseller game, right? Which there's a lot of ways to play that game. Um, you can give the book away for free or put it down to a penny and have people buy it, et cetera. Um, and the reality here is we didn't want to do it in, in a, a way that cheapen the book too much. Um, so we decided to just do the, the Kindle version at 99 cents. And, um, you know, hopefully we can get a bunch of those folks to leave verified reviews of what they honestly think about the book, right. Um, so in terms of pricing strategy, this is, that was something that was really driven by the publisher. Unfortunately, I didn't have a whole lot of say in it. They asked, are you okay with this? It was kind of like a wink. Are you okay with this? And it was like, yeah, um, you know, uh, you know, better than me. So that was how we, how I ended up at where it's at now. Nice. And does the publisher help with distribution or is that solely on you? They do help with distribution, but I have to be honest at this point, everything is done through the same places. Whether you self publish or you work with a publisher, um, they're almost all going to the same printers. All the services use the same printers or at least group of printers. And it ends up being regional to, um, a lot of Amazon warehouses these days. Um, so that's nice. Um, so if you work with a set of printers, you can get prime delivery and, and they fulfill from for Amazon directly from there with two day shipping. So you really have a limited set of printers that you're going to work with because of that. And so everybody's going to the same spot. Interesting. Is it, is it kind of interesting or crazy? Obviously I've never wrote a book, so I don't know, but it kind of seems crazy. Like you spend a year of your life working on this book that will take people, what, a few hours to consume. Is that kind of a crazy to think about? Have you ever thought about that? I look at it more as the legacy. I didn't want to put out a nearly 300 page book that I didn't feel good about in six, seven, 10 years. And the last book we wrote, um, you know, I, I put a lot of effort in that book and I still feel good about it, but it was so tactic focused and tactics change overnight in e-commerce, right? That there's some stuff in there that I look back at and I'm like, man, I wish I could like put a V2 of this book out. And I probably could, but the reality here is I really wanted something that would stand the test of time. And in order to do that, I, I wrote the first draft and started working with an editor and almost completely scrapped it and started over again, and that's why it took a year because I, I got through the first draft and worked with the editor and we cleaned up and added a whole bunch of examples and stuff together. And I read it through and I was like, this isn't good enough. This isn't what I want my legacy. If you know, you look at that way, it's something you're putting something in print. Right. It's going on a shelf in the library of Congress. Like, I, I don't, you know, like I wanted it to reflect what I want to believe in moving forward. And, um, in order to do that, I wanted it to be as good as possible. So yeah, it took a year, but I do feel like it's worth it. And if I, if I get somebody to change the way they approach e-commerce for the better, in my point of view, then I think, um, um, you know, it was a year well spent. Awesome, man. Yeah. The last question I have, and then if you want to share anything else, please do. Um, so you had one book previously, how much does like the reviews or the sell through of that book, uh, positively no impact or negatively impact kind of the, the sale of the next one is having that credibility and kind of that establishment. Is that going to give you a leg up? Kind of, if you were doing this for the first time, do you have any thoughts or any experience with that? I think the leg up is the experience and how to write a book. Most people will open Google docs or word document and just try to start writing. And that's the worst way to write a book. The best way to write a book I have found for me. And I think talking to a lot of other authors have found this out as well, too late, unfortunately. So, um, having the experience of writing a book and going through that process to do it a second time made it much easier. And I'll say the way that I did this was I sat down and I said, okay, what are the fundamental truths that I want to communicate? And I started there and I said, okay, here's a list of nine or 10 of them. And, uh, let's, what can I, what can I say about each of these? That is not obvious one and two is new to the industry and three is going to be helpful for folks. And, um, so I started outlining each chapter, right? So I treated it almost like a thesis paper in that regard. Um, not as dry of content as a thesis paper. I tried to make sure it was readable and fun, um, and entertaining to some degree. But what I really thought about doing here was, okay, now I'm going to sit down and I'm going to outline this. Then what we did is we took, uh, leadership of the team here at the good and folks that have been on our team for quite some time, and I knew, believed in how we approach this, this material. And I said, let's have a zoom call. And we'll do an hour zoom call on each chapter where we just bat ideas back and forth. Let's just discuss my bullet points. Let's rip them apart. Let's figure out the examples we want to use. Tell me everything. And I'm basically, we just sat down and we held a debate. So we did 10 hours of zoom debates about each of these chapters. And that really helped form the message and kind of massage it a lot more. I took that zoom call, had it transcribed and then went through that and picked out the examples and the lines that I liked that we said, and all of that kind of stuff and, uh, and then put, worked it into a first draft. And then I gave that to an editor and said, okay, let's, let's go through this, uh, together and, and then, you know, after three, four drafts later, um, had something was ready for a publisher. Um, and that worked extremely well because the first time I sat down to do this, as I said, I kind of ended up rewriting it. Um, I, I had somebody take the bullet points and try to write it for me. And that just doesn't work because nobody knows this or is as passionate about this as I am. And so, you know, there are services out there that will write books for you, but the reality is, and they interview you and try to write it. And that's basically what I did. I did the outline, had someone interview me and, and it just, A, it didn't sound like me and B, the content wasn't great. So I think what a lot of folks find is, is, um, doing this recorded zoom call really can help shape, uh, the contents of every chapter. Super interesting. I just thought of one last question before I wrap up. Do you, do you see a world in the future where all of this stuff is done for like an author through like something like a gumroad? Do you think like physical books are kind of going through publishers? Like, do you think at some point that's going to be outdated, kind of antiquated, disrupted, whatever the right word is? Cause like, as you're talking about this for me in my mind, I'm like, huh, do I want to write a book? No, I probably don't. But I really do like putting these things on gumroad, right. And going direct to consumer and having almost treating it more as like it's a business and trying to make money from it also while trying to help people. Do you have any thoughts on that? I do. We will be selling it direct to consumer off of our site as well. Um, it's just that Amazon is the easiest way to fulfill. The last thing I want my team doing is stuffing boxes of books and shipping them out. Quite honestly, right? It's just, that's not the game I'm in and that's not valuable use of our money. I could go get a ship Bob or something to fulfill it for me. Uh, and that might be a step, but everybody's on Amazon. So let Amazon fulfill it. So that was kind of the point of view there. Um, and in terms of, of, you know, making money on it, yes. A hundred percent. I think, you know, if I, it's not my end goal, but I do think I could have taken each of these chapters. They're all sizable, made it a PDF about that topic and put it on something like Gumroad and sold it for 50 bucks each and felt good about it and honestly felt really good about it. Um, but I wanted that physical product and that's just a little bit of a different mentality perhaps, but, um, you know, we are selling, I did an audio book version where I read it myself. And, um, it's actually pretty fun. There's a, uh, passage from Hamilton, the Broadway play in there. So I got to wrap that on the audio book, which will be rather entertaining. I'm sure when that comes out a little bit. Um, but we're also going to sell the PDF version off of, off of the good.com. We're going to sell both the hardback and paperback off the good.com. And those are obviously much higher margin. And that's where we're going to direct people after launch week. Um, but you know, getting a large number of books out the first week, uh, maybe two weeks really just wanted to rely on Amazon more than anything else. Yeah. The marketplace, right. It helps with distribution. That makes sense. John, this could have been a lot simpler if we'd just had you wrap the Hamilton and call it a quit. I could have been the whole episode, dude. You might lose all of your listeners that way. So we'll see. Yeah, we'll spare their ears. John dude. Thank you so much. Um, you're obviously very passionate about this. You obviously put a lot of time into it. So I really hope anyone listening, we'll go ahead and pick up a copy. Um, what's going to be the best way for people to get the copies that just to go to the good is to follow you personally. Like how can people actually get involved? Yeah. All of the above you go to the good.com. Slash book. And that will redirect you to the Amazon page. Um, so you can go grab it there. Um, or if you find me on Twitter, uh, at John McDonald with an a, uh, you will easily be able to see, uh, what I'm promoting on there in terms of the book and, and just go to my profile. I've got a bunch of links on there where you can get it. So, uh, it'll be everywhere. If you find me online, I'm everywhere. If you find me, uh, you'll, you'll hear about the book pretty quick. I'm sure it's amazing, John. Well, well, hopefully the book launch goes well. I'm sure it will. And thank you so much for your time. As always. Awesome. Thank you, Jay. Cheers.