#109: Optimizing eCommerce Conversions in 2021

Episode: 109

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Bill King, Director of Marketing at Frase.io – an Artificial Intelligence Platform that Helps Businesses Drive Organic Traffic and Improve Website User Experience.

Subtitle: “One Of The Things That Will Build A Better eCommerce Experience Is Building Authority.” 

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episode-109-optimizing-ecommerce-conversions-in-2021-w-bill-king/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces  Bill King, Director of Marketing at Frase.io – an Artificial Intelligence Platform that Helps Businesses Drive Organic Traffic and Improve Website User Experience.

Bill is a former professional poker player turned marketer, investor, and tech geek. In this episode, he talks about the current issues businesses face with e-commerce growth and ways you can optimize your eCommerce conversions.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 4:54 : Bill’s Background
• 5:48 : What Does Frase Do?
• 8:04 : The Current State of eCommerce Growth
• 12:08 : Optimizing eCom Site Through Frase
• 14:04 : Optimizing FAQ Section
• 21:47 : Building the Custom Buyer Journey
• 25:22 : Content Is King
• 29:09 : Making The Most Out Of Your Website Traffic
• 37:00 : Advanced Search Bar
• 39:45 : Strategy On How To Get Clicks Ad Sales
• 44:22 : Managing Content Creation
• 47:22 : Finding The Right People To Outsource
• 51:31 : Creating A Good Article
• 54:13 : Frase Free Account

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• https://www.billkingtm.com 
• https://twitter.com/inboundy
• https://www.frase.io/
• prREACH
• Outsource School
• FreeUp 
• Upwork 

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normanfarrar.com

Norman  0:02  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands.

Norman  0:19  

Okay, so today we have on the show returning guest Bill King, no relationship to Kevin King, at least I don’t think so and he’s head of marketing at Frase.io. I’ve talked about Frase quite a bit on this podcast. If you haven’t checked it out, you got to check it out. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. It’s an artificial intelligence platform that helps businesses drive more organic traffic and improve their website user experience. Now, we don’t plug apps. However, we have used this app, especially for content marketing, and it is incredible. So anyways, we’ll be talking about a variety of different things, how to optimize your eCommerce experience for 2021. But before we do that, Kelsey, are you around today? You are lucky you’re not outside.

Kelsey 1:08  

I know. I honestly got two hours of sleep. The wind was just going nuts in the morning and it’s crazy.

Norman  1:20  

Yeah. I thought something was coming into the house. 

Kelsey 1:24  

A little surprise visit. But yeah, so we have a couple things to go over quickly and then we’ll jump right into the show. But the first big thing is we are not broadcasting to Norm’s personal Facebook channel, we’re gonna try this for two weeks and see how that goes. We’re just having some issues with it. So of course, if you’re watching now, you obviously don’t have that issue. But in the future, if you don’t see a notification for Norman Farrar going live, you can always go over to the Lunch with Norm podcast, or the Facebook group or YouTube, LinkedIn, all that stuff and we also have our big Clubhouse today. We’re on Clubhouse every week on Monday at 1:30pm Eastern time. We have a whole bunch of different guests. I think they got up to over 100 people in the one room last week. So it’s going great. Looks like there’s some good discussions happening. So yeah, and let me say join the Beard Nation, if you haven’t, that’s our Facebook group lunch for Amazon FBA & eCommerce Collective, put the link in the bios and captions. But yeah, really excited about this episode. But it was on before and it was one of our best episodes, I think on YouTube. So you guys really like it. So we got him back. Welcome Mero and Andrew. Andrew is traveling the world again. He wants everyone to guess where he is right now.

Norman  2:50  

I’m gonna say Ethiopia.

Kelsey 2:52  

Ethiopia. Okay and welcome, let’s get into it.

Norman  2:57  

Okay, very good. Okay, so with that being said, you can sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. Enjoy the show, and welcome, Bill. 

Bill 3:10

Hey guys, thanks for having me again. 

Norman 3:11

Hey, our pleasure. Oh, yeah. Kelsey didn’t do his job and smash that like button. That’s right. Follow us, smash it, subscribe, ring a bell, do all that stuff, tag to people. So anything you can, we’d like to get the word out. We’ve got a great community. So I’m just doing Kelsey’s job. That’s okay. But Bill, I think the last time Kelsey didn’t do his job either. But it’s okay. We’re used to it.

Bill 3:41  

That’s okay. Kelsey has got a nice last name. We’ll keep them around.

Norman  3:44  

Yeah, there we go. Yeah. He gets paid accordingly, by the way. All right. So, Bill, last time you were on here and I want to go back to this because I am a fan. I don’t know if you can ever check into the back end of what we’re doing. But we use your app all the time and it’s an incredible app for building content and verifying content and making sure that it ranks on Google and again, I just want to say the app is called Frase, f r a s e.io, just like in Bill’s heading there. So check it out. We don’t promote, like Bill, I believe you’re going to give a discount code. We don’t take affiliates or anything like that. But this is an app that we use on a daily basis to build content. But that being said, Bill, I just wanted to say that because I really love your app. Let’s talk about well, first of all, let’s talk about you. Who are you? What do you do?

Bill 4:54  

Yeah, nice to meet you. So well. Nice to meet everybody in the audience. So my name is Bill. I lead Marketing here at Frase, it’s been about six months now since I joined the team. Before I joined here, I was at a company in Boston called Drift, which is exciting, they’re growing like crazy, they were just named to Detroit’s number six fastest growing company in America. So things are going crazy over there, really excited about their growth and I started in content actually, kind of by mistake. I had a baseball blog at night, and I was just really interested in baseball stats and telling stories around baseball, and was doing that just for fun and then career shift happened, and I just so happen to just get into marketing because of the content aspect of it. So I’ve always been really pumped about helping people grow their business through content, really excited about all the different things people have today. But basically, my story is, I was a customer at Frase, I was running SEO over drift on the marketing team and we had plenty of challenges around operations and scaling our content process, making sure everything’s doing really high quality, so that we can get maximum impact from search. But like all brands, one of the things that I was really fascinated by that Frase is kind of building is, a lot of people know them just for content, but it’s actually just more of an app or an AI platform with products on top of it. So AI for the content side of things, we help you create great content for optimizing for Google using NLP and we match all the topics you need to touch on to drive your traffic to your website. But what happens after somebody gets on your page, that’s the thing that we’re really focused on in 2021 is there’s a really interesting dynamic happening with a lot of brands out there where driving really high qualified traffic is super expensive, right? So I know this, I was leading acquisition over at Drift, we’re spending all sorts of money on driving get new signups for the platform to get folks to raise their hand for a demo and ultimately, if you want to drive high intent traffic, super expensive, right and then you have the other option, which is okay, I could go up funnel, I can drive traffic from SEO, but it doesn’t have as much high intent. So what happens is, you have a lot of brands out there, I’m sure like the audience can relate that you either pay through the nose for content for traffic, that’s going to convert, and you do your best to convert as much of that traffic as humanly possible. Or you drive as much high, low intent, but high volume traffic, and you try to rely on things like remarketing, CRM on page and all those other tactics to try to drive purchases later on. But ultimately, that drives up your acquisition costs because you have to rely heavily on remarketing. If you don’t get an email up front. There’s a lot of problems growing today in the world that we’re in. So that’s what I’m really, really excited about to talk about today.

Norman  7:51  

Okay, very good. Yeah, I want to learn a lot more about that, too. Sounds like there’s a lot going on over there. Oh, why don’t we just talk about the current state of eCom growth?

Bill 8:04  

Yeah, so the traditional eCom funnel has sort of like a few distinct stages, right? A lot of shops are driving awareness for their products. So a good example is, let’s say you wanted to buy a pair of shoes, right? A lot of folks to drive a transaction for the eCommerce store will go out and they’ll run ads, they’ll go on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all these other places that everybody is, they’ll do their best to try to identify who could be a really good fit for that type of product and just run as many ad tests as possible, right? Drive as many people to the landing page, drive them to your store, so they can browse around. A lot of our like our purchasing funnel start either when you have an explicit need, that means something you’ll search, or you have, you don’t have an explicit need, but you’re attracted to the offer and that would be like an outbound type of ad campaign. So a lot of stores are actually kind of stuck, right? They’ve got this interesting thing where they have to either buy the traffic, or they have to rely on top of funnel traffic, and it converts at an incredibly low rate. I mean, do you feel like that you work with a lot of eCommerce folks, and you talk to him a lot of times you feel like that’s a problem that a lot of folks can relate to?

Norman  9:15  

Oh, yeah, I think that’s definitely a problem.

Bill 9:20  

So one thing that we’ve realized too, is a lot of folks use Frase for driving a lot of top of funnel traffic to their website, right? They’ll either create that new asset or they’ll optimize their product page to try to drive in as much as high intent traffic as possible. But the problem is that once people get onto your landing page, there’s basically two ways you can go about growth. You can either reduce friction on a physical basis. So you can do things like you can reduce the number of fields to your like checkout process, or you can reduce the number of clicks required for you to go from landing page to customer. So eCommerce growth people are always thinking, How do I reduce a click? How do I take out the fields when you put in your credit card? Like how do I make it as easy as humanly possible for someone to go from a visitor to a customer on your eCommerce store. So that’s one side of things, the physical side, but then there’s the cognitive side. So what are the things that are stopping me from buying that I’m thinking about or haven’t thought about and a good example of that would be like, you can add high quality images or video, we see this on eCommerce, like an Amazon landing page, right? You see all this beautiful creative, and you see these walkthrough tutorials of how to use the product. That is something that people do to reduce the cognitive friction that you have, when you’re on a page, whether or not you want to buy something. So a lot of the emphasis is driven on new customer acquisition, right, because that’s where we drive a lot of our business and most eCommerce traffic is there to just buy something and never come back. But a lot of the growth that happens in eCommerce actually comes after acquisition, it’s when someone would say that they buy that pair of shoes from your store, they go ahead and they get the package, they get it at their house they tried on, it doesn’t fit, right or they want to go ahead and return it or exchange it. Maybe they like the shoes they don’t fit right. This is when a lot of the friction really, really starts to build up. Because as a natural, just part of our business, we’re always focused on driving net new acquisition on the top of our funnel. Makes sense, right? You spend all your money to acquire the person, you want to make sure you reduce as much friction as possible. But I think a lot of eCommerce shops can probably relate that as you grow the top of your funnel as fast as possible, other problems pop up, right? So as you drive more and more purchases, there are more and more folks who have problems once they purchase from you and so you want to make sure that you take care of the whole journey. But the problem is, when you run a lot of tests across your funnel, what happens is it ends up just being a ton of different tools, a ton of different processes, a ton of different ways to report on, and it becomes an absolute nightmare. So we’re over here Frase and we’re like, we’re helping people create awesome content to drive people to their site, and they’re getting a lot of traffic. But there’s a lot of friction, whether it’s from getting new people to sign up or once they’ve signed up, how do you help you be successful with your product or your brand experience? So we said, Alright, let’s think about ways we can potentially solve this problem and that’s what we’re working on this month and we basically have built a AI layer for eCommerce shops to reduce that friction. So a good example is a lot of shots will have FAQs about your purchase, right? What are the types of things that would help me buy something faster? Is this right for me? Will it work when I get there? Those are the types of questions you would ask. So what happens is those things are trapped in either a support center, or they’re in an FAQ section on your website. Or you can find them on Google search. But it’s only indexable by Google. The problem is when you get on the website, there’s only so much room on your landing pages, in your acquisition funnel. So what we’re doing is we’re saying, if we can take all the website content that you have on your site, and we can make that easily available at these really specific points of your checkout funnel, how much easier would it be for you to convert customers or keep them around?

Norman  13:27  

I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. Well, I know a little bit about what you’re talking about. But what I’m trying to visualize, are you going to be putting these FAQs? Are you going to be able to hover over it or? Because right now all we do is we’ll add it, we’ll hide it. Basically, if you want it, there’s a drop down, you hit the plus, there’ll be an answer and you can put a lot of information on your page without having it look like there’s a ton of information. How are you going to do that?

Bill 14:04  

That’s a great question. So what we do is we do what we call that asset extraction. So Frase basically, we built AI to basically take all your website club content, break it up into chunks, and then have it be an indexable version. So our AI can go Oh, you’ve got a question about this specific FAQ. Let’s deliver it on page versus driving you off page to an FAQ section or a Help Center to try to get that answer. 

Norman  14:30  

So it’ll be a pop up?

Bill 14:32  

So yeah, so basically, there’s two different interfaces we’re building right now. It’s like there’s a chat interface and then we’ve got a search bar. In the roadmap, we’ve got plans to be able to do embeddable search functions, or like you can click on things and then ask a question. So we’ve been running a ton of tests and this comes back to the problem that a lot of people have, they either have a problem with acquiring new customers and reducing that friction or they have once they come back, where is all this helpful information? It’s ultimately spread across all your different sites. So what we did was we took a look at these funnels, we said, How do we help these people? And it’s more about delivering the answer to that question than it is about adding extra stuff on your page. So FAQ is like you just said before, you can hide those, like you can make them so that they disappear on the page, or they take up less room. But ultimately, most people are just at the top of the fold. They’re looking exactly where they want, everything they want and if you make them work harder, it just reduces conversion rates. So what we did was, we have our AI that crawls all the content of your websites and puts it into one central database, it would be like Norm, if you could answer questions 24/7 on your website, wouldn’t you, but you can’t, right because you only have so much time. 

Norman 15:45

Kelsey does that for me.

Bill 15:47  

That’s a good point, though. Because a lot of people use live chat, right? So like, a good example is, one thing I’ve tested is like the average response time for live chat is 46 seconds and we’ve been on this podcast for 15 or so minutes. 46 seconds in the lifetime of when you spend on a web page is an eternity. So the traditional methods people use are like, they’ll think, oh, somebody wants to talk, someone wants to have a live chat. But that is so much time to wait. Nobody’s gonna wait that long to ask you a question for an answer from someone. Right? So what we’ve done is basically we said, Why don’t we take all this technology that we have on the content side of things to help you generate more traffic? Why don’t we extract all the great FAQs and nuggets you have around your site and then help you convert more people? Because it’s like, if you could train the perfect employee to do this 24/7 on your website, wouldn’t you? The problem is we just don’t have the technology to actually do it. We have to send people to a Help Center, or we have to send them to this blog post or we have to,

Norman  16:50  

Messenger.

Bill 16:52  

Exactly. Make them wait with live chat because a person has to tell you well, what we’re doing is we’re saying why don’t we automate all that, help you create helpful content, and then every time you press publish, your knowledge index is bigger, because you’ve got more FAQs, and then we can extract more answers into unanswered questions on site.

Norman  17:10  

So again, this is a brand new thing that you guys are working on. I’m trying to visualize. So let’s say that I have a bunch of different articles about Norm the Gnome. Okay. So if somebody might ask, What color is his hat? Does he have a blue jacket? When they ask those questions, is it going to populate with multiple responses? Like, oh this article, this article, this article or is it just going to have the best suited, most relevant answer?

Bill 17:44  

Good question. So because the AI basically does its best attempt to try to answer the question, there are some questions where let’s say like, you’ve got two different competing answers. Let’s say the answer was what color is his hat and you’ve got one blog post over here, it says, it’s a red hat. This one over here says it’s a blue hat. In those instances, on the back end Frase will show you Hey, this question came up, it was low confidence. We weren’t sure. Can you tell us what the best answer is and you train it like you would a person. So now it knows that the answer is actually Red Hat. So every single time it comes up, people will say, Oh, what’s this question? Red Hat. Just like you would.

Norman  18:22  

Never black hat.

Bill 18:24  

That’s right. 

Norman  18:29  

I’m curious, is this app out there right now? Or is this something you’re still developing?

Bill 18:35  

Yeah, yeah. So it’s available right now, we have some customers using it, we have some large, high traffic eCommerce shops, I think the people that it works best for are like our products where you’re driving, either, there’s basically two places on a lot of websites, people get a lot of traffic, it’s either the homepage. So it’s all of that brand traffic you’ve built up over time. So like, I go to the Lunch with Norm site, and think about all the different things I could be looking for there, I could be looking for your podcast library. I could be looking for potentially working with you and like getting to know you, like the types of things that you offer as a business person. So in order for you to do that, you have to play the pixel game, like you said, with your FAQs. There’s only so much space on the valuable real estate that you have. So the question is, what do you put there as a business owner, it’s really hard for you to jam as much stuff as possible. So you see navigations across websites that are just enormous. There’s stuff everywhere, you can’t find anything and what happens is when people think they have been in the session, and they quit and they go to somewhere else where it’s easier to find that information, or they make three or four clicks when they could have just done one. They could have just easily asked a question and gotten an answer. So anytime there’s friction, we’re thinking to ourselves, there’s so many people out there putting out great top of funnel content, but they’re not able to monetize it because they don’t have the ability to have that relationship between what the topic is and what somebody wants. So we’re thinking, Okay, the best way to do that is to answer questions with your content because people are already creating content on their site. So does that make sense? Like, basically, a lot of eCommerce shops, they have low intent traffic or high intent traffic and so what we want to do is we want to be able to answer not only questions that are just on that high intent traffic, but also the low intent traffic as well, because there’s just so much opportunity there.

Norman  20:28  

Okay, so let’s say you’re just on a regular website, and Bradley Long, I don’t know if you know Bradley. He’s the inventor and I was talking to him one time, and he and I had him take a look at our website and he goes, Oh, yeah I can tell you one thing. You don’t have a search bar in your title, or in your navigation. He says, put a search bar up there and tell people what they’re supposed to do. Like, what do you mean? He goes, people don’t know, it’s just a search bar. But if you tell them search by keyword search by, they’ll type it in and you can get information if you’re doing it properly about what they’re looking for. So that helps out. What you’re doing is fantastic. But let’s say you have a site right now that doesn’t use Frase. Okay, I didn’t even know that that app existed before we started talking today. But how do you or what can you give, what advice can you give for people to have information? So these high level or lower level traffic, high intent traffic are not going to just click off. Is there anything that people can do to make sure that people stay on page, rather than clicking off?

Bill 21:47  

100%? Yeah, so a good example is we have an affiliate customer who does it, they’re part of a massive affiliate company, they’re doing millions of visitors per month and so what they’re doing is they’re taking each core topic that is that their website is all about. So our AI will basically crawl your website and say, here’s the top like 20, or 30 topics that you have. So what we do is we give you the ability to basically build a what’s called a custom buyer journey. So somebody lands on a website page about a specific topic, what you want to do is you want to say, what’s the intent of this page? So if you have a blog post that’s like what is eCommerce marketing or something like that. You would say to yourself, okay, what are the types of questions people are already asking on page, and we give you that data. So if somebody asks you a question, like if they’re on a blog post about what is eCommerce marketing, there might be saying, What’s the next step in that buyer journey. That might be like, if I want to do eCommerce marketing, what are the types of apps that I should be considering? Should I be considering something that offers a free shipping pop up, or a coupon pop up or those types of things, like, as you educate yourself, the next thing you want to do is logically apply that information. So what we do is we give you the data of questions that are already being asked on page. But then there’s also the hypothesis part of it, which is like, if I were this person, and I were thinking to myself, what’s the next logical thing I can do to drive traffic to my site, you can test out different static CTAs. But you can also offer an open ended question field, where you can just use it as a data collection method. But you can also, they can also ask something and a good example is like, if you have that eCommerce marketing blog posts, you might have some pre laid out questions that they could ask, and some next steps, but they might have something like, Okay, how to do Facebook ads better? Or like, do you guys have any content on that? So instead of it being just a billboard with signs of what to do next, the AI will ask you questions, so it knows where to send you, even if you don’t have that answer already laid out on your page and I think that’s really important, because a lot of sites there, they set up their journeys, like, it’s just logical, from A to Z. But there’s a lot of illogical things people ask when they’re on site. So somebody comes onto your blog posts, and is about eCommerce marketing, they might be already interested in your products and say, what’s your shipping policy. But if you don’t have that available on your page, they have to click around and find it. So basically, we’re building like this centralized AI database for your website. As you ship more content that’s oriented towards the topics or your visitors are interested in, your knowledge graph gets more strong, but there are some things like your content can’t answer. A good example is like, what’s your return policy? Maybe you have that as available on your site, but we give you the option to basically do custom responses as well. If there’s a question that somebody doesn’t, somebody asked that you can’t answer with your website content. So I think a lot of eCommerce stores have to think for themselves. Where are the holes in my funnel? Where Am I getting a lot of traffic, but I’m not driving it deeper into a purchasing stage. Because for a lot of folks who are out there doing eCommerce, they get stuck, they think I just have to continue to buy ads, because that’s the only way I can get high intent traffic. Well, that might be true for your product purchasing, there’s a lot of topics on top of your products, that if you could get them on site and drive them deeper into your funnel, it would be super valuable.

Norman  25:22  

So let’s turn this just a little bit, I’m going to go back to content, because content is king, and no pun intended. But anyways, one of the things that we try to do is we try to create relative content that will rank on Google to get people to come to the site. A couple of things. First of all, remember, if you’re giving value, and it’s a great, really great piece of content, don’t forget to either have a pop up or have something that’s going to drive them over to your shop, because you’re going to lose it, you’ll lose a customer, all this great information. Wow, I never knew that dead sea mud soap could do this and then they click off and they go to your competitors. So don’t forget about that channel, get them to go over and buy the bloody thing. The other thing is Okay, so now I’ve got content about, let’s say, dead sea mud soap and the properties of the Dead Sea and blah, blah, blah, blah. What else can I write and again, what I love about this, and you can either go to Ask the Public, or, like in this Frase app, one of the things that is really quite handy is that you can get the sort of that mind map I guess, that Ask the Public gives you, Yoda gives you with all the top relevant questions of the top blogs on Google. So if I wanted to see dead sea mud, okay, and it would ask me what everybody’s looking for what questions are being asked, the content people are searching for, the best ranked article and then if I want it, I take that information and I can extract very simple 20 summaries and I can take that to my content writer, because I know nothing about dead sea mud. All I know is my wife splashed me with it, and I couldn’t see, true story. But anyways, being able to take all that content and build it out. So authority, the only way you’re going to get to authority is to be able to drive content, and really good high quality content, consistency with your brand, your brand story and I want to just plug this bloody app, it’s so inexpensive, that our writers over at prREACH, that’s what we’ve built our content creation around. So right now we’re in the middle of launching a new website called cigars.club and it’s about a cigar experience, but more like a trendy cigar experience, right? Like the new generation, not the old boys network. Yeah. Our writers have no experience writing about cigars. But they’re gonna create great content because of this. So I just wanted to go back and start there, because one of these eCommerce experiences, one of the things that will build a better eCommerce experience is building authority, authority equals trust, trust equals sales and the second part of this is what you were talking about. Now, that being said, so long winded. Alright, so do you see, between the little guy and the big guy, are there issues here? Is there still going to be that big advantage for the big guy or are you going to try to equal the playing field?

Bill 29:09  

That’s essentially what we’re doing is we’re saying, okay, it’s pretty clear today, that the competition especially in SEO, and ads is just increasing every day. So it’s becoming more and more expensive to acquire customers and the thing you have to think about is like, look at Google, they’ve done the best work possible to keep you on page, to keep you on a Google landing page, because that means more ad clicks, right? So we’re essentially at war. Even though these platforms are phenomenal for creators to build an audience. We’re actually as a brand, we’re at war with some of these platforms at the same time. I think 50 to 60%. I read somewhere 56% of most venture capital goes back to Facebook and Google, right. Wouldn’t you rather retain more of that capital if you could own your audience a little bit more, right? So if you think about our funnel ad Frase, right, somebody might discover us because they’ve heard of us from a podcast like this, right? They might make a brand search and then go sign up and get value from the product. But the inverse is also true where somebody might read a blog post about how to create a great content brief, and their relationship between you and that searcher is actually quite lightweight, right? So they search something, they come to your website, they get their information, they go away. So I’ve been thinking about for years now, and I’m like, how do we help the creators get more ROI from all this work that they’re doing? I mean, you put a ton of work into this podcast, and I’m sure you drive a lot of traffic to your site and so the question is, does it stop there? Or like, what are the ways we can do, we can help people drive more and more value from that content. Because at the end of the day, you really want to own your audience as much as possible and so if you have a problem, a lot of people think about, like, how do I get traffic? Well, once they get traffic, what do you do then? The question is driving as much monetization of that traffic as possible because I think the days of us getting tons of traffic from these platforms is dwindling every single day, it’s becoming harder and harder and harder to get traffic. So as a brand, you have to really think deeply about what is the intent this person is actually trying to solve for and if I’m lucky enough to get a click, how do I solve for the rest of that buying behavior? Because going back to that example, there are ways you can drive more relationships with your users once you get them on site. But it’s going to require a big time focus on how you can make most of that traffic once they’re on your website.

Norman  31:44  

Yeah, what really sucks is when you spend the time and the money to get somebody over to your website, they come on, they read a blog article, and they click off. So how do you get that person to give you their email address, or give them something, so you can target them later on. Because you could drive all the traffic in the world to a crappy site or with crappy information and get nothing out of it, you just wasted a lot of money, keep it in the bank.

Bill 32:14  

I think people nowadays are getting smart. They know that when they get to a website, it’s going to be optimized for the traditional framework we all use, we look at a z pattern on the site, it’s the top bar across the middle on the bottom, every site is optimized with calls to action, schedule a demo, purchase this and that. But over time, it’s fatiguing to most people who come on the website, so they see the same old stuff across all these different sites, add to cart this and that, like people eventually go blind to it. So what we’re basically trying to say is like, how can you do CRO for your website, but do it in a much more conversational and friendly way? Instead of asking for that initial email, if you could anticipate what would be the next thing that that person would logically ask, could you then answer that question and then drive them deeper in the site, and then you have a second chance at maybe converting that person. So these are like the types of outside the box ideas we have where like, instead of just trying to compete with other calls to action on the site, what if we just inverse it and said, How do we be as helpful as possible without asking for something right away, get them deeper into your website, get them to engage with your brand a little bit more, and then eventually drive a conversion? Because there’s tons of value and I think over the years, like, we’ve been trained, where we say, okay, we’re going to convert 1% of this traffic, and we’re happy with that. Right? What about the other 99%? There’s an enormous amount of value that we’ve kind of forgotten about, because we’re all we’re trying to do is pluck a needle from the haystack, with our traditional chatbots, our site search, we’re like, Who is it ready to buy right now, everybody else? Thanks for coming. But we’ll try to offer you some ads on Facebook later on. So we’re trying to make a much more easy way for people to engage with your site.

Norman  34:01  

I guess if it’s done right, you could build up a profile on this person as they go too. So if you’re answering a question, answering another question, and then kind of building up their confidence and then all of a sudden, Wow, these people they’re engaging me before getting married. So that’s kind of interesting. Yeah, I’ve got to learn a bit more about that. Because there’s all sorts of ways that we talk about building a profile, but if you can do it without the person really realizing it. That’s awesome.

Bill 34:35  

Yeah, like a good example. So I worked at Drift right, one of the biggest chatbot companies on the planet and a lot of the bots that you see out there today are built on what’s called decision trees, or live basically you have like three options right now if you’re in, you can do pop ups, you can do chat, and you can do like remarketing and on page conversion optimization, like those are the three things you can do. Over time, what happens is if you have a big website, you might have a really eloquent decision tree for your chatbot. But there’s only so much that it can handle right? Because it’s designed to do a certain goal. It’s not really built like AI is where it’s unstructured and it’s easy for you to ask anything at any point. So for big websites, they actually struggle quite a bit because live chat takes forever, you need to man a bunch of people on it, and it’s not like scalable and then you’ve got these other apps that are a little bit more scalable, but they don’t offer the flexibility that a normal conversation would have. So they’re kind of stuck. So what happens is, you see a lot of these sites, and they have a site search and that’s connected to a certain number of CMS like your Help Center, or your product catalog. But it’s like, what about the in between? There’s just so much other stuff that you would ask about if you could ask a person, but for a non sales model, how do you answer those questions? You either do it in FAQs, or they just don’t find it and end up exiting their session. So what we’re trying to basically do is like, how can we implement all the answers that a person would give on page to try to get those extra conversions to get people deeper in the site and I really, I relate to the struggles of building an eCommerce business. Because if you spend $10 to acquire the customer, and they’re worth $20 on average, that’s tough because you, you better get some return purchases, and you better get that email address and you better put a lot more emphasis on driving those conversions after they become a customer. Because otherwise, it’s hard to survive.

Norman  36:37  

So before we go forward, Kelsey, are there any questions?

Kelsey 36:42  

We have one question from Dr. Koz. So everyone, you have any questions about things like growth, your eCom website, put them in the comment section, and we’ll get to them. But this is from Dr. Koz, what’s the difference between what you described in an advanced search bar?

Bill 37:00  

Yeah, so that’s a great question. We actually get that all the time. So search bars are typically limited to a specific site or sites and it’s reactive, not proactive. So a good example is if you go on a traditional website, and you’re like, Hey, how do you compare to this vendor or this vendor that’ll come from your marketing site. If you ask me, hey, how do I integrate your product with this specific thing, that’ll come from the Help Center, most search experiences number one, they’re limited to a specific CMS, and it’s not optimized over time. So you install search, people search, that’s it. That’s pretty much the end of the optimization window. The other thing too, is, once you search something, it’s very transactional behavior. So if you have a search bar on top, you search something, you go to that article, well, now you’re off page. What if the page that was the most valuable conversion was actually the one you were just on before? Now suddenly, you’re on a different experience, and you’re in a different area, and it fragments the whole experience. The other thing too, is search doesn’t do is it doesn’t do a relational conversation. So if I searched like in a normal search bar, Hey, how do I work with Norm and then there’s a page like, hey, contact me and connect. Well, what if I have a question about a follow up question, now I’m, I’m off that page, and all sudden, the journey is all over the place. So what we’ve realized is like, you want to keep people on those money making pages and search bars don’t allow you to do that. Search bars also limit your knowledge to a specific site or multiple sites. So the only way to really solve this at scale is to use AI and I think some search bars are really good at doing this and most of them are not. So what we wanted to do was give people the data. So if you could like a good example, actually, this is a great example. When I was on the the consulting team at HubSpot, we had search bar on help.hubspot.com and our process every month was take this search query data, stack it by the frequently asked questions that we don’t have an answer for, and then update the support pages to reduce those gaps. Well, that’s good for like, for going from one place to an article. You couldn’t get that answer across the rest of the web properties. You had to use search, you had to go to that specific help article. So what we said was, how cool would it be if we could answer help questions on the marketing site because we know that integrations and support actually influences conversions and and transactions. So those are the types of benefits you don’t get from search.

Norman  39:32  

Okay, very good. Were there any other questions Kels?

Kelsey 39:36  

Yep, there is one that just came in from Muhammad. My product page is getting impressions, not getting clicks ad sales. What strategy should I adopt?

Bill 39:45  

Got it. So this is a product page. It’s getting a ton of impressions, but not getting clicks, ad sales, which strategy should I adopt? I would say, number one, you want to take a look at where those impressions are coming from. So a great example is, I’ll take you through his very specific example. So we used to rank number one for chatbot software at my last company, it was number one or number two for quite some time. So that was all about keyword selection. So I knew that if I got clicks from that specific keyword, it would lead to people using the product and so we went very aggressively after that high competition, low traffic query, because it was worth it. When you’re getting a lot of impressions, but not about a lot of ad clicks, it could be that your page isn’t relevant to the search query, you’re targeting the wrong search query, or you just don’t have enough authority on that specific search query. So let’s say that everything’s perfect, you pick the right keyword, and now you’re getting impressions, but not ad clicks. Now, your job is basically to show Google that you are the most authoritative answer for that specific search query. The best way to do that is number one is how competitive is the search for that specific search query? So I’ll take you through that example before, when I initially optimized that page for our chatbot software, we already had a bunch of really high quality links, pointing to that page. So I was able to gain traction. If your web page is brand new, or you don’t have a lot of votes from Google, those are basically links, you need to do things like how do I increase the number of links on my page? So Norm a good example is like, if I wanted to build eCommerce links to an eCommerce page, you’d have to ask yourself, why would somebody link to it? So the only reason why somebody is gonna link to a page that you either have some sort of incremental value, think about Zillow. Zillow was competing against all these large, large, large companies who had tons of brand recognition. So they took their product pages, the listing pages, and they added value. What’s the current market price for this product that has nothing to do with you buying a house from Zillow? Right? It does have a lot of value for people who are looking at that landing page and thinking, Oh, this helps me buy from these guys, or it helps me increase my journey. A good example is like, do you have some sort of original data or stats that you can put on there that is relevant to that search query. So like, people who are doing this are getting x response and so when you reach out to someone, and you say, Hey, you should link to this page or, like, Hey, let’s do a partnership together. There must be some reason for them to want to link to it and that’s where you have to really think as an eCommerce, subject matter expert. Why would somebody want to make a comment on this page? If there is no reason for it and then once you have it, go out and pitch it and start to build relationships with other brands to try to get some traction? But ultimately, I think the most important things are those three things. It’s like, are we targeting the right query? Do we have the right authority and if no, how do we build it? Those are the types of things you would do.

Norman  42:51  

I’m looking at it from a different angle. So you’re getting the traffic there and I agree with the relevancy, but it might also have to do with your images, like what are your images like? How are they compared to your competitors? Copy, is it an engaging copy? What other types of information do you have, and also price optimization. These are all things that will help once you’re there, you can only do so much. We tell people, especially in Amazon, if we’re driving people over to their first page of Amazon, and they’re there and they’re complaining that they’re not getting sales, but they’re there. I can’t help but if you’re listening is I can’t get people, I can get people over to page one. But I can’t get them to click on your listing, there’s got to be something wrong and if you compare or if you do some market research the old Brady Bunch thing, compare your listening to everybody else’s, you’ll probably see that there’s something there and then everything that Mr. King just talked about, I agree with as well.

Kelsey 44:03  

Okay, we have one more question. I think this is from Usman, how does one create content when we’re so busy with managing all the other aspects for the business?

Bill 44:13  

Usman, this is a problem.

Norman  44:14  

This is loaded. This is a loaded question. Usman, you did receive that $20, right?

Bill 44:22  

That’s the question. Oh my goodness. Okay, so I’ll make it easy on you. The topic we used to talk about all the time at my previous company was something called engines, right? So the idea of taking a search term or an idea and turning it into a live piece of content has generally a few aspects to it. There’s number one, research. Number two is enablement for your content team. So number three is actually creating it and number four is making sure the design and UX pieces are really good for your content, right and then you got outreach. There’s a like the, if you zoom way out on what a process would be from A to Z on content creation, it’s those five buckets for the most part. So when I was at my previous company, I said, Okay, where are the aspects where I’m strong or weak? So for content creation, I’m really strong at research at creating great content briefs, so that the content team will be in a good spot. But let’s say you don’t have enough output for your content. Let’s say you’ve got a ton of good research or whatever you need to zero in on where are the weakest parts for your process? So if you don’t have any of this going on today, and you want to outsource it, then you need to think to yourself, how do I create the systems so that somebody else can do this for me on my behalf, because you as the business owner, maybe don’t want to touch any of it. If you can do one part of the process, and then you can facilitate that externally with whether it’s freelancers or outsource, there’s so many talented people out there today that can pick up a piece of that. My story of how I found Frase was because I had a weak aspect of my in my process, I was really good at keyword research. But I didn’t have enough time to create really good content briefs and if I didn’t know that, the keyword research to live article process was a nightmare. Nothing was on point, it didn’t hit the aspects that needed to rank. So this was a problem that I needed to solve. I couldn’t get away without it. So I looked for a technology. I said, Hey, could I build something in the house? Could I buy something that somebody is already creating? Or could I outsource this and ultimately, the answer for me was I could just buy a piece of software that did exactly that. If you’re a busy person, and it’s more about like, you have a process, but you don’t know how to manage the whole process, then outsource the project management to somebody who’s really talented, it could use that extra work, say, Hey, here’s my process, let me teach you, I’m going to transfer this knowledge to somebody else, and they can manage the process and maybe you are the creator, or maybe like Norman does a phenomenal job at like getting people in his network that help him scale what he does, right? Maybe you enjoy content creation, but you don’t enjoy the other parts of the process. So you can always find somebody for that type of thing. But I think you need to just be very intentional about one of the pieces of me going from A to Z on that, find where you’re weak and say how do I fill in those gaps, because not pressing publish is not an option.

Norman  47:22  

You don’t have to be an expert and matter of fact, probably the best thing anybody can do if they’re at that point where you’re growing your business and you don’t have enough knowledge to train that person. Go and find somebody that knows how to find content and build content in it, you’ll get them to send you properly written articles. One of the things I can warn about, I’ve seen this so many times is that people go for the cheap. They go for a $2 writer, $3 writing, big mistake, and there are some incredible, matter of fact, our operations manager’s from India, and she does an incredible job if I ever need her to whip up something she can. But they’re also really horrible writers and unfortunately, a lot of the time you’ll get these horrible writers, especially by the way, what are they specializing in? Are they a blog article writer and in what niche? Or are they a press release writer? Most press release writers are not blog article writers, you’re either or, you’ll either know how to write a proper press release and you’re working in that niche, maybe you’ll overlap. But make sure that you check and and that you’re satisfied with the work. After that’s done, you’re depending on them. Your process is really okay, what’s my daily communication? Or how often managing expectations, when are they communicating with us and there’s a simple workflow that you can build out to make sure that it’s a two way workflow and they’re eliminating that task off of your desk. It’s pretty simple to do and there are processes like Nathan Hirsh has got Outsource School, if you want to understand how to build a VA network, really simple. He’s got something called the VA code and you just go in there, you study it, and you’ll learn how to do it. Otherwise, you can just go to Upwork or you can go to Iwork or you can go to FreeUp and just get an expert that knows how to do it, right? That’s the easiest Yep and use Frase and tell them to use Frase. That’s it.

Bill 49:48  

A good example is like, I hate doing the manual labor of outreach, but I love writing really good copy and like, networking with people. If you hate that part and that’s holding you back, or like, you’re not good at it, just hire somebody. By the time that you learn it, I mean, I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn things like, I’m a nerd, I love to learn about different processes. But like, the goal you have is to create awesome content to drive traffic to your site, and just be real, like, Hey, this part is painful, or like, I’m not good at it. Maybe I can hire somebody, and maybe you get good at it. Well, while you’re watching what they’re doing, because that’s also part of the process as well.

Norman  50:26  

Very good. Any other questions Kels?

Kelsey 50:29  

You guys kind of touched on it and I think it can be its own kind of episode too. But like, how do systems and processes work? 

Bill 50:38  

Yeah, that’s a whole episode.

Kelsey 50:41  

We actually did a couple episodes too on that. 

Norman 50:45

Nathan Hirsh came on and he was talking about that. But anyways, maybe you can put that into the comments Kels and Usman, we’ll definitely do something on how to create policies and procedures, the best way to train people. So we will definitely get to that. But that is an episode or two on its own, for sure.

Kelsey 51:08  

Oh, I also want to just mention the content, creating content. We have Cassandra Craven coming on, on Wednesday. Oh, good be talking about how to go live and so that’s a great way for content too, if you’re interested, you get someone else to do according to it doesn’t have to be you. But yeah, just check out that episode.

Norman  51:31  

The other thing about content too, that we haven’t even touched on. You can write a really great article. Well, you can write a press release, you can write starting off with the article. So you can write your article, you can create a YouTube video, that is a talking head about your article. You can take that YouTube video and embed it in your article, you can take an image and put it in your article, then you could write a press release about your article, and take that YouTube video, put it in there with all of your other social media platforms and contact information and blast it out. Once it’s out there, you can take the press release, and put it in your media room on your website, you can put in your email signature in the news, which goes to your media room and if people see in the news, Wow, this company is in the news, they check what you’re writing about and what the press releases saying you’re becoming an authority. Then you take all that content that’s in your blog and now you start repurposing and you can repurpose the YouTube video, you can repurpose the blog article, you post on Facebook, Instagram, you name it, and really get the most out of it. Like we had a repurpose io on and it’s a great way of taking small snippets, and just making the best out of it. So content really is king and if you can get the most out of the content and repurpose it and not once, I got a lot of people when they’re posting they think Oh yeah, I posted on Facebook once, a lot of people never see it. We kind of have a system of we’ll go through and we’ll post it four or five, six times over a six month period. So our queue gets so loaded up that we have so much content. We don’t know what to do, and I see that something else came in too here, Kels.

Kelsey 53:40  

Yep. So Simon had a question. So the answer to Usman’s question makes it sound simple. But there’s so many more questions. Recruiting takes time, Bridging takes time, training takes time, I guess the question is how to manage time.

Norman  53:57  

You nailed it there Simon, and that’s what we’re gonna go over.

Kelsey 54:01  

Yeah, so I did add, we have three episodes actually on VAs, the training, SOPs and stuff like that. So it’s Tomer Rabinovich, Gilad, Freeman and Nathan Hirsch. So I added those all in comments.

Norman  54:13  

Alright, so very good. Okay, and just wanted to touch on. There’s no giveaway today. However, there’s a discount code and if you go over to Frase.io, there is a free account. You just try it out and play around with it. If you’ve got a VA, have them play around with it. But I guarantee you once you play around with it, you’ll be sold on it. It’s very inexpensive and if you do go for the paid version of it, and I don’t know what the code is, or you said you were going to get a code later on and we’ll put it in the show notes.

Bill 54:53  

We’ll make sure we share it with the audience for sure. 

Norman 54:56

All right, okay and so, just so I’m clear on whatever we’re offering, is it the content side or is it this new app that you’re talking about today? 

Bill 55:11

That’s a good question. So basically, the way we’ve set up our pricing plans, if you look at the website. You have a choice of, you can pick content only. But anytime that you buy a plan that includes Frase answers, you get everything on the content plan included. So you can go that way or you can just create a free account and if you create a free account, it’s a true free account. It’s not like a free trial for a week, you can do up to five briefs per month, completely free and you can do up to 10,000 page views for your answers bot, it’s completely free. So if you like it, and you’re getting value from it, you can upgrade later on, but we just want people to enjoy it and to see value from it and go from there.

Norman  55:52  

Okay, very good. All right. So let me see. Oh my gosh, though we’re actually on time today. That’s pretty good. All right. Well, if there is another question, we can take it. If not, we’ll wind up.

Kelsey 56:12  

That’s it for now. So okay, yeah, I think that’s a good time. Yeah.

Norman  56:17  

All right. So Bill, unfortunately, can’t join us over on Clubhouse today. 

Bill 56:23

Another time, I promise. 

Norman 56:25

You gotta do it. It’s gonna it’s a lot of fun. We’ll be talking just a little bit about everything. But we try to touch on subjects we talked on last week about and give the audience a chance to ask. But anyways, Mr. Bill, thank you, sir. I really appreciate you coming back and we’ll have you back again, you gotta keep telling us more about what’s going on.

Bill 56:48  

I will, I appreciate it and I hope everybody’s having a good week and thanks for having me again.

Norman  56:52  

I love talking to people that are so much smarter than me. All right Bill, we’ll see you later. Okay, everybody. So I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Bill is just full of knowledge, you gotta check it out. Like I said, we don’t get anything at all, except satisfaction that you guys are getting, I think the best tools that you can use to work with to build your content, or in this case, man, like to be able to go out there and just be able to scrape your content basically, on your site, somebody asked a question, so I don’t have it and I didn’t know we were kind of going down that road today. I think we’re talking about something completely different. So I am going to check it out. I don’t get any special deals. So I’m gonna be if I buy it, I buy it and I’m gonna probably buy it. So anyways, Kells, what do you have to say?

Kelsey 57:51  

Yeah, so thanks everyone for watching. We appreciate your views. Hopefully you guys didn’t miss out, since we changed the Norm’s Facebook page situation. So there’s no more Facebook streams from his personal Facebook page. But thank you everyone for watching. We have a Clubhouse later today at 1:30pm, in about half an hour. You can join here, this is the link for it. I put it across all the YouTube, Facebook pages and LinkedIn and yeah, join the Beard Nation if you haven’t yet. Got some good questions coming in. We’re always happy to answer them. We also want to know what we can improve on. So if you look in my group today, there’s a little forum there. So you have any tips for us, if you want to see more of a guest if you want to see less of a topic or you just love the show, you can just give it a like. But yeah, check out the YouTube channel too. That’s where all of our full highlights and daily episodes or daily clips go to. I think that’s it for me.

Norman  58:54  

All right, so again, Kelsey failed at smashing those likes, subscribing, following, ringing a bell. All that stuff that I’m not supposed to say and on Wednesday, we are going to be having Cassandra Craven back. She’s awesome. I love talking with her and we’re going to be talking about the do’s and don’ts and everything in between about going live. So everything I probably shouldn’t have done in today’s episode. But anyway. All right everybody, tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon, Eastern Standard Time. Thanks for watching. Thanks for being part of our community. Enjoy the rest of your day and we’ll talk to you soon