Show Notes
Carl Lewis:
Welcome to The Connected Enterprise podcast. I’m Carl Lewis, your host from Vision33, and my guest is Chris Malta. Chris is an experienced eCommerce entrepreneur—and possibly the only person who will tell you the entire truth about eCommerce, whether you like it or not. Chris, tell us about yourself, your business, and your new book.
Chris Malta:
Thanks, Carl. And yes, unfortunately, the truth isn’t always the prettiest thing, but they need to hear it, right?
Carl Lewis:
Yes.
Chris Malta:
I’ve been in eCommerce for over 30 years. When I started in 1992, the only thing you could do was market through news groups. But since then, I've done everything you can do. I’ve worked with high-up executives in companies like Amazon, eBay, and UPS. I love it.
My new book is essential because people need accurate information. It’s called EBiz Scams Revealed: Ultimate Guide to Avoiding Scams. It’s on my website: chrismalta.com. It's free. I want to help people avoid the rabbit holes you can fall into in this business.
Carl Lewis:
You could spend a lot of money and not get much.
Chris Malta:
Most people have.
Carl Lewis:
Unfortunately. Chris, many small and midsized businesses still don’t have eCommerce. Is it relevant for them now that they’re so late to the party?
Chris Malta:
It's impossible to be late to the party because so many people at the party don't know what they're doing. Here’s a statistic from Forrester: 97%-ish eCommerce sites fail. Mostly because they don't have good information. They “learn” from YouTube or the big platforms selling a one-size-fits-all model. Put something up quick, get out there, and you’ll be on your way.
So, there will always be plenty of room in eCommerce. Everything is shifting that way, based on years of statistics. The growth is amazing. You just have to know what you're doing when you get there.
Carl Lewis:
If someone wants to run an eCommerce site for their business, what should they do first?
Chris Malta:
It depends on the business’s size. You're talking midsized to larger businesses, right?
Carl Lewis:
Yes.
Chris Malta:
First, consider the landscape. Where are they? What do they produce? I worked with a company that makes saw blades. That’s it. They've been around for a hundred years, and they make saw blades. Having one product works well for search engine optimization (SEO) because search engines look for sites that are authoritative on one thing. That company can laser focus on natural content ranking in the search engines.
Companies that make everything from purple shoes to green widgets can’t rank well in search engines. Unfortunately, they have to focus on paid advertising. But one of the first things is to get someone who knows—or teach someone they already have—how to launch and what to do with that site.
Carl Lewis:
So, one key is hiring someone or creating someone.
Chris Malta:
Yes. That's one thing I thought when I referred to the saw blade company. They had an internal employee familiar with online marketing, and I mentored that person to build the eCommerce site. We determined how everything needed to be done, set it all up, and got it running. If you have someone in-house who can do that, that’s best. You have to be careful if you want to hire somebody because most people have “learned” from YouTube. And that's like learning how to become a surgeon by watching online videos.
Carl Lewis:
Don’t hire your 12-year-old nephew to do this job.
Chris Malta:
No, and I've seen people do that.
Carl Lewis:
Me too. So those are good ideas for what to do. What shouldn’t they do?
Chris Malta:
Don't assume you'll put a website up and it will work. Big platforms tell everybody this. It’s a free trial website, so throw everything at the wall and hope it sticks. They don’t tell you the website is the last thing you should do. A tremendous amount of research and development should come before the website. First, what do you sell? Midsized and larger companies know what they sell—but they might want to separate it because if they make saw blades, shoes, and something else, they're corporate divisions. They may want a website for each division.
You need to research. Market research to figure out what you're selling. Keyword research to figure out how people search for what you sell. Search engines don’t create keywords—they’re the words and phrases people use to describe what they're looking for. They vary widely. Core keywords surround the product closely. Super sets of keywords surround questions about the product. You must know how people are looking for what you're selling.
Then you must know who you're selling to. If you don’t, you can't present it properly. You don't talk to people in their sixties the same way you talk to people in their twenties, and they don't respond to the same marketing.
Younger demographic groups look for cleaner websites, less talk, a smaller text-to-image ratio. They can even determine what font you use. So, knowing the demographic is critical.
You also need to learn about writing for a search engine, and how to work with SEO. What’s interesting about SEO is that it becomes less important over time because it helps search engines fill in the gaps it doesn't understand yet.
But search engines are systems that learn—AI—and fill in their own gaps because they process 30 billion daily searches. But even though SEO becomes less important, you still need to understand the gaps and how to fill them to show the search engine where to look. Graphics are important. You need to present things how people need to see them.
And you should do all that before the website goes up. But people rush to the website instead.
Carl Lewis:
So, you need to know what you're doing before you do it. You need to become an expert about what you sell and know your marketplace, customers, and competitors. That part’s a bit old school, but if you skip it, you're hampered on the creativity side.
Chris Malta:
Yes. Another mistake people make is buying tools: SEO, sales funnel, email marketing, etc. Google doesn’t like to be fooled. Google developed a whole web spam division in 2011. It’s called the penguin algorithm, and it says, "You’re not going to fool us anymore." There were many black hat techniques fooling them, and they didn’t like it.
People buy these unicorn and rainbow tools that are supposed to work magically—but Google buys those tools too, figures out how they work, and blocks them in the algorithms. So don't waste your money and time on tools.
Carl Lewis:
The search engines are sophisticated enough to know the truth?
Chris Malta:
Right. It's artificial intelligence. What I've seen recently is funny because people on YouTube are talking about OpenAI and ChatGPT. You’re supposed to use this AI tool to write your marketing material, but it can’t fool the Google AI. Google's AI can smell artificial intelligence-generated content a mile away.
And you can see it too. Try talking to your iPhone. Use talk to text, and words are misspelled, commas are out of place. AI isn’t a genius. It’s not nearly as smart as people. The human factor in content creation is vital. It’s another huge mistake people make.
Also, hiring virtual assistants. If you hire somebody in the Philippines, India, or somewhere similar and you say, "Write content about this keyword," they search that keyword online, grab somebody else's article, and use an article spinner. That generates 15 versions of the article by changing the words around. They send you one version, Google sees it, and says, "Are you kidding me?" Don’t do virtual assistants. If you're running a business or website, you need to understand how and why it works.
Carl Lewis:
You’re better off having your staff write a blog about how good your saw blades are than trying to spoof the system. Because Google will know that’s a fake article, for sure.
Chris Malta:
Yes! And they don't like it. And when Google doesn't like something, it goes away.
Carl Lewis:
Chris, you mentioned you teach people to use Shopify. Why is Shopify a good platform for eCommerce?
Chris Malta:
Shopify is a good platform technically. We like it because Google doesn’t like web pages that take 15 lines of code to do something you could do in three lines. Also, Shopify's platform is sleek and streamlined. It uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript wrapped in what they call their ‘liquid engine.’ Other platforms are more complicated because they often use PHP, which is a complex language.
We like the technical side of Shopify, but we steer people away from the marketing side. We do that with all platforms, not just Shopify, because that's where they sell the tools and things you don't need. I think these companies don't expect people to succeed with websites, so they try to sell as many tools as possible before the people realize they won’t succeed. That's how companies like Shopify make money.
Carl Lewis:
It makes sense that that's their sweet spot. Get them in and eating at the meals all the time you're feeding them.
Chris Malta:
Yes.
Carl Lewis:
Chris, many small companies think, "I don't need an eCommerce site because I'm doing things on social media. I'm selling stuff on Facebook." Or wherever. That doesn’t make sense. What’s the real relationship between social media and eCommerce?
Chris Malta:
It doesn't make sense because when you're marketing/advertising, you're looking for your customers when they're most receptive. But on social media, people are playing games, talking, watching videos, having fun. They don’t want to be advertised to. It's like when you're enjoying a YouTube video and, boom, an advertisement. That’s why conversion rates are so low with Facebook marketing. It's the wrong place at the wrong time.
The thing you want to do on Facebook or other social platforms is use your blog. Answer people's questions. I mentioned keywords. There are two major types of keywords—eight kinds, but only two types: commercial and non-commercial. Commercial keywords describe a physical product, like ‘coffee maker.’ Non-commercial keywords are like ‘how to roast coffee beans.’ That's a question people ask.
The non-commercial keywords belong on social media because you can write a post or blog about them, such as "Here's how to roast coffee beans." People will gravitate to that. Then you can link that material to your website: "Want to learn more about roasting coffee beans? Want to see the best coffee makers for home-roasted beans?" That's how you use that—you don't jam ads up people’s noses and say, "You were having fun, weren't you? Not anymore!"
Carl Lewis:
So social media is a doorway to your eCommerce site because that's where you actually sell stuff.
Chris Malta:
Exactly. And people are looking for information on social media. If you have a Facebook post you can rank on a non-commercial keyword, people will find it. They'll respond to it. They'll comment on it. You'll build your social presence that way. Be helpful, not pushy.
Carl Lewis:
You said many people start eCommerce businesses and fail miserably. Why?
Chris Malta:
It’s the incredible amount of bad information out there. The big platforms don’t expect you to succeed. The people on YouTube pushing these programs, systems, tools, etc. don’t want you to succeed. Because then they can't keep selling you more things. They'll hit you for $5,000 until you make $50k on Amazon per month, which you won't. But they'll give you specifically, purposefully incomplete information so when you get to the end and say, "This doesn't work," they say, "It’s because you don't have the platinum program. That's another $5,000." When that doesn't work, which it won’t, they’ll say, "You need a coach. That's $15,000." And those are real numbers.
I've been teaching for years, and I hear every day, "I lost my house. I lost my retirement account. I put $35k into this or that." That's mostly why people fail—they expect to find free information or pay for something that's not as expensive as it should be, and they think it will solve all their problems.
Unfortunately, there are many predators on the internet in this space. My book has examples of Federal Trade Commission and state lawsuits filed against people for that.
Carl Lewis:
Chris, I have one more question. Marketing is huge for eCommerce success. What are the marketing basics an eCommerce business needs to master ASAP?
Chris Malta:
The first thing is content marketing. It's critical to create content so search engines will appreciate it. When you launch a website, Google will index it. They'll read everything and ask, "Does this make sense? Does it not make sense?" Making sense means the words and phrases—product and category descriptions, articles, etc.—belong to the same group of keywords that all reference the same thing. So, learning how to create content so Google understands it is critical. Because unfortunately, Google weighs negative indexings far more heavily than positive ones.
Let's say you get a positive indexing, meaning Google says, "We understand this. It makes sense. We'll come back and look at it again." That's +1 point. But if Google says, "What in the world are these people doing? We have no clue," that's -250 points. The more negative indexings, the lower you’ll rank. And it happens fast.
So, understand how to create content first. Understand where you are. If you're midsized to large with diverse product offerings, understand you’ll likely spend more money advertising because you can't rank naturally in search engines. But don’t give up on content creation.
Have social media platforms. Have a blog. A blog is vital, but you can’t overdo it because Google's penguin algorithm looks at something called content stuffing. If they see you with a blog and a ton of social media every day, they don't consider it organic growth. They want human-based, organic growth of an idea, concept, and website. To Google, that's real knowledge being developed. Otherwise, they think you’re trying to fool them. Then, you trip over the penguin algorithm and you're out—you'll never get ranked.
Carl Lewis:
Chris, this is great information. Tell us more about the book, because it sounds like something I’ll want to recommend to my friends.
Chris Malta:
I wrote the book because there’s so much bad information basically roping people into scams. And that hasn't changed in I don't know how long. The book is free—no catch. It’s just that after 30 years in this business, I’m sick of hearing about people getting cheated, burned, and stolen from. The book was something I had to do.
So, it's at chrismalta.com. It's free, and I want people to read it because it could save them thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands.
Carl Lewis:
Sounds like a good plan. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today on The Connected Enterprise. We'll try to check back with you if we have questions in the future. And for everyone else, 'til we meet again, stay connected.
