James Dihardjo
Andrew, thanks for making time to do this which is, you know, what I think is the first thing in the morning for you. I just want to get you to start, tell us about yourself and your business.
Andrew Maff
Yeah, sure. So let's see a little bit about me, I guess as pertains to what we're probably going to talk about today. I've been in the digital marketing space for a little over 15 years now. I started off in e-commerce and more or less ventured into a couple of other areas, a little more solely on the retail side than just going strictly e-commerce about nine years ago. I've been in-house at multiple eight-figure companies. I was at an agency, well, I'd started my own agency in college and exited that a few years later. Started one with a partner of mine in 2016, and exited that one in late 2019. And then in early 2020, I started BlueTuskr, which is what I'm mostly doing now. We are a full-service marketing company for e-commerce sellers.
So in a lot of cases, we basically act like an outsourced marketing department. Or we kind of puzzle piece in with whatever marketing staff that might already be in, in-house with whichever seller we're working with. And then I'm also the host of the e-commerce show. So I have my own little e-commerce podcast where I interview other e-commerce sellers and kind of pick their brains about how they got to where they are and all that fun stuff.
James Dihardjo
Yeah. Cool. Alright. Interesting man. Straight into the questions. So you were recently at eTail, I think. Any big takeaways from that?
Andrew Maff
Yeah. It's an interesting question. It was not what I was expecting, I guess is the best way to put that. Because you think eTail, you think like electronic retail. So you think, okay, it's basically e-commerce. It really was a little more focused on the retail side. There were a lot of talks and stuff. They were a little bit more just solely brick-and-mortar focused. There were some that were a little transitioning, sort of from brick and mortar to retail. A lot of the people I met that attended were pretty good size companies, so, you know, like CVS and Alta and Nike and Adidas, like all those guys were there.
So, you know the calibre of companies that attended that was amazing. So that was really cool to like be able to sit and chat with all of them. Outside of that, I mean in my honest opinion, hopefully, they're not going to take this to heart, but like, it was a little fluffy is the best way I can put it. Like all the talks were kind of like, okay, like you didn't really learn too much. Granted, you know, after you go to a bunch of these conferences, sometimes it just stuff starts to blend in together and you can only hear the same thing so many times. So that could just be personal but otherwise, there's a good time. Love Boston. So that was fun. But yeah, overall, not too bad.
James Dihardjo
Interesting. That's interesting. I saw a lot of posts about that and I was thinking about going myself, but yeah. Interesting point of view. The next point is to talk to us through your opinion of Walmart marketplace and where do you think it's heading.
Andrew Maff
Oh, man. Walmart, Walmart's a pain. So Walmart, even though like, I get it, it's one of those things where I do suggest that most sellers get on it. A because I think that you should be anywhere that your customer might be. Walmart could obviously be one of them, even if it just means it's kind of keeping the lights on, you're going to want to do your own due diligence on how useful Walmart may or may not be.
But I think that it doesn't hurt to at least try it. It can. I've seen it where it does. Pretty close to as well as Amazon in some cases. It's not common, but it can happen. And then from another perspective, it's really just like, it's so clunky. They're so behind Amazon, just from a seller standpoint on functionality and being able to find certain reports and like all this stuff and that it's just complicated to work with. I do think that one day Amazon will either A, be much bigger and Walmart will be maybe similar to what Amazon is now, in which case, totally still useful, or B, the other thing that I always think is kind of interesting is you know these really big companies, you're always like one union vote away from being kind of screwed, in which case, like, you know, God forbid someone dies at an Amazon warehouse.
They find out one of the execs was doing something and it doesn't get covered up well enough or whatever happens there, and then all of a sudden everyone's got backlash on Amazon, they're probably going to turn to a Walmart. So, I kind of think that it never hurts to be on a channel and just be there and have some kind of presence just in case something like that happens, and you can easily pivot. But it is a complicated pain of a backend to use.
James Dihardjo
Very animated commentary there. I'm sensing that you we're both holding back some profanities. So,
Andrew Maff
Exactly.
James Dihardjo
So, Switching gears, man. To content, you know, content as a topic. What are brands focusing on at the moment in your opinion?
Andrew Maff
We've seen a pretty good size shift to SEO. And content is kind of broad like you could theorize it. Social is content, email is content like just creating stuff is content. But basically, there's been this huge shift to SEO and honestly, we've started to see it. We've started to push it even more that we like the direction things are going. And mainly because paid advertising continues to get not only more complicated as you get on different channels and everyone you know, wants to worry about attribution and stuff.
But it's also getting more and more expensive. Even though there are more channels and people are spreading their budget a little bit thinner on different platforms, it's still a matter of like CPCs have increased, I just did this thing the other day where I quoted this, and I can't remember what it actually was, but in CPCs have been increasing like year over year on every channel. Amazon, Google, Facebook, TikTok, you name it, CPCs are going up. And they're going to keep going up.
And the thing I always talk about with an SEO side of things, especially now that we're kind of in this inflationary sort of a recession, sort of not a recessionary period that SEO to me is actually an investment. You are building your website into an asset. If you ever have cashflow issues and decide you need to cut back on your paid advertising, you're screwed. Whatever you're getting at that time, you can expect significantly less.
From an SEO standpoint though, if you keep investing in SEO, you're going to thank yourself later on down the road because if you do need to cut back on paid advertising, your SEO's not going to stop. Like your rankings will continue. They might fall a little bit from the paid Ads and the traffic falling down, but it will definitely help you keep things going. And if you're looking to exit as well. Having that kind of organic traffic, that kind of like, visitors just coming to the site without needing to advertise and then having that kind of audience is significantly more valuable to a potential buyer of your business if that's the direction you want to go in, than if you were just solely focused on paid Advertising.
James Dihardjo
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It's interesting. I know a certain individual near where you are, that's churning out content with this thing called Jasper and it seems to be paying dividends for him constantly.
Andrew Maff
Yeah, there are a few of those platforms out there. They're really interesting. It's definitely, it's a helpful tool. I would absolutely say though, that it doesn't exactly do the job as well as you'd like it to. It still requires having a writer or an editor look at it and adjust it as it's writing stuff for you. And then it does obviously require someone who's using it to understand what's being talked about. Like actually as of this recording, I don't know when you're pushing this out, but as of this recording over this week and next week, Google's pushing out their new algorithm update, which is solely now more, a lot more focused on basically the value that these articles or that your pages are providing.
So instead of writing for the algorithm, It's more like writing for the consumer and the person who's visiting the page. And so Google's got whatever ranking factors they put into place to kind of make that judgment. And so people over the next couple weeks who maybe used a Jasper or who just kind of were throwing articles up and just shoving a bunch of keywords in it. They might start to see their traffic start to come down now because it's not, it's actually going to hurt them. So it's a cool tool and it definitely helps speed things up. But at the same time, like you got to have someone who knows what they're doing using it. So while it does save time, I wouldn't say it cuts it drastically.
James Dihardjo
That's very true. I think you and I are on the same page, except I'd use more profanities to steer that.
*(both laughs)*
James Dihardjo
Final thoughts, man, before we wrap up. So We are both going to the Helium 10 event in like a few weeks. It's the first ever. What do you think you and I are in for?
Andrew Maff
I think it's going to be really interesting. I'm hoping that I'm wrong, but I have a feeling it's going to be relatively intimate in comparison to what they were hoping for. I might be incorrect. I've reached out to a lot of different people to see who was going and only found a handful. But that doesn't mean that it's not going to be good. I think that it's helium10. They have been at every conference I have ever been to almost every time. So chances are they know how to do this by this point and like to have Your first, like they've had like other one-off events and stuff like that.
But to have your first like real big conference and have like, who is it? Like Gary Vee and Neil Patel are the two keynote speakers. They have Nelly who's performing, which I find hilarious. I think that they know exactly what hey needed to do. I think that it might be some people are hesitant because it's their first year and they just don't want to spend the money to find out that it was bad. But I just don't see this being bad.
James Dihardjo
Yeah. I think that's a very fair assessment and I think I'm just as hopeful as you are, man. But look, thanks for making time and I'm really looking forward to meeting up in person. I think you and I are the first people to do networking out at the Helium10 event before it even starts. But yeah, thanks again, man.
Andrew Maff
The way it's done. Yeah, appreciate you having me.