In this episode, Cloud Wise Joe and co-host Chauncey show local businesses how to make the internet work for them, not against them. Joe talks about how to thrive in today’s E-commerce economy and how using Pinterest can grow and expand your business as well as getting your products and services on the internet for consumers.

Joe: Good Morning. You’re listening to Being Found Show. I’m Cloud Wise Joe and I have my internet superhero, Chauncey. I’ve got to tell you it’s good to be in the studio. So I’ve got two locations now I spend so much time in Tennessee and some of my time here in California and those of you who have been listening, we’ve been trying to work out the technical challenges of doing a radio show with our talent intuitive place. We’re trying to do a lot of things like adding video to the radio show. So there’s a lot going on but I got to tell you it’s just nice to be back in the studio. The studio feels like home. Even big old Chauncey came and gave me a hug. Jared didn’t give me a hug though.

You know we do have our shows on beingfound.com. We’ve got all kinds of videos that go along with the show. We really are committed to making sure local businesses are being found by more buying customers. I believe that this is the best two hours of radio for business.

Chauncey: I think so too. I think a lot of other radio is maybe a little more self-serving than this.

Joe: This is about the businesses and it occurred to me that you know what we’re doing is we’re taking a lot of that information that you can find online about how to market and how to grow your business and how to be found. And we’re bringing it into the real world and into the real media and for people in businesses who maybe don’t spend their whole lives googling how to do search engine optimization or how to be found and all that like we do.

Chauncey: Right well I think that’s a big part of what we’re doing is like. You know we do this for a living. And in order to truly understand anything that you’re doing if you can teach it in simple terms an explainable, palatable, digestible terms then you really understand it. So what you can say is we don’t understand this stuff. Well, I think we’re on the road to understanding that. I think this road is helping us by helping other people.

Joe: You have to circle back to that as a matter of fact. You know if you listen to the show we’ve talked about something called “AMP” or accelerated mobile pages or the accelerated mobile project.

And I follow my own advice and I’m being a guinea pig for our listeners. We’re actually creating these different kinds of pages which Google loves. They’re fast but it’s a whole different kind of code that you add to your website so that it’s more mobile friendly and it’s faster. Well, it takes a little bit of time to understand how to work with it, how to do it and I’m actually my own guinea pig. If you go to any of our websites beingfound.com, Cloud Wise Academy or Cloud Potential, and you use a mobile device our AMP pages actually show up instead of a regular website and actually look like crap. Yeah, they do. We’re our own guinea pig. And one of the things we’re messing around with is how much of the styling that everybody does like when we build a website, we build it looking at our own desktop computer.

Almost never does a business owner build their website looking at their mobile phone? So what we’re doing is we’re seeing that difference between how an amp page shows because what an amp is it will rip out some of the sides and you get to go back in and restyle specific for mobile. And so we’re trying to figure out how much of that desktop styling that we think so important to make our page attractive and for people like it how much is actually needed on mobile. And so we’re we’re starting it like nothing basic.

Chauncey: Well I’m just starting to dabble in amp pages as well but for the past couple of years as a developer I’ve been doing what’s called mobile first where I designed the mobile site first and then built my way up to the desktop site. And this provides two advantages, for one, you know you’ve done the mobile site but for two it loads the mobile first allowing it to load faster on a mobile.

Joe: Another thing I wanted to talk about when we get going here is Project Hometown. You can go to projecthometown.com. And that’s the major reason I’m in town right now. Project Hometown is the idea that if all of our local businesses here in Shasta County and Chatham County who sell products or services brace the e-commerce economy and they made sure their products and services were being found online the way their customers want to buy which I got to tell you this is a specific requirement that customers don’t want to rummage through a website that’s really nothing more than a brochure. They want to get to products they want to get to reviews they want to go to buy it they want to compare features.

And one of the things we’re going to talk about is how Google and other monsters are actually looking at your website and determining if it should share your products or not and how it’s going to share your products. And so I’m in town. We’re going to be meeting with Tony at the EDC, I think Jake Mangus from the chamber will be there with a bunch of other web developers. Chauncey you’re going to be there, I don’t know if you know about it or not yet but you’re invited. And the idea is could all of us organizations and developers come together and figure out a way that we can make it accessible for all the businesses in Shasta County to essentially be a connected e-commerce economy because here’s the thing. There is a whole new economy happening. They actually expect that in 2017 e-commerce sales is going to eclipse brick and mortar sales.

We hear about brick and mortar businesses closing all the time and it’s really too bad that they’re closing because you do have this choice to plug into this e-commerce economy which means getting your product sold through Amazon, which means getting your products into an e-commerce platform. There are really specific requirements. So we’re going to talk about that this week.

Chauncey: Yeah. And if you think about the local economy you know let’s say a thousand businesses each make a thousand dollars online in a year. That’s an extra million dollars pumped into that.

Joe: That’s either keeping the money here or the nice thing about e-commerce is you can find customers anywhere. Right. And the big deal is that this isn’t as hard as people think. You can plug into them if you just took a little bit of time you know and the amount of time it takes to get an ad ready for radio or for TV with all the right research and doing the right steps to get that done. You could also be connected to e-commerce economy.

Chauncey: Step one of being found is to be available.

Joe: OK so I’ll get back to Being Found Show. Thank you so much for listening. You know we love doing this, we love pulling back the curtain in making the Internet makes sense for business.

Chauncey: You know we have an audience of business owners and then you know it’s probably a bit larger because of entrepreneurs. A lot of entrepreneurs that are trying to become business owners that we can probably help.

Joe: Right, that’s a good point. I like to think that this show is also for the dreamer because that’s kind of what I meant by an entrepreneur. Well if we talk about our example of where we came from you know we don’t have a pedigree for this. You don’t have a degree. I don’t either. This is one of those things that you got to learn the hard way. It changes every single day. But if you learn how to operate in this new world then it’s totally manageable like you got it. It’s more of how you look at and that’s really what the show is trying to do is what you think about how to look at things in this world. For instance, you’ll hear me talk about limited risk marketing. That’s because I learned that the hard way, that I’ve got to pay for my own marketing and I’m tired of wasting money on one channel when another one works right. So with competition, it is hard but it is here. And what we’re trying to explain is that if you just put some commitment and time to understanding it and knowing how to or what to expect what questions to ask. Every business person can do this.

Chauncey: I think you just have to have one quality that frankly if you don’t have it you’ve got to get it and it will help everybody in every single life ever. You have to like to learn. Yeah. So you know I’ve always kind of instead of riding my kids to get great grades and so on and so forth I’ve really taught them that learning is fun and you’ve got to like to learn. And they do like to learn and everything else took care of itself in the end.

Joe: In business, you like to learn. I mean I don’t know a single business person out there that doesn’t enjoy learning or doesn’t realize that you know how to solve problems and how to figure out supply chain problems and how to figure out how do I keep my doors open how do I hire a new employer. There are costs. That’s that’s the nature of the business. So I think you’re right about that very same nature. You just have to apply to understanding how the Internet’s going to affect your business and work with it which I had an interview where I interviewed someone named Kate All and shes with Simple Pen Media. And we’re going to have that interview available online. We’ll talk about it in the next show. But that was such a good interview that I want to talk about a little bit.

It was about Pinterest and you know the idea that Being Found Show and the whole concept of being found is not about search engine optimization it’s it’s not just about being found on Google. It’s about being found where your customers are looking and with what they’re looking for when they’re looking. Right. And so Pinterest kept coming up. I would talk to clients and say you know we don’t understand what’s going on but we’re actually seeing revenue from people who come from Pinterest to our website and there’s not that the conversion is higher than all of our other channels and what in the world is going on here right. And so and I wasn’t really independent. When you hear this interview you know I’m unashamedly unaware of how Pinterest works.

I want to go over a few things that she that she talked about that you literally could start right now and so. So one of them was Pinterest is smaller than Facebook. Essentially if you don’t know what Pinterest is, it’s a social media platform I guess is what you call it. But essentially what you do is many find good articles or you find pictures or things like that online that you want to keep for inspiration or you might want to use later to figure out how to build something or how to organize a room or whatever. Yes, the point is you save them so when you’re on that website you click a button, you pin, and it’s now on your Pinterest account.

Chauncey: Yes. It’s like bookmarking a website that’s much more social and visual.

Joe: That’s right. And so then Pinterest goes to work when you’re painting things. Pinterest goes we’re trying to share other pins and other boards and pins that other people like. So essentially you’re starting to show Pinterest what you like and Pinterest is trying to help get other things in front of you which is wonderful for a business. Every day she says until you figure it out as a business, go start pinning things that you think your customers would be interested in. So they’re on your Pinterest page and start pinning the things that you have on your blogs or website that you think would be valuable and just start doing it. So you know that’s kind of our advice all the time. But I think on Pinterest especially there’s no reason not to.

I think also what she pointed out was that this is where people are going for inspiration and inspiration is something that is early on in the buying process doesn’t mean it won’t happen right away. But it’s one of your first things that you go out to do, what kind of table do I want, how do I want my clothing to look or whatever. And so what you end up doing is you see things and find things and you save them. And so now it’s sitting there reminding you that you like that right it’s it’s piece it’s forming part of your decision making process. And so when it comes a time you have almost like sitting in a shopping cart that the idea or the product that you’re after seeing just go back there is bias. So one of the things that stick with you. The thing about Pinterest and I bring it up especially this week because I think it’s related to Project Hometown and e-commerce economy is Pinterest will allow you to sell on Pinterest.

It is fairly new and it’s called buyable pins. And so if somebody sees one of your products pinned and they like it they can buy it right there by putting it in a bag. And so that’s what I talk about the e-commerce economy in Being Found because it’s not about your website anymore. I mean you need a website but you’re your buyer is not just using your website to figure out what they need.

Chauncey: I think this is a good way to look at it is your Web site is a collection of pages. So your website is no longer just the collection of pages that are located under your domain name, but your website is your collection of pages that represent you. Right. And so that leads to your profiles that leads to your reviews that leads to everything that is.

Joe: That’s a that’s a good segue. We’re going to talk about something that is going to challenge your concept that we can take something complicated and make it simple and that means we understand it. Awesome yeah. Because in one of the coming out segments we’re actually going to look at and talk about the fact that Google is now trying to serve up your products and your content and allow users to do what they need with that content before ever going to your website. Now whether you like that or not just think about it that might mean that people never go to your website. Doesn’t really matter it’s happening. And so that’s a reality that you have to deal with. You know there’s five billion Google searches a day or something like that.

So it’s happening. And so there are very specific things you have to understand about your website and has very specific ways to test your website to see if your information is showing up showing up in Google in a way that Google wants to display it so users can interact with that content and it’s really a debate that’s going on. Is that a good thing or not that Google is trying to share people your content without them having to go to your Web site. And to me, the debate is mute because you have to deal with it either way. So that’s that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about. It’s private business you can’t stop you can’t stop them. Well, I guess the government got to walk me around.

OK, so I want to give one little action step. One of the things she said was we asked How often do you pin? How often do you go pin something and put it in your profile? And she said every day. Go pin a couple of things start there. So do that. Open a Pinterest account. Don’t be afraid and just start pinning things and we’ll keep covering it. Five minutes right when you get to work. Yup five minutes. Just do it. Right, you’re listening to the Being Found Show.