Podcast 31: Traffic & Conversion Summit 2017 Recap + More Updates

A few updates from Drew - recaps of three recent events he spoke at, the key learnings at each of them, and a preview of the near future for Drew and Nerd Marketing. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? Click here to download the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights RECAP: Traffic and Conversion Summit Niche businesses - why they're great, how they fail, and where retention marketing comes in The "Scrum" approach to growth RECAP: Brand Growth Intensive Workshop with Austin Brawner RECAP: Masterclass with ConversionXL What's Next: Build a Bigger Business Course for Shopify Catalogues - A resurgence of old school mail marketing? A couple of new courses are coming Much, much more Links / Resources Check out Drew's free, 7-lesson email course Double Your Ecommerce Touchstonetests.io More on basic segmentation in Google Analytics in Episode 16 Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can request the text transcribe and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Hello everybody, and welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast, episode 31. I am Drew Sanocki, and I am coming at you from New York City, where I'm finally taking a break. A break being defined as being an hour break, not like an extended break. Man, I have been running the gauntlet of E-commerce speaking engagements, and workshops, and classes. I'm going to tell you all about that stuff today. A lot of good stuff to report. Basically I want to spend this podcast just kind of reconnecting, welcoming all my new listeners who I've met over the past month or two since my last podcast. I want to do a little bit on what I've been up to, and then where I'm going, what I'm working on next. Let's start with the former, so what I did first. I spoke at Traffic and Conversion. This is the huge E-commerce and digital marketing conference that's put on in San Diego. It was, I guess about early March, this Traffic and Conversion went on. I was one of 10 or so speakers, and it's easily the largest E-commerce and digital marketing conference I've ever been to. Thousands and thousands of people, it's put on by DigitalMarketer.com. Obviously the focus is on traffic and conversion. A lot of big speakers. We had some people from Uber, some people from Casper, plus a lot of industry people there. I was asked to speak about Karmaloop, and what went on there, and database marketing more generally. I'm happy to share my deck with you guys, and kind of what I did. Maybe I'll do that as a separate podcast. But, my big takeaway from this was that the industry is still really focused on acquisition, and traffic, and hacks, and tricks, and bells, and whistles, and things that, silver bullets that people think are going to get them 10x growth in a year. It's not to say that those things don't exist, I think they do. But, we gotta beware of survivorship by us, right? Most of the blog posts that get published talk about these things, but it's not reflective of the vast majority of other companies that are around just slugging away, just applying pressure over time, and growing slowly. It's not to say one's better than the other, it's just to say, "Hey, when you read a headline you're focusing in on what that author tries to promote, and uses to promote that post." Even within a post. You read a post on DigitalMarketer.com about some company that 10x'ed revenue in a year. Even within that company that 10x'ed, there was probably a whole mess of stuff that happened behind the scenes before they figured out the one thing that would catapult them to the next level. Just beware what you read. I think you see it in the eyes of the people, when you look out at these conferences. They're just, they want the quick win. I think I've been there, I've been in those seats when I was running my own retailer. I too,