The Success of Design in Digital Marketing | Steven Schneider

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this conversation, Steven Schneider discusses the critical role of website design in conversion rates, emphasizing that even with high traffic, poor design can hinder success. He highlights the importance of guiding clients in optimizing their funnels and provides insights on how to analyze competitor websites to improve their own.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• Website design significantly impacts conversion rates.
• High traffic does not guarantee conversions without good design.
• Guiding clients towards better funnels is essential for success.
• Comparative analysis of competitor websites can reveal design flaws.
• A website's aesthetic can influence user emotions and decisions.
• Entrepreneurs should adopt a partnership approach with clients.
• Identifying and addressing design issues can lead to better performance.
• Effective funnels are crucial for converting traffic into customers.
• A gloomy website can deter potential customers.
• Continuous improvement and guidance are key in digital marketing.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.34)
Welcome to another episode of the profitable creative the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host Christian Brim special shout out to our one listener in Edison, New Jersey. I wonder if Thomas Edison is from there or that's where they named him. I don't know. Anyway, thanks for listening. my guest today is Steven Schneider of trio SEO. Steven. Welcome to the show.

Steven Schneider (00:30.67)
Thanks for having me.

Christian Brim (00:32.914)
Well, thanks for coming. You never know what happens with the podcast. You know, sometimes people don't show up. Some people show up and you know, they're not what you expect, but you look like someone that's going to deliver. So tell, tell us how you got into Trio. Well, let's start with what is Trio SEO. I mean, SEO is in the name. So I'm assuming that you do SEO, elaborate.

Steven Schneider (00:47.33)
Hope so, that's what I came for.

Steven Schneider (01:02.37)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're a B2B and SaaS SEO agency. And so our primary strength is driving organic traffic, whether in the form from Google or Bing or even places like ChatGPT nowadays to people's websites and helping them get organic business that way. So primarily, we do that through tools like calculators and quizzes and more engaging formats. But other things are going to be content, blogs, sales pages, kind of anything that would encompass all things SEO.

Christian Brim (01:06.728)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (01:15.87)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (01:25.937)
Mmm.

Steven Schneider (01:32.304)
video.

Christian Brim (01:34.776)
And how long have you been doing this with Trio?

Steven Schneider (01:38.734)
Trio's been around for about three years. We just had our birthday, but I've been in the SEO space for almost 10. Thank you. Yeah, so almost a decade for me and SEO in general.

Christian Brim (01:42.718)
Congratulations.

Christian Brim (01:49.118)
All right. So, so what was the journey like that brought you to launching Trio? you, were you, did you have another agency before or?

Steven Schneider (02:00.373)
Yes, I used to co-own a portfolio of about 40 different sites and that was kind of my crash course into SEO. I discovered Amazon affiliate blogging back when that was still a viable path and kind of the space of creating like best stuff, listicle style articles. I used to publish in the ballpark of like 300 to 400 articles per month. This was before AI and kind of all that sort of stuff. so scaled that portfolio to seven figures alongside my partners and a great

team and that was like I said kind of my you know internship into SEO a decade ago in college and we started that business from our dorm and that was kind of what we did to figure out how to not get a real job and then I've kind of been in SEO since so now I get to help clients do the same thing and help businesses scale all through SEO.

Christian Brim (02:50.941)
So did you and your partners exit that agency, like sell it?

Steven Schneider (02:56.695)
So we exited sites, was kind of like more on like the very similar to like an &A or like a private equity kind of setup where we would buy sites or flip sites or just cashflow them to kind of help sustain the business. We got hit with a couple of black swan events during the COVID area and during that whole kind of like chaos with Google updates and whatnot. So I accidentally stepped away from the company on good terms, stole up those guys and.

Christian Brim (03:02.085)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (03:23.837)
That was kind of when I was trying to figure out what was next and I just kind of randomly stumbled onto LinkedIn and met my partners just through a cold call networking, just kind of coffee call set up. And we hit it off and figured out there was something there and flash forward about six to nine months, we started Trio.

Christian Brim (03:35.037)
video.

Christian Brim (03:41.704)
So you had an unexpected interruption. You had something that was working, and then you had something beyond your control come in and disrupt that. So you had the opportunity to kind of take a fresh look at the lay of the land. Why did you land where you did with Trio? What was intentional about doing it differently?

Steven Schneider (04:08.417)
There was no plan. wish I had some crazy answer to that. Yeah, I went and got a real job. I took a year off for my first business and kind of coasted around and figured out what to do, tried a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Nothing really stuck. And so I just said, okay, time to go into the career path and sell my soul to corporate for the next 30, 40 years. And I absolutely hated every single second of it and just said, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, thick and through and I'll figure it out. So I quit.

Christian Brim (04:11.197)
I like that.

Christian Brim (04:17.169)
Okay.

Christian Brim (04:35.677)
You're officially unhireable. Yes.

Steven Schneider (04:40.033)
Yeah. Yeah. So I quit on the spot and said, I'll figure it out. And I started consulting and kind of figuring, you know, what would land essentially. And then I was already talking to my now partners at that time and they had just come off of an exit and they were kind of, you know, starting some new sites or new websites and new companies and whatnot. I just said, Hey, like I'm, back in entrepreneurship mode. I'm doing this thing. I don't know what's going to happen, but like, if there's any capacity to work together, I'd love to explore that.

And they said, you know, we don't have any intention of starting a new company, but if you come to us with an idea, we'll happily explore it. And so I just said, you know, why don't you guys have an SEO agency? It's a natural fit. They also have a wealth of experience in SEO. And they said, we have it all planned out. We just don't want to be the operator and the CEO. And so I kind of, you know, suggested myself and said, well, I can, I already know the system. I know how to manage all this because I used to manage my own websites. And so I said, I can bolt on.

my old system from my first company. And if you guys can find some beta clients, all we have to do is figure out the client ops side of things, but everything else is the same. And so we did that and had a good beta round and found three or four people that were willing to give us some money to test that out for them. And some of those people are still with us today and we haven't looked back since.

Christian Brim (05:57.662)
So what is different with TRIO than the previous agency, like from your perspective?

Steven Schneider (06:04.499)
Yeah, so the main one is that it's not, the first company wasn't an agency. I owned all the sites. So it was just like us, you know, trying to figure out how to build content sites. And we purely went after listicle style formats. So affiliate, Amazon, like best of articles. Nowadays, we're doing like real authentic SEO. So we're now we're looking at sales pages and landing pages and technical SEO. Back then, it was more or less a

Christian Brim (06:09.903)
Okay.

Christian Brim (06:22.449)
Right.

Steven Schneider (06:33.229)
bright place, right time content, cash cow, I guess you can call it. was publish article, wait for article to rank, make money. Nowadays, it's very strategic. We're looking at how to look at conversion rate optimization, user experience, pretty much the entire arsenal of SEO that contributes towards success.

Christian Brim (06:37.82)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (06:53.863)
That's interesting. okay, because you're throwing out terms there that in my mind don't have anything to do with SEO, but that could just be my ignorance. When you're talking about landing pages, sales funnels, conversion rates, that seems to be more in the purview of what I would categorize as marketing is

Steven Schneider (07:04.695)
Right.

Steven Schneider (07:13.815)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (07:23.778)
Is it really SEO or is it SEO plus?

Steven Schneider (07:29.209)
SEO plus, but I think that what we've learned is that if we just do SEO, people have a false expectation around SEO being the silver bullet to all of their problems in their business. And that's never the case. Like I can, I can grow your site like crazy and bring you all of the right traffic, bomb the funnel, high intent. But if your website looks like it was built in 2004, it's never going to convert. And so we have to

Christian Brim (07:41.297)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (07:57.824)
as partners for them, put on our entrepreneurial hats and say, hey, you you don't have a good funnel here. I would suggest doing this and we're not gonna actually do the work for them, but you know, we'll kind of guide in that right direction. So we kind of like to come in almost as like a fractional partner from that sense and kind of help show them the way and say, hey, look at this, like, look at this. Like, what would you do if you were, you know, them or all.

Christian Brim (08:14.682)
Right.

Steven Schneider (08:24.941)
I'll pull up their competitor site and I'll say, do you see how nice this is? Like, do you get that nice, happy feeling in your heart when you look at their website? And I quickly pull up theirs and I said, see how gloomy and awkward all this is. And I was like, that's why no one's converting. I was like, I just five X your site and conversion hasn't changed. So let's figure that out next. So that's kind of how we look at it.

Christian Brim (08:43.303)
Right.

Christian Brim (08:49.493)
Yeah, because traffic without something behind it is really a waste of time, right? I mean that's... Yeah.

Steven Schneider (08:55.949)
Yeah, and it's a waste of our time too. Because if they're not happy, they're not going to cancel it. know, it's just what's the point.

Christian Brim (09:02.651)
So who is it that you, I mean, the way you have this design sounds like it might be fairly targeted to a specific type of customer. Like who is it that you, is your ideal?

Steven Schneider (09:19.403)
Yeah. B2B service providers and SaaS companies are typically our bread and butter. Industries are kind of agnostic in that sense. Like, you know, it's kind of a, we let our own audit process do a lot of the due diligence to ensure that there's, you know, strategy fit from our sense. We really like building tools that can act as lead converters and kind of help push people toward, you know, the sales team. so.

Christian Brim (09:29.469)
Okay.

Steven Schneider (09:47.618)
we kind of go into it seeing like, there opportunity to create a calculator that already has search demand behind it? And then we can get traffic to that tool and then build the tool and then kind of push people in that format. So a lot of the more successful clients that we work with have those tools in place. And then we can just funnel traffic to one sort of like lead mechanic and then everyone's happy.

Christian Brim (10:11.451)
Yeah, I think it was Neil Patel when, when I was reading a lot of his stuff, he was talking about that tool element. And I don't remember exactly when he did it or what he did, but it was around an SEO thing. But, but like that anchor content that, that is as a tool, a free tool is extremely powerful if you can figure it out. But it, I guess, well, I don't know.

Do you find cases where that tool free tool model doesn't work?

Steven Schneider (10:52.205)
I think doesn't work is difficult to answer because there's times where there might not be a tool that already has pre-existing demand. So we go to our SEO, you know, like Ahrefs or SemRus and we look at stuff like that. Something might not exist there, but then what to do is say we go to the client and they know their business better than we know the business. And we say, Hey, what do you on your sales calls feel like would absolutely just crush? Like, what do think people would get value out of? And so.

Christian Brim (11:01.009)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (11:19.223)
Like we have a client right now who's, they help people hire fractional executive assistants and higher level executive assistants. And so he's helping us kind of formulate the logic behind a quiz, like figure out what's best for you. And so he can essentially use that quiz as leverage to help funnel and qualify people. And we can also promote it within his blog and get people that way. So.

If there's not a true fit based on what we can see in the market, then we'll just come to them and say, hey, what would work best? And then we can kind of start tinkering with ideas from there.

Christian Brim (11:55.006)
So I'm curious from the, said admittedly you're the operations guy. How did you guys come up with how you price your service?

Steven Schneider (12:08.397)
Um, a lot of it has to do with just competitive nature. mean, we know that we're on the higher side, but we also come with a lot of value. I mean, we're creating these tools, we're creating all the lead mechanics. Um, we're also human written at the end of the day. And so we're not using AI to kind of cheat and cut corners from that sense. So we kind of are in that premium luxury price category, but, um, that also helps kind of separate us from the pack in terms of the clients that we work with. Cause we've learned that if you're constantly in a race to the bottom.

those sort of clients are typically a little more challenging to work with. And so we try and be picky about that.

Christian Brim (12:44.073)
Do you find that prospects that come to you are primarily shopping your competitors and that's what's anchoring the price? Or, I mean, in other words, do they come to you saying, need an SEO solution or do they present with a different symptom?

Steven Schneider (13:05.353)
No, it's usually SEO either in the form of, I'm switching from an SEO or I'm looking to start SEO. And I know that it's important to my marketing strategy. I have a long-term vision. We have like this red flag and green flag internal document that we've kind of just come to know where it's if somebody is a good kind of client to work with. We don't want people who are trying to test SEO or look at it as a short-term way to get leads. And so we like to work with people who kind

have that mindset already in place where they can say, I'm looking to work with someone for six to 12 months, and I know that you guys are going to crush it for us and lead the charge, and I'll get out of your way and just kind let you do what you do best.

Christian Brim (13:48.638)
What would you say, I'm going to pivot a minute. We've had SEO folks on the show. I'd like to get your perspective on how search is changing and how it's not changing and how that impacts what businesses need to be doing.

Steven Schneider (14:10.143)
Yeah, so the biggest change is that it's harder than ever to get to the top of the list. And even if you get to the top of Google, you're going to be cut out by Google itself, trying to offer AI overviews and snippets and all that sort of stuff. Anything in between that is going to be, you know, images and YouTube links. And so, I mean, what is a true organic SEO ranking is not what it used to be 10, 15 plus years ago. That's just the inherent truth about that.

Christian Brim (14:24.957)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (14:39.437)
The other kind of point flip on that is that you're going to get traffic from Trapp LGBT, you're going to get traffic from perplexity and all these other places that are popping up. So there is a massive opportunity if you kind of position yourself to be that authoritative figure over the next 10 to 15 years and kind of look at it as a turning of the chapters, so to speak. And so that's kind of going to be the main thing. But it kind goes back to engagement. I think that

attention is so scarce and it's quickly becoming a very valuable resource at the end of the day. And so you have to figure out ways to hook people in and give them value and work them through the funnel. you know, people aren't going to automatically want to book a demo or book a 45 minute Kalan link. Like no one wants to do that. So you kind of have to figure out ways to start the conversation elsewhere in the format of these tools that I kind of mentioned and then try and, you know, nurture that from there.

Christian Brim (15:23.27)
Right.

Christian Brim (15:35.804)
Yeah, I think I I'm thinking back about how, you know, at the advent of, of digital and search and content marketing in general, the idea, and you look like you may be too young to have experienced this yourself, but you know, for, us that had marketed before digital, you know, the, the reframe and the flip really was

outbound marketing to people switched with the advent of digital to inbound where, you know, outbound became less and less effective because people did not want to buy that way anymore. The power shifted to the consumer where they'd reach out to you if they wanted you. Right. So it was then all about giving them the reason to call you, right. To reach out to you and

It's, odd to me, like when I think about like how I searched back then, I feel like I was, more, and maybe not intentional is not the word, but I would spend more time researching something. You mentioned that time is a scarcity now. And I, I, that, that tracks with the way I look at things for my own self and business.

I'm looking for a quicker answer than going through and doing my own research. Is that what you're describing?

Steven Schneider (17:14.667)
Yeah, I think it's a little bit of that. I think it's also that, you know, there's so many options nowadays. And so you kind of have to quickly grab somebody and hook them in and try to give them something that's unique out there. The other kind of

you know, point is that when it comes to just how you're perceived in the space and kind of amongst your competitors, it's really hard to make that impact. And so if you look at like, how do you become an authority in a space? How do you look at the trust that you're giving off in the space, whether that's in Google's point of view or your customer's point of view. And so your customers are going to rip you apart in a millisecond, just inherently mentally looking at, know,

the layout of your website and the logos you have on your website and the flow of it and the clunkiness. so part of all of that comes into SEO as we know it nowadays and looking at the kind of Bible of eat from Google, the experience, the expertise, the authoritativeness and the trustworthiness. It's like, how is that all built into the user experience at the end of the day?

And so that's kind of what I mean by the attention is that people are making these micro decisions so quickly because they're so exposed to every other competitor at the same time. So you really have to kind of, you know, level up your entire marketing strategy as a whole.

Christian Brim (18:27.889)
Right.

Christian Brim (18:34.513)
Yeah, because I mean, if you think about like where SEO began and what you described with eat, I mean, that's not the same thing. I mean, it used to be, you know, really how could you get to the top of the search based upon the intent of the search? but eat and, is really more, it sounds more like marketing, right? It's like, you know, going to the, to the user experience.

What would you say? You know, this is kind of an out of left field question. What would you say to somebody that would say SEO is not about creativity, that it's a technical thing, that like it's, if you look at marketing, there's the nuts and bolts and then there's the creative aspect of it. What would you say to say?

to someone that said, you know, SEO isn't about creativity.

Steven Schneider (19:40.022)
I strongly disagree for once. I would start there. I think the main thing is that if you look at a website, websites are all art. And there are going to be technical components where the fundamentals like your technical schema and the linking and the, I could ramble on in that, but there's always going to be the way that your copy is written or the headings that you use or.

Christian Brim (19:50.109)
Mmm.

Steven Schneider (20:06.263)
how your navigation is formatted or the pictures that you use and maybe the alt text that's in there. Like all of that is subjective at the end of the day. Like there's no, there's a checklist of things you should have, but how they're portrayed and how they're designed and the layout, that's totally art. And so I think that...

that's one component, but then you also look at strategy. Strategy is, at its definition, just balancing of scarce resources. And so if I have a hundred articles or a hundred opportunities that I have to look at for a client, me making that decision relative to their goals and their business and how I think about all that sort of stuff, that's art too. Like I could line up 10 strategists and we'd all have 10 different strategies. And so that's kind of how I look at the art form of SEO is that it really

comes down to knowing your stuff and having to just touch hundreds of websites and hundreds of different strategies because you're going to look back and be like I remember when we did this that way back then and probably should do that again so let's do it this way and then you kind of have to have that firsthand experience.

Christian Brim (21:10.365)
I love Rory Sutherland. Have you read his book Alchemy?

Steven Schneider (21:15.923)
No, but it's on my list. I've heard great things about it.

Christian Brim (21:17.571)
Okay. The thing that struck me about it, and it's a theme that he's not the only one that touched on. There's another book that I read called Predictably Unpredictable. And this idea that we want humans to behave in a rational way and follow a predictable pattern, but they don't. And...

It seems like there's this thought that LLMs and AI in general is going to somehow wrangle that human cat and make it predictable. Like if we, we throw enough CPUs at it, we'll figure out the pattern. What do you think? mean, like, is, that a pipe dream or can it help you in predicting people's behavior?

Steven Schneider (22:15.723)
maybe to some degree, like maybe there's always gonna be some statistical kind of, know, baseline that we can try and put it within, but I don't think so. I think that that's kind of the beauty behind the human aspect of all of it is that.

SEO is not perfect because search queries change over and over again. And even though we're going after a set of keywords or pages or however you want to look at it, we've seen from a lot of data that there's many ways it's going to cat in terms of arriving at the same piece of content, whether that's going to be two words or a hundred words in a prompt on chat GPT. And so

Christian Brim (22:51.613)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (22:59.297)
I think that, especially as voice becomes more integrated into things, I think that will really change the game. And especially how people start to talk to their GPT searches as if they're talking to you and I right now. That will massively open up lot of variability into the entire conversation.

Christian Brim (23:19.857)
Well, yeah. And I guess what you're speaking to is, that the reality is, that it's not a static target. Like, you know, the, the, the technology changes, therefore people's interactions with it change and their behavior change. like it, it's not, it's not like there's one target that you can keep aiming at. keeps moving.

Steven Schneider (23:42.72)
Exactly. And I think that the other thing too is that, you know, you can look at even Google right now and some keywords are just kind of like a catch grab based on guesses. You know, if you look at something like a, like a big term, like podcast, like it doesn't know if you're looking for the top podcasts, it doesn't know if you're looking to start a podcast. doesn't look, no, if you're looking to what you're supposed to do. And so it's just trying to predict its best guess on

Christian Brim (24:02.054)
Right.

Steven Schneider (24:08.285)
what people have done in the past. But again, someone could just try to spell the word podcast and like that definition is going to be up there as well. Or what is the key? Like, what's it mean? So based on just how people engage with tech, I think is going to help shape it, but it's never going to be perfect.

Christian Brim (24:24.517)
Yeah, I find myself making my prompts to GPT shorter and shorter. It's like, I, I, I started out with these Uber long prompts to try and make sure I got a directed answer, excuse me, or the answer that I wanted. But now it's, you know, I'll come up with like five or six word prompts and I just expect it to know what I'm thinking. I've had a couple of AI people on here that have said that.

talked about, and I hadn't really considered this and I'd like to get your opinion on it. like all algorithms, LLMs want you to engage with them because that's the measure of success. And so there is a feedback loop built into it that gives you the answer that it thinks that you want. And I'm, I'm fascinated about like when, you're

When you're talking about something like what you do, how that could be a real challenge if the algorithm is trying to predict what the user wants to hear. I mean, can you opine on that?

Steven Schneider (25:42.094)
Yeah, I think the, LLM space and how it overlaps with SEO is so new that we're all just, we're back to square one. It's like we're in SEO in 2000, 2001, and we're just trying to drum up all these experiments. And so what we're trying to do, least in our content now is add in a lot of the forward thinking ways that we use prompts and trying to reverse engineer that in content. So if you're reading an article around, um,

Christian Brim (25:55.047)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (26:12.269)
you know, the top 10 best podcasts for SEOs, for example. Like at the top of the article, it might make sense to say, if you're a SEO strategist with 10 plus years experience looking for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that could overlap with how somebody is now using that prompt. And so what we're trying to do is almost reverse engineer, like I said,

a lot of that into the content so that when the LLMs go to scan that content, there is overlap into that Venn diagram of sorts. And so, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting puzzle because it's

It's not easy to solve, nor is there very concrete ways to get those answers as of yet. So it's just kind of like, I wonder if this would work. And then we kind of just wait and see. And if not, it's like, OK, let's try this. And so we're just very gung-ho about trying to figure out what's there.

Christian Brim (26:54.467)
Right.

Christian Brim (27:08.217)
Yeah. And I think what as a consumer of I'll use the broad term marketing services. I think that's one frankly where a lot of marketers in the last 10 years got really lazy is that, yeah, we can solve that. Like we figured that out. We cracked that nut. Right. And if you just follow this recipe, you're going to get results, which

I don't know where that became not true, but it's a hundred percent not true. which, which makes scaling, from, from an agency standpoint, really difficult because it's like, I don't, I don't have a predictable recipe that I can sell donuts. Like I don't have that. Is that your experience?

Steven Schneider (28:00.877)
I have a very, very strong repeatable process that over time has driven results. The main thing that we look at is where the starting point is for everyone's website. So every new client that comes along gets an audit. And the starting authority or what's called the domain rating of someone's website is kind of what tells us the upward trajectory from that point forward. So if it's a brand new site,

Christian Brim (28:05.777)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (28:26.285)
No, let me interrupt you real quick. you using, would this be a similar methodology of A-Refs or SEMrush as far as what they would say would be domain authority? Okay, all right.

Steven Schneider (28:38.965)
Right, Yeah, so we can kind of look at that and know what the competitive landscape is from there. So if somebody had just started their website yesterday and they came to us and say, hey, I'm looking for SEO services, we would probably just turn them down and say, hey, it's just not gonna work. Like we're not gonna take your money for five years to help you get to where you wanna go if your competitors are massive, massive authoritative sites. But on the other side of it.

Christian Brim (29:02.78)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (29:04.365)
have a website come along for a strong website and they have a domain rating of 60, 70 coming along and they have zero SEO, quote unquote, like no content, never really pay attention to it, kind of have this off of PR, where we can just look at this and say, yeah, it's gonna be a clear win, like let's just go crush this. And so the process from that point forward is highly systemized and very repeatable and scalable from that point of view. But the...

landscape to which the starting point is, is always going to be different.

Christian Brim (29:36.049)
Well, I think I think I heard something. don't know if you intended to say it, but like if in defining your target market, you're looking for someone with a high domain authority that they really haven't utilized it. Well, is that a fair statement?

Steven Schneider (29:52.0)
Or at least like a high enough, yeah, or a high enough domain authority where we can just kind of like jump it up and go from there. Like we don't want to have this massive gap in our strategy.

Christian Brim (29:58.728)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (30:02.749)
Okay. I'm going to pivot back to the old agency. Is there a way, you said black swan, which by definition is unpredictable, except that you know they're going to happen at some point, right? Like, you know, is there anything that you could have done or should have done in retrospect? I mean, looking backwards, is there something that you wish you had done differently?

Steven Schneider (30:32.361)
So we, yeah, so we got hit by three Black Swan events in 30 days. So the main one was COVID. That was in March of 2021. Everyone knows that the economy just kind of went to shambles. In that same timeframe, Amazon had put out a public announcement that they are cutting all of their affiliate commissions by about 40 to 50 % overnight, which was just completely out of our control that we couldn't have done that.

And then the other one was the Google algorithm update, which was specifically targeting affiliate websites. And so since we had enough sites, it was kind of distributed pretty well. Like some sites went up, some sites went down. Portfolio kind of balances itself out, but.

just the kind of overall landscape. But to your question, like we were already doing certain things. Like we were kind of leaning more toward e-commerce. We were using our traffic to kind of drive traffic to our own e-commerce websites and brands and kind of using the affiliate model as a, instead of we'll send in the traffic to Amazon, we'll send it to our own drop shipping company. And so we started to do that, but it wasn't gonna be a quick path. Like we thought we had maybe a five year timeline to get that figured out. Cause we knew that the game we were playing was not a forever sustainable game.

We should know that the five-year runway had turned into like two years or less. So we had tried to front run a lot of that, but it just happened sooner than we could.

Christian Brim (31:56.318)
Yeah, think my experience and not that I've experienced this in my business, just observing other businesses, is that if it's easy and you're making money, understand that is not going to last because that's the nature of a competitive market is people are going to fill that gap. I think not that you shouldn't

You know, make hay while it rains or harvest time. don't know what the analogy, you know, the, the metaphor is there, but like, absolutely have to take advantage of it. like you're, you're probably going to find something similar with the advent of new technology and you're going to find this niche and it's like, Ooh, this works. but you can't, you can't stay there. The, the, the, I don't remember who said it.

somebody successful said, you, if you're not busy disrupting your company, someone else is working on disrupting your company, right? Like you can't just stand still. so it sounds like you knew that, like you knew this is too good to be true, but the timeframe was not what you thought it was going to be. Is that accurate?

Steven Schneider (33:18.867)
100%. Yeah, we scaled for, I mean, it wasn't like we had played this game for a long time. We scaled to seven figures within three years, just hammering down on content. And at that rate, we kind of just saw how quickly we were able to grow. And that was kind of what triggered the alarms is that, like, hey, this is not normal. Like, we should probably figure this out pretty quickly. And so at that rate, we just had so much content at our fingertips and so much traffic amongst the portfolio.

Christian Brim (33:34.535)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schneider (33:47.314)
And we knew what products were more expensive because we knew all the affiliate relationships. knew what traffic, know, products were getting more traffic than the other ones. We're like, okay, well, that one's probably really popular. Let's go see if we can find a supplier. So we had definitely started to go down that path. But like I said, it just changed so quickly and all the things happened at once that it really kind of made us just rethink things.

and just kind of really shook the company. And so for that reason, I was just like, okay, I think it's time for me to de-risk and figure out what's next and set my sights on something new.

Christian Brim (34:23.005)
Well, you said you had partners. The fact that you're still speaking is a testament to something. What would you attribute it to be? Because a lot of times partnerships, even if they survive or they don't survive, there's a lot of animosity and bad feelings. like, why was it successful for you?

Steven Schneider (34:46.925)
I think it was because we were just such good friends before that all happened that like the business side of things was more or less a cherry on top. And like, I, I still talk to like one of my partners, like weekly, like he and I are still like best friends and

Christian Brim (34:55.025)
Hmm.

Steven Schneider (35:01.537)
go golfing once a week as much as we can. And so when that happened, wasn't like it sucked. Like it was awkward for a couple of months, but it wasn't like it was the end of the world. Like none of us, either of us wanted that to happen. Like that wasn't the goal. And it wasn't like it was messy or it wasn't like a divorce. It was like me, came to him and just like, Hey, this isn't working out. And he's just like, yeah, I know. I was like, okay, I think I'm gonna go do something else. And the arrangement that we had kind of within the like internal legal side of it was pretty,

you know, we wanted the best for all parties involved and that was how it was from day one. And so it wasn't like we were, like even today with my current partners, it's like, we don't want to screw anybody over. That's not our intent. Like we only want to do business with people that have good intentions. And I think you kind of have to trust your gut when you go into business with other people. And it's like, if you get the sense that this person is acting weird or has weird tendencies, like you kind of have to just sense that out.

But like I said, we were such good friends in college before that. it wasn't like it was, we started making money together and we're like, we went from making, you know, two grand a month to making a hundred grand a month. It was just like, it just scaled up and it wasn't like it was anything that was really, you know, hostile.

Christian Brim (36:16.155)
Yeah, you, you, you mentioned, you didn't use this word, but as you were describing that relationship, it's, I would call it equally yoked. Like, you know, having the same values, having the same desires, that's key to have partners because if you're not, then when, you know, it's not even necessarily when things go bad, when things go good, sometimes that causes problems because all of those

misalignment start show up. It's like well I want to take all this money out of the company and I or you know whatever that looks like. How do people find out more about Trio SEO and Stephen Schneider if they want to learn more?

Steven Schneider (37:03.607)
Google, I always joke that if you can't find me, I'm doing my job wrong. But yeah, I'm always on LinkedIn. I post daily content. So you can just look us up, trio SEO. You can find me through that way. know, first name, last name. It's always good. Yeah. So one way or another, you'll be able to track me down. I guarantee it.

Christian Brim (37:05.329)
Ha

Christian Brim (37:24.935)
Perfect listeners will have those links in the show notes. Steven, thank you very much for your time and your candor and your experience here. Appreciate it. Listeners, if yes, absolutely. I just talked all over you. Hopefully we can fix that in editing. Listeners, if you like what you've heard, please share the podcast, rate the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message, tell us what you want to hear and we'll get rid of Steven until next time. TTFN.

Steven Schneider (37:33.332)
Thank you.

Steven Schneider (37:52.877)
you