On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Brent Peterson. Brent is the host of Talk Commerce and Founder of Content Basis LLC, a cutting-edge startup that helps businesses optimize their content discovery through predictive analytics and human expertise. We talk about crafting human-centered content solutions, customizing AI for specific needs, establishing authority through content expertise, and so much more!
With over 25 years of experience in the e-commerce industry, Brent is the President and Founder of ContentBasis LLC, a cutting-edge startup that helps businesses optimize their content discovery through predictive analytics and human expertise. ContentBasis is a unique solution that combines advanced technology and human talent to enhance clients' digital footprint and customer experience.
Throughout his career, Brent has been a serial entrepreneur, a keynote speaker, and a fervent advocate for outstanding e-commerce solutions. He started his first eCommerce website in 1995 and later co-founded and led Wagento, a top Adobe Commerce Agency in the Americas. He has also been recognized as a Magento Master for five consecutive years for mentoring the Magento community and delivering exceptional projects.
As a podcast host and a global speaker, He shares insights and best practices on various topics related to e-commerce development, project management, and customer experience.
He is also an active Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) member and a passionate endurance athlete. 27 Marathon, 1 Ultra Marathon, 6 Majors, and one Ironman.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Brent Peterson
There are so many more things that encapsulate why content is important other than keywords.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I am blessed to have another podcaster on the show. So you're going to get two zany, interesting characters here that give you a wealth of knowledge. Brent Peterson, welcome to the show.
Brent Peterson
Thanks, Chase. Good to be here.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited. So Brent is the host of Talk Commerce. And we'll try to link to the show in the show notes. I believe my episode should be out by the time this airs. So we'll have a link in there to hear me on his show.
But quickly, can you just tell the audience what they should expect on Talk Commerce? Why is it better than Honest Ecommerce?
Brent Peterson
Well, I don't think it's better. Maybe it's a little different. I don't know. We talked to a lot of founders, we talked to a lot of startups, we learned about their journey and how they got there. I'm incredibly interested in entrepreneurship. We dive into that a little bit.
And then we do explore a lot of the bigger platforms. So we look at Magento, which was where I really came from in that community. But we look at Shopware, BigCommerce, Shopify, VTex, whatever that platform is out there, we'll look at it.
Chase Clymer
I would say I try to put on this level-headed “here's a tool for everything and I'm platform agnostic”, but then if you listen to anything I say, I'm such a Shopify fanboy. So I think hearing the other perspective of the other solutions that are in the ecosystem definitely makes sense.
My perspective is definitely very DTC. I think Shopify wins there. But anytime you're getting more B2B or you're trying to do something that Shopify really doesn't want to do, there's a million other amazing solutions out there.
So a tool is only as good as your strategy, I guess.
Brent Peterson
Yeah, that's very true. And I think your strategy has to be what is going to be the best way to get us to live. That's the first thing, right? And then how can we sell things more efficiently?
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
I just want to let the listeners know, Brent's podcast is actually great. He spends quite a bit of time editing it. It's definitely more of an audio format. There's a lot of interesting stuff that they do post in there. Some audio gags brought in. It's really like a talk show. An old-timey talk show, maybe perhaps.
Brent Peterson
Maybe. Yeah, it's very conversational. I don't have an Ed McMahon, if you're my age, who would be a co-host. But yeah, it could be like a talk show. Absolutely.
Chase Clymer
I enjoy it a lot. Also, you're the host of this awesome podcast. Everyone, go listen.
You're also the founder of Content Basis. What does Content Basis do in the ecosystem? What problems are you trying to solve?
Brent Peterson
I think Content Basis started before the generative AI boom started. We were using some of the tools that were out there before ChatGPT to help clients build content quicker, and our little niche is that we use actual human beings that are people like you and I, at least I think you are.
No, I've met you in person, so I'm pretty sure Chase is a person and not an avatar.
Chase Clymer
Yes. We met at... eTail. eTail West. Shout out to the lovely people at Etail.
Brent Peterson
Yeah, they were fantastic.
Chase Clymer
Making human connections. We are not in The Matrix. This is not a simulation.
Brent Peterson
That's right. So what we do is we take some content that was generated somewhere, it could be written by a person. And we do some non-English speaking content and edit it to ensure that it's good for the US audience. But we take that content and edit it, making sure it's readable.
I don't believe that content written by a bot for a bot is what people want to see. They want to see well-developed content. So that's what our core service started as, and now we're moving more into managed AI services where we'll help clients with whatever that endpoint is: it could be voice, it could be audio, it could be video, it could be text, whatever that thing is, we'll help manage that.
And that could include us just developing content or developing images or developing video or developing audio, or even helping with those private LLMs in the cloud. So think of Lama 2 or stable diffusion where you want to run it on your own and not have to depend on a ChatGPT to get your content.
Chase Clymer
Oh, so you are maybe positioning yourself as AI as a service, but in the way of we're going to build the solution for you and help you solve your problems using what's out there?
Brent Peterson
Yeah. I mean, I think if you were to run an agency that helped people get onto Shopify, if you could imagine that, we would be doing the same thing but helping people to get on to using different LLMs.
The idea of both having a SaaS LLM like ChatGPT or having your own private LLM like Llama or Gemini has their own private open source LLM that you could run. It's the difference between those two. So we can either host a private version of that LLM on our own servers on AWS or Google Cloud or whatever that place is, or help you run your own LLM through various means.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Alright.
So let's talk about a real-world use case. I'm a Shopify merchant. We're fairly successful depending on what your idea of success is. Let's just say we're doing $5 million a year. We're definitely not struggling to find product market fit anymore. We definitely have levers we can pull to increase sales. We're a business. We've been around.
But from a content perspective, I would say our blog is lacking. We haven't really been doing anything there. Is that, like, a use case, I guess, or something like an exploration where your team could help me actually build out my content and make it better?
Brent Peterson
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a Shopify client we're doing this for right now. We can take all the numbers out of your Shopify store.
Let's just say we take your past 12 months worth of sales and learn which of your products are selling really well and which aren't selling well and maybe which products you'd like to sell well, then we can compare that against Google Search Console and Google Analytics to see where opportunities lie within that realm.
Then we can start writing specific content about that product that helps then drive traffic to say a blog post that then references the product and ensures that you become an expert in that field. And that extra content, and Google is really looking for 40 pieces of content to make sure that you are an authority in that field.
So that's where I think that, not just the generative part, but the analytical part that we use to feed into our little engine that comes back with some topic recommendations.
Then what we'll do is come up with say 8 to 12 weeks of topics. It could be about that one product but more likely it's going to be spread out across a number of different products or different services or whatever things you're offering.
And then in there, we will write topics or write content that is related directly to that topic.
Chase Clymer
And just to clarify it for me, and I know the audience probably has the same question as well.
You're not just dumping my URL in ChatGPT and saying, “Give me 8 blogs”, right? There's a lot more hand holding to what you're asking the AI for. There's a lot more human editing after it hallucinates out some answers.
Brent Peterson
Yeah. I mean, if anybody used the early days of ChatGPT, it did give a lot of false answers. It also gave a lot of references to things that don't exist.
So we would: A. make sure that whatever is there is readable. The client of course is always a subject matter expert, but in some cases, we have subject matter experts that can help to make sure that this is real.
And then secondly, if there are referenced items, we will find that reference and post the link directly in the article.
So typically, ChatGPT never gives you a reference link to whatever it's referencing. So there is a little bit of extra work in there that is involved in ensuring that that reference is there. So think about all those little steps that you as a merchant have to take to ensure your content is good. We take all those steps for you.
And I think the bottom line is, no matter where you get content, in the past when you were just hiring college writers to write your content, if they didn't give it to you, you didn't do it, right? So this is ensuring your content is consistently going up on your blog and that there's no weeks missed. Typically, we're able to deliver content faster than merchants have time to read it often.
So depending on how busy your story is, one to two pieces a week is sufficient.
I would say that in the beginning, we started with five pieces a week and it was very difficult for people to keep up with that pace.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, I have questions about the SEO implications of this content. First being, I've read and I'll say I just read titles only, which is the worst way to consume news that Google wasn't a big fan of generative AI content.
How do you respond to that?
Brent Peterson
I 100% agree with that. That’s why you have to have a human read it to ensure that humans want to read it before you put it out there in the world.
In the beginning, when we started, or when I started, I should say personally, before ChatGPT, the content was garbage. And it was very... I don't know what the word was, but it wasn't good, right? It was very flowery, with lots of adverbs, lots of adjectives, and it was very easy to pick out content that wasn't human written.
And, you know, even now, like if you were to have a freshman in college, write you an article about something they don't know about, it's going to be okay. It's going to require editing. So typically in that situation, when you have a ghostwriter and you give it to the merchant, they're gonna have to do a little editing to ensure that it is what they're expecting.
I think our editors get to know the merchant, they get to know the products and they can help make that process work much quicker, go faster to get that content live. And then in terms of how Google looks at it, I will say that I've done an experiment, I would encourage your users to type into Google what companies use cricket flour.
It's an experiment that I started one year ago. All I would do is write about cricket flour, and right now I'm still ranking number one on it. I will say that in the very, very beginning when I first started, I did it as a joke. And I didn't edit or do anything from the output.
I think I used Jasper or Writesonic or something to generate an article. Now I do put a lot of work into making sure my articles are correct and that they're factual. But in the very beginning, the first one, I didn't do anything. All the subsequent articles have been checked by me.
So I guess now the time will tell if Google is going to punish me for generating all this content about cricket flour, but I am number one when you search for it right now.
Chase Clymer
And now this was just an experiment to see if you could rank using generative AI content.
Brent Peterson
Correct. With humans.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. I just googled it in a different window and yeah, you're number one and number two.
So now I guess the follow-up question is around SEO and search engine optimization. Creating this content, how does it help a brand or whomever you're working with?
Brent Peterson
I think the old idea of SEO was really keyword stuffing, right? Google has moved their algorithm to wanting people to read the content, and then they stay on that content. Part of how they're seeing how well the content is performing is how long people stay on the content. They are moving away from just keywords. I don't think keywords are the way that our future of SEO is going to go.
I think it's important to know that there's words that people are searching for, but more importantly, those words have to be there to have relevant content. The content just can't be a bunch of keywords.
The old way of doing it was if you're trying to target 50 keywords, you try to get all 50 keywords into an article in a way that's readable. That's really hard, right? I think it's better to have maybe your long tail version of that search or a shorter version of the keywords in your content.
But really, there's a core of what people are looking for, whatever that product is. If that product is a widget and at the widgets blue or whatever the thing is, that content should be written about and then how that widget is and what's the story behind the widget.
There's so many more things that encapsulate why that content is important other than keywords.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Do you have any, I don't know, success stories that you can point to with this content of how it helped a merchant, either sales or rankings, have you?
Brent Peterson
Absolutely. We started one year ago in March. A lot of our clients are B2B, so I can't say their names. But a lot of them are agencies like you.
So we help write content around other platforms and help that platform to become more of an authority in their own space. Not that they weren't already an authority, but part of this is getting it out of the owner's head or the team's head into the public to see and write about what they are an expert in.
In terms of a Shopify merchant, or a Shopify agency, there are a myriad of different things that as a Shopify agency you want to be an expert in. Maybe you don't always articulate all those things well to your client. You do it in a sales call, right?
But there is a whole plethora of downstream items that you could be writing about that bring people to your website or at least show that you as an agency have authority in that space.
And traditionally, like I said, I've been in the Magento space. I'm very vocal about that. I write on both sides. I criticize it and I also publicize it.
So for me, it's very easy to write in the Ecommerce space in general. Because a lot of the things fit together. Every store has a shopping cart. Speed matters. There are all kinds of different things that matter across any sort of platform.
I think that the fact that we've had clients now for a full year since our inception of our new company is a success in itself.
For D2C clients, we have a client now in Hawaii. They're a vacation rental. Their previous postings were just a paragraph of the image.
So what we've done now is we've started doing, and it's Kona Vacation Rentals, if you want to look them up there on the Big Island. We started writing a monthly What's Happening events blog, and it's very informative and detailed.
So, you know, even for AI, it's not always super simple, right? And sometimes those blogs take a little extra time to produce.
But what they do is they give both an authority and they give some background to why somebody would want to go to the Big Island and rent a vacation rental condo on the Big Island.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
The strategy behind content for your product is so interesting and difficult to crack at times.
How to come up with it, say for... If you have a clothing brand and lifestyle apparel, it's rare to see a unique take on how to produce content in that ecosystem. Because at the end of the day, you're just putting some words on a shirt.
But you have to take a step back and really think about what makes your business unique in that lifestyle element of it, which what you just shared about the vacation rental strategy was like, “Well, people are going to be looking for things to do when they're staying in these units. Let's build content around that.”
I think that's just how you have to think outside the box on these things. And computers think very much inside the box. You still need to be creative.
Brent Peterson
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think really digging into your Google Search Console to find out: where you are ranking on page 100? Is there a reason you're on page 100? You want to be number one, right? Or in the top 8.
Finding those things that people are searching for that you're giving an impression of that you're not being seen. Then trying to drive those clicks, I think, is really the analytical part of it that I'm interested in.
So we give a couple of scores. We give opportunities, which is what I just talked about. We give questions like in Google Search Console. You can find what is, like, sustainability in the t-shirt business is a big one. So what is the most sustainable t-shirt or something like that?
People are asking those questions and they're searching and they're going to find a brand that's giving that.
Then the next one is that will give you the new keywords that have shown up in the last 30 days and the lost keywords. So those two things, if you lost keywords that you're trying to rank on, that's a great indication of, “Hey, I need to spend a little bit of time to make sure that I'm writing something about this content to keep myself relevant.”
The lost keywords are something that you've ranked in the past, but aren't ranking anymore.
And then the last piece of that is, I'm not ranking anywhere. Let's try something new. And that's where my Cricut project came from.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, I guess if I was thinking about tackling content as a strategy for my business, I want to build out this channel, it makes sense to me.
What are some indicators in my business that I should be looking for? Or what are the signals that I should be trying to spot around that are like, “Hey, this is probably a good idea. You'd get some good results here.”
Brent Peterson
For content and strategy, start with your PDP pages. If you're selling a product or service, your service page, what are you offering? Look at that. And then how does that relate? And how much more content do you have around that?
If you have such a niche that you're already ranking number one, I would say double down on it because somebody is going to come into your space and start trying to push you around.
Chase Clymer
You're gonna eat your lunch.
Brent Peterson
Yeah, absolutely.
And then explore other things, explore audio, explore video. I think video is really where a lot of products are lacking. And I know that even having the founder talk about that product and the more time that founder can spend, if you're a smaller brand, on those product pages have a short video from the founder.
And the more unique those videos are, the more targeted they are to that specific product, that video is going to resonate fantastic on your product play page.
Plus you can post that video to YouTube. You can have a description in YouTube that links back to your product page. There's so many different things you can do. You could start by socializing that video across TikTok and across Instagram and whatever the other platforms are out there that are going to come next.
All those things help to drive and make you an authority in that particular space for that service or product you're trying to sell.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And I think that's a great call. You talked about video and audio. We talked a lot about written word, blogs, and content for a website, but you can use AI beyond that to help produce video and audio.
Have you seen anyone get into producing AI-generated podcasts or podcasts-like content yet?
Brent Peterson
Yeah, I've thought about it. I've thought about doing it myself. I've actually had conversations. I use Eleven Labs and it's a fantastic audio tool where I have two voices. There's just some editing that has to get involved later to put the two voices together to have a conversation. It's only going to get better.
And I think AI-generated audio is a great way to give more information. I think that people are always going to want to hear us talk. They're going to want to know that it's a real person. Maybe a newsreader is a different type of situation. Maybe just intros and I'm guilty of having… I have a Brent audio voice and I encourage people to go back and listen to my podcast.
You could probably figure out which of the ones that I did as I'm traveling. I do a lot of traveling.
So if I have to get a podcast live, sometimes I will throw in my intro. I'm trying to do that anymore. However, I will say that I'm also experimenting with RunwayML. It has this new lip sync version. I did post some tweets yesterday with myself and a different voice using lip sync. It's super awkward.
But, having said that, it's like this is version 1 of those generative videos, and it's going to only get better from now on.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. No, I'm excited.
Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Brent Peterson
Wow. What didn't you ask me? We didn't talk about running or marathons. But that's probably not going to resonate with anybody's audience.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. For the audio listeners, there's a picture right over Brent's shoulder of a marathon. This guy likes to run, is the simplest way to explain it.
Brent Peterson
Yeah, I'm on day 700+ of my running streak, which I had a previous running streak. We don't have to get into that.
No, I mean, I think I'm really interested in Mid Journey. I have a project on Twitter right now and on Instagram where I'm doing a famous painting, but it's incorporating a Jack Russell terrier into it.
I use something as a baseline. So think of crickets… I know it's so silly, right? But think about crickets for content. But I use a Jack Russell for my images to kind of give a baseline of where that is.
And I spent a lot of time this morning even redoing in Photoshop, maybe some Bang Z images with a Jack Russell in it. And it doesn't matter. So yeah.
Chase Clymer
No, yeah. Everyone check out Brent's Twitter feed. It is a riot. I am a follower.
Where should people find you on the internet other than Twitter, obviously? If I'm interested in the show, where should I find that? If I'm interested in maybe checking out your service agency and learning more about how you can use AI to help them do what they need to do, where should people go?
Brent Peterson
Yeah. So my show is talk-commerce.com. You could look up anywhere. It's on Spotify, Apple, wherever you find your podcasts. Please subscribe. It's gotten very popular lately. So we're approaching 1000 downloads a week.
You can find contentbasis.io. For our new company, that’s called Managed Machine Learning. LinkedIn is my biggest following. I'm Brent W. Peterson on LinkedIn. I would encourage you to follow me there.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Brent, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Brent Peterson
Thank you.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!