Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting as usual, and today I'm going to talk about something that I think we lose sight of sometimes and that is celebrating small wins.

So this is almost and as I said probably in the last episode, I don't really make many New Year's resolutions. This is probably one that I ought to try, and I ought to try and stick to, and this comes about because recently well, I say recently, middle of last year a guy I know he's part of my extended friendship group back from when I was at school contacted me out of the blue not heard from him for many years really to talk to. So I bumped into him and his parents actually live not far from me, they live in the same village as me and he just said ed, I really want to talk to you, I really need some help. I said, okay, yeah, sure, paul, come, and you know, come and um come around and see me and um, you know, arrange the date. He came around and he told me the story of this product that he was trying to develop.

He, he's a plumber by trade. He'd been a plumber for many years and he'd identified an issue that he kept coming across in his plumbing trade and that is when you fix a shower in a bathroom, so someone's fitting a bathroom whether a new build or a renovation you know the plumber has to come along and bury some pipe work or set up some pipe work for where the showers are going to go. And then lots of other people, other trades, will come along and there'll be a tiler and a plasterer and all sorts of people will come along and electricians and all sorts will do lots of other work around this pipe work that he's set up. And then when they've done their all their work, he comes in and does where. He'll come along and put the actual shower mixer on and fit the final shower to the, you know, within the shower enclosure, and he was always finding that he'd set these pipes up the first time before anyone else was there, with the perfect alignment, all in the right place, all ready to go. But he found in many cases all of the trades would, even if only slightly and subtly, would move and interfere with the pipework that he put in, which meant that when he came to fit this actual shower unit, which has to be an exact size, it wouldn't fit and he'd have to, in some cases, take tiles off, redo tiling to get the pipes in the right place to get it to fit. So he invented a fixing kit that's all set up for this pipework so that the pipework cannot be moved by anybody else once it's fitted to this thing. And yeah, it's a piece of plastic, you know it's about six inches long, called the 150 because, yeah, it's 150 millimeters, which, in inches for anyone who's listening to America is about six inches apart. And this is the perfect thing for this plumbing problem that he'd solved. And he even went to the trouble of patenting it, which is a big, big deal, cost him a lot of money. And he initially outsourced the license, this product to a third party company that got it manufactured and produced it and actually sold it for a while. But there was some disagreement between the two over the licensing terms and they went their separate ways, which meant he then got all the tooling to create this product and a whole load of stock, thousands of units of stock, but no means of selling it.

And he's, by his own admission, he's not a tech guy. He's not. He, you know, he's a plumber. He's obviously got entrepreneurial spirit and drive to actually, you know, create a, identify the problem, create the product, you know, get it manufactured, even do licensing deals, those kind of things. But he's now in the situation where he just needed help with what to do with it next. And um, he knew I was involved in web and sales and online marketing. He came to see me, so I've started helping him out. You know, at the moment we haven't quite worked out what the relationship is going to be. You know he's an old friend, so I'm happy to help him in whatever way I can, with the minimal effort to start with, but at some point I think I'm going to take an equity stake in his business.

But where we are at the moment is I've said to him right, he'd got a, a website that had been set up for him, that he paid somebody, you know, a lot of money relatively for a really rubbish website that was not ever going to sell anything. Um, and wasn't. You know, it's the worst kind of e-commerce setup I've ever even tried to imagine seeing. It was awful, um. So I said to him look, what we'll do is we'll get a Shopify site set up. You know, we'll get you a new domain, we'll get the site set up. And I said it's going to be like. I say to everybody who listens to this podcast along with no, I always say it's patience, this will not be quick, but whatever we do, I'll make sure it's going to have longevity. Um, so we've got this basic, you know, shopify site set up with. This is just the one product. There was only one product to buy, so it's not like a big complicated setup for shopify.

We um took some information he got. He got actually taking this product out and giving it to like 30 other plumbers and got them to fill in a form with their feedback on what they thought about it. So I took all that, those forms, and actually put them into chat, gpt and said here's what all these people review, what all the these real users of the product say about it what would you say, the key features and the key elements and the key selling features, what problems it solved for people and it came up with some actual, really good stuff. So taking that summary from ChatGPT and then using that as the basis for how we then spoke about the product and sold the product on the website has been really, really useful. Anyway, I said to him it'll take some time and then we got that set up maybe a couple of months ago and I said, right, we'll just leave it now.

And I actually really wasn't expecting any sales before Christmas and I'm recording this just before Christmas now and we got the first sale through the site Saw and bought two units £19.98, so just over $20 worth of product, which is two units of this thing, this thing paid for, need to be delivered. So I ring. I ring up Paul and say Paul, did you get the email? Cause I had to sell it, so he should get the emails. He was honestly so over the moon that we got a sale. Yeah, cause you got to think this is his first online sale that he's actually ever received. You've got to think this is his first online sale that he's actually ever received and I remember that small wins, when I was first setting things up and the first time we made an affiliate sale, the first time I got an AdSense check back in the days when they actually were checks you know those first small wins, you remember them and you should celebrate them.

And these small wins, you can still get them, even as you progress, even like saying even now you know over 20, more than 20 years of doing this I was still celebrating. It was amazing feeling to watch that sale come in, see the email saying you've got a sale. You know, and we just must remember to celebrate these, because that's what part of the fun of being in business is having these wins, setting something up, building something and then putting it out there into the world and waiting to see what happens. And when you get these first milestones come in and you tick them off, you should celebrate them in whatever way you want. You don't have to have a huge party. I've got to admit, when that one came in, I did have a little drink and, you know, raised a drink and said you know, this is what I'm celebrating this first sale tonight. Um, yeah, so I think it's a key thing that for this next year.

If I had one resolution, it would definitely be that I'm going to try and celebrate these small wins a little bit more, just when you get a new feature live or when you get your first bit of positive feedback on something, when you get your first sale, when you hit a new traffic milestone, anything like that. Celebrate these wins, because business, websites, online, seo, it's all about ups and downs. So hold on to those ups. Celebrate those ups because, a they're great for endorphins, they're great for making you feel like you're making progress and B it's obviously the downs we have to roll with. He's taken them off with a smooth, isn't it? The downs we have to roll with. So when the ups come, let's celebrate them. So that's one thing we leave with today for this next year. Celebrate your small wins. Anyway, until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember seo is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services.

You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the ed is spelled with two d's. You can find me on linkedin and blue sky just search for ed dawson. On both you can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast the link is in the show notes. You can try our seo intelligence platform keywords people use at keywords people usecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your google search console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize continually refine your content, targeted, personalized advice, keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO Is Not that Hard.