It's been a while since we've had an Under the Hood episode! For those of you who are new to this segment, we sometimes bring on podcast listeners to the show where they can talk to us about their businesses and ask us for advice. It's essentially a free 1-hour business coaching session turned into a podcast episode. It's a win-win!

If you'd like to be featured on the podcast and get advice from us, just send us an email at [email protected] with the subject line: Under the Hood application.

For this episode, we bring on Sebastien Taché, an ecommerce entrepreneur from Canada. Sebastien holds a full-time job while running an ecommerce business that nets him $170k in revenue. His ultimate goal is to be able to grow that revenue to $700k-$1.2M by 2020.

Get high-quality articles without breaking the bank

One of Sebastien's first steps towards this goal is to improve his content. However, he is facing a problem most ecommerce owners with blogs do: experts who produce high-quality work are too expensive but generic freelancers on sites like UpWork who charge on a per article basis will most likely produce mediocre work at best.

We faced this problem too early on in our business and we found that the best way to get around it is to hire a full-time content writer.

Granted that it takes longer to find a good content writer than finding a freelancer, and that you'd have to pay them a monthly salary, the advantages are tremendous. As a result, number of articles writter by our content writer has consistently been on page 1 of Google search.

We discuss this strategy in detail on the podcast, but aside from that, here are a couple things Sebastien and I discussed as well:

• Whether outsourcing PPC is a good or bad idea
• How to develop your own brand in a competitive niche
• Is it a good idea to go to China when you're bootstrapping your business?
• How to use available line of credit
• How to approach a product that's potentially patented

Tips from the conversation

Here are some of the tips I gave Sebastien during our conversation:

• Aim for low-traffic, more-specific long-tail keywords that will yield better coversion rates
• Put your writers through a digital marketer training course
• Never, ever outsource SEO
• DO NOT rely on the manufacturer telling you that a product is not patented

I enjoyed this conversation with Sebastien and I look forward to talking to him again in 12-18 months and see where he is in his ecommerce journey.

If you'd like to be a part of the show and be featured in your own episode, send us an email at [email protected] with the subject line: Under the Hood application. Looking forward to hear from you!

Thanks for listening to this episode! If you found this helpful, please leave us a review on iTunes.

Until next week, happy selling!