In today’s podcast, my good friend and colleague, Patrick Rauland joins us as we announce a new project we launched, the Lift Off Summit. This online summit is the culmination of something we both care deeply about: the struggles online store owners face getting and keeping customers. As a result, we brought 21 experts to share with you everything they know about getting traffic and loyal customers.

For five days in June, over 500 people watched 3-4 videos each day absolutely free.

So tune in to learn why we pulled together this event and what you can expect. And of course, you can now get full access to the site with not only the videos from that week, but an additional video from each speaker and an audio file to download to listen to anytime, anywhere.

Thanks to our sponsor Bluehost

Transcript

You can also download a pdf of the full transcript here: WordPress eCommerce Show Episode 80 May 31 2017

Bob Dunn: Hey, everyone, welcome back to the WP e-Commerce Show. Bob Dunn here, also known as BobWP on the web. On today’s show we are mixing things up a bit. I’ve partnered with my friend and colleague Patrick Rauland to put together a five-day online e-Commerce summit. A few months ago, in a post Patrick wrote on his blog, he hinted that, hey, I’m thinking about doing an online conference. I reached out to him and said, “Let’s do this together.” The rest is history. So that is what our show is about today. It’s really more of an interview show and I’m bring Patrick on to let him share the goodies. So hey, Patrick, welcome back to the show.

Patrick Rauland: Thank you, Bob. It feels cozy here. I feels like I’ve come back maybe two times now?

Bob: You know, actually, I thought it was the fourth time.

Patrick: Is that right?

Bob: And I figured out, since this is episode 80, that means you’ve been on five percent of my shows.

Patrick: That’s cool. Do I get like a medal when I get on the fifth episode— or a T-shirt?

Bob: It would be kind of like Saturday Night Live.

Patrick: I was JUST thinking that!

Meet Patrick Rauland, Co-organizer of the Lift Off Summit

Bob: [laughter] OK, so let’s start in on this Lift Off. But before we do, everybody kind of knows me, Patrick. And they know you from being on the show a few times. But for those people who don’t know what you do, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Patrick: Yeah, so I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve been in eCommerce for about five years. I’ve done everything: sites for clients, eCommerce support and commerce development, eCommerce product management. And now I’m working for myself. So I’ve kind of done all this different stuff and it all leads into why we’re doing this.

As a product manager, I talked to so many people who could build a website, but didn’t know how to get people there. That’s that’s kind of why I’m doing this now. So many people struggle to get traffic to their sites. So in addition to the summit, I started to offer my own nine months ago and now I am doing a lot of the e-commerce content for Lynda.com. So if you go over there, I have three eCommerce courses: I have a Shopify course, I have a second Shopify course in the works. And then I have a couple of Google Analytics courses that isn’t anything to do with eCommerce, but is something that I’m interested in.

What is the Lift Off Summit and why are we doing it?

Bob: Yeah. And as you mentioned,