Eli Schwartz

Your ad costs are rising. Your ROAS is shrinking. But some Shopify brands are quietly growing without increasing their ad spend at all. How? Affiliates and referrals. Not the same thing — and confusing them is costing you money. Here's the quick version: → Affiliates bring in strangers (creators, bloggers, influencers who earn commission) → Referrals convert friends (your existing customers recommending you to their network) One builds reach. The other builds trust. The best Shopify brands run both. I've put together a complete guide covering: ✅ The real difference between affiliates and referrals ✅ Self-managed vs. network-based programs — and when to use each ✅ The best Shopify apps for each channel (with pricing) ✅ Commission structures that actually attract good partners ✅ Which approach fits your revenue stage Whether you're doing $10k/month or $500k+, there's a setup in here that fits where you are right now. Full guide in the comments 👇 #Shopify #EcommerceMarketing #AffiliateMarketing #ReferralMarketing #DTC #ShopifyTips

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$273,007/month from one optimized page. I’d take that deal. When we analyzed AirOasis’s Air Purifiers collection page, one thing became clear quickly: The page has strong potential, but it isn’t fully optimized to capture search demand. https://lnkd.in/grQbFukN We ran our SEO Revenue Calculator on the page and found a $273,007/month revenue opportunity sitting on the table. Check the math here: https://lnkd.in/gvV8Saps SEO snapshot of the page: • Domain Rating: 61 • Organic Keywords: 30 • Organic Traffic: 114/month • Backlinks: 15 (from 11 referring domains) The page already has 579 words of content, which is a solid starting point. It also includes Breadcrumb and Organization schema, and the meta title is optimized. Full Strategy With Screenshots: https://lnkd.in/gGEJ-Kkb But several critical ranking signals are still missing. What’s happening here 👇 AirOasis has the authority and content foundation, but the page lacks key components that drive rankings for ecommerce collection pages: ❌ Unoptimized meta description ❌ No FAQ section targeting buyer intent ❌ Missing high-impact schemas (Product, Review, Merchant) ❌ Weak internal linking signals ❌ Limited backlink profile for a competitive category Now compare that with a competitor: Alen’s air purifier page https://lnkd.in/g5Y_JMKP • Domain Rating: 53 • Organic Keywords: 448 • Organic Traffic: 10.9K/month • Backlinks: 56 (from 52 domains) The interesting part: Alen’s page has only 69 words of content, far less than AirOasis. Yet it dominates search results. Why? Because it implements the core signals Google prioritizes. What Alen is doing right: ✅ Optimized meta title and description ✅ Clear H1 targeting the primary keyword ✅ Product schema ✅ Merchant listing schema ✅ Review schema ✅ FAQ section targeting buyer questions ✅ Stronger backlink profile This isn’t about content length. It’s about structure, signals, and authority. Google rewards pages that clearly communicate: • What the page is about • What products it contains • Why it should rank What this really means: AirOasis actually has higher domain authority and more content, but the page lacks the technical & structural elements that turn a good page into a ranking page. This creates a classic SEO visibility gap. Based on keyword demand around air purifiers: Estimated SEO traffic potential: 13,113 visitors/month Assuming: • 3% conversion rate • $700 average order value That equals: $273,007/month in potential revenue. From one optimized collection page. The takeaway: SEO growth doesn’t always require a massive site overhaul. Sometimes the biggest opportunity is simply fixing one high-intent page that isn’t fully optimized yet. Jon Bennert,  if you want a team to unlock this growth, reach out ASAP. 👉 Reminder: Full strategy doc linked above.

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BYE BYE $400 guest posts, Google hands you the list free 👋 (2 search operators, 1 requirements page, and a brief you never had to ask for) Someone slides into your inbox offering ten placements on DR 60 sites for two grand. You pay. Six months later nothing moved. Here is what that seller is actually doing. They search for pages where a site has written down, in public, that it accepts outside articles. Those pages exist because the site needs content and has an editor with an empty queue. You can read the same pages they do. Better, the page tells you what to send. Word count, originality, subheadings, tone, whether the link sits in the body or the author bio. That is a brief, published free, by the person who decides yes or no. Almost nobody reads it. They pitch anyway, get ignored, and decide outreach is dead. Here is the process we run at Distribb: Step 1. In Google, search your niche in quotes plus write for us. Example: "HVAC" "write for us". Then swap the second phrase for guest post, contribute, submit an article. Each one returns a different slice of the same list. Step 2. Open the contributor page and find one line only: where the link is allowed. Body or bio. Step 3. Bin every site that only offers a bio link. It sits away from the topic, under a stranger's name. You want a link inside a paragraph about the thing you sell. Step 4. Paste their requirements block into Claude and ask for an outline that hits every line of it, on a topic where your site is genuinely the best source. Their reader's question, not your product. Step 5. Send the outline, four lines, not the article. An editor answers an outline in one line. A 1,400 word attachment gets archived. Step 6. Keep the give first lane running underneath. We place a contextual link out to another real business and earn one back through the exchange, so links keep landing while pitches sit unread. The full playbook has the operator list, the contributor page checklist that kills a bad placement in thirty seconds, and the four line pitch. The image below tells you how to grab it 👇 PS: If the contributor page shows a price list, you are not pitching an editor. You are buying an ad.

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TrioSEO just quietly launched a new service 🤫 After talking to a ton of CMOs, Founders, etc., we noticed a pattern: people were burned by SEO agencies that brought in traffic, but generated no leads. Sound familiar? In addition to your “traditional SEO” strategy of content, backlinks, and technical upgrades, we added a key layer: lead magnets and funnels. Here’s how it works: 1. We find lead magnet keywords like “bookkeeping services pricing calculator” (200 searches per month). We also create quizzes, assessments, and generators based on what we see. 2. Then we design and develop those tools for clients 3. And create a visitor engagement funnel 4. Then layer content + backlinks + technical This way, your ideal customer is attracted to your website, engaged, and sent value before you pitch a discovery call or demo (big unlock). On the backend, you collect their contact information and qualification data (based on their inputs), then begin nurturing them. We already have two case studies, each getting 100+ leads/mo. We’re looking to connect with personal injury and family law attorneys, but this strategy works for just about any business. Slots are limited if you want me to run this strategy for your business. Repost ♻️+ Follow me for SEO & GEO strategies. P.S. - Steven wrote an eBook about this process if you want to grab that below!

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Pinterest impressions, saves and outbound clicks fell off a shelf on August 1, and a month later there is still no explanation. Account owners posting in Pinterest's own community forum describe the same shape. A normal July. An abrupt drop. Outbound clicks and saves falling harder than impressions did. That last detail is the one I keep coming back to. Amazon storefront linking took away a click-out. Boards got rebuilt as shopping surfaces. Ask Pinterest moved discovery into its own app. Every one of those keeps the session inside Pinterest, and every one shipped before August. So my read of 2026 is that the search intent is real and still growing, and the free ride out to your own website is the part being repriced. That changes what is worth building there. An account built to work as a traffic firehose has all of its value sitting in the one metric the platform has the least reason to protect. An account built to catch the person while they are still on Pinterest, and to own the relationship afterward through an email address rather than a session, keeps working through a distribution event nobody explains. I would rather say that now than wait for it to be announced. By then it arrives as a feature instead of a warning. And if the drop reverses next week and I look ridiculous, I will take that trade. Early and wrong beats right in hindsight.

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I don’t sell courses. I don’t have affiliate links. I don’t ask you to like and subscribe. I don’t monetize my socials. And I don’t make content for content’s sake. I share information that might be useful to someone. Whether that’s a dozen people or a million doesn’t really matter.

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At scale, growth is not about campaigns. It’s about systems. In one of our case studies (BluLogix), we implemented the right organic acquisition and conversion infrastructure turning pipeline and revenue into something predictable https://lnkd.in/dxzJ6zu7

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