OIL 014: An Interview with Newbie Rockstar Matthew Newton and How He Got to $1500/Mo in Just 60 Days

OIL 014: An Interview with Newbie Rockstar Matthew Newton and How he Got to $1500/Mo in Just 60 Days

Trent: Hey everybody! This is Trent from Niche Site Mastery and the Online Income Lab here with session number 14 of the Online Income Lab podcasts. And on the show with me today, a half a world away is one of my students by the name of Matthew Newton.

And Matthew commented on a post that I made a while ago and he mentioned how much success he was having with building his niche sites. And so I immediately asked I said “Matthew will you come on the show?” I know there’s a lot of people who are listening to my show who might not yet be building niche sites, might be thinking about it, might have built a few, they’re not having a whole lot of success, they’re scratching their heads, they don’t know what to do. And so you are kind of I think a fantastic case study to share with these folks to hopefully motivate them that this whole business is real. It is doable. You just need to make sure that you follow a proven process and you are organized.

We’re gonna get into a whole bunch of details but Matthew thanks very much. Welcome to the show. I really appreciate you making the time.

Matthew: Thanks for having me Trent.

T: So let’s give just a little bit of background before we get in so people know a little bit about who Matthew Newton is. You’re down there from the land down under in Australia. What city are you in?

M: I’m in Melbourne. It’s south of Australia.

T: Real brief, what were you doing before you decided to get online? Or maybe you’re probably still doing it as a matter of fact. I don’t think you’re full time at it, are you?

M: Yeah I’m not full time but I used to be a real estate agent and I was tinkering around online and I basically quit real estate so to get some more time to work online. I have a full time job actually working SEO right now which is a pretty good business but the only reason I settled with that job was to give me more time to work online and build my niche sites.

T: So when did you start building your first niche sites? Was it before you became a student at Niche Site Mastery or a member rather?

M: Okay well I’ve had a few websites for about last year that were not kind of niche sites we’re talking about now. They were directories and they’re making a couple hundred bucks a month between them. And that was quite the inspiration. I thought if I could build more I could do well. But then I saw some of your stuffs and I was like “this is actually better”. So I switched from what my ideas were. I was gonna build just tons of directories everywhere and I’ve just sold the 2 directories I’ve had for about $8,000 and now I’m just sort of focusing on the niche sites.

T: So before we dive in to the niche sites I didn’t know you’d sell those. Did you sell it on Flippa?

M: I put one on Flippa and that led to people finding my other site coz their interlinked. And then I was getting frank calls. Basically it wasn’t valuable so much for adsense. It was valuable because it was in the limousine industry and I had some of the best limousine rankings in Australia. And obviously limousine companies want that. So I just got private offers and bang bang!

T: Terrific! You’re like a little injection of working capital to help fund the gate of your adsense business.

M: Absolutely.

T: When did you build your first adsense site?

M: I spent a long time working on my systems and processes. So I basically took your virtual task management dashboard. I started writing processes and adapting all your ideas to what worked for me and that was in ages. And then you made a certain call and you said “Matt, you have to load your website at some point.”

T: I remember that.

M: And in September I finally launched a website.

T: Interesting. Just so the listeners know Matt has a way that’s a little bit different than what most people do. Instead of just throw up a bunch of websites through brute force for lack of a better explanation it sounds to me like you got really, really focused on getting your systems and your processes down first so that you could grow your business. And we use a term for that called scalability. And we’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about that in this episode but before we get to that I know everyone’s chomping and they think what’s results, results, how much money are you making. So let’s get that out of the way first. So you put up your first site in September this is being recorded in early November so we’re talking about 60 days?

M: Something like that yeah.

T: How much you’re making a day?

M: Last week, the last 7 days average is being about $55 a day. I’ve already past that today and we’ve got 9 hours left in a day as well and it’s just going strong.

T: Bravo! So clearly what he’s doing is working. So now let’s get into some details so that the folks listening to this can hopefully take away some nuggets and improve their own businesses. So you joined Niche Site Mastery, we’re talking of this year sometime in June or July. You work as an SEO now so kind of what was it with Niche Site Mastery that caught your attention and what do you think has been, what did you pick up that’s helped you so much.

M: Okay. So just before I answer that question I’ll just jump in regarding the fact that I’m an SEO. Some people are gonna make excuses for themselves. They’re gonna tell “oh he’s an SEO that’s why he’s doing well”. My job as SEO has basically not helped me at all on this. It’s all via learning via the internet. Because I’m doing SEO for a small company it’s being completely unrelated to Niche Site Mastery and there’s been very little transferability but I don’t want people to make that as an excuse. Anyone can learn this stuff.

T: I’m glad you brought that up. Absolutely. Okay so basically you knew nothing. And it makes an even better case study and you came in and joined the Niche Site Mastery.

M: Sure thing. So what attracted me to your course was your virtual task management dashboard. I was trying to think of how to run processes. I was trying to think of a good way to do this and I saw this. Bang! This guy knows something. This guy he’s a business person. He understands leverage. So I was like I want in. So I signed up straight away and just started lifting your instructions to VAs and molding them obviously according to my very specific needs and that’s how it’s done.

T: Terrific. So you mentioned to me before the show that you, this task management dashboard. I’m gonna talk a little bit about that so folks know what we’re talking about and then we’re gonna talk about how you’ve used it specifically.

So one of the things folks that a lot of people don’t really, it’s not that they don’t get. I don’t think they even think about this stuff in the beginning because they’re just thinking “oh I’m gonna try to build some sites”. There is kind of 2 components at the very high level. There’s 2 components in this business. One is what’s everything I know to build a niche site and make that niche site make money for me. So that’s keyword research, it’s how you get content, it’s how you actually build the site, how you get traffic to the site, how you monetize. And Niche Site Mastery covers all that stuff in detail. And I think a lot of people know that stuff. And if you spend enough time googleing around and you could probably find all that stuff for free. It will be scattered but you could probably learn it all.

My particular background is that I run an outsourcing company before that I sold in 2008 before I got into this. And I very, very early realized that okay 1 website’s great but if I’m only making $5 a day from 1 site I need to have 500 sites so I can make $500 a day. So when you start adopting that thinking there’s a whole another aspect to the skill set and the knowledge that you need to be successful online and that is how do you structure the scalability and the processes and the systems and the controls and everything that has nothing to do with keyword research per se. But how do you make it so you could replicate your success over and over and over again. And Matthew it seems to me that that’s what it was that caught your attention to my blog post on John Chow’s was this virtual task management dashboard. And then you’ve taken that dashboard and adapted. So do you wanna talk a little bit about how you took that piece of information and how that has helped you to be successful?

M: Yeah yeah definitely. So what I did I started, you have to do this once yourself before you can teach anyone else. So I built the sites and just wrote every single step that I took. And what I do instead of having tons and tons of little boxes of my virtual task management dashboard I just put a checklist of all the things I need to do for one process. Then once they’ve done that process they mark it done in my virtual task management dashboard. And just took obviously some of your instructions and mellowed it with my own instructions like place a different hosting account blah, blah, blah…

And then what I did is I gave my instructions to my brother who doesn’t even know what hosting account is.

T: Aha the guinea pig.

M: The guinea pig. I basically sent him a form in the computer and I said Pete I want you to follow my instructions that I’ve given to you. And I was gonna take notes. I’ll tell you what… by the end of the first dot point on the checklist I’d already taken like 10 points that I needed to fix.

T: Interesting.

M: Coz I said you need to add this to web hosting and I’d go you need to go to the dreamhouse and he’s like (blank) “what’s the hosting?”. And then I realized I’m in trouble. And so basically I’ve written this process and he’s testing it out. And then the 2nd time around when I came back to him I said the process is fixed we only have 2 little things that we need to fix. Then the 3rd time around that I brought it to him I only finished when I had a drink he just did the entire thing by himself.

T: And that is where the leverage comes in and the freedom. Now I will say in my own experience I typically will go to Odesk and I’ll recruit my VAs there. And most often you can find someone who already knows what hosting account is. Who already knows some basics but the very 1st VA that I ever hired, she still works for me today is closing in on a year now, she’s in the Philippines, she didn’t know anything, nothing. She just was administrative support. And the reason I ended up hiring somebody that didn’t know anything back then is coz I didn’t know what type of person I should be hiring. I didn’t know how to find the right skill set and all that stuff so I ended up creating like huge just like you did it step by step by step instructions. And since then I’ve also tried to improve the videos that are in Niche Site Mastery to make it even easier and easier for folks who are new so that they run into less of these little questions and road blocks what does that mean, what does that mean.

M: Absolutely. I use Odesk as well. I have 2 VAs right now and they’re both from Odesk and they’re both doing fantastic job.

T: Fantastic. And now let’s talk about how you found them. Coz I have a whole component in Niche Site Mastery in the outsourcing module. Did you simply take exactly everything that I had there or did you find that you had to change it a lot? Or how useful was it?

M: At that time I think that section was nice data as it is. So what I did was I might as went to Odesk and I found someone to sort of set up my blogs and something cool actually happened. I was paying her a bit more than another guy that she’s working for and I started asking her questions about when are you available, and how many hours you have. And she said just pointing from an outset she said even if you’re paying me more I’ve made a commitment to this other guy and I’m gonna honor that. And as soon as she said that to me I was like bang! I can trust this woman. So she currently, all I do is give her a topic and she goes over the domain, she goes and adds it to my hosting account, she sets up the managewp, she does everything.

T: So you’ve given her access to your hosting account?

M: Absolutely.

T: Ah you know I’ve thought about that because now I have moved to my critical assets which are my blogs in Niche Site Mastery in a dedicated server so I have a separate blue host account for my niche sites and I think I’m cool and pretty close to doing the same thing so that there’s a couple less steps that I need to do.

M: Absolutely. And what she actually does she manages what you have the content authority that you use. I found that what happened is I pick a topic and then we get 5 different articles that are written by 5 different people that really sit together like I wanted them to. What we did is I got her to hire 3 writers on Odesk, right?

T: Yeah

M: And one of her jobs is that she orders content from the writers and she has to manage those writers to get the content done by the deadline.

T: I’ve done exactly the same thing.

M: Seriously?

T: He’s got hiring authority on Odesk now coz he’s… and this is what happens folks when you get a good VA. He came to me and he said you know exactly what Matthew just said. I’m not happy with the consistency of the articles because they’re written by different writers and I don’t like this I think we should do this better. He said I know we can find great writers on Odesk. So I said fine. He said all I want you to do is make a job posting and make me the hiring manager and I’ll handle everything. So I said okay. And I have an amazing writer now. She’s in Utah. Full time writer. She’s actually developing a video, quite a few podcast ago I interviewed a guy by the name of Nate Rivers and he talks about his video tycoon strategy and I have my first product in the development right now and my VA found, interviewed and hired the right writer to create that product for me. And now …

M: How cool is that?

T: It’s very cool. We’ll just compare notes. Sounds like to me you even outsource even further than I have. So he finds all my keywords. I register the URLs. I go to my host and do the one click install and put them into managewp. And then that’s all I do. And then he takes it from there. He orders the articles, he puts all the articles on the site, he’s actually doing backlinking for me and as well I’ve got 2 VAs backlinking, him and another one.

So sounds like your strategy you’re even just handing a little bit more. Are you having your VA register the domain name for you?

M: Yeah. So the only thing I do right now is pick a topic.

T: I don’t even do that.

M: I’ve seen the systems and I am definitely moving across something similar to what you do for sure within a month SEMRush will be my go to. Not quite ready to go to that yet for various reasons. But I give her the topic and then she basically goes to order off contents, she builds out the website. And then a 2nd VA comes in and adds the content to the website coz she knows a bit more about this stuff. She does a bit of interlinking, she does a bit of 1 page SEO adds images, blah blah blah, and then she goes off and buys some links.

T: Okay. And how many articles coz I just yesterday I made a big change in Niche Site Mastery. I emailed everybody because one of the guys in my mastermind forum was telling me about his last sites that he launched 3 months ago and we did one article per site.

M: Yeah. And I don’t know if you saw Spencer Haws’ blog post the other day but he has been doing one article per site as well lately.

T: That’s the guy I’m talking about Spencer. He and I talk a lot. That’s exactly who I’m talking about.

M: I can see why he’s doing that coz he says he’s lowering his cost. My worry, my biggest fear in life pretty much at the moment is google’s quality of editing coz what could happen is this. Every now and then google’s quality editing team might bump into your site for whatever reason like you get a $100 a day on adsense. I’m not sure how it actually works. But let’s say one of them they see your website and say oh that’s junk then they do a bit of a background search and found another one of your sites through your adsense ID and say oh that’s junk. They will do that and pull the trigger and then boom! Every single site with your adsense on it is gone. It’s not a very frequent thing but that really, really scares me. So I’m trying to figure out how to make my site look good to a google quality writer.

T: I tell you I can give you an answer to that. Spencer and I both have exactly the same belief system that it’s a numbers game. Launch 10 sites and not all will be successful. I had a long talk with him yesterday and one of the things he said to me in that conversation coz I said “look, you got one of this last sites he’s making $900 or something last month. And he says he has some sites that are making $4,000 a month and said I never would have discovered those sites had I not been launching a lot of sites.

So what he does now and what I’m doing as well one article per site lowers your launch cost, allows you to throw a lot of poop against the wall for lack of a better term. And very, very quickly you’re gonna see which sites are ranking and you immediately go and start adding more content to those sites. And the ones that aren’t ranking you can either take your adsense off, abandon them, sell them, do whatever but it’s not gonna leave them just hanging out there in the wind to put them at risk in a way just described.

M: Would you keep those sites on a different adsense account to protect your owners?

T: No because again I think google has I mean if you think about it with the natural evolution of a website, when a website’s launched let’s say the first articles are really good, high quality article well you’re not gonna be 3 months without adding any more content. Mine would be 30 days. So is it fair for google’s viewers to say “wow this is only one article we need to rate this site poorly. Everyone’s always adding more content on an on-going basis so it’s not as though you’re gonna have this one page websites out there forever and a day. They’re simply what you’re allowing your websites to do for lack of a better term speaky. They’re basically saying “hey I’m doing okay come and add more content to me” and that’s immediately what he does.

And then with the ones that aren’t earning or aren’t ranking is there any harm or if you can do one or two things. Well one of a couple of things. You could add more content but I don’t know why you would since they’re already showing you that they’re not going to perform. You can just disable your quick adsense plug ins and then your adsense is off the site and you could let it ferment for a while and see if it’s ranking proves without putting your adsense account at risk coz the ads aren’t live on the site. Or you just sell it. Bundle them all up and sell them on Flippa because people are rabid buyers of adsense sites. So I completely hear what you’re saying but I think there are really effective ways to mitigate that risk.

M: Well I’m very excited about the idea. I’m very excited about the idea. I’m definitely gonna take as many steps as I can to make the risk covered. Coz obviously a good test of a business is if it’s defensible. You can’t have a business that can just disappear overnight. So I need to make sure that I keep it defensible obviously. Yeah I’ll get back to you. Definitely we’ll be testing that out. So what are you talking about? Like 1,000 words article?

T: 750 to 1,000, I decided I would do 900 so the instructions in Niche Site Mastery are 900 and that’s what I’m doing myself and anyone who’s choosing to follow that particular leverage module under the VA tight launch instructions. Those exact instructions are what my VA uses to launch the sites for me.

M: Can I also suggest one more thing?

T: Yeah please.

M: Well you’re talking about all the different things you can do with the websites that doesn’t succeed. I’ll tell you one more thing. In the light of PR update I had a bunch of websites that really they’re ranking high but it’s terrible niche selection. They’re on PR3. And you’re seeing all these people with front page PR networks going on warrior forum. I’ve tested one out and it was amazingly effective but on going cost gonna put me off. However if you’ve got all your own domains sitting there that are PR3 and you say they’re useless have a think about it.

T: Have them on redirect. Is that what you’re saying?

M: No I’m talking about putting links so let’s just say you built a new money site so blue house dream house host and what you’ll get is that the more websites you add they’ll double your different IPs and C class IPs anyway. And that is how they structure their servers so you don’t have to worry about links coming from all the same C class IP. All you need to do is just put links to say a new money site. I’m gonna be testing that out in a month or two. Build links to a new website solely from a file website and see what happens.

T: I actually sold a large volume of my quote unquote failed websites. They were on Flippa recently because they were Amazon affiliate sites and that’s not really the niche business that I’m in and so I sold them. And they were all PR2 and PR3, mostly PR2. There’s one PR3 and a couple of PR1s and all in one niche and I advertised that. I said hey one of that key assets that you could be buying here is just all the PR. There was 25 URLs and a vast majority of it were PR2 so some guy there and I’m presuming this was what was the case for the buyer you know maybe he’s got a photography site that’s ranked 5 and he now can start putting all these links from all these sites that he bought from me to the home page of his photography site. Maybe that will put him up to number 2 or number 1 and their earnings boost gives him an ROI on the money that he paid me for those niche sites.

So there’s a lot if you think outside the box a bit there’s a lot of ways that you can use quote unquote failed websites to actually be an asset back to your business.

M: Absolutely.

T: Okay so let’s go back to your process. So walk me through your spreadsheet if you think there’s any new nuggets that we haven’t already covered off. I don’t want to be redundant here.

M: Yes so process 1 is contents so that’s my VA ordering the content.

T: Let me jump into some questions. What’s this writer base camp? Are you using base camp to manage your projects?

M: Absolutely. So what every writer when they join have project credit just for them. So my VA she’ll post a message to the writer to upload the content. And my first VA says in that box who’s she’s ordered it from. And once its grain is complete so the next VA knows where to go within base camp to get the content. Does that make sense?

T: Yeah. I’m just, coz I thought about using base camp a lot myself and I’ve monkeyed around with it but curious why and maybe you’ve figured out a way to tie this in. I love the visual dashboard. As soon as you start getting just a bunch of task check marks this to this date this date I think it gets confusing and this goes back to this whole process capability thing that I was alluding to earlier. So I haven’t yet figured out a way that I’m satisfied with to tie base camp in. Because when you order, I’m using The Content Authority I still use, you order content from them it is already organized coz you can create folders, each folder for one of your sites, so you can see that the article is there. You can see that it has been used or it hasn’t been used as there’s a little tick box for posted or not posted.

So what you’re doing with base camp you gotta pay $50 a month for that I think?

M: I’m paying $25.

T: Okay. How is it, so you’re not using TCA you’re using all writers that you found out off Odesk so coz you could be using dropbox to store the content in but kinda help me understand and I’m not super familiar with base camp so maybe that’s the piece I’m missing but help me understand how you’re getting extra value to justify the $25.

M: Yeah it’s just a place to have communication that we can go back and look at coz email is not practical.

T: Yeah that’s true. There’s the audit trail of communication there.

M: That’s right. There’s communication that 2 different VAs that see and only one person necessarily need to be interacting but the other person might need to read that communication to really know what’s going on. I don’t use checklist or anything on that because the virtual task management dashboard that is the dates, that is the deadlines, the VAs know what needs to happen. So for example in the virtual task management dashboard I’ll give them the topic but also set the expected that I want the task to be completed from. And so I’ve trained my VA to order content from the person and ask them to have it ready by a certain date. And that certain date should be one week before the site needs to be ready. And the VA is accountable to that date. So there’s none of this confusing you’re right, you’re completely right, there’s task list and check list and all those crap on base camp page that’s really confusing. It’s just that I see the communication if I need to but I don’t really bother. My VAs doing a great job.

And then VA no. 2 can come in. She knows according to virtual site management dashboard who’s written the content, it’s in a green box it says complete John Sykes’ base camp. So she goes to John Sykes’ messages, finds the file he’s uploaded that’s the title that corresponds with the topic and boom! They have no issues whatsoever. That’s being great.

T: I’ll have to check that out. Terrific. Okay so again I don’t know if I asked you this I think I might have asked you off the air. How many sites do you have now?

M: I’ve got 65.

T: 65? Okay. And all of these are 60 days old or less, correct?

M: Yeah. Correct.

T: Okay.

M: Most of them don’t even have links built on yet.

T: Okay. And so how many of those are making consistent money for you at this point?

M: So far it’s probably around 10 but I’ve had one of those instances you know basing on your podcast Spencer mentioned that a website with 3 keywords like cheap laptops online and he accidentally ranked with cheap laptops same thing happened to me with 2 of my websites. I’ve ranked for a much higher traffic return than those 2 websites are making more like should I share my money right now.

T: And then again that’s another reason to say that this is a numbers game because you never can predict that in the beginning. And how have you discovered that? Just looking at your analytics, looking at your keyword sources or what keywords are driving traffic to your sites?

M: Yeah I used getclicky.com for my analytics and yeah the keywords are yeah you can just go in and see what keywords are through.

T: Okay. But you can also do an analytics with google. Is there any reason why you chose getclicky over google analytics?

M: The basic reason is I don’t want to have any footprint in terms of google accounts.

T: Well you do you’ve got adsense on them all.

M: And trust me that’s the one last thing I’m fixing and I am fixing that. I’m actually I’ve got 2 adsense accounts as of today.

T: Okay so but still I mean that 65 sites you’re gonna have 32 ½ sites in each adsense account. You still have a footprint from it. Trust me google knows what you’re doing.

M: Yeah I fully agree. Obviously there’s a limit to how far I can take this but these adsense accounts I’m not logging into from this computer. There’s virtually zero how to connect this to adsense accounts.

T: You are paranoid, aren’t you?

M: I’m super paranoid. It helps me sleep at night.

T: Well I will say that paranoia is maybe not the worst thing in the world but the other thing that I would encourage is that you might also not wanna have them. All of your income from adsense there’s a lot of different ways to make money online. Adsense is awesome. I love it. There’s a lot of reasons to do it but I think it will be a fool’s game to develop say for 2 years of your life into building nothing but adsense sites that are completely and solely dependent upon traffic from google.

M: I totally agree. What I’m doing once I’ve got this keyword process though where the keywords are selected by a VA I’m gonna start working on my next project.

T: Care to tell? Care to share?

M: Honestly I’m not sure.

T: Not sure what it is? Okay.

M: I’ve got a few options and I’m trying to decide.

T: I’ll tell you take a close look at Nate’s video tycoon model.

M: It’s interesting.

T: It’s very cool, very very cool.

M: I’m gonna watch here if that’s okay.

T: Absolutely. I’m gonna be blogging a lot more about that. And just so everyone, coz I’m sure we have some new listeners that have no idea what I’m talking about, maybe you could go back to podcast no. 5 or 6, an interview with Nate Rivers, the niche video tycoon I think. And in that episode he explains how instead of using adsense to monetize he’s actually creating courses, his own product that is delivered in video format which really is just powerpoint with a voice over reading the slides turned into with camtasia or screen flow into a video. And then he sells that course for $47 with a $77 on upsell. Nate is doing exceedingly well with that approach.

So I decided that was a very cool approach and so I, my VA found this writer for me. I became to an agreement with her. I said I want you to do everything, the whole course. So she put on Amazon, I don’t know a topic that has anything about so if you have a limiting belief on how can I become an authority on something that I don’t know anything about get that out of your head. I just said go buy these 3 books.

The very first thing I had her do was write a syllabus for me which is a fancy word for table of contents. We agreed upon the syllabus. And then we agreed upon a $1500 price. I said so this is what the deliverable needs to be. I want 20 videos, I want this many articles, they each need to be 10 minutes long, this is what each ones gonna look like, blah blah blah. Tell me how much you’re gonna bill me for that. And I had a number it was like $1300 in my head and she came in 15 and I think we actually agreed on $1400 or something like that. I don’t remember. And that is in development right now. The site is up. The articles are on the site. My VAs are starting to build links to the site and that’s just another form of super passive income.

I know that Nate doesn’t do anything beyond what’s in this. And he built them all himself which if those who has been listening to me for a while kind of against doing any, I’m like a high level, I don’t wanna work on the business but and I guess this is coz I was a CEO before and I was used to having employees to do the task. I don’t wanna do the task. I wanna think up what needs to be done. I wanna create the systems to make it happen but I actually don’t want to do anything.

M: Bang! That is the way to go with business. You are a business person Trent not some sort of clown. I love it.

T: Well thank you very much. I wish I got Matt here on video so I can see him jumping on his chair and swinging his arms. You were pretty stoked on that.

But I’m very serious I’ve got it actually on my white board that says video to talk about scalable repeatable processes and that’s something that none of the other teachers out there, they’re not touching on coz they weren’t CEO’s beforehand. They’re just saying here’s how to do keyword research, here’s how you build a site, here’s how you write an article, here’s how you build traffic. But there’s nobody teaching how do you do that 300 times without having your head fall off. Without having the whole thing explode on you and that’s one of the huge areas of Niche Site Mastery.

I know I’m giving myself a plug here but I think this is really important. You’re not gonna survive off 5 niche sites. You’re not gonna quit your job off just 5. You’re gonna need 150 or 100 or some large number and unless you wanna take 3 years to build these things one at a time yourself you’re gonna need to outsource. And if you’re gonna outsource and this is what Matthew and I have just been talking about you cannot email back and forth and say do this do that because you’re gonna have multiple people that you’ll email. You’ve got multiple projects. You have multiple sites, multiple steps per site, multiple due dates. It’s just not going to work. And that’s what this virtual site management dashboard and base camps and the systems and I’ve got more ideas yet that I haven’t even made it into Niche Site Mastery that I’m still in a process of testing on my own. But that’s it you’ve gotta have that piece.

M: Yeah absolutely. And you know what people kinda say you know coz you used to be a CEO. Look at me I used to be a CEO. You don’t have to be some sort of one the kind of MBA graduate to do this stuff.

T: I was just gonna say I don’t even have a university degree.

M: Oh really?

T: Nothing. I’m a highschool graduate. And you know what I was before CEO. I was not a CEO. So you can learn all these stuff.

M: Yeah absolutely. It’s just an MBA of life. It comes from doing.

T: Absolutely. You know there was a piece of advice I don’t know if I’ve ever said it on a podcast before but when I first started the business I was this guy who used to go to everybody at the luncheon meetings all over the place and I was I wanna pick your brain, I wanna pick your brain. I think people probably think of me often annoying in site. But somebody, I don’t remember where I got this piece of advice, the best way to succeed in business is to be in business. And I thought to myself that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That doesn’t mean anything. What a load of crap. It might have been in a book some guy might have told me at lunch because I didn’t understand what it meant.

And so I’ve evolved that piece of advice into what I’m about to say and it’s called my green dot theory. Now let me explain this and you can now weigh if this is the real deal. So you go and get this idea from the business and so you write a business plan or not but you start and so you’re gonna be in the green dot business. I’m gonna sell green dots. So you start off and you try to sell green dots and you know this is what happens. You’re not gonna be very successful coz you missed something you didn’t understand your market. You might have priced it wrong. Your market sucks or whatever. Or just nobody wants green dots. But while you’re trying feverishly to sell green dots you discover there’s some blue dots over there. And then you think screw green dots I’m gonna adjust my strategy and I’m gonna start selling blue dots. And you’re doing a little bit better you’re making a little bit more but you’re still not killing it and then you discover purple dots. And then you discover yellow dots and by the time you get to black dots you are crashing it.

But my point is the best way to succeed in business is to be in business. You would have never, ever, ever discovered the black dots or the really high performing niche site if you didn’t start and you didn’t build the stinkers in the beginning and you didn’t fall on your face a few times. This is what people who have not been in business before who only had jobs this is what they don’t get. They wanna say tell me it’s gonna work. Give me the surefire strategy that will absolutely guarantee that the very first niche site that I ever build will make me a gazillionaire. Guess what? It doesn’t work that way. It never happens. You go study the most successful people in the world and you read their bio. They will have failed over and over and over and over again before they became successful.

So I don’t mean to be in my soap box but that is the biggest thing that I would get. All the time when I was a CEO people would come to me from business schools and they would interview me and ask me what’s the thing. What do I got to know. I go you don’t have to know anything you just need to go and start so that you can screw up so that you can learn from the screw up so that you can be smarter the next time around.

M: Absolutely. I call it levels of understanding. So every time you go do business you do it with a level of understanding. And from that business you go generate a new level of understanding which takes you to the next level. And from the next level you generate a new level of understanding. It’s like peeling white onion on the streak. You can’t hide this stuff. You can’t just take a silver bullet or knife and cut that onion up. You gotta go through these levels, go through these processes and learn the really intricate stuff like identifying opportunities that you will never learn out of from a book. You only can learn that out of experience. So yeah Trent I’m gonna arrange for purpledots.com tomorrow.

T: There’s a couple of other points here that I wanna make. So when we talk about processes and task management dashboard and so forth there are probably people listening to this episode who haven’t built their first site yet. And they’re going what’s all that stuff. I don’t wanna do that stuff. I must build sites and build another one. But trust me once you start you’re very, very quickly going to realize that the whole systems and the processes are really, really important because now my 2nd point, darn it I forgot my 2nd point was gonna be. It was equally important and hopefully it will come back in a minute or two.

M: Well if anyone wants to see a sketch of my virtual task management dashboard it’s on matthewn.com. Check it out it’s all from Trent’s guidance I would say. It’s different from his but it just goes to show you can adapt your learnings and make something for yourself.

T: Indeed. And speaking of task management dashboard for the Niche Site Mastery members that are listening to this I have updated my substantially and this is my kick in the butt to realize that I now need, coz I don’t wanna release stuff into Niche Site Mastery until I’ve tested it for a while and really figured it out. And so yesterday I updated my backlinking process substantially and a lot of things have evolved so I am going to upload a screen shot minus all my niches of course of my new task management dashboard. It changed a lot.

M: So you’re uploading it soon?

T: Yeah it’ll be uploaded probably before this podcast is live to be honest with you. So the Niche Site Mastery members are gonna find out before the Online Income Lab readers.

M: I can’t wait.

T: Yes. It’s a business of details and making sure that you get all of those details to the point where it’s just so incredibly repeatable that other people can do it for you.

M: Absolutely. So the first time you try any system it just seems so many things pop up you’re kinda like is this really worth it. And then the 2nd time goes so much more smooth and then the third time there’s one or two questions and then fourth smooth, so smooth. And now I’m bored during the week coz my VAs doing everything. I’m just sitting there reading websites coz I don’t have enough money to go off and do my next project yet. So I’m just refreshing my google adsense account and watching youtube. It’s like what do I try now Trent.

T: You know if you’d like to take over some forum moderation I’m getting inundated with questions within Niche Site Mastery I’d love somebody else take that off my plate.

M: You’re tripping out there Trent I can’t hear you. What did you say?

T: I was saying if you’re looking for something else to do… oh you did hear me, didn’t you?

M: I keep on radio landing and radio landing.

T: The joke’s on me on that one. Alright well I think we’re getting into rambling territory I don’t know as much as I’m still having a gas having this conversation with you. I don’t know much more value that we’re adding to listeners’ experience at this point in time.

M: I’ll be reading all comments in your blog if anyone has any questions I’m sitting here and I’ll help out with the questions on the comment on this one as well.

T: Absolutely. That would be awesome. Suggest to Samurais Matthew started less than 60 days ago in the Niche Site, roughly 60 days ago depending on when you’re actually listening to this. It’s November 11th today I believe. It’ll be published after that. So within 60 days you’re making $1800 a month with adsense?

M: Yeah well I’m not yet climbing that coz I wanna do consistently but yeah $1500.

T: $1500. So he’s hit this big bear and trust me if you can get to $1500 a month with adsense you can get to $15,000 a month with adsense coz there’s no difference. It‘s just do more. That’s it.

M: Absolutely. It’s just a numbers game from that point. It’s put more websites up.

T: Correct. So my shameless plug of course from Niche Site Mastery and the reason that I brought Matthew on the show was I wanted to have someone else other than me tell you that the stuff actually works. I’m gonna stop talking. Matthew if you have anything that you want to say about Niche Site Mastery you go right ahead and then we’ll end up the show.

M: I promise you I’m not gonna start like a niche site expert to comment on like that. I don’t wanna be a guru. I wanna let Trent be the guru. Guys sign up to his website you’ll love it. I have learned so much in it. It’s just giving me so much towards my business, I mean my $55 today and all that and all I’ve done is go around in the internet not even doing anything. I mean isn’t that the last time you want? It’s at matthewn.com.

And you know he’s not paying me for this. He should but actually, no I would definitely recommend and put a blog press up at matthewn.com show you some of my 4 or 5 greatest influences has been in terms of just shaking my mentality around leverage and online marketing. If you wanna be successful I’d definitely recommend checking that out coz I’m not gonna do any other blog posts. This is the only knowledge I’m gonna give away and I’m gonna let Trent do the rest.

T: Alright. Well I do enjoy being the teacher. It’s a lot of fun for me. I love doing it and I love teaching it just as much and so I’m gonna keep on teaching for quite sometime yet.

M: Very good.

T: Okay well thank you so much Matthew for being on the show. Again I think I like to have you on a couple more months as well so that we can just kind of keep a case study of you and see how successful you become. You’re probably gonna end up making more from adsense than I do because it’s all you’re doing. But that’s okay. That is okay. I don’t mind that at all. There’s nothing that makes me happier than to see someone who is taking the information that I’m sharing and running with it and killing it. To have that amount of success inside of 60 days is absolutely phenomenal.

I hope those of you who are listening to this either on your computer or in your car are motivated that the thing you need to do, the only thing that is standing between you and your $1500 a month is not your Niche Site Mastery membership. I know you thought I was gonna say that. It’s your first website. Go build your first website right now. If you don’t know how to do that, yes and you can learn how to do that inside the Niche Site Mastery and you can learn how to get traffic and pick your keywords and where to put your adsense ads and what names to use. I cover all that stuff. And we have on going webinars and so forth. You can go to the page and watch the video. It’ll explain everything. I don’t wanna make this the big Niche Site Mastery commercial. It already has become.

So on that note I will stop talking and again thank you very much. If you’re listening, if you wanna get the address by the way to this podcast coz I’m gonna link to Matthew’s website underneath this episode. It’ll be onlineincomelab.com/session014. That’s onlineincomelab.com/session014. Any of the links that I can remember that we’ve talked about will be there underneath the podcast for you to click on.

And if you’re listening to this on iTunes and you thought it was either entertaining, interesting, valuable and in some way, shape or form I would love it if you would take a moment and give some positive feedback for the show. I get a lot of people coming who get their first experience of the Online Income Lab as a result of the iTunes podcast so it’s really important to get that feedback. So thank you in advance to take the time to do that.

And I think that’s it. Matthew unless you have any other parting words of wisdom that you wanna add.

M: I think I’ve said enough.

T: I think both of us have said enough. Okay thanks very much. Have a terrific day down under and we will talk to you again soon.