OIL 22: An Interview with Eric Lass on Making Money with Kindle Books

Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! This is Trent Dyrsmid here with the Online Income Lab podcast session no. 22. And man oh man in this one we’re gonna be talking about something I have never talked about before. On the show with me is the author, I guess author is the right term, author of quite a number of, and he’ll clarify if I’m making that wrong or explaining that wrong rather. of a number of kindle ebooks, selling a lot of kindle books. So we’re gonna be talking about how to make money with kindle books. And my guest on this episode his name is Eric Lass. So Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Lass: Hey Trent! Thanks for having me.

T: No problem at all. So Eric and I, just so you know listeners, we were introduced through a third party and this fellow Shaun said “Trent, you gotta get this guy, Eric, on your show. He’s doing really, really well with kindle books which is something that, you know, not many people are, at least that I know or should say no one that I know is doing. And so for my own purposes I became incredibly curious to figure out what is this guy doing. How much money is he making? Is it hard to do? Can other people do it? And so Shaun thought it would be an excellent podcast or he would be an excellent podcast guest and so I got in touch with Eric and he agreed to come on the show and here we are.

So Eric, just before we get in to the whole business of making money with kindle books maybe just, coz I want my listeners to understand that what you’re doing is doable by somebody else. So what’s a little bit about your background? Where did you go to college? Where did you study? What did you do after school? You know, kinda how did you get to this whole internet marketing thing?

E: Okay. Well I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh and I graduated in 2006 with a 2 degrees in economics and another one in finance. And I went on to manage a retail store right out of college. And I didn’t like that too much after about 6 months, I get bored at the job so me and my dad started a drying company where we dried seeds and powders and things like that and sold it to suppliers and people who made products out of those dried materials. That didn’t last either, pretty much went bankrupt in about 9 or 10 months.

So after that I went to work for a finance company as a financial rep and again after about 6 months so I learned everything that I could learn in that job. And when I started at that finance job it was an AIG company and that’s when the whole AIG thing came out and the government was doing the bail outs. Well it was like one year to the day where they laid me off from there. They were closing a bunch of branches in the state and luring a bunch of people around and I was just cut out.

And then while I was in that job I started looking at internet marketing, creating websites and trying to make a profit from those. At first I started looking at what John Chow was doing. I’m sure a lot of your viewers know about John Chow. And I started a website shuckabuck.com that talk about poker because I was really into poker at that time and I played a lot in college. And I’ve played since I was 12 really with friends and family. So I started that and found out about keyword research about 6 months after that. I think I wrote like a 180 articles myself in that 6 months and didn’t make a dime.

T: Wait a minute. You wrote 180 articles not knowing about keyword research? You’re just like randomly?

E: Yes sir.

T: Ooh okay. So that didn’t work very well.

E: No.

T: Thanks John.

E: That’s what I said. I was mad at him forever. And then.

T: I don’t think he listens to my podcasts folks so he’s not gonna care.

E: Right. Yeah after that I found Allyn Hane. He used to have a website called the bloggerillustrated.net I think. And I was talking with him and found out I should be targeting keywords and stuffs like that. A month later I made my first sale I think it was $24 in the commission. So I started building up websites targeting keywords basically just like what you teach.

T: And you started to make some money?

E: Yap.

T: Cool. So how does it go from, where does, how many websites did you build? And how many of them you still have? Then where and how did kindle get into these? Coz you know it’s not, they’re kind of different things.

E: Yeah okay.

T: And by the way this is what you do for full time living now, is that correct?

E: Yes.

T: Okay. So no more jobs to get fired from. No more crappy bosses.

E: Yeah I did leave a job out of there. After that financial company laid me off I took another job and about 6 months later they moved me up in a position and I didn’t like it. And they eventually fired me for not showing up so…

T: Funny how they’ll do that. They’re just “you know if you’re not gonna come to work we’re not gonna employ you.”

E: Yeah I still feel kinda bad about that but I think a lot of people would say that getting fired or losing a job was the best thing that ever happened to me kind of thing. If they go on and start a business from that but from there I was, where was I? I have about 50 worth of sites. And I started from 2008 until today.

I haven’t started a new site in probably 7 or 8 months but one of my friend from Milwaukee sent me a link on facebook on December of last year 2011. And it was with a guy making $30,000 a month selling kindle books. And I thought it was just like kind of scam type of thing coz you see that all over the place. But I listened in on the webinar anyway and he was teaching how to create a like from start to finish, do the research and all that kind of stuff. And his research was using keywords which was fine and trying to rank that page for google for your kindle book page on google. And I thought it was a great idea because Amazon has such a high authority in the search engines. So I wrote my first book. It was like a how to type keyword and it just tanked.

T: Well yeah I guess people would go direct to Amazon and type in the search box there.

E: Yeah exactly. So after the first book I did some research and found out that people don’t actually buy books from google. I mean it’s pretty, I should have known that from the beginning but they buy them from the best seller list pretty much especially with kindle devices. I don’t even have a kindle device so I don’t really know exactly how people search for books on there. But the best seller list and promoting with the free promotion that Amazon gives you really helps with everything. There’s no, you don’t need to do keyword research at all. You don’t need to have a domain or a website. It’s just all Amazon.

T: Very cool. Oh man at least I can tell you how I buy on Amazon. I buy a lot of books. I go to Amazon, I type in kind of like the topic that I’m looking for, I look in the category and you’re right and then I look in best sellers and just see what’s there that’s kinda close to relevant to what I think I’m looking for. And if it is I read a little bit, table of contents, maybe some of the reviews and yap if it’s only 5 to 10 bucks or less I buy it.

E: Yap exactly.

T: Alright. So do you make more money now from kindle or from your websites?

E: Oh that’s probably about 60/40, 60% to my sites, 40 to kindle.

T: Kindle, okay. And which do you put more time and effort into developing for the future?

E: Websites I would guess just because it only takes up more of my time. What I’m seeing is, since I’ve only been publishing since January of this year I found that you know the books keep selling no matter what. I mean I haven’t done anything to my first 5 books except upload them mid-January, late January and they’ve been selling ever since.

T: So it’s very passive.

E: Extremely passive yeah.

T: We like that. Oh we like that. If I had a sound board here that made sound effects now I’d likely hit the applause button or maybe like a harp sound (makes a harp sound).

Alright so let’s, before we dive into the how to do this because that’s the whole point of this podcast is to explain to people “hey, here’s an opportunity. Here’s how you do it.” I wanna talk about something that is super duper important. The psychology behind the success. What I mean by that is what is it that happened to your head to make you believe that you can do this? And when I say this I mean make money online, I don’t mean just kindle books.

E: Okay.

T: That kept you going in the face of, and I read on your blog lots of failures in the beginning, coz everybody, I mean the sad truth is and it’s not just in the internet marketing business, it’s in any sales or small business, the vast majority of people aren’t successful. They simply, they get the first hurdle and when this isn’t gonna work and they give up. And when they go by somebody else’s course that has another shiny object and another easy button and years go by and they never make 10 cents but boy oh boy they spend on tons of money on courses.

E: Right.

T: Doesn’t have to be that way. And the people who come on my show and myself are examples of that not happened. What happened in your head to keep you going? When? A 180 articles and you made nothing but you didn’t give up. Why?

E: Why? Well the main reason for me personally is just because I cannot see myself working, going to a job at 8:00 or 9:00 or whatever and coming home at 5 for 30 or 40 years.

T: Yeah.

E: I just can’t. When you think about that it’s just why would you do that if you don’t want to do that with your life. For me I don’t even know if it’s just that just working at the same job. It’s just I want the freedom to do whatever I want kind of thing. And that’s what keeps me motivated in this internet game I guess.

T: Yes.

E: But… go ahead.

T: It’s exactly the same thing for me. You said some really keywords there and so listeners I hope that you more than anything in this podcast take this to heart. What drives entrepreneurs is, this is an expression for it but I guess I’ll give the expression, if you’re willing to do what other people aren’t willing to do, you will be able to do what other people can’t do. For me the drive comes from, if you can build a life for yourself as a owning your own business you will have choices that other people in the world simply do not have. How you’re gonna spend your time? Where you’re gonna be? Where you wanna live? How much you want vacation? The car you wanna drive? On and on… you’re gonna have the plethora of choices that are simply not available to the rest of the population and for me that’s my big WHY. Like if you’re gonna be successful at something you need to have a super compelling reason why you’re going to do the work every single day to get yourself towards that goal. And that’s kinda what I was fishing for as what your why was.

E: Right. I’ve had people, just to add to what you’re saying, I’ve had people ask me what I do for a living and I usually just tell them I’m a spammer coz they don’t understand anyway. But I tell them about my business and they’re like “so you just work from home all the time?”. I”m like “yeah” and they’re like, they usually say something like “man, I can never do that.”

T: Yeah.

E: And then I ask where they work and they’re working on an assembly line for 10 hours a day or something. And I”m like “I don’t know how you can do that!”

T: Yeah.

E: It sounds like the worst thing ever. I mean I don’t wanna say that to their face and make them feel bad but yeah that’s pretty much my motivation as just that – not having to do something I don’t wanna do.

T: Correct. I got a better answer for you when they ask you what you do. You have an online publishing and training company.

E: Yes. I have a book publishing company.

T: Coz that’s what you do. You publish content and then you have a blog and you wrote this whole ebook that we’re gonna talk about later that teaches people how to make money with kindle books.

Alright so with all that said (drum roll sound) I”m to jump into and let’s talk about kindle books. Somebody knows nothing, nothing, nothing and they say “hey man, this guy Eric, he’s onto something really cool. I wanna do that too.” What do I gotta do first?

E: Okay well the first thing, I’ve already said this before but the first thing you have to realize is how, where, why people buy kindle books. Obviously the kindle is pretty popular. I think they are selling 1 million kindle devices weekly in the month of December of 2011. So that’s just tells you how many kindle devices are out there, lots bought it. I wanna say people type in they use Amazon as their search engine for books but they also use the best sellers list.

T: On Amazon?

E: On Amazon yap. So actually let me pull up Amazon.com quick on my computer just so I don’t miss anything up. So if you go to books in kindle books on Amazon and then look at the best sellers list on the left side.

T: Okay so I’m in the kindle store, kindle books, new releases, departments, average customer reviews. Why am I not seeing best seller list?

E: If you hover over shot by department and then go to books and then go to kindle books. And then on the left side it’ll say best sellers.

T: No it takes me to the kindle store.

E: Right. Do you have a list of categories there?

T: Yeah departments, kindle store, kindle books, fiction, non-fiction, advise how to.

E: Okay that should be right. Does it say Amazon best sellers at the top?

T: No badly enough. Anyway we don’t need to slow the podcast. People will figure this out. They’ll be smarter than me.

E: Right. So there’s a bunch of categories on the left side and pretty much what I do is think of something I’m interested in or I know a lot about or I wanna do more research in or pretty much I wanna write about something. I’m gonna go into, what’s that I’m looking at? Something like dog training which is like the, I don’t know why I was looking at it but I was looking at the category dog training, I don’t even know how to get there right now but you’d basically click on a category and drill down until you get to the last like the bottom most category and just look at the books that are selling there. So if you click on like the no. 1 book in a category you can scroll down and see the sales rank data. You can see the reviews and all that kind of stuff. But what you wanna look at is the Amazon best seller rank.

T: Okay so let’s look at, I’ve been scrolling down here and I’m in this book called The 17 Day Diet. Alright so let’s scroll that down.

E: Right under product details?

T: Yap. Amazon best seller rank no. 270 in paid kindle store. See top 100 paid in kindle store. Maybe that’s the best seller list you’re trying to commit to earlier.

E: Probably yap.

T: Yeah best sellers in the kindle store. Ah don’t know why I couldn’t find it earlier.

E: So the best seller list is where you wanna do your research.

T: Okay.

E: Because these are books that are already selling so you know…

T: There’s demand.

E: There’s demand. People are buying what’s there so that’s where I start my research from.

T: Okay so walk me through the process. Coz the very first thing that pops into my mind is I’m looking on the Hunger Games which was totally awesome and all those stuffI”m thinking “oh I couldn’t write that.” So how do you get around that limiting? Like what do you, what are you looking for specifically here?

E: I am looking for a category where I can, where books are selling and it’s easy to get into the top 100 in that category.

T: Okay so can you try and walk me through that here?

E: Yap if you are in the top 100.

T: Yap. Top 100 paid and top 100 free.

E: Of a specific category, not just a kindle store.

T: Okay so now I gotta figure out how to do that. So how would I go, going from the kindle store looking at the best sellers how do I find…

E: Kindle… is there like kindle books, kindle ebooks under that?

T: It says kindle store, kindle blogs, kindle ebooks, kindle magazines, yeah.

E: Click on kindle ebooks.

T: Ebooks okay.

E: And I’ll just walk you through, I’m clicking advise and how to.

T: Okay.

E: And then there’s more under that. Let’s do, this is the one I usually like, go over exercise and fitness.

T: Okay.

E: And then running and jogging.

T: Okay. Alright.

E: Alright. So you’ll see the top 100 paid there. There’s no free books in this category and I can talk about that later.

T: Okay.

E: But you click on the first book.

T: Want to Run?

E: Want to Run.

T: Okay.

E: Scroll down to the product details.

T: Yeah no. 521.

E: 521 that’s extremely high. I had one of my books selling around the no. 1,000 rank and it was selling between 80 and 120 books a day.

T: Wow!

E: Yeah.

T: Okay so the rule of thumb, no. 1 – if you’re shooting for anywhere in the top 1000 is pretty awesome.

E: That’s yeah.

T: Overall. And then if I’m understanding what you’re explaining to me you’re trying to pick some drill down categories like this book has where it’s no. 1 in 3 different target drill down categories, is that correct?

E: When I’m doing my research all I look at is the best seller rank at first.

T: Okay.

E: So we got no. 521. All you need to know for now is that the book is selling. So there’s a lot of books in this category that are selling.

T: Okay.

E: Let’s go to no. 10. Back up and go to no. 10.

T: Okay and that’s Marathon – The Ultimate Training Guide. Okay.

E: Yap and that one’s rank is around 10,000.

T: Yeah.

E: So that one’s, these are rough numbers coz they update it hourly and you know that kind of stuff but that’s probably selling 20-28 copies a day or yeah 20-28 copies a day.

T: How do you, where do you get the 20-28 copies from based upon the ranking of 10,058?

E: I’m getting them off of my own books.

T: Okay.

E: I’ve had books in the 1,000 range, the 5,000. I’ve had ones sitting at the 10,000 to 15,000 and I have ones all the way down to 80,000. So I’m just getting this off of the numbers that I get from my own books.

T: Okay and so going back and I wanna write this down, I didn’t. The one that was ranked about 500 and something rather, 512, how many a day do you think that one would be selling?

E: Minimum 120.

T: Okay.

E: But I haven’t had a book that high so I can’t really tell you exact numbers.

T: And what price point would that be like 99 cents, 2 bucks, 3 bucks?

E: Well the price point depends on your competition, that’s where I look at. So if you’re gonna be posting in the running and jogging category I would look at, okay so the no. 1 book is a $10 book. The 2nd one is $2, $5, $14, $10, $10. Most of these books are pretty high.

T: Yap.

E: So you would probably be fine starting out at the $2.99 mark testing that price point and then changing it later because you can do that in your kindle direct publishing kdp account.

T: Yap.

E: Pretty quickly.

T: Okay.

E: So you can test all price points but this category is selling pretty high so I wouldn’t be surprised if you could sell a book for 6, 7, 8 bucks.

T: Okay.

E: So I try to get the numbers for the no. 1 and the no. 10 then I go to the no. 20 and grab that just to make sure that there’s no like huge drop off. Look at this one. And there it is, it’s sitting at 15,000 in best seller rank.

T: Hey I’m hearing that click, click, click is that you clicking your pen?

E: Oh yeah I’m sorry.

T: Okay thanks.

E: I’d put that down.

T: So sorry. Back at …

E: So it’s at 15…

T: Yeah which one did you just look at?

E: The no. 20, it’s a Half Marathon title.

T: Okay. So you wanna make sure that when you’re looking at no. 20 it’s not ranked like a 150,000 or something like that?

E: Right.

T: Coz that would mean that only the top 2 or 3 books are selling where as 3 up to the top 20, this one’s down to 15,000 and there’s diversity. People are buying lots of different books, not just the top 2 books.

E: Yap. And you have to realize that people usually buy more than 1 book in a category. I’m guessing especially in this category. I mean it looks like a lot of marathon, running type of books, so I’m guessing maybe people would buy maybe 2 or 3 books from this category. So that’s basically how I do my research. I just make sure that the top 20 books are selling and then to note how to get in to the top 100 I just go to the 100th book.

T: Okay so let’s do that. So that’s gonna be page 81 to the 100th so book no. 100 Chicken Soup for the Soul Runners. And it’s 73,507.

E: Yap. I’d like to see over 100,000 over the 100th book just because it would take about 1 book to get into the top 100 and it will take one sale.

T: Okay.

E: With this one it might take 2 or 3 but there are a lot of books being sold in this category so it’s a pretty good one. I would definitely, if you know something about it or hire the right writer to write your book you could definitely sell books in this category.

T: Okay. So is that the next step in your, let’s say that now we’ve done some research, we’ve hit the criteria that we’ve just talked about which is you wanna see that the books are selling. You wanna see that it’s not just the top 2 or 3 books. And then you wanna look at the 100th book to make sure that ideally it would be ranked over a 100,000 coz then that would tell you that you’d have a pretty good shot in getting in to the top 100 even with just a single sale. Did I understand all that correctly?

E: Yes

T: What happens next? You then think I’m gonna write a book on running. Now what?

E: Now it’s, this is gonna seem funny but I go back to the top 20 or the top 100 and I just look at the first page of the top 20 books.

T: Okay?

E: So I see no. 20 is half marathon, we got a barefoot running book, train like a mother, how to get across any finish line and not lose your family, job or sanity so I’m guessing that’s finding time to run, something like that. Guide to runners, Daniel’s running formula, marathon again and you just look through and see what type of theme people are looking for. So something in marathon running or something in, I really like the idea of how to train for a marathon, you know, without losing your family, job or sanity, that type of book. You know, finding time to run, how to run even if you’re busy type of thing and I just go through the top 20 books and basically use some little creativity and come up with a title for the book.

T: Okay.

E: I usually write down about 5 titles before I choose one.

T: Okay. Alright. And then how do you choose your one title out of the 5? Cut?

E: Whichever one, I like brandable titles. Let me think of an example. I’m in the business and investing category I think I have one in careers and the first 3 words of the book are kinda like the brand and it’s like land that job.

T: Can we pull that book up?

E: Sure.

T: What’s the title?

E: I think you can just type in my net job at Amazon. In the first one the ultimate guide to answering interview questions.

T: This coming from the guy who didn’t have jobs?

E: Yes sir.

T: Alright. So you did that. That’s good, nice cover, good looking cover. You got a pen name Stacy Michelle.

E: Yap.

T: It’s your pseudonym?

E: Uhm.

T: Okay so you came up with, we’ll get into the stats and stuff later. So you find, why did you choose this title?

E: I chose it because it stands out. It gets people’s attention.

T: Yap.

E: It might be intriguing. Something like that. You want something that gets the attention of the searcher or the browser and something that’s intriguing or entertaining or funny or whatever. Something that will just grab the attention of the potential buyer.

T: Okay. Now is this one of your, how many different ebooks have you published or kindle books rather have you published?

E: 8.

T: Okay. Does the 80/20 rule apply? Are 20% of your books making 80% of the sales? Or is it kinda evenly spread among the 8 books?

E: What’s 20% of 8?

T: 1.86.

E: 80/20 kind of.

T: So 2 books basically are making 80% of the money?

E: Actually no. I wouldn’t say that. A lot of my books are making a 100 bucks a month. I don’t think I have one that makes less than 50.

T: Okay.

E: But I don’t think it’s around 80%, no.

T: Okay.

E: But that’s why you create a series of books. This is a series. I think this is the first one in the series.

T: Oh yeah. Coz that’s why the whole brandable title and so forth. Your customers will repeat look. We’ll get to all of that. I still wanna get through this process. So we’ve picked a title, now what do we do now?

E: Now you want to start writing the book, grab an outline. Not grab an outline, come up with an outline for the book. What you want included. And then start writing it. And then if you’re not a writer you can always hire someone to do that. I’m not a writer. I have only written one of my books just because I knew a lot about the subject. But I get all my writers from the content authority.

T: And that would be why Shaun was the one who introduced it.

E: Yes.

T: Okay so in the case of land that job if that’s a good example to talk about, what did you have to pay a writer to write it and how many words in it?

E: This one I believe is only around 5 or 6,000 words so it’s about 25 or 30 pages.

T: Okay.

E: I paid, I don’t have exact figures. It was around a 100 or 120 for the book.

T: Somebody wrote this book for a $120?

E: Yes.

T: Is that typical?

E: Yeah if you find the right writer, yes.

T: Wow! Okay folks I hope you were listening to that. No links to build. No website to build. No articles to write. No nothing. A $120 investment and maybe some more for the cover art. And this thing, how much does this book make in a month?

E: This one is making about $350, 300ish.

T: $300 a month. Wow! That’s a pretty good deal. That is phenomenal. Fantastic! Love it! Absolutely love it!

Okay so you went on to the content authority which is thecontentauthority.com and you wrote some kind of job description, a job offer. Hey this is what I want done and tell me about that. Did you have, did you create the outline? Did you get the author to create the outline?

E: Yeah this was my first series so I wanted to do a lot of the outline myself. And so I came up with like an introduction portion, what I wanted covered since this was an interview question type of book. I wanted to get the most questions that an interview or would ask an interviewee so I gathered all those and then sent it to the content authority. Now I used their support option. I contacted support and got a hold of one of the customer service people and they actually went out and posted it into their forum saying “hey someone’s looking for a book to be written and here’s what he’s looking for. If anyone’s interested and knowledgeable on the subject, let us know. ”

T: Okay.

E: So I think I went through, the first writer for this book was pretty good so I chose her and she wrote it up.

T: How long did it take her?

E: A couple of days.

T: That’s it.

E: Yeah.

T: Okay. I mean for a professional writer if I wrote 6,000 words it’s nothing.

E: Yap.

T: Absolutely nothing. Okay so you hired a writer, he came up with a draft, you read the draft I”m assuming.

E: Of course.

T: And said you know change this, I love that. How much changes, how much back and forth did you have to do?

E: A couple of times.

T: Okay.

E: I went in, I wanted some things added and you know some sections shortened or talked about more in some areas but for the most part it was pretty good. I think it was finished in a few days and then it’s on to the editing stage once you have all the content in it that you want.

T: And did you hire a separate editor for that?

E: No actually a family member of mine who’s pretty good in writing so I sent it over to him and he looked through it and sent it back to me. But I think you can find editors if you are not a good grammar person for around a $1.50 to 2.50 a page which may seem high but it’s, you don’t wanna publish a book that has errors.

T: No you don’t.

E: It’s fully worth the time and the investment.

T: Okay I can ask you to put your pen down again too, you’re a notoriuos pen flicker. Put it out of your reach.

E: And terrible.

T: Alright so we’ve got content, it’s been edited. What about the cover art? Coz cover art I’m assuming is pretty darn important because if you’re looking at that list of the top 100 books people are gonna go for the ones that look the best.

E: Yeah of course. The two most important things I think in a book are the cover and the title.

T: Yap.

E: If you have a good cover and a good title that’s half the battle of selling your book. With this, I have some experience in photoshop so I went and bought some royalty free images. I think I got them from bigstock.com or something like that. And then just created a simple cover in photoshop. I mean you don’t need photoshop either you can use gimp or whatever is free out there. But I just use text and picture and that’s about it.

T: Yeah this is a, it’s a good looking cover but it’s really simple. I mean it’s stock photo of handshaking and then some black text.

E: When I’m, when I think of covers I think simple is better.

T: Yeah.

E: I just want people to know what the book is about right when they look at the cover.

T: Yeah big, bold title Land that Job doesn’t really leave anyone wondering what this book is about.

E: Right.

T: Okay so you’ve now published your first book for call it under 200 bucks if you have outsourced everything, editing, content writing, cover art, the whole thing. Now what do you do? So if someone, so the author has delivered to you a pdf I’m assuming.

E: Actually I use word, microsoft word.

T: Okay.

E: I believe you can do a pdf. Actually I wanna say no.

T: Okay so they give you word.

E: There’s a bunch of different formats. You can go to kdp.amazon.com and look at their formatting guidelines where you can use a doc, a docx and mobile formats too. But I just write it down with word, make sure it’s formatted with headings and a table of contents and go to kdp.amazon.com and log in to my account and upload it.

T: Wow that’s easy.

E: Uhm.

T: That’s really easy. Okay so what happens after you upload it. Then what do you do? Sit back and wait?

E: No. You wanna get reviews for your book, good reviews. So at first I’m sending them out to my friends and family, people on facebook, twitter, whereever I can find them, forums if it was in a subject area of the forum and I just tell people “hey, I wrote a series of books. I will give them to you if you can give me an honest review.” And a lot of people said “sure” so I gifted them the book. Right under the buy now button on the amazon there’s a give as gift button and you just put their email address in and you buy it for them. When they send it, amazon sends it and they read it and whoever wants to post a review on amazon post their reviews.

T: Okay cool.

E: And hopefully they’re good reviews.

T: Yap.

E: So that was the next stop, it’s getting reviews.

T: And so after this particular book here and I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this is probably typed in amazon as we are and we can see there are 6 customer reviews. And what is the ranking of this book by the way, it is 12,523 and it’s no. 4 in job hunting.

E: Uhm.

T: So you’ve uploaded it, you got some reviews, then did you sit back and just wait for the money to come in? What happened next or what did you do next?

E: Well I found out when you start uploading, when you upload to kindle there’s a program called kindle select which is a program that allows kindle, I think its kindle primie readers to borrow your book to other people so I signed up for that and they allow you to also go free with your book for 5 days every 90 days.

T: Okay.

E: So I went, I chose to go free 1 day and when you go free you get all this people to download your book for free and usually they download other books in your same niche, same category.

T: Uhm.

E: So when that does, and this is after a while of actually publishing a books and reading a lot I found out that the more you get into the queue for the customer also bought list coz right under the book you can see the customers who also bought this item, bought these books, if you get into those list more often your books are gonna be seen by more people. So you’re gonna get more sales that way.

T: And the giving it away for free for that 1 day per month or per 90 days, what did you say that was?

E: You can go up to 5 days per 90 days but usually I only do 1 day. Coz I’ve seen that if you go more than 1 day it usually doesn’t make that much of a difference.

T: Okay so you did it, gave it away free for 1 day and that got you into the queue of customers who bought this item also bought for some other books, was that the tactic there?

E: Yes.

T: Okay. So we got reviews, we got it in the queue, prefer we’ll call it a related items queue, was there any other promotional activities that you do?

E: None.

T: Wow cool.

E: Nothing.

T: And now what do you do with this book now? Nothing? Just count the money?

E: Yeah pretty much. Yeah I just wait for my check.

T: Now do you, you know I’m a big fan of list building, you put up a niche site, you build a list, you can reach out to your list and say “I’ve got some new stuff, do you wanna buy my stuff?” Is there anything in the amazon world, do you get a customer list? I don’t imagine that you do Amazon probably called?

E: No you don’t. Amazon does allow links in your books so you can link to your website.

T: Or the book?

E: Yeah.

T: Or your website you could promote all of your own books on your website so every book that you write can just link back to your site and in doing so you’re cross promoting everything you’ve ever done.

E: Yes. We could do that.

T: Under that author name do you use the same pseudonym for all your books? Is Stacy Michelle for everything?

E: No I use different pen names for different categories of books.

T: Oh yeah that makes sense. Okay.

E: I don’t want people clicking on like you can click on the author to go to the author page. I don’t wanna see books on gardening with answering interview questions.

T: Yeah.

E: By the same author. So I highly suggest sticking with one.

T: Okay so Stacy Land that job, How to write a perfect resume, Get paid, Secrets to Negotiating and Land your dream jobs. You know that’s beautiful. People who bought one of your books will probably buy most of them.

E: Right.

T: Brilliant. Are there any other golden nuggest to get someone started?

E: Golden nuggets? I will just say taking action. That’s about all you have to do. If you do your research correctly and make sure the title of your publishing is actually being bought by people.

T: Yeah.

E: Then you should be fine. That would be fine with your books.

T: Anyone who’s been listening to me for a while has heard that theme over and over again. If you wanna get wet, stand under a waterfall. If you’re building an adsense site you wanna find keywords with lots of advertiser competition coz you wanna know people that are some money niche, that people are actively spending money and buying stuff and that is exactly what you have just shared with my audience. Don’t go find something where there’s no competition coz there’s a reason there’s no competition.

E: Exactly.

T: Nobody wants to buy anything. You know like how to make your aunt do country line dance, like how to teach your cat country line dancing. Guess what? There’ll be no competition for that at all. None. You can be no. 1. But nobody’s gonna buy that book coz nobody cares.

E: My dad always uses the expression underwater basket weaving.

T: There you go. Absolutely. So don’t write any books on underwater basket weaving or cat country line dancing. Alright so I’m sure some people, Eric, are listening to this and they’re thinking “hey this is cool but I need more details” so how can they, I know you told me you wrote an ebook on this so if you wanna tell us a little bit about your ebook and where they can get it and what it costs and all that kind of thing?

E: Yeah well the ebook has, well it’s called publishing for profit and you can find it on shuckabuck.com and you can get a few free chapters too if you wanna check those out. It goes through the research process. I have a bunch of screen shots and it walks you through step by step. And then it has more on developing titles, where to get covers made if you don’t know how to create a cover. Writing out descriptions which is as pretty big too. And then everything from getting reviews and pretty much how to sell your books because with the reviews and your product description it’s kinda like an area for your sales page and it should be a sales pitch. So you wanna be selling the entire on your description and it goes through a couple of different ways that I do that with your books. And it goes through the publishing, how to upload the book step by step. And pretty much everything you need to know. Everything that I use to publish and sell books is in my ebook.

T: Okay. And he’s understating his ebook, folks. It’s 45 pages long, I’m looking at it and it has a truckload of details in it. And what do you sell the book for? 20 bucks I think you told me?

E: Yap it’s $20 until May 11th but I think we talked before about…

T: Yeah we’re under a promo code.

E: Yeah we can give you a discount code for your readers.

T: Okay. So if you’re listening to this in your car or whatever and you wanna be able to easily get to the page that hosts this podcast we’ll make it onlineincomelab.com/session022 and that’ll take you right to this page. And the other thing if you want to just go directly of course you can go to shuckabuck.com but you will not get the promo code if you do it that way. And so it makes more sense obviously to go through my affiliate link. Actually I think there is no affiliate link, is there? I may make 10 cents for this. Why, why are you on my show?

E: I could set one up that would be fine with me.

T: If there’s an affiliate link, yeah sure go ahead definitely set one up. But that’s not why I brought you on the show. I brought you on the show coz I wanted to learn about this and I thought my audience would think it as cool as well. Which has been. This has been a really interesting podcast. You mentioned to me before we went on the air and I’m not gonna mention the dollar figure in case it’s private to you but if you wanna share, you know, kinda how much you’re making, you know, as you’re into internet marketing now it’s a great time to do. I know that people seem to place a great deal of credibility on how much someone says their making so if there’s a number you wanna share feel free to.

E: I make a million dollars a month selling kindle ebooks.

T: (Laughs) That’s all? Ah dude, I’m doing a million a week.

E: No I passed the thousand dollar a month mark with kindle ebooks only last month. That was April.

T: Yap.

E: And this month it’s gonna be close to 2,000.

T: That’s pretty good folks. He’s only been doing this since January. How many of you would like to make an extra $2,000 a month in 4 or 5 months from the time you started. And outsourcing everything. This is easier than building websites. This is ridiculously easy. I’m gonna have to try this with all the extra free time that I don’t have. I need to go in to entrepreneur start up addicts synonymous. Everytime I see another cool idea that makes passive income I wanna be in that.

E: Yeah.

T: Well because I have an outsource I think well I’ll just write another check. I’ll always get somebody to do it for me. And that’s generally how I do it. Alright so what are we missing here? So we’ve given out the url of how you can listen to this episode. We’ve talked about a lot of really interesting stuff. And we’re rolling up here on an hour and I don’t like my podcasts to go longer than an hour.

So Eric, 2 thumbs up man. You’ve been an awesome guest. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with myself and the readers a very interesting way to make what seems like incredibly passive income that is totally Google proof. You don’t have to worry about losing your adsense account or Google algorithm changes or nothing. You can tell Google they can go piss off. If you wanna be in the amazon business or the kindle books business. Of course you know Amazon may come up with some trickery of their own one day but I don’t know, I think that’s pretty far off.

E: Yeah. Well you’re welcome Trent.

T: No problem at all. Okay folks again thanks very much for listening. It’s always a pleasure to have you listen to the show. I love your comments and your feedback. Again to get to this episode it’s onlineincomelab.com/session022. Eric and I will both be paying attention to the comments box. If you have questions go ask and we’ll get you some answers. So that’s it until the next episode, we will talk to you soon.

OIL 006: AN INTERVIEW WITH NATE RIVERS – NICHE SITE WIZKID

Trent: Hey everybody! Welcome to the Online Income Lab podcast. Here we are with episode no. 6. And speaking of avoiding anything to do a real job or avoiding a real job rather we have the San Diego blackout last night. That was pretty exciting. Absolutely no internet, no cellphone, no power whatsoever. Very good for forcing you to go out and go meet your neighbors. So anyone in this neighborhood. I hadn’t actually expect to be able to do this show today.

So on the show with me, fortunately we’ve got the power back, and on the show with me is a fellow by the name of Nate Rivers who I’ll introduce in just a second. I came across Nate a number of months ago and somehow found his blog, street blogger, I’m not even really sure how I found it. I joined his mailing list. Nate sent an email out 4-5 days ago. Caught my attention, clicked the link through to the warrior forum where he had a warrior special offer that he was explaining something called the niche video tycoon. So I bought that and I thought I was gonna check out what this guy is doing because it sounds very interesting. So Nate and I had a short conversation after my purchasing that coz I told him I was so fascinated with what I found in his course and I really wanna get him to talk about it.

And so it’s a new activity that I’m gonna start in addition to my adsense sites hopefully some of my listeners here will want to do the same things. With all that said, Nate, very happy to have you on the show. Welcome to the Online Income Lab podcast.

Nate Rivers: Thanks Trent, it’s good to be here.

T: So I’m assuming you didn’t have any power either last night.

N: No

T: That’s good.

N: I was just sitting here like normal.

T: So Nate, let me ask. Many of my guests probably are not familiar with you yet. If you could start by saying a little bit about your background. How did you get started it online? And what were you doing before you got online?

N: Well, before I started online I was doing whatever anyone else was doing. You know working at some crappy job and hating every minute of it. I went to college. Got a degree in accounting and god I just hated having a job. It drove me crazy, the idea of making somebody else rich. That was the main thing. I wasn’t even having so much having a go at jobs everyday. It drove me insane to, no matter how hard I work or how good my work was I got paid a fixed amount. Somewhere along the line I got the idea of making money on the internet and I don’t remember what I came across online and how I got that idea.

But if anyone’s heard of this site building software called SBI or site build it, kind of a primitive, all-in-one package that’s supposed to teach you how to do online marketing. And that’s the first thing I came across and this was like 3 or 4 years ago. So I built a site with that and spent a lot of time on it for basically 2 years and it never went anywhere. And so my first 2 years I tried to build an online business was a complete failure.

T: I don’t think that’s terribly uncommon. 2 years? Maybe longer than most I’m really not sure but I’ll tell you what. If it is a test of it with the fact that you decided to stick with it, if you continue at something and don’t give up that’s make a success of yourself. So the failure in the first 2 years, I’m guessing you didn’t do any keyword research, you weren’t sure what traffic was. What made you pick this particular site and now that you know the whole researching aspect how bad did you screw it up?

N: That was the main thing. Not something that people usually don’t really focus on coz they wanna start building sites as fast as they can or whatever but yeah, I didn’t get the idea of I guess competition in the search engine or whatever. And the site was about body building of all things. And I wasn’t even going after like long tail keywords like I was trying to rank, seriously trying to rank for the terms like body building or how to get ribs. It’s ridiculous. And so I’ve built all these pages after like 6 months or a year it’s not even showing, they’re not even on the map in the search engines anywhere. And I was thinking “man, this sucks”. I have put in all this work and nothing happens.

And so choosing your niche and how to like find niches that you’ll be able to rank for and keywords I would say that’s the most important step to getting started on the right foot because well you could spend 2 years working on something and if you’ve chosen the wrong niche it’s not gonna go anywhere.

T: I couldn’t agree more as you and I were talking about very briefly before we went on the air. That’s one of the reasons why I’m re-launching my training webinar series and you can just go to the Online Income Lab blog, there’ll be a button on the right hand side bar where you can sign up for. Because keyword research is 90% and I say that in every episode of the podcasts and I think in every post that I make I hammer the point on keyword research, keyword research. And it takes a long time to figure out all the little itty, bitty specifics that go into the importance of that.

So interesting that you’ve started off like the rest of us, following, actually on my webinar I point out a couple of my mulligan sites one of mountain biking and one of car driving video games and yeah it wasn’t quite bad as your body builder story but it was a whole lot better. So what happened after what you call an internet flop to the wildest, successful guy that you are now? So let’s go back to the body building disappointment. What happened next? Why didn’t you just quit?

N: Well, I did quit for a few months. Yeah at some point like the SBI program’s $30 a month for their site hosting and everything. And after 2 years I just added it up in my head and said ok I’ve spent like almost a thousand dollars by just working on this thing with no returns whatsoever. I finally just went into my account, cancelled my account completely. I took the site offline and I just for a few months just given up on the internet idea completely.

And then I couldn’t really get the idea out of my head. And I’m just, you know I go online everyday and just mess around like everyone. This stinks. How come I can’t figure out how to make money somehow in here. The internet is huge. There’s gotta be something that I can figure out. And so I started looking around again. And this is basically another failure. I’ll give you a short version.

But I came across the idea of pay per click. And you know, anyone selling of course on pay per click, they want you to think that you can just set up a campaign direct link to an affiliate offer and it’s as easy as starting a campaign. Well, they sold me on that idea. I still haven’t learned that much I guess because I’ve waited. And I spent like a whole day setting up my pay per click account, loading money in there, setting up my first campaign. And I remember finishing like 2 or 3 in the morning and just, this is funny but I went to bed sneaking and I said this is gonna be so sweet when I wake up in the morning. I’d make like 500 bucks. And I woke up, I’d spent like $200 and not made a single sale and I just could not believe it. I was like how I thought that this was gonna work for sure.

And so anyways, a few months after that that made me give up again for a few months. A few months after that, this part I’m really hazy on. I don’t remember where I came across the idea of niche sites but I did somewhere and then I brought a course on building this small niche sites. And so I started doing that and I didn’t have any huge success fast but I started getting just small sales pretty quickly and it has blown my mind coz I spent 2 years on that body building site and never even, you know I think the whole time I think I made $5 per adsense or something. The whole 2 years. When within just the first 2 months of setting up these niche sites I started getting sales from the different sites. And it just kind of, I don’t know, I did get a lot of training I guess in the first 2 years just kind of learning how it all works. So it wasn’t a complete waste. And just in the process of building these niche sites, I just kind of, I finally just got how it works I guess.

And then the next level was, you know after the 6 months of building these sites I kind of look back and the more successful ones I just thought “wooh, I should just create my own product for this instead of sending all my traffic over to as an affiliate to another vendor.” So that’s what I did. I just created my first product, it was an e-book for one of my niche sites. It was doing pretty well and that just really changed things from there. I got into creating e-books for most of my niche sites and then I thought well I’d rather sell these things for higher prices so I started creating video courses instead of an e-book. So now, that’s just been for the last year and a half. That’s my main thing. That’s what the WSO was about is. Putting together simple video courses to sell in these niche sites instead of the e-book because video and audio content is just much higher perceived value than just an e-book.

T: Absolutely. So for the readers that are curious, for the listeners rather that are curious are you willing to share how well are you doing online? How many sites you’ve got?

N: Well, yeah, I mean I’m gonna add this up in my head. I have over a dozen of this little sites. Well, I have a lot more than that that are, I still do just affiliate sites you know. So kind of my main method is I set up affiliate sites first and a lot of work. And then the ones that perform well then I go back and create my own product for it because creating your own product is kind of a lot of work and you know obviously if you can see how it goes with the affiliate offers first it’s better to find your best performing sites, what niches are performing best and then go back and create your own course.

So that’s what I do. So my main course site, sorry, my own site that I have my own courses for, I have over a dozen of those and everyone of those makes between like 500 and 1300 a month.

T: That is fantastic.

N: And it’s pretty awesome. I gotta tell you it’s pretty sweet because I don’t really do anything to work on those. Those are 95% auto pilot.

T: No gc’s, no organic traffic.

N: No, geez, I don’t pay for traffic.

T: Interesting. So I have a copy of your course here in front of me. Now I’ll just ask you a few questions. So when you are, sorry let’s go back. You said that you do a lot of affiliate sites first. Let’s talk a little bit about that. So what’s a lot? How many of those things are you launching in a given month would you say?

N: Well, to be honest with you, the last few months like I was telling you on the call the other day, it’s kinda been in this last six months that things have really gelled and my online income has just exploded. So the last few months it’s been summer I kind of been like basking in the… whatever you call that…

T: The glow of the internet lifestyle.

N: Yeah, and I haven’t done a ton of work. But back when I was just, I mean I had a goal to set up 50 sites like 6 months ago and so I would get usually 4 or 5 of those niche site set up every month. And someone who’s just willing to work their ass of could do a lot more than that really. And I point out I was only writing articles for this which is stupid like there are article writers out there that can write articles better than I can. And you pay them 10-15-20 dollars per article. And it’s done in 3 days instead of taking a week to write 10 articles or so. But people that are just starting and maybe don’t have the budget writing your own articles is not really that big a deal. In fact if you have to get started then do it obviously.

T: So let’s talk about the specifics about an article. How many words? How long do you make it?

N: 500. Everytime 500.

T: What keyword density are you using?

N: 2% I mean when I was writing myself I did not take the time to like calculate that. I just made sure that it was in an H1 tag or an H2 tag on the page and on the last paragraph. That’s only like things I like make sure I did every time. Because having the keyword in your URL, your title, your meta tag, your description and your first paragraph is by far the most important thing as far as on page SEO.

T: Yap. Same process I follow. Have you been able to discern, excuse me, since the panda update 500 words have you tried any, the sites that you’re creating with 500 words they’re still ranking like before panda?

N: Yeah definitely. And this is something that, might sound crazy but I go for very, very low competition keywords and that’s kind of the, my whole process just to give you an example. In one of my sites, one of my better performing sites it made 1300, it has like 7 raw pages on it. The main keyword phrase that the site is optimizing is for gets searched only for 140 exact match searches a month if you look in Google tool. So most people that know what they’re talking about so to speak or gurus would tell you that it’s totally not worth the time to go after. But you have your own priorities so, you know, and it’s a video course that you can sell for more than just 15 bucks like an e-book. You don’t need that many sales to hit 5,6,700,000 dollars a month.

T: In that way, ladies and gentlemen, is what really calls my interest when I read Nate’s course. Why I had him on the show. Coz if you’ve been at this any amount of time and myself and many other teachers who are talking about adsense or affiliate stuff or all I’m saying is you should have a few thousand searches for that primary keyword and of course it’s more difficult to get a site rank when there’s 3,000 searches because there’s that many people pursuing that word. But you start going down in a 140 searches a month. Nobody, nobody is paying attention to that keyword. Nate, how long does it take you to set it out on the first page? A month?

N: No, less than that usually 2 or 3 weeks. A lot of times the youtube video will hit the first page like in a week or a few days. And I guess I might as well explain that I know I didn’t mention that before. Each article I write, I go in and make a powerpoint video that I put on youtube that’s optimized for the same keyword as the article. And then I take the youtube video and embed it on the article page on my own site. Because then the youtube video 9x out of 10x is gonna rank in the top 10 so is your article. And then the youtube video being embedded on your article on your site will quadruple your average time on site. And that’s another huge indicator that Google looks at to decide which site is most relevant to these viewers. They see how long do people stay in your site, you know. So having a youtube video embedded on the site will just really send up your average time on site.

T: So let’s just dive to that youtube video for just a little bit deeper for a second. So you get a 500 word article, how are you gonna turn that into a youtube video? Do you basically make a short powerpoint presentation that kinda encapsulates what the article is about?

N: Oh yeah that’s it.

T: And then do a voice over or do you just read slide by slide like slide 1 blah, blah, blah… slide 2 blah, blah, blah?

N: I don’t read slide by slide. I just kinda talk about the contents of the article. I mean, I cover what’s exactly in the article but I just like to talk… the thing you’ll hear me say over and over again in my training whatever it is, you owe it to your video whether it’s a paid product, a video course that members pay for, youtube videos, you just wanna talk like you would be talking to your bestfriend. Just very casual, you know, a casual tone. When you try to like read slides word for word it becomes just uninteresting instantly.

T: Yeah it’s boring. How long do you make these videos?

N: 2 or 3 minutes. And if it, you know, sometimes I’ll just end up talking longer about whatever it is, 6 or 7.

T: So far what we have is we pick a keyword with 140 searches. You built the 7 page site. You got a total of 7 500 word articles. You’ve created sounds like 7 youtube videos that are between 2 and 3 minutes each. One of those youtube videos is embedded on the page for the keyword that it’s targeting. Am I understanding this correctly?

N: That’s correct.

T: Ok. Now do you have to do any link building at all? Or are you on first page just on what I described?

N: Well, I don’t really know because I do link building, yes. But I made this some automated process that takes me like 5 extra minutes after every article I post. So when I setup to build all these niche sites really fast. I sign up for Unique Article Wizard and you know one submission will give you about 2 to 300 backlinks to the given article and you can put 2 links in every resource box. So one of the links in the resource box I use for the same article on my site and then the 2nd link on the resource box I link to my youtube video for my same keyword phrase. So that process 9x out of 10 will give me top 10 ranking for both the video and the article on my own site.

T: Wow. Talk about going after the low hanging fruit. And I think absolutely that’s one of the brilliant parts of your strategy. You just think about how many keywords that are out there that are under 500 searches that you could go after.

N: Yeah that’s ridiculous.

T: You’ve opened up an entirely new market that isn’t really on anyone else’s radar coz I’ve spent a lot of time in the forums, a lot of time talking with other niche marketers and nobody, nobody has ever made their primary keywords under 200 a month. You’ve figured out how to make money. And the reason why for the listeners and the audience that may be grasping this yet, if you’re running an adsense site or you’re doing affiliate site of any kind the reason that you need 3, 4, 5, 6,000 searches is in the case of an adsense site you might only be making 50 cents to 52 cents to a dollar per click. So you need a lot of clicks. Or if you’re doing an affiliate site you know depending upon the sale price of the product that you’re selling you’re probably only getting 4 to maybe 8% depending on the product of whatever that product is. So you simply, you just need a higher volume of clicks to make a decent income.

But in the case, Nate, what you’re doing because you’ve created your own product and you’re selling it for $47 you don’t have to give any portion of the $47 to anybody else and so 1 or 2 sales a month and that’s as much money as most people make from an affiliate site and they’re happy if they’ll make a hundred dollars a month.

My aunt quoted many times as saying “hey, I’ll build an adsense site if it’ll make me 50 bucks a month”. So out of a 140 searches and you’re ranked no. 1 we’ll assume so you’re gonna get the vast majority of those people to your site that makes 1300 a month. Now what’s the amount of traffic that goes to the site each day? Do you know what that is off the top of your head?

N: Yeah, yeah. On average it’s like 37 visitors a day.

T: Yeah 37 visitors a day. So you figured out that’s like a thousand. You must be getting some long tail as well coz that exceeds a 140 searches. But the point is

N: Yeah. Only 1 page you know 1 keyword phrase gets a 140 then you add 10 pages that are all around there you know. So yeah, it adds up but still not, it’s much less than a guru would tell you to go after. But yeah those 10 pages help out obviously.

T: Ok so you hit on a very important topic there and I don’t want to skip past this. This is the related keywords. And actually hold on before we get in to the related keywords I just wanna quickly talk about – so when you’re ordering your articles I think you and I both talked that we order from the content authority. And I know on the content authority when you’re ordering article no. 1 there’s a little check box and you can order a rewrite of that article or 2 rewrites or 3 rewrites and the major benefit of doing that is you don’t have to spend all the time using a spinning program like The Best Spinner and going and inserting all the spintax which can be a little bit labourish. Lots and lots of copies when you’re done but you don’t do it that way.

N: No way. I figure out the fastest way to do things possible I guess mine is creating my own products. I don’t outsource my product creation. I do them all by myself. And I guess the point will come where I will do outsourcing but everything else, the stuff that I absolutely hate doing like writing articles, building backlinks obviously, manually building backlinks, there’s nothing worse than that.

T: Yeah.

N: Or spinning an article. Like I tried some spinning software once and I just can’t stand doing that. So I just really like Unique Article Wizard’s format. I order a set of 3 articles, 1 original, 2 rewrites. Plug it into the Unique Article Wizard and I’m done. A few days later it’ll have 300 backlinks.

T: So for each, I wanna wrap my mind all the time to do this, so you’ve created a post and you pasted it in the content that you got from the content authority so that’s really quick. I have my VA’s for example going to embed images in those articles, tag the images, do you do any of that or do you add the content?

N: I do actually. I will put an image in and give it an alt-tag that’s the same keyword phrase and the youtube videos as well.

T: Ok so you got that in there. You got a couple of minutes and then all you do is you take and rewrite no. 1 and rewrite no. 2 plus do you use the, coz you use the Unique Article Wizard, you need 3 versions of an article right?

N: Yeah I don’t use the original one.

T: You don’t even spin it.

N: Yeah the original one won’t be posted anywhere exactly like it is on your own site coz it’s gonna get spun in between the other 2.

T: That’s true. See I’ve spent so long my VA is using Unique Article Wizard for months I haven’t laid a finger on it myself personally I’ve gotten a bit foggy on it I don’t know how it works. So you put in the 3 versions in Unique Article Wizard will swap the paragraph. Will it swap it in paragraph level or sentence level? I don’t remember.

N: Paragraph.

T: Paragraph. Ok so you just hit the go. So really for each one of those post that you’re doing this extra layer of work with Unique Article Wizard we’re talking minutes, not much time at all.

N: 10-15 minutes at the most.

T: Yeah ok. So I wanna go back now to where we were a minute ago with these related keywords. So how, you’ve mentioned your primary keyword searches 140 a month but now we’ve got 7 or 8 or 9 or 6. How many articles do you wanna do? How do you pick your related keywords? What are the criteria? What are the tools?

N: I use Market Samurai for all my keyword research. That’s the only thing I use because it runs from the Google keyword tool and just makes it much much faster and easier to see everything at once. And so what I do if I get a general idea of something that I might want to create a site about I search for a certain phrase that has to do with it in Market Samurai. Then your big indicator is the, inside Market Samurai there’s a column called SEOTC, Search Engine Title Competition. That’s telling you how many other pages out there in the internet are actually optimized for that keyword phrase. So that’s really all you need to look at. All I wanna know is monthly searches, monthly exact searches. Don’t use broad or phrase. Monthly exact searches and then I just go through and look at the search engine title competition and if it’s less around 5,000 or less and it is as far as like from human perspective it logically relates to my main keyword then I’ll use it.

T: So let me summarize that back make sure that I understand this right. You got primary keyword, we’ll call it dog training for lack of a better word. You punch that into Market Samurai, it’s gonna produce for you when you hit the analyze button I believe if I remember this correctly coz I don’t use Market Samurai anymore, it’ll produce a list of related keywords. You are then sorting that list by the SEOTC column looking for words that have fewer than 5,000 and then just using common sense to say does this relate to dog training that I would write another article to put on my site.

N: Yeah. That’s funny you say dog training because anyone that talks about you know like finding niches they use that example. It’s just the gold standard example in internet marketing. And so when I put this WSO together just to prove that you can even find keywords within the biggest most saturated niches that will still make this formula work. I searched dog training to start off with just to see what I could find. And what I found was like how to housebreak an older dog and that phrase itself is very niched.

T: Very much so.

N: How to train an older dog. But that phrase gets exact searches and it only have like 600, not 6,000 but only 600 SEOTC. And that’s a ridiculous keyword like you know that’s 8x as many searches as my main keyword for other sites that I already make like a thousand a month you know. And then I do a separate search for that keyword, how to house train an older dog, and I was able to find like 15 other keywords that directly were about how to train an older dog. Something to do with older dog, training an older dog. Most of them had less than a thousand than SEOTC.

If you can find keywords with less than a thousand SEOTC it’ll virtually guarantee you, it’ll be very easy to get in the top 10 for those keywords. That’s a super low amount on a competition, your competing pages. And even within the dog training niche they will find I mean 20 keywords. You could make 20 pages of full site of how to train or how to break an older dog. And there are even any e-books out there like on click bank or anything that I could find. But it’s obviously if you add those up collectively that exact niche is getting searched for several thousand times a month. There’s no product out there about it.

T: I just want to, I’ve fired up my browser out here coz I want to type that in. I wanna check something. And there’s one how to train an adopted dog by the way that Google instant just punched in for me. Ok so one of the tests of commerciality that I always look at when I’m building an adsense site if keywords fail this test coz I want to look at how many ads is played on when you go to Google, you type in how to train an older dog and hit the search button, if you don’t see any pay per click ads at the top or over at the right generally speaking that would be a keyword that I would have avoided.

Now in your situation have you run, is this one of the tests? Coz the word we’re talking about is a hypothetical one that you know we’ve got this phrase how to train an older dog which is easy to rank for and is related to dog training. But when you, for the sites that you’ve built that’s been commercially successful, is part of your research has it been, how do you tell people that you’re spending money on that niche. I have my tests that I do and by the way I cover all of this in detail in my webinars so if you want to find out the real detail just sign up to one of the webinars in Online Income Lab. But Nate what are the tests that you use to test for commerciality?

N: Yeah I have a very, very simple test that so far has a 100% success rating. To create an info product all I do is I go to Amazon.com and if I can find a published book, even one, about the general idea then I’ll go forward with it. That’s it. Now there’s a big distinction because one of the popular technics, overnight niches right now is upload a bunch of PLR crap into Amazon’s kindle store so don’t look at results that come up for the kindle in Amazon if you do this. The big difference is once you do a search you can click on pay per box only so that would give you actually if a publisher has decided that this book is gonna sell enough to make it worth it for us then that’s my test.

T: Ok. So I’m already on Amazon. I did that how to train an older dog. We’ve got

N: There’s a book called How to Train a Dog of any Age.

T: So there are 6 results: How to Housebreak your Dog in 7 Days, How to Teach a New Dog Old Tricks, How to Teach your Old Dog New Tricks. Lasels has nothing to do with dogs. The Power of Positive Dog Training and Everything you Need to Know about Housetraining Puppies and Adult Dogs. Those are the only 6 that I see. Which one did you say was supposed to be there?

N: There was a book that I just saw when I was doing this the other day called something like how to train a dog of any age.

T: And what was the search phrase that you typed in to Amazon?

N: Probably it might have been how, maybe not training, it may be housetrain like as in potty train, I don’t know, something like that. But there was a paperback on there and that’s what I, that’s like my key test. That’s it.

T: Interesting. Anyway, the point I’ve got so when you type in your search there’s 6 paperbacks. They’re all sort of kinda close but they’re not exactly about how to train an older dog. Is that a pass or a fail?

N: That’s a pass for sure. I’m just looking for like related. If there’s the book published that’s like related.

T: So you punch it into Amazon, a couple of paperback results come up. Common sense says that’s pretty closely related to my topic so from a commerciality stand point for you that’s a go.

N: Yeah and like you said a few minutes ago, ok so once I pay for articles at the most $200 to set up one time, even if that only gets like 1 or 2 sales a month, within a year tbat’s produced, even if it’s only 500 in a year I mean that’s a passive income producing asset of 500 a year that once you do it once it’s over and you don’t touch it again. So I mean I’m willing to do that.

T: Absolutely.

N: But most of them do better than that but I’m just saying like worst case scenario.

T: So let’s go back to this building affiliate sites first then picking the winners from the affiliate sites to actually build a product for. So how do you typically, let’s just stick with this how to train an older dog thing here for just a minute. So you’re gonna build an affiliate site around that topic and you’re just gonna promote some Amazon products on it? What is it that occurs that makes you think “hey this site is worth making my own product for”? Is it just traffic or is it traffic and conversions? What are you looking for?

N: Yeah I don’t really have a set indicator for that. I just kind of, yeah, I mean it’s definitely traffic and I’ll look at average time on site or the views that the videos that I’ve made for the articles. How much they’re getting. And then I guess if it’s $400 in a month in affiliate sales, a combination of adsense, Amazon stuffs, click bank products then I will create a product for it.

T: $400 in commission to you or $400 in sales?

N: I mean commissions to me.

T: Ok.

N: Not 400 in sales because in Amazon you’d hit 400 pretty easy. It’d only make like whatever 6% of 400 is. Yeah commissions to me.

T: Ok again I wanna make sure that I’m really grasping this concept. You’re gonna pick a keyword, a primary keyword that has 200 searches or less somewhere in that neighborhood.

N: Well it can have more.

T: Sure sure.

N: If the SEOTC is 5,000 or below then I mean I’ve had a few that I found like 3 or 4,000.

T: Sure. So you pick primary keyword and 6 or 7 related keywords all that have an SEOTC of less than 5,000. You go ok I’m gonna build the site and then you’ve checked on Amazon and found out that there’s a published book so you’re gonna put adsense and you put Amazon and do you look for click bank product and just throw them all in one there?

N: Well I guess it’s like backwards from that maybe. So for me to come up with ideas for niches I go to click bank or Amazon and I just start digging through the categories. And then if I see something that seems like that in itself is kind of like a niche idea already then I’ll just do a search in Market Samurai. So that I have a starting point of there’s already product to sell for this list.

T: Yeah. The concept I’ve heard the term parade. You wanna find a customer parade and then stand in front of it. So what does that mean? A lot of folks especially when they’re new and if they jump in here if when I’m explaining start to diverge from what happens in your mind. A customer parade is a proven, there’s competition. There’s actually one to see lots of competing products. Because if there’s no competing products there’s nobody spending money on that niche.

And so if they’re not spending any money then you’re not gonna make any money. So you find a niche where there is plenty of competing products and then you’re gonna find some way to get some portion of that traffic to your site. Now we’ve just covered that portion and repeat that yet again. So in the case of click bank you could go on and find some high gravity products and I would say stay out of the make money online niche because your competition is off the charts. Find some other stuff, start doing some research around that. See if you can find number of keywords that fall under the SEOTC of 5,000. Then build a site, promote that particular click bank products and if you see I’ll maybe throw some adsense on and maybe Amazon affiliate on some of the other pages but if you see that you’re starting to make a couple of hundred dollars per month for you that’s when you say “hey now I’m gonna reserve time, effort and resources to go and build a product to put on the site. Did I digest that correctly?

N: Yeah yeah definitely. Like my method I don’t look for, like I said the Amazon test the published paperback that is, you know to a small degree just make them sure that there’s a demand. But I definitely don’t go after things that are super popular if there’s like only a few paperback books chances are there’s not even like a click bank e-bok out there about it. So you can make that and then in most niches like outside of the IM niche nobody knows those video courses as like a paid product. Nobody that does so creating this is like you know I guess technically you could go into an area where there’s tons of e-books but you really a video course and instantly be perceived better than all the other e-books than all these e-books.

T: And now you’ve segway into the next topic that I wanna cover and the course itself. So at this point now you wanna have content that’s not widely available so we’re not talking youtube videos anymore. So what do you do? How do you make the site? What does the video teach? How do you host the video? Can you give us some details there?

N: This is the part that blows people’s mind and most people just have this thing in their head that I can’t make a product I’m not an expert in anything. That’s just, it’s not even real concept. It’s not real. I basically do what I call become an expert in a week. These books that I mentioned I buy them, I read them then I just search any forms. Basically just do 2 or 3 days where I spend a few hours and then I become an expert. And really the definition of an expert at least for our purposes here is that you know more about the subject than the people looking for information. That’s it. You don’t need a PhD in whatever it is. You just become an expert in a week. I don’t copy to make my video courses. I don’t copy the book that I bought. I just learn everything I can about it then just kind of put my own twist. Well maybe not even a twist. Just create these video courses where I just talk about it and you know teach it to people.

T: You do what all the other authors do. They read everyone else’s book and they take the best ideas from everyone’s book. Make the content their own and write their own book.

N: Yeah it’s totally true. That is how it works.

T: So let’s talk about the video, are you on camera facing the video?

N: No

T: Are you just powerpoints?

N: Yeah strictly powerpoints. I used to think well you can say that this is a video course but someone might pay for the product, get in there and just think what the hell these aren’t real videos. These are just powerpoints. And then my first few products I didn’t get any. All I got was positive feedback from people, from customers saying thanks this course is super helpful and everything. And then at some point it just kind of dawn on me that every college course in America where kids are paying thousands of dollars per semester to attend these classes, what are they getting taught on?

T: Powerpoint?

N: Powerpoint. So that fixed that limiting away from my mind. This is what I mean to what people are used to being taught. It’s the medium people are taught to learning from anyways. Powerpoint.

T: Absolutely.

N: And these videos are like ridiculously easy to make.

T: So the average, in a given course, how many videos would you produce?

N: Like 15 to 20.

T: And how long do you make these videos each?

N: I try to make each one around 10 minutes and some just end up being quite a bit longer than that. And the reason that like I wanna say in the sales page whatever is like this is the only video course anywhere about this subject. When you sign up for the member’s area you’re gonna have access to over 2 hours of video training or over 3 hours of video training. That just sounds like a thousand times better than an e-book. You know, 3 hours of video training.

T: I agree. Ok very, very interesting. So we are targeting keywords that the people are not targeting. We’re using a commerciality test that other people aren’t using. We’re delivering content in a way that other people are not delivering that content but yet you’re sticking in niches where you already know that people are buying stuff. You’re using an affiliate site in the beginning to test your assumptions and when it passes the test then you make the investment, develop a product. The net result of which is a site that produces passive income for you of 600 to 1300 a month as has been your personal experience over the roughly dozen sites that you have.

Absolutely a brilliant business model my friend. Absolutely brilliant. So at this point in time and I don’t even know how far I think we’re probably 40 minutes or so into our conversation, I’m sure that some of my listeners are thinking “hey wow! That sounds really cool. I’d like to do that”. Because I’ll be honest with you this is a strategy that I’ve never ran across before. You’re the only guy that I’ve ever met, ever read about just doing it this way and you’re killing it. You’re making over $10,000 a month so very clearly this works.

N: Yeah you could say that.

T: Some people are gonna be wanting to sign up. They’re gonna say how do I get the play by play on step 1, 2, 3, 4. How do I do that? So do you have a product or are you offering a product?

N: Yeah I mean I have the WSO that’s just like a 50 page pdf and as soon as I put that out there I had several experience people in the warrior forum contact me and they’re like ok you could, you shouldn’t be selling this for like $7. You need to create like a full course that you sell and show people how to do this on video. And then I had a lot of people probably like 30 or 40 private messages from people that are at WSO asking me basically the same thing, do you have a video course that shows this process. And I didn’t at that point. That was like 2 weeks ago or whatever. So the last few days I’ve just been putting videos together, putting course together and hopefully is gonna be available by next Monday or Tuesday. So to answer your question, yes I’m putting together just a training course that’s screen flow video or screen cast video of exactly how I do every step of this.So by the time you publish this podcast it’d be available.

T: Ok and I will put a link. If you’re listening to this in your car or on ITunes or anywhere out of the Online Income Lab you’ll need to go to onlineincomelab.com/session006. Again that’s onlineincomelab.com/session006 and that is the page where I will put the link to Nate’s course underneath or just in the post that contains this particular podcast. There will also be a link there for Unique Article Wizard. There will be a link there for Market Samurai. I’ll put a link to the Content Authority. Market Samurai I know they have a trial I think that you can get I don’t know how long the trial is. Unique Article Wizard there isn’t a trial. It’s a $67 a month product. I use it. I absolutely swear by it as obviously does Nate. So all of that information will be there.

What else Nate? Am I missing anything? Anything else you wanna add? I know there’s more stuff that we talked about before hand but I don’t expect you to give away all of your best secrets for absolutely free. I think you’ve been super generous with the techniques here so far. But is there anything else you wanna add before we bring this show or this episode to a close?

N: I guess I just want to say you know whatever, if you’re still trying to figure out just how to build an online business is that’s how you have to think of it. Quickly take the phrase make money online out of your vocabulary. You need to figure out like a business model that you can turn into a system that works that you can do over and over and over again. If you’re just constantly looking for new opportunity or new ways you just have to find one model, become good at it and just do it over and over again.

T: The expression we call is rinse and repeat. For those who followed me for a while you’ve heard we talked about shiny objects before and how important it is especially a new marketer to avoid shiny objects. So shiny object is some other newest bang idea and for some of you this might be a shiny object. You might already be going down the road with the adsense sites which you know I love and you might think “oh I don’t want to do any more adsense sites. I wanna do Nate’s technique”. And I would say to you be very, very careful about pursuing new shiny objects before you’ve figured out what it is that you’re doing. We talked earlier, Nate talked earlier about using affiliate sites first. Well you could then build the adsense sites and then your most successful adsense sites you could simply take those and create a product and see if that product is able to end up increasing the monetization of the earnings from the site.

So don’t necessarily abandon what you’re doing now but maybe try and see if there’s a way for you to fit this in with it because it’s really important to stick with one thing. And I couldn’t agree more Nate, having one thing that you’re really good at and just doing it over and over and over again is what allows people to have a much higher level of success than those who are continuously chasing the next new big shiny object.

N: Yeah definitely.

T: So listen thank you very much for being on the show. It has been absolutely a thrill to have you on. I’d love this conversation. I’ve learned a ton. You can rest assure that I am going to be launching some of my own video products in addition to Niche Site Mastery.

For those that have not heard of Niche Site Mastery that’s my private membership site. And in it I teach from step 1 all the way to step zed or z. See there’s the Canadian in me that’s become. A to Z on how I make small sites that makes adsense income and you can get signed up for a trial or whatever at nichesitemastery.com. If you wanna get more podcasts like this one or see just more of my training content, thoughts and rumblings. If you’re listening to this on my website already onlineincomelab.com I look forward to interacting with any and all of you.

Nate, again thank you very much for being on the show.

N: Yeah thanks for having me.

T: No problem. It has always been an absolute pleasure and I’m sure that we’ll get you on again at some point in the future.

Trent: Hey everybody, I’m Trent Dyrsmid, and I’m the founder of the online
income lab and welcome to session number 40 of the online income lab
podcast. Today is going to be probably one of my more controversial
interviews. My guest on the show is a guy by the name of Ryan Holiday. He’s
currently the director of marketing at American apparel where his work is
internationally known and his campaigns have been featured or rather used
as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google and has been written about
in Ad Age, The New York Times, Gawker and Fast Company.
He currently lives in New Orleans and writes at RyanHoliday.net. Now,
probably more or most interesting of all is the fact that Ryan’s the guy
behind the marketing of the very controversial best-selling author by the
name of Tucker Max and Ryan is also, the author of a new book titled “Trust
Me I’m Lying Confessions of a Media Manipulator”.
This is an episode that you really want to listen to if you want to learn
how you can get the media to give you all sorts of attention and you can
get all of that attention for free. Ryan is an absolute genius in this
regard. Trust me this is not an interview that you want to miss. You’ll
also want to make sure to go and pick up his book. We are only going to
barely scratch the surface here in the interview.
Please join me in welcoming Ryan to the show. Hi, Ryan welcome to the show.
Thanks very much for making the time to do this interview with me.
Your book is called “Trust Me I’m Lying Confessions of a Media Manipulator”
and that is absolutely one of the more interesting titles I’ve heard in a
good long time. How did you come up with it?

Ryan: Yes, thank you. I wanted the title to be a take on David Ogleby’s
“Confession of an Ad Man” which I think is sort of a classic book. I wanted
to do an updated version of that but I knew that since that title has
already been done we had to add something new and exciting. So we did a
ton of AB testing and “Trust Me I’m Lying” just tested off the charts. It
got the greatest response and that’s what we went with.

Trent: How’d you do the AB testing?

Ryan: I took a cue from Tim Farriss, who’s a friend of mine and I think we
did, Survey Monkey and then I just went out to a network of about 100 sort
of influential advertisers and marketers and authors that I knew. It was a
small sample but it was an expert sample. I think “Trust Me I’m Lying” got
twice as many votes as any of the others and then we did the same with the
cover. The cover tested at the same “like” margin of victory as the title.
We knew we had a perfect fit with both.

Trent: Nice, so you had your artist do a couple of different versions of
the cover and then you just split test the versions?

Ryan: Yes we did three covers and I think we tested, we tested slightly
more titles but we did three covers and the one we went with was the over
whelming favorite.

Trent: Cool. Listen, I want to give for the listeners who might not know
much about you or why you’re on the episode with me I want to kind of just
talk briefly about that first.

Ryan: Sure.

Trent: And then we’re going to kind of go into some of the specific things
that you talk about in the book. So, as a media manipulator why should a
business owner care about you and your message and this guy that worked
with the controversial Tucker Max? Why is he going to keep listening beyond
right now?

Ryan: Yes. Look, we live in what’s called an “attention economy”. That
means that the most precious and scarce resource is people’s attention.
What I say in the book and what my experience has shown is that fight is a
vicious fight against professionals, against corporations, against people
with multi-million dollar advertising budgets and the best publicity agents
that money can buy. If you want your business or your art or your book or
whatever it is that you’re promoting, if you want to get the attention that
your hard work has deserved, these are the rules of the game that you maybe
don’t know is being played.
These are the rules that you need to know if you want to get that
attention. You don’t have to like it but that’s the reality and what I do
in the book is sort of rip back the curtain on that world and show you how
the pro’s do what they do and give you all their secrets, all my secrets.
This isn’t like something I just observed this everything in the book I
have personally done for a billion dollar brands or number one best-selling
authors.

Trent: All right, hopefully that sets the stage and people are going to
listen long enough to remain captivated and want like myself go out and buy
your book which by the way I compliment you, it’s been a very, very
interesting read so far. So-

Ryan: Thank you very much.

Trent: I want to go before we get into the nut and the bolts of this media
manipulation I always like to talk about psychology a little bit first
especially in people who’ve experienced high levels of success in any one
area and something that I read about you in my research is that you dropped
out of college to go and be- Where is it in my notes here, my goodness
gracious me, I should have bolded it. You went to work for- Remind me of
his name I have too much writing on my page.

Ryan: Yes, so I dropped out when I was 19.

Trent: Robert Green, there we go. Yes, Robert Green.

Ryan: Yes. Robert Green, the author of the “48 Laws of Power and the 33
Strategies of War”. He was an author that I sort of was a huge fan of. I
deeply admired. I mean his books have sold millions of copies worldwide and
I had this chance lunch encounter with him and he was complaining to a
friend of mine about how he desperately needed a research assistant and he
couldn’t find anyone good. I sort of like leaped across the table. I was
like I’ll do it. I’ll do it for free right now. I don’t care what I have
going on I will do that for you and the rest for me has sort of been
history.

I started working for him, he got me- he’s on the board of American Apparel
where I became the Director of Marketing. He introduced me to all these
other authors and clients and for me it was like look this is a once in a
lifetime opportunity. I’m not going to let something like school which I
could always go back and do at least at that point get in the way of real
life and a real opportunity to do something I cared about.

Trent: Yes, that was a very, very pivotal opportunity it sounds like.

Ryan: [sure]

Trent: The reason I bring that up is a lot of people- My last guest on the
show I had just finished a recording with a fellow by the name of Dane
Maxwell who’s been pretty successful in his business as well. We spent a
lot of time talking about limiting beliefs and knocking out of the way
limiting beliefs and how these are so pivotal and they prevent so many
people from going on to having success that they probably could have if
they get the beliefs out of the way.

One of these things with dropping out of college. I mean there’s “Oh, I
don’t know, what if it doesn’t work out, I’m in college, I’m in all these
classes, it’s safe, maybe I should just stay here, or my parents might not
approve, or there’s all these reasons why someone wouldn’t drop out of
college.” Did you get any of that push back like that and if you did how’d
you deal with it?

Ryan: Yes, it was a super scary thing for me. My parents basically disowned
me. It felt like I was cutting ties from the world that was very
comfortable and traditional and it was what I was supposed to do. I didn’t
know that all these great things would come from it but I sort of I had
this faith. I knew that like “Look, I’m not going to die if I do this. Like
I’m not going to starve to death this is America. Like, I’ll figure
something out. I can always go back to school. What if tomorrow I got hit
by a car and I had to spend a year in the hospital. I wouldn’t have any
control over that. This is the same risk, except I’m doing it knowingly and
I’m in control.” For me, I sort of said, “What is the worst case scenario
here?”I realized that I could stand the consequences of that worst case
scenario and then I willingly took the leap.

Trent: Interesting and as I hear you say that and I think about all the
examples like the Tucker Max, and the billboards, and the stickers, and
stuff that we’ll talk about kind of the same mindset I would think went
into a lot of those decisions into your media manipulation, which as we’ll
get to in this remainder of this interview, had some pretty profound
affects for the client that you were working for.

Ryan: Yes. Well what I said was, “Look, all these people are so scared of
controversy, they’re so scared of doing things a different way of saying
like maybe we don’t need to do all the traditional stuff and when I- Again,
it’s like I looked at the worst case scenario and I said, “Look, we can
stand this worst case scenario and frankly the other options aren’t really
on the table. We don’t have the benefit of…” You know, when I was in
college, I wasn’t in Harvard I was just at some school. For these guys, it
was “Look, what do we have to lose? We’re an author, we’re facing
obscurity, we could take these risks and the payoff could be selling
millions of books.” We took the calculated risk and it worked out. That’s
exactly, sort of, what happened because we weren’t afraid to do the things
that everyone else thought was so taboo or so controversial or off the
table. It’s actually a really good thing. The things that are scary or the
things that everyone else thinks are off the table they’re sort of leaving
there for you, for the people who don’t have anything to lose. They’re
leaving those options for you and my sort of MO is to take advantage of
those things. “If you’re going to leave ‘em I’m going to take ‘em.”

Trent: Absolutely. Let’s talk about this formula that you talk about,
outrage plus controversy equals massive traffic. I want to set the table
for kind of where we’re going with this discussion. Tell us about that
formula.

Ryan: There was a really interesting study that studied the sort of the
most viral articles that the New York Times magazine had published. I think
it looked at 7,000 articles that the magazine had published that made the
most popular list. What they found is the number one predictor of virality
was how much anger an article invokes. That makes a lot of sense if you
think about it because when was the last time you read an article and you
thought, “Oh that was a good article”. Then you turned around and passed it
to all your friends.

This sort of near satisfaction or even just liking it is not viral on the
internet. It doesn’t make things spread but when you see an article that
you hate or an article about a topic that makes you angry or livid or
really excited that’s what you spread. What I realized from my authors and
my clients was look we could go out there and we make a good product and
people like it but that’s not what’s going to make everyone talk about us
and that’s not what’s going to get us on the front page of the New York
Times. If we want those people to write about us to really sort of get
everyone riled up we’ve got to figure out what parts of our message make
people angry or excited or sad or what part of it is controversial.

I sort of instead of steering away from those things and trying to be
vanilla or cookie cutter we courted that controversy. We would do crazy
things. We weren’t afraid at the end of the day we weren’t afraid to piss
off people who are not our core customers. We would never want to let down
our core customers, the people who buy from us, but the people who don’t
like us if you’re not going to like us, we may as well turn you into
someone who’s spreading our name on all corners of the earth.

Trent: Yes. Your work with Tucker Max was a perfect example of that. Let’s
start with that. We’ll talk and then I know the people listening are going,
“Yes, well OK, my business is not as controversial as Tucker’s.”

Ryan: Right.

Trent: We’re going to come after the Tucker story. We’re going to start
talking about some things that the folks listening can actually use in
their business, but, none the less it’s a very interesting story. So, I’m
going to turn it over to you and what did you do with Tucker and why’d it
work so well?

Ryan: Yes, so Tucker is an author who, I mean the best way you could
surmise his work is he’s an author who writes about getting drunk and
hooking up. For him, he has a core audience of young men who like his
stuff. They think it’s really funny and interesting and he’s a great story
teller. There is this whole other part of the population who’s just never
going to like him let’s say feminist, let’s say you know old people,
conservatives they’re not going to like his stuff.

What we said is, “How can we turn those, sort of non-entities into people
who cannot stop talking about him?” When one of his books was turned into a
movie and so what we did was we said “How can we make those people who
don’t like him boycott and protest his movie because when everyone says
don’t go see this movie?” If it’s evil, the first thing everyone does,
especially young people, is go see that movie. We orchestrated a campaign
of fake outrage. I personally went out I vandalized his billboards. I
organized protest.

Trent: These are billboards that you paid for?

Ryan: That I paid for, oh yeah. We would buy them in strategic places and
then vandalize them and take pictures of that vandalization, then leave it
to the media. The idea was we would kick off this outrage by sort of
showing the way and that would spur who actually did object to his content
who really did believe that it was bad an evil and awful that they would
take it to the next level and that’s exactly what happened and it made
everywhere from editorial pages of the Chicago Tribune to the front page of
Fox News to real protests in cities all over the country. It took an Indie
movie that had a very small budget into being one of the most talked about
movies of the year.

Trent: That’s pretty phenomenal results.I imagine you sold a reasonable
number of tickets and I think it went on to-

Ryan: It did quite well.

Trent: And it continues to do well on DVD, I believe.

Ryan: Yes and the sort of ancillary benefit was his book which had always
been successful, hit number one on the New York Times best seller list the
same week the movie came out. For him, he’s not just looking to promote the
movie. It’s “How can I make myself a media sensation, a real celebrity?”
Sometimes it’s like they say “behind every great fortune is a great crime”.
Behind a celebrity is often some sort of controversy that after it dies
down and people forget why they were so angry or upset all they remember is
that this person is some one that everyone knows.

Look at someone like Kim Kardashian, here she is sitting on a media empire
and what began that media empire was a deliberate sex tape that she leaked
and that’s not obviously for everyone but I think you can extrapolate from
those actions a sort of a general understanding of the media system which
is it’s not about who does the best things always or who’s the most
exceptional but it’s who does something that makes everyone talk.

Trent: It’s that, and understanding how the media system works so that it
can be manipulated to your benefit because it’s not just enough to do
something controversial. If you don’t know how to get the leverage out of
the controversial thing-

Ryan: You got to (inaudible 16:00)

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: Absolutely.

Trent: It’s like chopping a tree down in the middle of the forest. No one’s
going to know. All right.

Ryan: Right.

Trent: I read, in prepping for this interview, there’s a story on Forbes
which I’m sure many people have read that basically chronicles how you flat
out lied to the media just to see if you could get coverage. Then once we
get through that we’re going to talk about the kind of blogs and how to
turn something into nothing and the whole blog thing. I think that all of
that stuff, once people understand it, they’ll realize that they will be
able to use this strategy in their own business and that’s really what I
want to get to in this interview.

Ryan: OK.

Trent: Let’s talk about this thing this whole Forbes. You’re just going to
go out and do this little experiment and lie your ass off and see how much
coverage you can get. How did that happen?

Ryan: I wrote a 300 page book about how the media system works and how
easily it could be manipulated and sort of understanding my own medicine
and my own research here, I know that a 300 page book is hard for people to
just jump into. It’s hard. I sat down to write a 300 page book because it
was difficult to write this in five sentences, to describe a complicated
industry in five sentences. I wanted to do something on top of the book
that sort of encapsulated everything the book was about and made it clear
to people just how easy it was.

For the last six or seven months I used a service called help a reporter
out, which I think is a micro cause for a lot of this stuff that I talk
about in the book and I used it to show that literally anyone can get press
for literally anything with almost no work. What I did I used this service
called help a reporter out which is basically a secret social network where
publicist and companies can connect with lazy reporters who want sources
for their articles that they need to- It’s like, “Look, oh you know about
cats? I’m doing a story on cats can you give me an easy quote that I can
use?” What I did is I went through this service and I basically answered
every query I could using as little work or time.

I actually had an assistant do most of the work for me. I just told them
sort of exactly what they wanted to hear even though I wasn’t an expert on
any of these things. I got quoted in I think close to two dozen media
outlets from MSNBC, to The Today Show, to ABC News, and ultimately to the
New York Times and I did that by just answering these queries on this
website. When I sort of exposed how this was done, it really it went off
like a bomb, I think, in the media industry. This was a secret that
everyone knew about. Everyone knew this service existed but they kind of
didn’t want the public to know about it because it’s sketchy and a little
bit uncomfortable.

With my stunt, I wanted to show like, “Look, here’s me lying, I’m not
trying to get anything out of it, I’m just trying to prove a point. But
here’s what someone could do to the media system if they were so inclined”.
Sort of like a hacker breaking into a secure system and saying look the
front door is left wide open you got to do something about this. That’s
what I did with this service. I think that Forbes story now has like
150,000 views which is sort of- It blew up in a way that I didn’t totally
expect but what I showed there was you don’t have to be an expert to be
quoted as an expert in the New York Times. You don’t even have to be- I was
quoted in a story about Vinyl Records.

Trent: I was going to ask about-

Ryan: And I don’t even own a turntable.

Trent: Yes I was going to ask you specifically about the Vinyl Records.
Now…

Ryan: Yes.

Trent: … you didn’t use your real name or your real e-mail address for
any of this stuff did you?

Ryan: No, no, no I used my real name. I used my real name. I used a
variation of my e-mail address just so like these queries weren’t bogging
down my inbox.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: Anyone one of these reporters could have Googled me at any time and
figured out hey this guy has a book called “Trust Me I’m Lying” about
manipulating the media maybe we shouldn’t run him in our paper but nobody
did that because- That’s sort of my point is that they don’t care they’re
just publish anything.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: What I think I proved is that reporters aren’t verifying the
information they get out there and that creates an opportunity for people
who want to promote something that maybe is a little less than 100% true.
Don’t worry about journalist fact checking it for you because they just
don’t do that anymore.

Trent: All right. Let’s use for the rest of our discussion lets us an
example. Let’s say that somebody is going to launch a new business on the
internet and that business, because I’m doing this right now on a site
called brightideas.co and that’s where this interview will be published
when the site goes live. When I launch this thing, I want get as much
attention possible for brightideas.co as the place to go to for people who
run a company that has up to 20 employees and are either using a certain
piece of software called InfusionSoft or are a candidate for it or are
selling on Amazon market place or are a candidate for it.

That’s a reasonably large audience but it’s not the whole world by any
stretch of the imagination and there’s nobody else out there who’s doing an
interview site focused on that market. As you know, Mixergy’s out there,
and Andrew does a great thing but he’s kind of like all over. He doesn’t
want to pick any one particular niche. There’s another guy who does
something and he’s kind of all over as well and there’s nothing wrong with
that but I wanted to get like, this massive amount of traction in this very
specific audience. What should I be doing?

Ryan: First, like I tell people, you got to start small and you got to lay
the ground work. What I would do is I would use something like “help a
reporter out” to get a lot of easy press for totally unrelated things to
your business. It’s like you answer a [horror] request for Forbes about
Infusion Software. Then you do another [horror] request for the Huffington
Post about some other things.

The reason you’re doing all this is not because you’re going to benefit
from that press but so you can put featured on Forbes and featured in the
Huffington Post and featured in the New York Times so you’re going after
social proof to prove that you’re a news worthy topic because no one wants
to be the first person to write about something because when you’re a
blogger that’s a risk, right.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: You’re writing about something that maybe nobody cares about and
that’s sort of a death sentence in blogging. You want to write about things
that other blogs have said are worthy. So, that’s your social proof. I lay
the ground work first and then what I think about is what are the sites
that the influencers read and what are the sites that other media reads at
in my space that I can get coverage on? For Tucker what we did was, we knew
that main stream press read sites like Gawker and Media Bistro and local
blogs like Curbed LA or LAist. We placed controversial stories about him on
those blogs. With the idea-

Trent: How’d you do that?

Ryan: What?

Trent: How did you place a controversial story on one of those blogs?

Ryan: Like, vandalizing the billboards was a good example. We knew they
would love a story about Tucker supposedly being embarrassed by people
vandalizing his billboards. We sort of, we did this stunt that we knew
would get coverage on those sites which we knew would then catch the
attention of sort of main stream reporters. You’ve got to figure out who
are the influencers of the influencers. Who is the media reading to
discover their stories and that’s who I like to follow. That’s who I like
to pitch.

For you maybe, you’re not trying to get in the New York Times. What you’re
trying to do is get the attention of sort of influential people on Twitter
in your space. Maybe you find a blog that you know they all read and you
pitch something to that site so you know these guys will all retweet it.
It’s about finding out who’s your target audience here in terms of the
media. Who’s your target media [fans] and finding things that they can’t
not talk about or finding angles or stories or types of stories that are
the stories they personally and historically love.

I tell them what they want to hear. It’s the same thing at the end of the
day. It’s like Gawker loves gossip. Tech Crunch loves controversy and
fighting and acquisition news and breaking news. That’s the language that
you have to speak to them with.

Trent: OK, what you’re talking about is a hook.

Ryan: Right. Exactly.

Trent: How do you do that? Let’s say that I find that there’s three or four
blogs that I know my target audience, they’re reading these blogs, I need
to get my story on those blogs so I need a hook to do that. How do I do
that?

Ryan: Well, let me flip it, what’s special about your thing? What is it
that makes it worth talking about?

Trent: It’s special because it’s specific. Every entrepreneur under the sun
if they’re running… Like when I ran a million dollar company, I wanted to
get to a two million dollar company as an entrepreneur that’s all you think
about, all day every day.

Ryan: Right.

Trent: But that’s to broad so that’s why I picked these very specific
things. If you’re somebody that’s using Infusion Soft and they do like $40
million a year so there’s a lot of somebody’s using Infusion Soft.

Ryan: Right.

Trent: It’s got a nickname called Confusion Soft, so I know that not
everybody’s using it is getting like a big bang for their buck out of it
and they’re seeing other people are killing it using it. They’re thinking,
“How do I get from being a Confusion Soft user to like a ninja Infusion
Soft user?” I want to speak to specifically that group of people.

Ryan: It sounds like there’s a common problem in your industry and everyone
is sort of struggling for a solution to that problem and some people are
closer to it than others. It sounds to me that your angle is probably going
to be something in the realm of case studies. How “so and so” turned
Confusion Soft into Infusion Soft and made $10 million in 20 days. Like how
can you give a tangible example of what worked well that you know there is
an audience who will respond to it? You’ve got to break that all the way
down into its simplest form.

Blogs fight each other for attention through headlines. It’s the headlines
from the Huffington Post are competing with the headlines of CNN.com on
Google news. It’s all about the headline at the end of the day. You’ve got
to reduce that case study down into a headline that you know blogs will get
excited about and then you’ve got to give them that headline. You’ve got to
go to them with all the work and hand it to them with a nice bow on top and
say “Look, I did the work here I think this is an exciting story and you
shop it around until you find a buyer and you know that you’re going to
find a buyer because this story works so well”.

Once you’ve figured out your headline, you can’t go to a blogger and say
“Here, I wrote this story put your name on it”. There’s a little bit of an
art and sort of psychological dance there. You’ve got to do where you’re
doing all the work but letting them take the credit in a way that isn’t to
transparent but it’s surprisingly easy. It’s just persistent e-mails,
presenting the information in a compelling way and knowing that their self-
interest here is going to make them take from you what you want them to
take.

Trent: OK. If I understand what you’ve just explained, the very first
thing I’ve got to do is put myself in the reporters shoes or the bloggers
shoes and say “What lights me up?” We’ll get into this why bloggers do what
they do, that’s where we’re going to kind of go. Actually you know what
let’s go into it right now.

Ryan: OK.

Trent: What’s the big problem that all these bloggers are trying to solve,
because again by giving them stories I’m trying to help them solve their
problem, what’s their problem?

Ryan: Right. What I wanted to do in the book was examine the forces that
make bloggers do what they do and the idea is look I think at the end of
the day some of these things are negative and bad but for time being you’ve
got to know how they’re operating so you can anticipate those actions and
use them to your advantage. I think one of the biggest factors here is
blogs get paid not by how much people subscribe to them and give them money
but how much traffic they do which translates to advertising revenue. At
the end of the day, the god that blogs worship is the god of traffic.
Everything at the end of the day is about how much traffic a story gets and
how much traffic the site gets.

Trent: Because they’re charging their advertisers a certain amount of money
per view so they drive up views their revenue goes up lock-and-step to
views.

Ryan: Right, more views equals more money. They don’t want to write about
anything that’s not going to get them views. That’s the metric that they
all have to observe. Then at the same time these are sites that are very
understaffed and using an under sort of inhuman crushing deadlines. They’ve
got traffic quotas they’ve got to hit. They’ve got to show growth every
month. These are bloggers who are basically chained to their computer
because they’ve got to post ten times a day to get those traffic numbers
where they need them to be. Everyone is trying to do a whole lot more with
a whole lot less.

These aren’t reporters for the Washington Post working on the Watergate
story for a year and a half. These are people who got an hour and half tops
to get a story out. If you come to them and you say, “
Look, here’s a story that I know will get traffic and I’ve already done
most of the research you’re just sort of polishing and putting it
together.” That’s a dream come true to them because you just made them
money and did their work for them.

That’s basically ever thing they could possibly hope for and you’re solving
their problem which is I’ve got to get traffic and I’m very, very busy. If
you can arrange your pitch around those two obstacles you are not just
changing the game you’re turning it from a buyers’ market into a sellers’
market. You’ve got the power because they need what you’ve got almost more
than they’ve got what you need.

Trent: Yes. And like anything else in business, once you have relationships
with these people they’re going to publish you over and over and over again
right?

Ryan: Right. Once you show that you delivered on those two obstacles,
they’re going to be much more receptive to messages from you down the road.
Sometimes I suggest don’t even pitch yourself first. We’re out there we’re
reading we have a sense of what’s news worthy what’s not news worthy. Pitch
them about something that has nothing to do with them. Say, “Hey, I just
noticed this. I think it would make a great post. They’re going to say “Oh
yes, you’re right it would, thanks.” Then when you do that two or three
times and on the fifth time you come back to them and say “Hey, I just
started this site. I’ve got a really exciting case study about someone who
went from $1,000 a month to $100,000 a month.” They’re going to say give me
it. I want an exclusive on this story. You’ve been giving me gold I’m going
to lock you in.

Trent: Le’ts say that that story because I can definitely find like the top
users of this software but their story has been told in other forums. Not
in the wide press of course because we’re talking about a specific industry
a micro cause as it were but it does it- When I’m approaching this new blog
that say has maybe never written about this particular person or this
particular topic does it matter that that person’s case study might be on
somebody else’s, not even necessarily the media, but somebody else’s blog
or somebody else’s case study?

Ryan: Not really. I mean look at the front page of Reddit, right? I think
half those articles are repost of [beams] that we’ve all seen before.
Right? Like online the memory is very short. It doesn’t matter where it
came from or if it’s existed before, what matters is right now, and who’s
writing about it right now. You see this all the time like your blog could
break a story someone else could aggregate your story or write about it
after you and they’re going to end up getting all the traffic.

It’s kind of unpredictable but no one gets all the credit that they deserve
and so it doesn’t matter and in some cases showing that this case study has
done well in the past as long as you can show that you’re take on it is new
and interesting can actually be convincing evidence that this is worth
writing about. The worst thing that a blogger can do is write an article
about something that gets zero views or zero comments or just doesn’t do
well, right? That meant that they spent an hour of their ten hour day…

Trent: For nothing.

Ryan: …on a post that didn’t go anywhere. Now they’ve got to spend an
extra hour to hit that same goal. If you can show look this is a proven
entity that will deliver results they’re going to take it. They’re going to
weigh that over something that could potentially be bigger but has risks
involved because opportunity costs weigh on everyone.

Trent: Yes. Mindful of opportunity cost a very good point. Sorry I’m just
jotting down notes here ’cause this is very valuable stuff.

Ryan: Cool.

Trent: OK. Let’s go into in your book you talk about Chapter One is “Blogs
Make the News” and then there’s this, what you call, the “How to Turn
Nothing into Something in Three Easy Steps”. We’ve already kind of talked
on the blog on how publishers make money, it’s all page views. We need to
go back a little bit. I think there’s- You wrote the book. I read the book.
We know what we’re talking about but there’s people listening to this who
still don’t kind of get this whole, how the blogosphere[SP] actually works.
So, do you want to explain that? (inaudible 34:55)

Ryan: I think at the end of the day. People don’t know how much the online
news cycle drives the offline cycle. I’ll give you a sort of a past analogy
that should maybe make it clear. Everyone knows that the morning news, the
morning television news is just reading the newspaper headlines. That’s
where they get all their story ideas. Your radio DJ’s are just grabbing
things from the newspaper and talking about them. Well, today they’re not
doing it with the newspapers. They’re pulling up the drudge report and
Politico and Gawker and Dead Spin [SP] and they’re reading these blogs and
that’s what’s driving the conversation. What I say in the book is “Look, if
you want to be in this offline cycle, if you want to be in the New York
Times or you want to be on CNN, don’t throw yourself against that brick
wall. Don’t try to climb that very tall ladder. Start at the bottom, get on
these blogs which are much easier to get traffic on or to get traction on
and let that influence the people who read them”.

The way to turn nothing into something is to start small to take a story
that you concocted or a small story that’s never gotten traction before and
find a small blog who you have a relationship with who you know would be
interested in this and get them to write this starter story here. You get
them to do the first post and then you take that post and you send it to
other blogs and they as you know the Huffington Post likes to rip off
stories from other blogs and aggregate them which really means take a 1,000
word article and turn it into a 250 word article.

That’s negative if you’re a content producer but if you’re trying to get
traction in the media the Huffington Post ripping off a small blog is a
great way for you to get in the Huffington Post without having to pitch the
Huffington Post. You know that if you get an article on Laughingsquid, a
local blog in San Francisco that’s a ticket to also being on the Huffington
Post, the Huffington Post steals stories from there.

Trent: So then to find some of these-

Ryan: And so-

Trent: Sorry if I’m jumping in.

Ryan: Yes.

Trent: Let’s say that my goal was to be on the Huffington Post if I read
the Huffington Post for a while am I going to learn where they’re ripping
off all their stuff because they with curation, they attribute-

Ryan: Who they link to and who they talk about and who they seem to get
their story leads from those are the places that you want to pitch because
they’re the influencers of the influencers.

Trent: You’re just kind of reverse engineering where they’re getting their
content from which is really easy to do and then you’re going directly to
those content sources with a good hook because you know that the people at
those places are way over worked. They have almost no time at all. They’re
driven by these quotas and they’re just looking for content that is going
to drive traffic. Give them what they want and you’re going to get what you
want.

Ryan: Right. I’ll give you sort of a hypothetical example. Let’s say you
know that advertising on like Rush Limbaugh’s radio program is a million
dollars. Well, you don’t have a million dollars and you want to get on his
show. Well, if you just pitch Rush Limbaugh, he’s going to say who are you
go away but you know that every day he talks about stories that were first
on the Drudge Report or Michelle Malkin, or any number of conservative
blogs.

Well, pitch your story to those blogs who have to churn out a whole lot
of, a hell of, a lot more stories that Rush Limbaugh and make sure that as
your speaking to the Drudge Report or as your tailoring your story to
Michelle Malkin you’re also thinking about what Rush Limbaugh is going to
be interested in and you’re sort of communicating to these top tier targets
through these lower tier targets with your stories. You know that he reads
that site and the next thing you know, you turn on the program and he’s
talking about you even though you’ve never spoken with him. That’s because
you figured out what was on his radar and you registered on that radar and
then it went from there.

Trent: OK. Now, in your book you talked about how you used these fake e-
mail addresses to be able to move your content, your story, up the chain.
Can you talk about that and how that plays into this?

Ryan: Yes, look basically I just realized that if you’re out there e-
mailing a blogger and you say hey I just featured on Bobsblog.com you
should write about me. The blogs going to say who is this guy I don’t have
time for self-promoters but if one of their fans e-mails and says hey you
got to check out this amazing story on bobsblog.com I think you’ll love it.
They bite and the next thing they’re going to be- It’s the same message but
they’re going to be much more receptive about it because it doesn’t look
like you’re pitching yourself.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: I use fake e-mails to do that. If you already have an audience you
can ask your audience to help pitch. You can maybe retweets of your article
can register. There’s a variety of ways to do it but it’s just an
understanding of sometimes pitching yourself is not the most effective way
to do it. Once you get to a certain level of media.

Trent: So, when you’re creating these persona’s do you go so far as to
create a Facebook and a Twitter account for these pen names as well or do
you just make up an e-mail address?

Ryan: It depends on the situation. When I’m coming up with a fake name what
I used to do is I would take the first name of a friend and a last name of
a friend and I’d just combine them. It looks and feels real enough and most
of the time they’re pretty disposable. Blogs are too busy to bother
drilling down and trying to figure out who this tipster was because it’s
not really in their interest to see if this story is fake or not. If it’s
fake, it means they can’t write about this interesting thing that they
wanted to write about. They sort of suspend disbelief even when they maybe
shouldn’t.

Trent: That comes back to understanding what they’re trying to accomplish
and that is traffic. They’re not all these- ‘Cause unlike a newspaper,
which they have a finite amount of space every single day and a TV show
that has a finite amount of space, a blog does not have a finite amount of
space.

Ryan: No, on the contrary they’ve got an infinite amount of space.

Trent: Correct. So, more traffic, more traffic, more traffic, make more
money. That is the number one thing that drives them not to be an
investigator.

Ryan: Right they’re not protecting a century old brand that means a lot.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: They’re trying to make a name for themselves at basically any cost.

Trent: This kind of goes to I think what we talked about very early on in
our interview in that these younger blogs they don’t have a lot to lose but
they have a lot to gain.

Ryan: Exactly.

Trent: They’re going to be a lot less risk averse in the stories that
they’re going to write about and they’re going to fact check a lot less.
I’m not saying to people to go and lye I’m just saying that you can use
that to your advantage to give them what they want so you can get what you
want.

Ryan: Yes, you don’t have to like it. That’s just the reality of how the
media system works and if you’re trying to get attention for your business
that you put a lot of work into and it deserves attention well here’s how
to do it.

Trent: Mm-hmm. OK. So, let’s talk- You talked earlier about emotions and I
want to come back to that and then there’s a couple of examples with Sasha
Grey and Rick [Santorum] that we might talk about if we have time.

Ryan: Yes.

Trent: It seems to me like getting the hook right is pretty darn important
because if you don’t get the hook right-

Ryan: It’s crucial.

Trent: Yes. The hook would, I guess, be all about using the right emotions
in that headline? I’m not sure that I get that yet. Can you help me out?

Ryan: Yes. It’s certain emotions are more viral than others. This isn’t
just my opinion there’s a bunch of studies that back this up and what they
say is an emotion like sadness is not viral because who wants to share
sadness with other people.

Trent: Nobody.

Ryan: But we share joy with other people or we want to share humor with
other people and paradoxically we need other people to share our anger so
we don’t feel like we’re the only ones going through this. Based on these
studies and my own personal experience in this stuff, you’ve got to
understand what emotions will get traffic, what emotions bloggers like to
use and exploit, and you tailor your angles around those emotions. Jonah
Peretti who founded BuzzFeed, he talks about this. He says, “If you’re
running a charity that’s trying to help starving African children, a lot of
imagery of starving African children may not be the best way to get a lot
of traffic to your website, people don’t want to look at that”.

On television it’s different, you can’t really look away we can’t do
anything about it but online when we’re sort of more in control and we
click on the things we like there’s no unlike button. There’s just a like
button. You have to sort of pander to these emotions and you’ve got to
translate your message. You’re helping starving African children you can’t
change that but you change your presentation and the tact that you take to
make sure that you’re not running against a headwind of being a message
that people don’t like to spread.

Trent: You- Sorry I have a sore shoulder. That’s why I flinched. You gave a
great example of this with the Detroit Housing picture. So, maybe let’s
just talk about that and we’ll take a little side bar and talk about that
for a minute.

Ryan: There was a, really, interesting break down of those pictures of
Detroit, which we’ve all seen and we’ve all talked about, they do millions
of page views. They’re sort of haunted ruins of this great American city.
Well, if you could imagine them right now the pictures that are coming to
mind the ones that you seen there’s one thing conspicuously missing from
all those photos. There are no people in them and the reality is Detroit
has an enormous homeless population and it’s got stray cats and dogs.

Those buildings on most days are filled with people and those people are
not attractive to look at because it’s sort of right there in our face that
this isn’t just a haunting building, this is the collapse of an American
power. This is a failure of capitalism or a failure of government so what
you see online is only the photos that don’t have people because the photos
of people in them make us uncomfortable and thus don’t do as well online.

I think that’s a good metaphor for everyone in their business. Don’t try to
spread things that make people uncomfortable even if it’s the right thing
to do because the reality is online there just isn’t an audience for it. If
you want people to pay attention to this painful message, you’ve got to
find some indirect of getting at it because you’re not going to get it
through photography in this case.

Trent: What are the strongest emotions if you had to pick the top four?

Ryan: Well, this study that I talked about earlier the number one predictor
of spreading is how much anger an article provokes. What they actually
found in the study is that believe it or not it’s not so much specific
emotions. It’s the degree to which those emotions are evoked. Something
that makes us a little bit happy is not going to be as effective or- Sorry.
If anger is the great predictor, something that makes us only a little bit
angry is not going to be as effective as something that makes us laugh
really, really hard. It’s the extremeness at the end of the day that is the
best predictor of spreading. If your emotion goes to one degree on the
spectrum it’s all the way or all the way cold that’s what you want to focus
on.

Trent: In terms of a hook, let’s say, this guy is using this software and
his business doubled its sales in one year.

Ryan: Right.

Trent: How do you phrase that one so it’s going to be a good hook that uses
a good emotion?

Ryan: That’s a pretty effective hook because I mean there’s some elation
involved with doubling their business.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: That sort of jumps out at you but maybe you flip it and you go the
other direction here’s how someone’s business was ruined by Confusion
Software because they didn’t understand it.

Trent: OK.

Ryan: Like the idea of someone being destroyed or someone being wrecked or
a failure, that’s a compelling image. That might be better than just say
“Hey, a lot of people are confused by this, It’s “Here’s how one man lost
everything because of ‘X’.”

Trent: In your book, you wrote about how subject lines of e-mails, which is
the number one thing when you’re e-mail marketing is your open rate, you
could phrase them as a question mark but if you took away the question
mark, it would almost be a lie. It sounds like that’s kind of what you’re
talking to right at this moment.

Ryan: Right. What people talk about in the media all the time is look if a
headline has a question mark in it the answer is always no because the
question allows you to phrase it in its most extreme form without taking
ownership of that assertion. You can say, “Did Glenn Beck rape and murder
that girl in 1990? Well, now you just implied that he did, without saying I
believe that.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: There is an internal memo that I said in the book from the founder of
Gawker who’s saying that in his, based on his internal studies, a question
mark does twice as well as an exclamation point. If you think about why
that would be it’s because you’ve got to click to figure out the answer to
a question. Whereas an exclamation point the assertion is all there in the
headline. Another Gawker said, “You want to get everything you can into the
question mark but leave just enough out that people still have to click.”

Trent: Yes. Brilliant. Then, I’m assuming the same applies then for the
headlines you’re going to be sending to these reporters at these blogs
because it’s the subject line of your e-mail.

Ryan: Right. It’s like before they put out a headline on their blog post
you’ve got to get them to read the headline of your e-mail, which is the
subject line.

Trent: Yes, absolutely. OK. Let’s give another example here. Which do you
think is a better example to make this point Sasha Grey or Rick Santelli
(inaudible 50:08) brother?

Ryan: Sasha Grey was a good example. It was a series of ads we ran for
American Apparel. At the time she was a porn star. I don’t think she does
porn anymore but-

Trent: Was this before Entourage or after?

Ryan: Way before.

Trent: Way before so she was-

Ryan: This was in 2007 or 2008.

Trent: OK, pure porn star.

Ryan: I think we paid her $50.00 an hour to be in the ads. It was like
“Look we do all these controversial ads and people talk about them. What if
we did an ad where the model wasn’t wearing any clothes?” Now, obviously
that’s not an effective advertisement because you’re not advertising any
clothes but because it was so controversial we got so much media coverage
out of it that sales went up anyway even though we weren’t directly
pitching a product. We ran topless advertisements of this beautiful model
on a set of influential blogs because we knew that the idea of a model not
wearing any clothes in a clothing advertisement would be viral and generate
attention and chatter and it did.

Trent: Interesting. You basically had your company brand, you had her
standing there topless, which obviously is an attention getter, and then
you found blogs that who’s audience that message would appeal to. Was this
one of those instances-

Ryan: Those who were OK running those ads, right.

Trent: Sorry. Say that again.

Ryan: We found blogs who were OK running naked advertisements because not
everyone’s going to be OK with that.

Trent: Clearly. Now, where those blogs- Does this follow your kind of
tiered strategy where you knew that those blogs were read by the people
that you were trying to influence?

Ryan: Yes.. I think we spent $1,200 on the two ads. We did that, because,
you couldn’t buy this ad on the back page of the New York Times. They’d
never let you run it.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: But we know that lots of reporters for institutions that big read
these two influential sort of hipstery cool sites.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: And because of that they got a ton of attention.

Trent: And what did it result? Were you able to make a correlation between
the impact on sales and so forth in this particular ad campaign?

Ryan: Yes. I don’t have the exact numbers on that specific advertisement
because it’s hard to say what product it was responsible for selling
because there was no product involved, but what we saw was a big spike in
traffic to our site and based on our conversion rates that more than paid
for $1,200 that we spent in advertisements. I mean when you’re a big-
American Apparel did $500 million in sales that year. For us to spend
$1,200 on something that gets us on every major news site in the country is
the bargain of all bargains.

Trent: Absolutely. OK. Another thing that I read in your book, it said, “If
you’re waking up at 5:00 a.m. and working until midnight, you’re doing
something wrong”. Do you remember writing that?

Ryan: I think that might be on my blog not in my book.

Trent: Yes. You’re right.

Ryan: I believe that.

Trent: I stand corrected. It was on your blog. I’m sure like myself there’s
a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening to this and they’re thinking,
“You know, this stuff is all great but I’m already working too much. I
don’t have time to do any of this stuff”. What did you mean by that quote
and what advice would you give someone to start taking advantage of what
they’re listening to right now? Because if they’re just listening and don’t
do anything it was wasted time.

Ryan: Yes. What I think about are what are the undervalued assets, what are
the things- There’s a great book “A Blue Ocean Strategy” where you don’t
want to compete where everyone else is competing. If you’re trying to out-
work everyone, you’re not going to win. There is some crazy person who does
Adderall or takes Nootropics that is going to be able to out-work you.
That’s not where I compete. I try to compete on the things that no one is
thinking about in systems that are maybe poorly understood or confusion or
whatever.

Like you’re not trying to launch Mixergy 2, you’re trying to launch Mixergy
for a smaller more lucrative audience and you’re not going to have to work
as hard as someone who’s trying to outdo a well-funded popular competitor.
My strategies in this, I do this for everything, but in the media sphere I
looked for the things that other people where either afraid to touch,
didn’t understand, or maybe were poorly organized. I focused my energy on
getting really educated and really understanding those thing.

I made those my domain. Controversy was one of them, blogs was one of
them. I don’t pitch the New York Times, I pitch blogs and I get the New
York Times to call me and that means I don’t have to work all day to pitch
the New York Times. I just got to call up some blog contacts and make
things work. My personal philosophy is to work smarter, not work harder.
I’ve always tried to think about those advantages. I think Tim Farriss is a
great example of someone who deconstructs systems and then look for
inefficiencies that he can exploit. I try to do the same thing.

Trent: Mm-hmm definitely a smart way to go. You’ve also been obviously with
a guy who is well known for media controversy. There is lots of talk about
the coincidence of the timing of the launch of your book and all these
experiments and undoubtedly you’ve received a lot of heat for that over the
last week or two. I don’t know whether you’re ever going to tell the truth
or not. Was this all orchestrated to basically make sure that your book was
a huge success? All the power to you if it was.

Ryan: Yes. I think that that criticism just sort of baffles me. It’s like
oh he’s just doing this to promote his book or whatever. It’s like of
course I wrote a book that I’m very passionate about that I think says
something that’s never been said. I want people to read it and yeah I
benefit financially from it. I did all the work of course I should benefit
from it but this, the media stunt that I did with HARO, I didn’t have to
expose that. Nobody caught me. I did it for six months. I proved my point.
I could have told people about it in March but why would I do it in March,
when I could do it in July to coincide with my book because I think they
support each other.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: One makes one clear and the other sort of adds extra context to the
other. I said this in my book proposal, I said, “Look, I’m exposing how the
media system works and I’m making a lot of claims. I’ve got to prove those
claims with this book a final time”. It’s sort of like “Look I’m going to
call exactly where I’m going to hit the ball and then I’m going to hit the
ball and that’s going to prove my point one last time.” I said, “This is a
book about creating controversy and how easy it is to do”. I would be
dishonest if I didn’t go out and get controversy to make that a reality and
that’s what I did and it’s a book about marketing and it’s now a best-
selling book about marketing because the things I’m talking about I’m not
selling theories and medicine that don’t work. They work and the book is
proof of that.

Trent: Yes. Absolutely and again all the power to you and all the kudos to
you…

Ryan: Thank you.

Trent: …for making a success because that’s what capitalism is about and
God loves America loves a promoter and you’ve done a heck of a job of it.
All right so we’re going to…

Ryan: Thank you.

Trent: …finish off on one last tactic from your book, tactic number
eight.

Ryan: OK.

Trent: Use the technology against itself. Now I confess I’ve not read that
chapter yet so you’re going to need to tell me what-

Ryan: OK.

Trent: Just the headline caught my attention, which is again the whole
purpose of being good at writing headlines. What are you talking about in
that chapter and why should I care? Why do I want to read it?

Ryan: What I’m saying there is a lot of people think that there thing
should get attention or traction because it’s amazing. They’re like look I
spend two years of my life writing this million word book everyone should
know about it. Well, the reality is online is not a great medium for a
million page book. How am I a blogger who’s very busy going to digest this
million page book? What I talk about in that chapter is some of the
realities of online content. For instance, YouTube videos under 3 minutes
do better than videos that are 30 minutes.

Trent: Yes.

Ryan: Or blog posts under 800 words do a lot better than blog posts that
are 3,000 words and a lot of blogs have bounce rates, right, which is high
bounce rates. Like let’s say most gossip blogs have a bounce rate of 50% or
60% which means the majority of all people that come to that site will
leave within like a second of coming there. With those realities, your
content has to anticipate and address them to make sure that your stuff
sticks.

If you want someone to write about your million word book you better break
it up into digestible pieces that can make for an 800 word blog post. If
you are trying to get a gossip story out there and most people leave
immediately you better include a sexy picture that’s going to catch their
attention and make them stick. If you want people to watch your video,
don’t make it 47 minutes because that’s way longer than anyone has time
for. You’ve got to make it a multi-part series in 3 minute bytes. It’s sort
of like look this is the way people consume content online. This is the way
that the online medium works. You’ve got to meet them were they are. No one
watches boring television. No one reads long internet articles. So, you
would be a fool to do either.

Trent: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. In most things in business there’s a
frame work or a process that you can follow to execute something, and
ideally as a CEO you create processes for other people to follow.

Ryan: Yes.

Trent: So, in this regard, let’s say that there’s a CEO that’s listening to
this and he’s thinking you know this makes a lot of sense for me, I want to
have one of my staff start to take ownership of this. What advice would you
give that person on creating a process or a framework so that this could be
successfully executed by someone on their team?

Ryan: In the book I have nine tactics that I think break down exactly how
the media system works and that’s how you got to think about all your
messages. If you want to break it down to three: it’s identify your targets
like identify the influencers. Then part two would be, appeal to self
interest so don’t ask them to write about you because you have a good thing
ask them to write about you because it’s good for them. Then finally it’s
trade it up the chain or feed the monster. Once you’ve got this little bit
of attention you’ve got to turn it into a lot of attention. You’ve got to
be the one that makes this a big thing. You can’t just hope that it
happens. So, it’s identify, appeal like reach out, and make the most of it
once you’ve got it.

Trent: OK. Let me make sure that I understand that. The identify is what we
talked about earlier where you’re looking at if you want to get on the
Huffington Post, you’re looking at what the Huff Post is paying attention
to. The blogs are there so that you’re identifying your target audience and
the reporters on that blog that’d be your target audience. Then, you’re
understanding that their number one goal is traffic. That’s appealing to
their self-interest. Then so they publish you so now you trade it up the
chain. By trading it up the chain is that where you use these fake e-mail
addresses and so forth or you get your list or whoever someone other than
you to start…

Ryan: Exactly.

Trent: …sending e-mails to the next tier of blogs saying hey did you see
this story on Bob’s blog?

Ryan: Exactly and make sure that you’re constantly feeding more and more
content. It’s not enough to do this one time. The internet is a machine
it’s got an infinite amount of material. If you expect doing one
interesting thing one time is enough to coast on you’re going to sadly fall
off the radar very quickly.

Trent: How much is enough?

Ryan: There is not too much, too much is impossible.

Trent: OK. There is no real rule of thumb there that you can suggest for
anyone?

Ryan: I mean, I think the Huffington Post says they Tweet every five
seconds.

Trent: Wow.

Ryan: Maybe that’s not possible for you but I think it sets the ceiling
pretty high.

Trent: Yes, yes, it does. OK. In the interest of brevity, we will leave it
there. Ryan I want to thank you very much for taking a few, well I guess
maybe probably the better part of an hour here, to be on the show with me.
I know that you’ve probably done a lot of these interviews but that goes
with the territory when you publish a book. You have to expect to do that.

It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show and I want to thank you very
much. If anyone wants to get a hold of you is there a way for them to do
that?

Ryan: My site ryanholiday.net has all my info right there.

Trent: OK. The Skype cut out there for a minute. That’s ryanholiday.net and
holiday is spelled just as you’d guess, like a vacation.

Ryan: Exactly.

Trent: H-O-L-I-D-A-Y, Ryanholiday.net.

Ryan, thank you so much for being on the show. We’ll wrap it up and folks
we’ll see you again in another show soon.

Ryan: Thank you very much for having me.

Trent: All right. That wraps up session number 40 with Ryan Holiday. Thank
you so much. If you enjoyed this interview I would love it if you’d take a
moment and head over to iTunes and give the show some feedback because
that’s one of the ways that the show gets more exposure and the more of an
audience that I have the more of interesting and high profile guests like
Ryan that I can attract to the show.

I also want to just thank you very much for being one of my listeners.
Getting to do this podcast is truly a privilege it’s one of the most fun
things that I do and I absolutely love it when people listen to the
episodes and they write me comments down below saying all the great things
that they learned from the guests.

If you do have any questions for the guests or you have questions for me,
please use the comment forum down below. If you’re not listening to this on
my blog, you can get to this at onlineincomelab.com/session040 and if you
haven’t yet checked out my new blog, you can find it at brightideas.co. At
the time that you’re listening to this that is probably not live yet but
this interview and others will be on the site.

If you want to make sure that you get notified and learn more about what
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just by putting in your name and your e-mail address there on the page.

Again, thank you so much for listening we’ll see you again in another
podcast very soon.

Trent: Hey everybody, this is Trent Dyrsmid. Welcome to session number 38
of the Online Income Lab podcast. Today you guys are in for another really,
really interesting interview. My guest on the show is a guy by the name of
Dane Maxwell. He is not even 29 yet, and has already started two six
figure, successful online businesses, both in the software as a service
space, that make applications for the real estate industry.

These apps help real estate professionals to increase their productivity
through more agents, follow up with leads, as well as to communicate with
their co-workers. Whether you’re interested in real estate or not you are
going to love this podcast, because Dane and I talk at length about the
number one thing that prevents most people from ever even starting, and
that is how to come up with a profitable idea.

Then next we talk about all the limiting beliefs that get in the way of
people taking any action at all to make that idea become a reality. I’ve
got to tell you, this was one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve done in
a good long time, so make sure that you check it out and join me in
welcoming Dane to the show.

Hey, Dane. Welcome to the show, thanks for making time to do the interview
with me today.

Dane: Yes, you’re welcome, Trent.

Trent: In doing my research on you, one of the things that I came across
was that you think most entrepreneurs are focused on the wrong things, and
as a result they’re wasting their time. I thought we’d start off with that.
What did you mean by this?

Dane: I’ve been thinking about this. I think ultimately, entrepreneurs, the
most important activity for business is sales and marketing. Without the
sales and marketing you have nothing. You have a product, but if you’re not
making money with it you’re not selling it, it doesn’t exist.

Trent: Yes, who cares.

Dane: You don’t really have a business until there’s profit. I think what
happens is people’s insecurity about sales or marketing drives them to do
just about everything else under the sun, except for the actual selling of
that product.

The most important thing in a business is lead generation and closing those
leads in a sale. Typically the first hour of any morning that I do is the
highest value revenue generation that I could do.

Yes, I have some discomfort when that happens, but it’s a commitment in my
mind. It’s not “Oh, am I going to do this, am I not?” It’s if I decide to
work out, I decide the night before, when I wake up, I work out. It’s not
like, do I think about hitting the snooze button. It’s definitely a
commitment to revenue generation the first hour of the morning. That’s
really all that I’ve ever committed to to build the freedom that I have.
That’s how I would answer that.

Trent: Give me an idea of what that looks like. Tell me that first magical
hour for you. We’re going to be talking about your first product,
Recruiting Ninja, today. If you wanted to talk about how when you were
launching that product, how you spent . . . and we’re going to go into a
whole bunch more detail, but I just thought this was a great way to get us
started and get the listeners interested.

What was that first hour of your day like when Recruiting Ninja was
everything?

Dane: What a good question. The hour changed as I figured out more and more
about marketing. Then when I discovered direct response marketing, that’s
when the flood gates opened. Direct response marketing is the secret
language of millionaires. I’m sure you’re no stranger to this.

You’ve undoubtedly heard of direct response marketing?

Trent: Oh yeah. Yes, absolutely.

Dane: I was getting ready for you to say no and I was going to be like, ‘oh
s**t,’ I didn’t mean to call you out. I’ve seen your site and I know that
you have direct response [inaudible 00:04:29].

Trent: A little, yeah.

[laughter]

Dane: The first hour when I started was like well, I had my target market
in mind, which was Remax real estate brokers, and there are about 32,000 of
those in the country. You can look those up pretty easily, so I was cold-
calling for an hour every morning. As I like to say, just getting pooped on
all day long, rejected.

I had no other choice, because I don’t want to be an employee. I wonder, to
go on a little bit of a tangent but not totally unrelated, there’s a lot of
conditional entrepreneurs out there. The conditions need to be right in
order for them to want to be an entrepreneur. “Oh, I’ve got to cold call?
No thanks, I don’t want to be an entrepreneur. Oh, I’ve got to do this? No
thanks, I don’t want to be an entrepreneur. Oh, I’ve got to do this? No, no
thanks.”

Versus the people that are like, “I’m going to do this no matter what.”
Those are the kinds of guys who actually become entrepreneurs. Those are
the kinds of people I like to coach, the ones that are like, “I’m ready to
do this no matter what, I just need direction. I have the desire.”

The first hour was cold calling. Then I discovered that I could send email
and get sales that way without any of the rejection. Then I started doing
that for the first hour every morning. I would craft an email, send it out
to, say, the Texas state of real estate brokers.

I would go through their sites and copy/paste their emails and put them
into a BCC file. This was 2007, so it was a little weird to do then. You
can definitely still do it now. I would send them super-valuable content,
really education based content, tips on . . . the business was on
recruiting agents, so I would send them tips and strategies on how to
recruit agents.

Then a PS, “By the way, if you’d like a system to do this, check out the
recruiting platform.

Trent: That right there is a big distinction, because so many people, if
you didn’t give that last point, they would have said, “Well, you’re just
going to write all these guys and say do you want to buy my stuff, do you
want to buy my stuff, do you want to buy my stuff.” Or check out my stuff,
and people are just going to delete, delete, delete.

Whereas you were doing something really smart in that you were giving them
value first and building some good will in the process.

We’ve got lots more questions on that, but I want to jump back just a
little bit, because I know one of the things, and your assistant, our pre-
show communication, maybe it was even you, I don’t remember. We talked
about, and I know this first hand, that so many people who are listening to
this podcast and in general really struggle with the question of how do I
get a good idea?

When I was the CEO of my last company, I had an inordinate number of people
come to me, and they would say What should I do, how should I get started?”
My answer was always really, really short. I would say ‘just start,’ and
they’d look at me like I was an idiot. I wasn’t giving them any really
great advice.

I don’t think what I was telling them was anything radically different from
what I have researched about you and from what you tell people. I don’t
want to be putting words in your mouth, so why don’t you tell me, when
someone says to you ‘how do I get a good idea,’ what do you say?

That’s the whole thing, right? People get stuck. I can’t be in business. I
don’t have a good idea yet. Which is not true.

Dane: Yes, let’s zoom out for a second and the answer this question,
because this is the area that I feel like I am incredibly efficient at.
This is an area where I think even entrepreneurs that I meet aren’t even
really that good at this.

This is the process of idea extraction. If people were to ask me ‘I need an
idea, what do I do,’ I tell them find the pain. Find the pain. We have a
process of a series of questions and a framework that we do where we go
into markets and find the pain.

Every different business I’ve started, none of the ideas have been my own.
To very briefly touch on the recruiting example for brokers . . . this
isn’t what I did but it’s what I would have done now that I know what I
know. I would ask real estate brokers, “What’s the most important activity
in your business?” They would say “recruiting.”

I would say “Do you have any pain associated with that activity?” “Yes.”
“Can you tell me more about that?” Boom, you’re going to get an entire list
of ideas.

That’s the tactic. I give you those two questions you go do that, but I
want to give you the believer mindset so you can actually create more of
these tactics at will. Remember you’re going to find the pain in the
market.

I want to zoom out to two things, if I can stay on track here. One about
just get started, how important that is, Trent. The second is the
difference between a limiting and an empowering belief. It seems like a lot
of the world is run on limiting beliefs. You know a belief is limiting if
it makes you feel all tight and convinced inside.

For example, I need to be an expert before I can start a business. You feel
that tension in your body. That’s a limiting belief versus you don’t need
to be an expert. You can find experts to solve most problems for you. You
can find the pain, define that problem clearly, put experts in play to find
that.

We have at the Foundation, which is the company that I’m running now, we
have a whole set of empowering beliefs that turn people into rocket ships
regardless of any external circumstances they have. Like if they don’t have
an idea, if they’re not an expert, they don’t have money.

Trent: Give us three.

Dane: We believe there’s an unmet need in every market. All you need to do
is dig long enough to find the pain.

We believe in not being the experts, but in being the experts at finding
the problems, defining them clearly and putting the experts in place to
solve them for us. What’s another good one?

We believe we have an endless supply of internal resources inside of us
when we want something bad enough, and that when we’re stretched and our
back is against the wall we can do even more [inaudible 00:10:33].

Trent: Bravo, I agree with all of them. Definitely.

Dane: We believe in doing work that matters in solving real world problems.
We believe that entrepreneurship is the greatest vehicle for personal
growth and self-discovery. The whole thing about just getting started, and
thank you for asking about it.

Here’s the barrier for an idea. Here are all the skills that you learn once
you start on an idea, and then here’s where your skills are now because you
haven’t got the idea yet. You have to learn these skills, it doesn’t matter
what idea you pick as long as you pick one.

I’ve seen studies and reports show that people that have started a
successful and profitable business and a failed business are much more
likely to succeed than people who’ve never started at all. This is common
sense, like duh, but if you’re waiting for that idea to get started, there
are all these skills past this idea that you have to build, like marketing,
going through the process of cold calling. This sucks. Doing e-mail
marketing. Okay, it’s good, but it’s not as good as webinars.

Those are skills that you build because you start on an idea. If you don’t
get started, you’re never going to build the skills that are actually
valuable. When you’re waiting for an idea, you think . . . here’s what’s
interesting, Trent. When people are asking for that idea, that’s what they
think the value of a business is. They’re like, “Oh, I got this idea, but
since the value of the business is that idea, if there’s competition then
that idea is no longer valuable.”

The value is not the idea. It’s the implementation and the process. I can
say that and you can logically understand it, but until you’ve internalized
it it’s not going to make a lot of sense. The value of the business is not
the idea. That is so foreign to people [that have never started].

Trent: It is. I’ve actually blogged about this exact question. In this post
I talk about the greatest advice I ever got from one of my mentors about
being a success in business. He said the best way to succeed in business is
to be in business.

At the time I thought I don’t really get it, that doesn’t seem particularly
profound. Then years later when I had hindsight to my benefit, I came up
with what I call my “green dot” theory. You get this idea and you’re going
to sell green dots, so you write this little business plan, and you go out
and you try to sell green dots.

You suck at it, but because you’re trying to sell green dots as opposed to
talking about selling green dots, you actually discover that there’s a
market for blue dots. You adjust your business strategy and you go out
selling those blue dots, and now you’ve forgotten all about green dots.
You’re breaking even selling blue dots, but you’re still not really
crushing it, and then you find black dots and purple dots.

By the time you get to yellow dots, which you would have never, ever, ever
discovered if you didn’t start with green dots, you’re absolutely crushing
it. You have the life of your dreams, and the difference between the guy
who’s selling yellow dots and the other guy is that he was willing to start
not knowing ultimately where he was going to go.

The best way to succeed in business, and this is exactly what you’ve been
saying, and it’s been my life for the last 14 years, is to be in business.
I wish more people would get past their fear of I’ve got to have the yellow
dot idea before I can start. The green dot idea is good enough.

Dane: Yes, me too. I’ve got a couple things if it’s Okay.

Trent: Absolutely, please.

Dane: Don’t forget about the question you’re asking. I can talk about how I
discovered the recruiting a website idea, because it is a yellow dot, and
it didn’t start out that. It took me six months to find that yellow dot of
taking action.

The best business ideas are three or four layers deep, right? Not the first
layer you start out, it’s the second or third, and you pivot. You don’t
pivot unless you get started.

The second thing is a lot of my work now is in creating entrepreneurs. A
lot of my work spent with creating entrepreneurs is reversing the limiting
beliefs that keep them from getting started. I tried to address the tactics
and teach them tactics to start companies, but they would come back and get
stuck all the time.

We would start reversing limiting beliefs like “I’m not good enough because
I’ve never started a company. Why would anyone pay attention to me?’”That’s
a limiting belief. I reversed that limiting belief.

Or a lot of people I meet are actually not afraid of failing, they’re
afraid of success. They’ll continue to sabotage themselves right to the
point where they become successful, because it would be too painful to
finally be a success in all of their friends’ and family’s eyes.

Trent: How do you reverse a limiting belief? I’m sorry to cut you off, but
I think that’s important.

Dane: There’s a book called “Loving What Is, Four Questions to Change Your
Life.” It’s by Byron Katie, and there’s a simple four question framework in
there that you use to reverse limiting beliefs. Now I’ve taken that four
question framework and I’ve added two questions to it, one or two questions
to it, and I’ve reworded it a little bit.

You go through that four question framework, and that’s how you reverse a
limiting belief. If you want to do that now we can, but it takes quite a
bit of time. It’d probably be better to jump into the business. I have a
full 30 minute video on reversing limiting beliefs coming up.

Trent: Okay, perfect. Terrific. Let’s keep on going down the road.

Dane: It’s so important. It’s so important that the limiting beliefs are
the foundation. That’s why we call our company the Foundation, because we
help you with having a concrete foundation so you can just soar.

You’re not stopped by tactics. You’re not stopped by how. You’re stopped
because you have deep internal beliefs, and once those shackles of those
beliefs have been removed you become a rocket ship. What happens is people
become successful and then they’re like “Oh crap, I’m becoming too
successful,” and now we have to reverse that limiting belief that says you
can’t be more successful than your parents.

We start getting really deep into the psychology of these beliefs, and
that’s where you really need a loving, compassionate set of eyes and a
gentle approach to reversing these. It’s not about you can do it, rah-rah,
push through the concrete wall. No, it’s a very compassionate approach to
reversing.

Trent: The interesting thing is, and I can think back to before I started
my first business. I think myself, like many people, think that success is
the byproduct of strategies and tactics. Those of us who’ve been fortunate
to have some level of entrepreneurial success, and folks who have had high
levels know this even more, that ain’t it. It’s the mindset, it’s the
belief systems.

If you don’t see a huge potential you won’t take much in the way of action.
Then you won’t get the results. The only time that you see a huge potential
is when you have a really empowering belief system. If you don’t have that
belief system, “I don’t think I’ll be successful,” you don’t take much in
the way of action, you don’t get much in the way of do much, you don’t get
much results. It just reinforces that negative belief, and that’s to be . .
.

Dane: [inaudible 00:17:52] reminds me Trent. Sorry, there is a delay. I’m
not purposefully trying to interrupt.

Trent: No problem.

Dane: Safe to talk?

Trent: Yes.

Dane: We have a belief that says, “We believe in failing fast and
frequently. We believe that success comes from progress, progress comes
from experience, experience comes from failure. We fail so we can succeed.”

When people join me, I had an intern come visit with me for the summer.
Three months later he said, “Dane, I feel like I’m a failure because I
haven’t started anything.” I looked him in the eye and said, “Chris, you
didn’t come here to succeed. You came here to learn how to fail faster.”

Now he’s got his first business with paying clients in the pest control
industry. He failed three or four times throughout the summer. One of the
things I do is I speed up people fail.

Trent: That’s a good thing, because the more times, if you can shorten your
failure time then you can get to your success that much sooner. It’s like
finding a date. You have to get told no a few times before you find someone
who says yes.

Dane: I actually need to hear that, but that’s good. Sometimes I get
nervous when I have to [inaudible 00:18:59] girls.

Trent: I just watched the movie “We Bought a Zoo” with Matt Damon, and in
the movie it’s how he met his wife, and he’s telling his kids. He talks
about you just need 20 seconds of courage. He saw her in this coffee shop
and he’s walking by, and he said “All I needed to do was suck up 20 seconds
of courage to go and say hi to her.”

Because in 20 seconds, it’s either going to be over or you will have met a
fabulous person, and possibly changed the rest of your life.

When I was younger and very sheepish about that, the question in my mind,
instead of it being well what happens if she says no? I used to reframe the
question and go what happens if that’s the girl of my dreams? Then I had to
go find out.

Anyway, now I’m getting off-tangent.

Dane: No, that’s a good tangent.

Trent: All right. Recruiting Ninja. You said it wasn’t a green dot, it was
a yellow dot. I can tell this hour is going to go by way too fast, but
let’s talk a little bit about how you got started. Were you ever a realtor?
Were you ever a broker? I don’t think so.

Dane: I did get my real estate license, but I sold one transaction and I
was miserable.

Trent: Yes, I had mine and I sold no transactions. I got two listings and I
hated it. That was short lived.

You didn’t have this depth of experience in the industry, and so you decide
well, I want to make a software product or something. Tell me what happened
to lead you to your yellow dot, which was Recruiting Ninja. Then we’ll talk
about what Recruiting Ninja is and how you sold it and all that stuff.

Dane: Okay. Really quickly, I read the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” It talked
about the importance of real estate. I’m driving in my car a month later
and I’m like ‘oh my gosh, my uncle owns a Remax.’ On the ‘Rich Dad, Poor
Dad’ it also talks about working to learn.

I said, “Hey Rob, I want to come work for your Remax company, and I want to
work to learn. I don’t need to be paid.” He said I’ll pay you and put you
in my foreclosure department. He was the foreclosure king in Des Moines,
Iowa. He processed 400 foreclosures a month. I got to see really in depth
the foreclosure space.

In that office, he invited me to go to an office meeting. I had to drive 45
minutes one way to get to them, and then I’d just drive back home. I said
yes to that office meeting. In the office meeting I heard all these agents
complaining, when Rob, my uncle, was talking to agents about “Okay, to do
this resource you go to this site, to do this resource you go to this site,
to do this resource you go to this site.”

Finally one of the agents is like, “Isn’t there a place we can go where all
these links are organized?” Rob’s like, “No, no, we don’t have anything
like that”. I was pretty nervous, I was 22 at the time, I raised my hand
and said, “I think I can probably put something like that together for you
guys if it would be valuable.”

The whole room just locks onto me. I was like “uh-oh.” I created the
product based on that need that I saw in person. Since then I’ve developed
idea extraction to the point where I can create ideas from thin air, just
by talking to people and asking a few questions. What’s important to you
and does it have any pain? Initially that’s how I got started.

What I found is that the money that I make lags about six to 12 months
behind my mindset. If I want to make $10,000 a month, that’s my mindset and
I’m really developing it and taking action, it takes about 12 months for me
to get to that point. If I want to do $50,000 a month, I’m thinking $50,000
a month in my mind, it takes about 12 months, six to 12 months.

Somewhere around the line I developed the mindset through reading different
books by Perry Marshall and buying stuff on the WarriorForum, buying those
silly [inaudible 00:23:02] on the WarriorForum buying those silly products
on the WarriorForum can sometimes be helpful.

I came across and started to believe that I wanted three things. I wanted
to sell tools and shovels instead of digging for gold. I wanted a business
with an automated sale, and I wanted a business with recurring revenue, and
also no accounts receivable, so I don’t do something and then a week later
I get [inaudible 00:23:21].

These four beliefs became so embedded in me that my mind cannot even think
about a business that doesn’t have recurring revenue or an automated sale.
That happened somewhere around those lines, so I started thinking that for
a little while, then here comes this recurring revenue website based idea
in my life that I became aware of because I had that deep seated belief.

That’s where it started. Then I spent the next six months cold-calling and
selling this product to real estate brokers.

Trent: Wait a minute. You didn’t have a product yet though did you?

Dane: I built that product that had “The Organization of Links”. I didn’t
know really how to design websites. I took an HTML class, but that stuff’s
so over my head. I used Joomla. I looked for free, open source websites,
how can I make a free website, started Google searching around. How do I
make free websites, what’s good?

Like I started to see WordPress and Joomla and June Pool [SP] and all
these. I thought I’ll pick Joomla. It looked best to me based on the
design, so I picked Joomla. You install it on a server with a couple
clicks. Anybody could figure that out. Then I can just point and click
around and add links to the site.

My uncle’s like “Hey, can we upload files to the site, so agents can come
get their contracts?” I thought that sounds really complicated, so I Google
searched file sharing on Joomla and lo and behold there’s this plug-in that
I can install right away that’s free, and now I can install files. He’s
like, “Wow, Dane, you are a genius.”

[laughter]

Trent: I love it.

Dane: That became the product.

Trent: Okay. You were cobbling together this thing as the marketplace or
your uncle . . . I’m sorry, was it your uncle? Am I making that up in my
head?

Dane: [inaudible 00:25:10]

Trent: Okay, as your uncle was telling you what the pain was that they were
trying to solve. Okay.

Dane: Yes, and I wasn’t smart enough to ask for the pain. I just sat in the
office and experienced it. I don’t know if there’s any better way to
replace that. You can ask the questions and they work well, but you sit
behind someone and watch them work . . .

You can ask them about pain and get a really great process and it works
really well, but you can still sit behind someone and watch their body gets
tense, just watch them. You can tell which applications they like to use,
which ones they don’t use. If they’re bouncing between three applications
for one thing you’re like “Oh wow, there’s a hole.”

There’s so much you can do by observing, but you don’t absolutely need to
do that. I just like asking questions.

Trent: When I did it I just went to a trade show and I just walked around
the floor. This was back in 1999. I wanted to create my first, I didn’t
know what it was, it was going to be an online something. I loved cars and
I loved the Internet, so I went to the SEMA show, which is the Specialty
Equipment Manufacturers show, it’s their biggest show in the car industry.

I just walked around and I asked one question, because I didn’t know what
else to ask. “What are you doing to integrate the Internet into your
business?” Through a full day of walking the whole trade floor and asking
people that, conversations got deeper and deeper and I kept learning more
and more. Eventually I got this company called Chicago Rawhide to sign on
as my beta customer.

Their whole pain point was because they didn’t have any visibility, because
all the guys were ordering stuff over the phone, into the production
pipeline. Their forecasts of how many widgets they should make would be off
wildly, and this was a company doing half a billion dollars a year in
sales.

He said to me, “We’re wasting $10, $20 million a year, because we make too
many of these and we don’t make enough of those. If you could create a way
that would solve that problem, that would be immensely valuable.” Then the
dot-com crashed, and that’s why I didn’t end up building that company,
because I wasn’t even smart enough trying to get them to pay for it.

I’m running around looking for investors. Meanwhile I should’ve gotten the
customer to pay for it, but I was an idiot back then, so that’s Okay.

My point is the questioning thing. It works so incredibly well. At the
beginning of the day I didn’t know what questions to ask, but by the time
I’ve interviewed dude on the trade show floor number 22, now I sound like
an expert, because I just talked to 21 other guys and they all gave me
these little nuggets that I could use.

Like I said, within one day, I had an idea for this business that had I
been smarter and had I had the resources and had the timing been different,
probably would’ve been a good business.

Again for anyone that’s listening to this, if you’re interested in a great
niche or any niche, go to a trade show, go talk to people, phone them up. I
just want to say that I really, really strongly agree with what Dane is
saying, that this is how you’re going to come up with your best ideas.

I think I even saw you in an interview on Paperless Pipeline. You said any
idea that you ever thought up never actually worked out.

Dane: No. I’m awful at coming up with good ideas. I’ve tried two on my own
and both have failed.

Trent: Both have failed. Okay, let’s keep talking about Recruiting Ninja.

Dane: [inaudible 00:28:30] your story.

Trent: What’s that?

Dane: I loved your story about the trade show thing.

Trent: Oh, thanks.

Dane: Really [inaudible 00:28:36] to hear that. I want to just touch on
that for a second, because in case anybody in their mind is going “Okay,
that was great back when the Internet wasn’t a big deal,” but when people
went on the Internet that was an easy question to ask. If I was back then I
could ask that question too.

If that’s a thought in your mind, that would be a limiting belief. Dig
deeper underneath what Trent’s doing here and you can go to businesses now
and be like hey, what are you doing to integrate your business into mobile
applications? That’s how you process that.

20 years later you can use the same process Trent did too. Really dig for
the framework, don’t try to get stuck on the surface level. If you are
having these limiting thoughts in your mind, just be aware of them and you
can start to see how dangerous they are and how they can sabotage.

Trent: Absolutely. Like I said on the trade show, the more people you talk
to the more of an expert you’ll become in asking questions. You will, I
absolutely promise, you’ll get results and you will find an idea. If you’re
focused and committed to it, it will not take you long.

Dane: One last thing. I don’t care if this goes a little longer if people
want to watch, if that’s OK with you.

Trent: That’s fine.

Dane: My mission on the planet is to create as many entrepreneurs as
possible, especially from the wannabe entrepreneur category. People that
are stuck, there’s so much opportunity for them to reach their full
potential and they’re not reaching their full potential. They’re miserable
because of it, they’re unhappy.

Where am I going? I wanted to talk about . . . I lost my train of thought.
If it comes back to me I’ll bring it up [inaudible 00:30:08].

Trent: Okay. Just wave your hands and I’ll know that you want to talk. All
right. When you were first starting off, and you kind of gave the answer to
this, but I just want to . . .

Dane: Got it.

Trent: Got it? Go ahead.

Dane: If you have a limiting belief that says I don’t know anything about
your business, I don’t have enough value, I don’t have enough questions to
ask, so who am I to even ask these questions, because I haven’t done
anything?

If that stops you from even starting asking questions because you’re
[inaudible 00:30:37] and you’ve never done anything, examine that thought
and you’ll see that person that you’re asking the questions to won’t
necessarily care.

You can call up a veterinarian in your local city and be like “Hey, I’ve
driven by your place a few times, I’m really curious about your business,
I’m really passionate about entrepreneurship and I want to get into
entrepreneurship and I’ve never started a company before, but I’m really
interested in maybe helping you solve some problems in your business. I’m
completely clueless, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know if we find
some pain in your business there’s probably some ways to solve it. Would
you be open to exploring that?”

Veterinarian’s going to say hell yes. I have a friend who’s actually
selling insurance. He makes $30,000 a year, and he’s building lead gen
products for ophthalmologists, and he’s knocking it down. He’s charging
anywhere from $400.00 to $2,000 a month by installing an AWeber pop-up form
on their site, and then creating an auto-responder so he can just follow-up
and close those leads.

He takes 10% of the sale, $400.00 a month. He’s absolutely killing it, and
he’s going to finally leave his job. That’s all his business is, and he’s
doing webinars. When he does the webinars and he goes to close, he’s like,
“Look, I believe in transparency and honesty, and I want you to know this
is me, this is my wife, this is my house, and I’m actually a full time
insurance agent at Nationwide, and as you can imagine I’m absolutely
miserable.

I’d love to be an entrepreneur and I’d love to help you at the same time,
so I’m offering this to you and if you could have a hand in helping me
become an entrepreneur I’d be really appreciative.” The ophthalmologists
start drooling over him and buy his stuff.

Trent: I was going to say dude, that is so incredibly powerful, that level
of transparency and authenticity endears people. Because what are the
reasons why someone buys something from you? The two greatest reasons are
they like you and they trust you.

He just knocked those out of the park with a sledgehammer, because he’s
saying I’m just starting out man and this is really what I want to have and
this where I’m going, and I’m going to bust my a** to help you get there if
you want to sign on with me. I could see how that would work very, very
well.

Dane: If you have the belief that says you have to have a track record or
expertise or credentials to ever be in a place where people listen to you,
that belief is going to sabotage you and you’re never going to get started.
You really want to examine that and reverse that belief, so you can be like
my friend Nick who’s now the most excited guy on the planet because he can
be totally honest with people about where he’s at.

Trent: Absolutely. All right. We’re going to go back a little bit now to
the very early stages of Recruiting Ninja. You’ve cobbled together a
product just using some hustling basically. It’s something anyone could do
with WordPress today, because WordPress makes it even easier.

My question that I originally wrote down was did you look first for
customers, did you write a business plan, or did you start developing
software? It sounds to me like, well, it doesn’t matter what it sounds to
me like. You tell me the order you did those things in. Because a lot of
people…. . .

Dane: I started trying to sell . . .

Trent: A lot of people make big mistakes in this early part, and that’s why
I wanted you to speak to this.

Dane: The most important thing in business is making money initially, I
think. I don’t know if I want to generalize and say the most important
thing, but for me, I had to make money because I was in my parents’
basement. Running a business plan didn’t make me money. Developing a better
product didn’t make me money. The only thing that made me money was
selling.

I woke up and for the first hour every morning I sold. I got that strategy
from a really successful multi-multi-millionaire who said someone went up
to him once, like “How have you been so successful?” He said “It’s simple.
I spend the first hour of every morning making money.”

I just modeled that. I just started selling. I started looking up Remax
brokers in different states, find their websites, calling them up, trying
to sell them.

Trent: Okay. You got a lot of no’s and then every once in a while someone
would say yes. Over time I’m guessing it got easier?

Dane: No. Yes and no. Now it’d be easier for me to be on the phone. Yes,
you build the skill. Actually the telephone is so tremendous. One of our
students in the Foundation who’s going to be on Mixergy this week or next,
just built a phenomenal product in his garage in New Zealand, just from
using the telephone. Just by following the teachings.

He discovered his idea in two or three days, he got 12 people to buy into
the product before it ever existed, used that to fund development,
negotiated equity with the developer so he got it virtually free, and he’s
on his way to six figures faster than I ever was.

My point with this is yes it is definitely easier. But the six months, it
was so painful, I could call ten or 20 brokers a day, I’d get one that was
a tentative yes, but then they’d have to get the whole office on board, so
the whole office would have to go to the website and the whole office would
have to be using the website for it to be valuable. In six months I sold
four or five of these products. It was awful.

Trent: You weren’t at your yellow dot yet. This was the early iteration of
your product, right?

Dane: Yes.

Trent: Okay, so what happened?

Dane: How I got the yellow dot. Six months in I call this broker named Jay
Blessent [SP] or Jay Houston in Texas. I show him my product. I don’t even
know how I called or what I said, but I said “Hey, I’ve got this product
that might help your agents be more productive in your office. Are you
interested?”

‘Yes, I’m always interested in productivity or whatever.’ I showed him the
website, I showed him the example of the product and he’s like, “I don’t
like this, this is stupid.” I didn’t say, “Okay, well thank you for your
time,” I said ,”Well, what’s stupid about it?”

He didn’t really say it like but that’s what I heard and that’s what I
felt. That this is a stupid product. I wanted to dive more into him and the
way he was feeling. He’s like, ‘well, I don’t need this, I don’t need this
calendar, I don’t know why you have all the photos of all the agents.’

I said, “Let me show you this section. Do you think this is silly?” “Yes,
we’re not ever going to use that.” “What about this section? Do you like
this, do you think this is silly?” “Yes, that’s not good either.”

About 20 minutes in, he clicks on a section that has these videos come up
that talks all about Remax, and it was the section that agents would look
at to learn about the company, potential agents. He said, “Oh, I love this
section. Is there any way that I can just get this part of the product and
nothing else?”

I said, “Well what would you use that for?” “I’d use that to recruit
agents.” I was like, “Is that important to you?” He’s like, “Yes, that is
the most important part of my business. It’s all I think about all day
long.”

Trent: Ding, ding, ding.

Dane: I could just sell you a recruiting process. Sorry, go ahead.

Trent: I just said ding, ding, ding. You found the gold.

Dane: Yes, I found the gold. Now to replicate that for other people I just
say, “Hey, what’s the most important part of your business, and do you have
any pain associated with that?” Those two questions took me six months and
more time and money than I’d ever care to share, so those are not questions
to be taken lightly. Those are really valuable things to do.

Those are just the tactics. Remember the mindset is you want to find how
can you be creative about finding the pain in business?

Now that product went on to do over $20,000 a month. I doubled the price of
that product twice. I was traveling the world while that product was going
on. Once that product took off I just started emailing brokers, “Hey, we’re
doing this thing that helps you recruit agents. It’s actually a recruiting
website. Do you have any interest?”

That would be in the PS. Actually, it was so new I would just send that
out, and that would actually work. After that it was just selling it
straight up, [inaudible 00:38:34], I started sending tips, and then putting
a PSA if you’re interested in the recruiting thing.

I built the business off those 3,200 brokers that I was able to research
and get their contact info, I was able to build a $20,000 a month business
with just a couple hundred customers. It’s really easy to take care of a
couple hundred customers.

Trent: Is that business still running today and still doing $20,000 a
month?

Dane: It is not. It is running. I’m stepping away from it. I’m
intentionally letting it die. This business is a cash cow, it’s one of the
most lucrative, profitable businesses, but it takes . . . some people might
be like, ‘Dane, you’re a retard for saying this,’ but it takes about one or
two hours a day.

It could easily be a $40,000 a month business if I spent one or two hours a
day on it. Two hours a day, make $40,000 a month, but it’s not my heart
center, it’s not what I’m ultimately passionate about.

A year and a half, two years in, I started to grow tired of this. I started
to see there was a bigger vision for me. I ultimately wanted to help
brokers bring agents into their company, but I don’t know anything about
running a real estate office, and if the broker signs up for the recruiting
website but their office sucks, they blame the recruiting website when I
can’t help them recruit agents, if their office sucks but they have a great
recruiting website, there’s this disconnect. I didn’t like that aspect of
it.

Also brokers, 80% of brokers don’t treat recruiting as a priority, which is
why most brokerages fail. Rather than try and convince them to keep
recruiting a priority . . . recruiting is a sugar cookie product for a
diabetic, and I wanted to sell insulin to a diabetic, so that’s why I
shifted into transaction [inaudible 00:40:20] pipeline. That grows
automatically without me, I can’t stop people from signing up for that.

The recruiting website itself is an amazingly lucrative niche. You could
take that model and apply it to insurance agents, anything, helping
companies recruit is good. I got burnt out trying to help brokers recruit
when I saw my vision for my life is much greater.

I just spent six months teaching 88 people how to build a life of freedom,
and out of those 88 people we’ve had five or ten new companies come out of
that, built out of thin air. Five or ten peoples’ lives have completely
changed from the ground up, not just a recruiting website. My vision now is
completely shifting people on the deep belief level so they can go after
what they want.

The business does $5,000 a month right now. I don’t touch it. Brokers sign
up for it every once and a while, but I don’t even want to run it.

Trent: You’re not promoting, you’re not doing anything with it because it’s
not your passion, fair enough. I’m going to keep our interview . . .

Dane: [inaudible 00:41:28]

Trent: Say that again?

Dane: What a great place to be in, where now I can actually pick something
I’m passionate about. I’m actually passionate about… this is another
thing that stops people. I must pick something that I’m passionate about to
get started. Become passionate about the process and not the actual thing,
and then you can go anywhere and do anything.

I was very passionate about solving this recruiting problem. I saw pain and
I wanted to solve it, but once I solved it I was like, “I’m a creator at
heart,” so I wanted to create something else. I’m just passionate about the
process. I keep on creating.

Don’t be passionate about an area, be passionate about the process and a
whole new world will open up to you.

Trent: That’s the whole serial entrepreneur mindset is that we love to go
out and solve problems and create businesses, and at the end of the day we
love to build stuff. Then we get bored with it and we want to go build
something else.

For the folks that are listening to this, because my audience is going to
be folks who are not in a position to start Foundation yet. I’m going to
keep us talking about Recruiting Ninja, because I think there’s a lot of
really great lessons here.

We know how you did early sales and how you got your early customers. Let’s
talk a little bit about product development. One of the things that you
said earlier in your interview was there was four tenets of the business
that you can’t even think, and I am so on the same page as you, about being
in a business without these things in place.

One of those four was the recurring revenue stream. Your business with
Recruiting Ninja, would that be classified as software as a service?

Dane: Yes.

Trent: Okay, so let’s talk about what is it that the product, let’s talk
about the mechanics of what it is you built.

Dane: A custom, from scratch, basically a really rinkety-dink [SP]
WordPress type CRM platform, plugged in, direct response marketing
principles. It’s tailored specifically to real estate companies. That’s
what it was.

Trent: Okay. To someone listening, because I was fascinated with this
product as I was studying it last night. I thought to myself all right, you
could basically build this, and tell me if you think I’m wrong, with
WordPress, some good videos, and something on the back end.

The simple thing, you could use AWeber, but I’m a big Infusionsoft fan
because it’s got way more horsepower. You could basically put WordPress on
the front and Infusionsoft on the back and you can be in that business. Is
that correct?

Dane: Absolutely.

Trent: There’s no, you didn’t build any super fancy custom coded hired
developers to do all this stuff. Between those two tools, which are very
powerful and have a lot of flexibility, you could essentially replicate the
product that you’ve got. Fair statement?

Dane: Yes.

Trent: Okay.

Dane: You could probably make it even better.

Trent: Technology keeps evolving, right? I’ve spent quite a bit of time
studying the concept of sales funnels, which we’re going to talk a little
bit about here in a while, as I become an Infusionsoft user. It’s awesome.
I’m spawning a whole new business called brightideas.co as a result of just
how much I’m learning in that regard and how much benefit there is for so
many business people in the world.

Back when I was a CEO, and I thought at the time that I was a good marketer
but in hindsight I completely sucked, because I didn’t know about building
lists and nurturing the lists and having a trust building sequence with
multiple product launch sequences strung in amongst and helping people self-
segment themselves.

There’s just so much valuable information there that I think a lot of
people really don’t know about. We’re going to try to knock a few of those
down here in our interview.

You really like the software as a service model because it generates
recurring revenue. Is there any other reason why you think that that’s such
a compelling model?

Dane: There’s more reasons than I could count. That’s not true. I could
probably come up with four or five good reasons.

One, the lifetime value of the customer is much higher than if you’re doing
a monthly recurring membership website. The average lifetime value is three
or four months of someone signing up for a membership website. The lifetime
value of a pipeline client is as long as it’s been in existence. Some
clients use it 24 months, people plug that in, they use it until that
business fails or they die.

Two, you don’t have to do anything, because you have developers working for
you that build up a feature set. Once they sign up there’s no more real
work involved.

Three, it’s easier to sell a software as a service than it is to sell just
about anything else on the planet. Takes a lot of convincing to convince
someone to buy information. That’s not always true, if you’re selling to
desperate buyers, but for the most part I’ve never had an easier time
selling anything than software as a service.

Trent: Because the product sells itself. When they see it doing the stuff
that it’s doing and they see it, in their mind they’re thinking, “Wow,
that’s going to solve major pain for me. I want that.” Is that correct, is
that why it’s so easy to sell?

Dane: Yes.

Trent: Okay.

Dane: Absolutely. It’s also a very dangerous field to play in if you don’t
know what you’re doing. It’s also one of the most lucrative. It’s more
lucrative than anything else on the Internet. 80% profit margins are not
uncommon.

For the Recruiting Ninja, I had one server that was $200.00 a month
powering a $20,000 a month recurring stream, and I had a $2,000 a month
developer in Pakistan running the business full time. What is that, $2,200
a month to make $20,000? Where else are you going to find margins like
that?

Trent: Nowhere.

Dane: If you’re trying to sell e-books, e-books are old news, man. The bane
of every business is acquiring a customer. Once you do all the work to
acquire a customer, why don’t you just keep them for life?

The things that are probably coming up in people’s heads are “I can’t do
software, I don’t know anything about it.” Those are all limiting beliefs.
Do you think I started knowing anything about software? No. Hiring the
developer to build the product, I was on Rent-a-coder back when it was
called Rent-a-coder instead of V-Worker, and I was like, “All right. I want
to build this site that looks like this,” because I had a designer put
together what the product looked like.

I got the product idea for how it would look by asking this broker what do
you want on the site? I got that design for $300.00. Then I showed that
design to a developer and I’m like, “How can I turn this into a system that
multiple people can use? Because I don’t have any idea.” That was my Rent-a-
coder post, and I had 30 developers reply to me.

I started asking, they’re like I can do this with this. What does that
mean, what does that mean? I just started asking the developers questions,
and that’s how I did it. It’s much easier than you think to build software
as a service product, but you can get your a** handed to you if you don’t
know what you’re doing. It’s a catch-22.

Trent: Let’s talk a little bit more about this product development. I think
it’s pretty straightforward. You ask people what they want, you find out
what the pain is, and you can literally sketch it out on paper. Then there
are tools that you can use like Kakoo [SP] and there’s probably a million
of them, where you can literally put up wire frames, and then you can drag
and drop and make all the boxes and the buttons and it doesn’t take any
coding talent to be able to do that at all.

Now you have a very detailed visual representation of what it is that you
want to build, and anybody listening can do that. Now you’ve got to get it
built, and you just said you can get your a** handed to you. How do you
avoid getting your a** handed to you when you go to a Rent-a-coder or an
oDesk or wherever. Where should people go?

Dane: Of course they have that strategy that I mentioned in the Pipeline
interview, right? We can start there. Basically you don’t get your a**
handed to you, and we covered this in full depth in the Foundation, because
it’s not something that I can talk about in ten minutes I can do the best
things I can.

The first is that you strip away features until the point that it scares
you. You strip away features by, you list out all the features that your
product was going to have, and you show them to your potential customer, so
you’d better have one for those products you’re building, and you say, “Do
you absolutely need this feature for the first version? Would this prohibit
you from signing up? Yes or no.”

Yes or no, and then they cut the features out. Product development is where
it becomes a really fun, sexy art. Everyone sabotages this, I barely ever
see anybody do this correctly. Strip that thing away until it scares you.

We built the first version of Paperless Pipeline, an example, in eight
weeks. It was going to be 16 weeks initially, and we cut that thing in half
by stripping away features until it scared. I was convinced that the
customer said this is all I needed to get started. I said, “What’s the
minimum you need to get started?”

This goes for content, this is not software as a service. Get out of the
tactics and zoom up to the bigger picture of this if you can. This is about
product development in general. This is for physical products, info
products, everything. You need the book to have this chapter for it to be
valuable right away. Can we add that in a month later after you’ve started
[inaudible 00:51:21].

That’s how you strip away features, and that’s known in lean start-up lingo
as the minimum buyable product.

Second is the biggest risk is in hiring the developer. If you say you think
you need money to hire a developer, that is a limiting belief. You can give
developers a percentage of revenue, and if you’re solving a painful problem
with a market in mind and they can see the revenue potential, developers
that are smart will offer something like that. You can give the developers
equity.

Or you can opt to pay a developer half of his hourly rate in exchange for
giving them that half hourly rate back plus 50% of the future revenue of
the product. These are all different tactics and strategies, but remember
the underlying belief, the empowering belief, is that you can hire
developers regardless of how much money you have. That’s the empowering
belief, notice how good that feels to say and to hear.

The way you get your a** handed to you is in hiring a terrible developer.
The success of the software as a service company rests on two things, your
marketing and your developer. With the developer, you want to be really
careful how you hire them.

One of the things we do in the Foundation is we give programming tests.
Typically we’ll post a job and we’ll get ten people back interested. If you
give them this programming test, typically the ten that sound awesome, like
“Wow, these people sound awesome,” you give them the programming test and
then two out of ten pass it. The other eight out of ten, they don’t have a
single clue.

You saved yourself 300%. That’s not an exaggeration. 300% you just saved on
your development cost by giving someone a programming test. And we have
those programming tests in the Foundation that we just give that they
copy/paste.

If you Google search around programming tests, programmers, you’ll probably
find some stuff out there too. Is that helpful?

Trent: Yes, absolutely. I’m just looking through all the other questions
that I had jotted down on this particular section. I wrote how did you come
up with the scope of what the application was supposed to do? Easy, talk to
the customer. What are some of the mistakes people make? Not having a
programming test.

How did you find, because I know in the past, the Paperless Pipeline
interview, you had a pretty interesting strategy. You said the best
developers aren’t looking for work.

Dane: Yes.

Trent: Tell me a bit more.

Dane: What’s that?

Trent: Tell me a bit more about that.

Dane: This is the very best way to hire the best developers in the world.
What you want to know, what you need to understand, is the deeper game
going on. I’ll give the tactic and then I’ll talk about the deeper game.

What I did is I went to a Google Group for the programming language called
Django [SP]. The way that I picked that language is I Google searched what
is the fastest, best programming language. Anybody can Google that. Ruby on
Rails comes up first, Django, and then I see all these case studies for how
Django executes how much faster than Ruby on Rails.

I’m like Okay, so it looks like Djano’s good. I don’t know anything else
other than Django seems to execute faster than Rails. Rails is great, I
actually encourage people to use Rails instead of Django because Ruby on
Rails has more great developers available and a bigger open source
community for you to tap into.

Oh yeah, crap. Another thing to really significantly cut your development
time in half is extend an open source product. If you’re going to build for
example one of my buddies, he’s building the stuff at property management
inspectors. One of their pains is they need a CRM software to calculate all
their rent [inaudible 00:55:06].

He’s calling [inaudible 00:55:10] CRM, and he’s going to use fat-free CRM,
which is an open source Ruby on Rails framework, customize it a little bit,
and like four weeks you have a [inaudible 00:55:17].

Trent: Yes, nice.

Dane: You can use open source, it’s so easy and fun to build software. Once
you have the perspective.

Anyway, the best developers are not looking for work, because they are
busy. There’s something about A-player developers that are busy that they
just get more stuff done.

There are a few things you want in a developer. One, they release features
on time when they say they will, two that they release features that have
been bug tested. They don’t send you a feature, you use it and there are
obviously bugs, they never even tried using the feature first. These are
things that really good developers do that bad ones don’t.

The best developers aren’t looking for work. What I do is I go to message
boards and Google Groups for DJango and in a Google Group, you can see who
the top ten posters are. I figure the top ten posters are the people that
contribute the most, because they know the most, so they’re probably the
best. I email the top ten people in Google Groups and I make them an offer
to work on a new project.

It was the real estate project, eight out of ten were like this is either
stupid, or I’m busy, or real estate’s struggling and failing why would I
ever do that? Two out of ten replied. One was a PhD in Django programming,
and the other was a developer in New York named Raheesh [SP], and he’s been
the foundation, if you will, of Paperless Pipeline. That’s how I found him.

Trent: Very, very cool idea. Much better than just putting up a job posting
on oDesk or Rent-a-coder.

Dane: Yes, it is. I also recommend posting your jobs on oDesk, because the
more developers you talk to, the more you flesh out your idea, the more
completed it becomes. Most of my students are posting on oDesk, and they’re
finding great developers through there, because we get the programming test
now to filter out. You just have to deal with a few more bad applicants.

That being said, this process works really, really well for anything. If
you want to have a good video editor, find video editing messaging boards
and look for the top video editor. If you want the best in any category, go
to the message boards, find the top posters, send them an offer. Not only
are they the best, they’re passionate about it.

Trent: How do you do that? When you say message boards you mean discussion
forum, yeah?

Dane: Yes, yeah.

Trent: You could go forum: video editing and you’re going to type that into
Google and that’s going to give you a whole bunch of discussion forums for
video editing, correct?

Dane: Yes, something like that.

Trent: Okay. If you can’t figure out how to find a forum, Google how to
find a forum and it’ll tell you.

Something that I heard you talk about as well in that Paperless Pipeline
interview, and I listened to that a long time ago, so I’m digging deep here
in the memory banks. It was the process that you used to manage your
developer, and I want you to speak a little bit about that as well, because
it was pretty important as I recall.

Dane: I almost forgot about it. Well, I don’t forget about it, but. We have
a CEO that runs Paperless Pipeline that does all that now.

This process works for any business industry, and I got it from Eben Pagan
and I modeled it with Eben Pagan for software developers. The first two
weeks of the development cycle, I watched the developer very carefully. I
tell them at the end of each day . . .

Here’s what happens. When people are building software, I ask them how it’s
going. It’s so awesome, it’s not awesome at all actually, it sucks. Because
usually what I hear is “Oh, I’m, um, uh, we’re supposed to have a new
version out this Friday.” I’ll be like, “Oh, cool. How many times have they
been late on delivery?” “Every time.”

“This Friday”. “How long have they really been waiting for what’s supposed
to happen?” “Oh, it’s about a month delay” “Well, do you know the progress
or are you going to find out on Friday that it’s delayed again”. “Well, we
have to wait until Friday”.

Being in the dark is the most painful thing ever. What’s going on and
Friday comes along and you get that same email, “Hey, we ran into issues
with ‘XYZ’, so we have to delay again.” I wanted to get away from all of
that.

Every night, a developer will spend five minutes, and they’ll go into a
Google document and they will answer four questions for me. One, how many
hours did you work? Two, what did you accomplish? And I put in parentheses
not what did you do, what did you accomplish, bolded. Three, what problems
did you encounter? Four, what questions do you have?

In two weeks, you tell a developer if you spend more than five minutes
doing this, you’re doing something wrong. Most developers, sometimes
they’ll resist this initially. Like they might do two days and slip off on
day three, and you email them and say hey, I see you didn’t do a daily
update. Can you explain? Is there some resistance you have to doing the
process?

They say “Oh, it takes too much time.” I say, “Set your watch for five
minutes. If this takes more than five minutes you’re doing something
wrong”. Then you get them doing this.

In two weeks, what happens is you start to see the progress of your app
every single day, your confidence grows. The developer says “I ran into
this problem, blah blah blah,” what questions do you have for me, they have
this question, and then they start typing and oh, actually I just answered
that question now that I typed out what problem [inaudible 01:00:51].

They actually become even more self-sufficient as well, because they don’t
micromanage well. I hire great people and just let them go. I watch them
closely for the first two weeks on the daily updates.

Trent: I could go a lot longer and I’ve got a lot more questions, but we’ve
been an hour already. I want to jump to one of the questions I was going to
ask you at the very end of the interview. You mentioned Recruiting Ninja
which you’re not paying a lot of attention to anymore. You mentioned
Paperless Pipeline that sounds like it’s wildly successful. What’s that do
in a month right now?

Dane: When I shot the video for the Foundation it was at $40,000 a month,
and now in just a few months it’s up to $47,000. It’ll be a million dollar
a year business pretty quickly.

Trent: Okay. You’ve got those two businesses. What percentage of Paperless
Pipeline do you own?

Dane: 100%.

Trent: 100%, because you didn’t need to take any . . .

Dane: Right, 100%. I’ve actually shifted my perspective on this. I didn’t
want to give away pieces of my company, and then I took a personality
profiling thing called Wealth Dynamics. Have you heard of that or taken it?

Trent: No, I have not.

Dane: This is so fun, man. Wealth Dynamics is $100.00, there’s eight areas
that you can build wealth in. If you’re a negotiator or a relationship guy
or a creator or a mechanic. It tells you the area that you’re gifted in so
you can create massive wealth in that area.

It turns out I’m in the creator category. One of the things that creators
need to learn how to do is give away pieces of their company, because they
create a lot of different pies. Instead of looking at that 100% as scarce,
look at it as abundant because you can create as many pies as you want. I’m
giving away 20% of Pipeline now to the CEO, lead developer and parts of the
team, and then I’ll have 80%. Then I’m going to create more pies.

Trent: Then your thing that you’re really passionate about now is
Foundation where you’re teaching other people to go and create these
amazing lives that you’ve been fortunate to create for yourself.

The question I have for you is what does your life look like right now? You
obviously don’t work, it sounds like at all, on Recruiting Ninja. I’m
guessing you have basically nothing to do on a day to day basis with
Paperless Pipeline?

Dane: I don’t even think about it.

Trent: Yes, nothing. And this business is making you, your share, $20,000
or $30,000 a month?

Dane: I invest significantly into the profits to expand that. We have eight
competitors in that niche, and we are blowing all those competitors out of
the water. We invest 75% back in every month, so 25% is what I could live
on, but I have different income streams beyond that too.

We shoot for 25% profit margin a month, and then I aggressively grow it. We
could do 50% profit margin monthly [inaudible 01:03:57]. It’s not so much
about well it’s $20,000 or $30,000 a month or $5,000 or $10,000 a month.
It’s the value of a dollar.

If you have two $10.00 bills, and one you had to work an hour for and one
you didn’t have to work any for, that $10.00, it’s very different. I don’t
like to measure business based on revenue or profit, I like to measure
business based on freedom and fun and passion. That’s off the scale.

Trent: That’s where I was going with this question of what does your life
look like? It sounds to me, you’re doing this interview with me in what
looks to be your home. I’m guessing the lifestyle that you’ve managed to
create as a result of all of this is absolutely a dream come true for you.

Dane: It is. I have to pinch myself. It’s pretty unreal. If you would have
told me when I’m 28 now, I’ll be 29 shortly, if you would have told me at
22 that when I was 27 I’d be traveling the world for three months, come
home with more money . . .

I think in total back when I was traveling the world I was doing $40,000 a
month on auto-pilot, and I was keeping most of that because I was running
the company myself. I left to travel for three months around the world and
I came back with $120,000.

Well, no, I spent $30,000 on travel. It was $90,000 more in my bank account
when I got home than when I left while I was traveling. Kiteboarding and
jet skiing and white water rafting and going on cruises.

That’s fun, but ultimately what happens is that gets old. Because this
little voice inside that says Dane, there’s much more for you to do in the
world. You have much more service to provide. My life now is . . . I’ve got
this really beautiful condo -I’ll spin the camera around- in Boulder.

I’m kicking it in Boulder for six months. I just signed a lease on this
place for six months, and it’s one of the nicest places you can get in
Boulder. I didn’t even sweat writing the check. I sweated a little bit
because it’s more expensive than I like, but only because I’m not used to
spending that much on rent.

Trent: How much are you paying?

Dane: Oh God. $3,600 a month.

Trent: Okay. That’s a pimp condo.

Dane: I paid six months in advance too, so I gave her a check for $27,000.
That’s a lot of money to write for a check, and I can actually do that and
that’s Okay.

What’s more important than the traveling the world for three months is I
don’t look at prices anymore. I don’t sweat the price of gas, I don’t think
can I not get Starbucks or not. I’m on a veggie juice fast right now, so I
go to stores and I buy $6.00 veggie juices and I’ll buy five of those a
day, and I just don’t care.

It’s the little things during the day that you don’t have to sweat that
make the freedom incredible, and it’s only possible once you start to
reverse limiting beliefs or empowering beliefs, because there’s nothing
that I have that I don’t think anyone else could build. I got a 20 on my
ACT. I’m not a smart guy, just know how to reverse limiting beliefs.

Trent: That is so incredibly key. I went into this interview thinking we
were going to be talking mostly about how you build Recruiting Ninja, which
I don’t think we’ve even done a good enough job of talking about that, to
be honest with you.

There’s probably a bigger and more important lesson that I’m hoping the
people who are listening to this have gotten out of everything that we’ve
talked about so far. That is just the mindset. Stop getting in your own
way, and you’ve heard it from Dane, these limiting beliefs. “I don’t have
money to hire a developer. I don’t know anything about writing software. I
don’t have a track record. I don’t have credibility or I blah blah blah.”

No matter what you have in your mind, we’ve already in this interview
knocked it down and given you some strategies. Obviously there’s a lot
more, and we’ll finish up and we’ll talk a little bit about Foundation. In
the interests of time we should probably maybe even shift to that now.

Let me just look at all these other questions here that I wanted to get to
that we didn’t get to and see if there’s any that I think that we’re
really, really salient that I wanted to talk about.

Dane: Yes. While you’re looking at questions, the initial product for
Recruiting Ninja cost $3,000 to build. I didn’t have that money, and I
didn’t have money to pay for the server or the SSL certificate to charge
money. I didn’t even know I needed an SSL certificate. I said how do I
collect money, and the developer was like, ‘Well, you need an SSL
certificate.’

I went to my uncle and I said, “Hey, Rob, if you pay for 100% of this
development I’ll give you the product free for life.” He’s like, “What’s it
cost?” “$3,000 at the most.” He’s like, “$100 a month, I’ll break even in a
year or two. Yes, Okay. I’ll fund the development of that.”

Now I just have my customers fund the development of the products in
exchange for having it free for life.

Trent: Just so the people know, I haven’t seen the product yet, but I bet I
could build it for basically almost free. Because WordPress is free,
creating videos is free, auto-responders, if you use AWeber it’s next to
free, it’s $20.00 a month. Like I said, I use Infusionsoft and it’s $249.00
a month, but there’s very, very good reasons.

You have to pay $1,000 or $2,000 up front, but you don’t have to go that
route in the beginning. You can build auto-responders in AWeber or Mail
Chimp or Direct Response or any of the other ones that there’s no big
upfront cost. That $3,000 that you spent back then, I can’t see what I
would spend $3,000 on today to build basically a pipeline for recruiting
real estate agents or insurance reps or whatever, whatever market you
choose to go into to solve that recruiting problem. I can’t see what you’d
need $3,000 for.

Dane: I have a buddy who, he’s selling direct response marketing websites.
He’ll contact websites and say, “Hey, is your website converting for you?
Are you paying for your website? Is your website paying you?”

He’ll interview the guy on the phone for an hour, then he’ll have that
transcribed and that’ll turn into the content for the site. He outsources
it to a guy in India for $200.00 and he charges $6,000, and he sets these
things up in five hours and knocks out these direct response marketing
websites.

We take direct response marketing, apply it to recruiting, we make a
killing. We take direct response marketing, apply it to any different
business website, and charge $6,000, outsource to India for $200.00 and
[inaudible 01:10:48] four or five hours a week.

Trent: I just want to drill on that one for a minute, because I think
that’s a concept a lot of people don’t necessarily get. So many people when
they don’t have any money, they go start a service business.

I ran a service business. You have to go get the customers, and then you
have to do all this work for every time you get a customer, and then you
build them later and hopefully they pay you on time. That model sucks,
trust me.

What I don’t think a lot of people get, and we’ll use the direct response
as an example. If you simply said, ‘I am just going to go talk to every
tattoo artist in my neighborhood, and I’m going to have this conversation
of how are you getting customers, and how is your website fitting into
that, and what could be better?’

You’re going to have this conversation, and you’re going to find out their
pain points because you’re going to think, you’re going to ask them what do
you think about most? What’s the pain?

Once you build that template for one tattoo shop, you now have all your
email templates written. You’ve got everything you need done one time, and
then you can simply replicate it for the next tattoo store and the next one
and the next one. You don’t even have to be doing it in your own city
anymore.

Once you’ve got a product and a case study and a customer who’s waving your
flag, saying, “This is awesome, this helped me, this was the ROI that I
got,” now you’ve got stuff to put in a webinar, which you can also automate
by the way. I do. Shh, don’t tell anybody. All my webinars are automated,
even though they look live, I don’t do them live.

Then people just sign up. You have to drive traffic to it of course, and
there’s lots of ways you can drive traffic. You can pick up the phone, you
can do joint ventures, you can buy solo ads, you can pay for reviews, you
can do pay per click, you can do Facebook, ads on the radio, whatever you
want to do. You can drive traffic.

If you’ve built the funnel correctly, everything else can happen on auto-
pilot, and that’s more or less what you’re selling to your tattoo shop
customers. You can do this over and over. To the individual tattoo shop, if
they had to build this thing from scratch, this direct response marketing
system, is $6,000 a reasonable price? In the tattoo space, maybe it’s
$3,000, maybe it’s $7,000, I don’t know, because I don’t know the tattoo
space.

My point is once you have built it one time, to get someone to replicate
it, to basically take a photocopy of it, does not cost you $3,000 or $4,000
or $5,000. It costs you almost nothing. You can literally, as Dane just
said, as his buddy’s doing, knock these things out, running out of your
house, have no full time employees, almost no overhead.

The only thing that’s standing between you and doing that is number one
your belief systems. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” Number two, taking action
which can be torpedoed by bad belief systems.

Am I oversimplifying this? Am I being a pompous a** and just making this
sound easier than it is?

Dane: I don’t think this process is easy, but no you’re not being pompous.
It may not seem easy but it is a simple process. To me it’s easier than
applying for a job.

Trent: Yes, I agree.

Dane: Whether or not it’s easy or not is relative to how else can you make
money? It’s one of the easiest things I’ve found. I think it’s disgustingly
simple. I always joke that the time it takes you to fill out a job
application I can already have my idea and my first paying customer for my
next business.

Trent: Yes. All right, let’s talk a little bit. You’ve mentioned this thing
called Foundation, and I suspect some of my listeners are curious. Can you
tell us a little bit about what it is, and if they want to get more
information on it where they can go and do that?

Dane: I’m guessing you’ll put a link below the video to it?

Trent: Yes, I will.

Dane: Click on that link. It’s thefoundation.io. What it is, is you can
actually request a case study of how a 22 year old kid with no coding
skills, no product idea, and very limited money built a six figure software
product. He went from nothing to creating a company out of thin air in six
months, and he made $2,000 his first month that he launched, and he’s
quickly on his way to six figures.

Modern day alchemy, just did this all out of thin air. He had every excuse
in the book. I’m not in the country, I’m not in America, people won’t
believe me, I’m 22, I don’t have any ideas, I don’t know how to write code.
Every excuse in the book he had, every limiting belief, he reversed all
those.

His interview will be, we have a case study of him that you can actually
watch what he did. If you go to thefoundation.io you can request that case
study. It’s free.

The more exciting thing that I think would helpful, Trent, is the entire
launch sequence we have, setting up to the Foundation launching on October
first. It’s a very limited group, it’s expensive, and we don’t have final
pricing set yet. Just know that it’s expensive.

However, the case study’s free, it’s very valuable, and we have the
content. We have four videos that will completely change the way you look
at business. First, I’m going to be doing a long, long 30 or 40 minute
video that’ll walk through all the intricacies of Recruiting Ninja, how I
built it, the emails back and forth with my developer, how I hired him,
every single little detail.

I’m going to log you into the back end, show you the numbers, the author
rights, you’re going to see how that business runs, so you can actually see
it’s much simpler than you think. We’re creating a video on the secret
language of millionaires where we really, really expand on direct response
marketing in a way so you can actually learn it and apply it.

We’ve also got the limiting belief video, that’s 30 minutes, which includes
three or four or five people as examples of the beliefs they have, us going
through that five question framework and then reversing their beliefs.

We’re giving away all of this incredible stuff free, because I can only
help so many people in the Foundation, I can only work with so many people
at a time, but I don’t want that impact limited. That’s why we’re giving
away so much content for the full Foundation launch. I think people are
going to adore you, Trent, for introducing them to this stuff.

Trent: Can you give me a hint at how much it’s going to cost?

Dane: No, I don’t want to. I think if you don’t have at least $10,000 in
the bank I wouldn’t even think about doing that. That includes development
and some other things. Total, if you have at least $10,000 you can budget,
you’ll be able to swing the Foundation and get your product out.

We’re actually having investors… I’m networking with some of the best
software guys on the planet as investors to invest in the product. Even if
you don’t have money to fund the development, you can’t sell a developer or
give him equity, we’ll have investors that will fund your product for you
so that you don’t actually have to worry about a lot of that.

Trent: Fantastic.

Dane: Initially, let’s just say we charge $10,000 flat. That’d be $10,000
to learn how to make $100,000 a month business. I think the price is pretty
cheap compared to that, but it’s expensive to some people on the outset.

Trent: Yes, and there’s no question that $10,000 is a very, very meaningful
amount of money for someone who’s never been an entrepreneur before. I will
tell you that I have spent substantially more than that just to be in
mastermind groups back when I was running my $2 million company, and it was
of questionable value.

Ten thousand dollars to me doesn’t sound like a huge sum of money for what
sounds like is going to be a pretty phenomenal learning experience. They
can get that at foundation.io, and there’ll be a link under this.

Dane: It’s “thefoundation.”

Trent: Sorry? Oh, “thefoundation?”

Dane: Yes, thefoundation.io.

Trent: Okay. Io, what country is that one?

Dane: That’s Iowa, the state of Iowa.

Trent: Oh, Okay. Is it the only one that “thefoundation” was available for?

Dane: Yes. No, there were a couple. I don’t know why we did that one.
Domain name’s not nearly as important as the marketing. In the Foundation,
when people buy domains before their product’s [inaudible 01:19:29], I just
b****slap the s*** out of them in front of everyone. Excuse my language.

People buy domains when they have their idea. I didn’t have a domain for
Paperless Pipeline until three months in, people were using the product, we
had a made-up domain. I didn’t have a name picked. The name’s not
important, it’s about the problem you’re solving.

A lot of limiting beliefs that we like to reverse in the Foundation. If
you’re one of the guys that gets an idea, goes out and buys a domain,
you’re definitely a newbie. You need to have that reversed.

Trent: Uh-oh. I bought my domain first, come on, man. I bought a domain
called “Bright Ideas,” because I like interviewing people about bright
ideas, and I figured that that was descriptive enough, but not so much that
it would pigeon hole me into any one niche or any one particular strategy.

Dane: We’ve all done it. I’ve done it too. The newbie marketer treats that
as the first step in starting a business, getting a domain name. The all
star marketer, the first step is getting money from a customer.

Trent: Yes, yes, yes.

Dane: The marketing mindset, you talk about the newbie, minor league, major
league and all star marketer. The types of things they do and what
separates them and how to move to the coveted all star category. That’s all
free in the Foundation.

Whether or not you can afford it, don’t sweat that, get the free content.
That stuff could completely change your life alone.

Trent: I’ve got another interview with you or one of your students I think
in another week or two. Which student is that?

Dane: Yes, you do.

Trent: Yes, no, which student am I interviewing? No one’s given me a name
yet?

Dane: Paul. He’s created a software for private investigators. He joined
without any [inaudible 01:21:12].

Trent: The Sherlock guy.

Dane: Sherlock Docs.

Trent: Okay, cool. All right. Well, listen. I’ve got my next guest coming
on with me in another 25 minutes, and I’ve got some prep I’ve got to do for
that. That one’s going to be, I’ve got to get off. I could sit here and
talk to you all day, but.

Thank you so much, Dane, for spending this time here. I think this is
probably the longest interview I’ve done yet. We’ll talk offline, I’ve got
lots more questions, and I want to ask you about some other things, but it
just can’t be right now because I’ve run out of time.

We will be in touch, thank you again. Folks, if you want to learn more
about the Foundation is thefoundation.io, and of course this interview will
be posted probably on both of my blogs, Online Income Lab and on
brightideas.co, which is not yet even launched, and I don’t have the launch
date yet, so you’re probably going to hear this first on
onlineincomelab.com.

All right, so thank you so much for listening. It has been an absolute
pleasure to have you as an audience, and Dane, an absolute pleasure to have
you on as my expert interviewee for this time around. With that, if there’s
any final comments you want to add, please jump in now, otherwise I’m going
to hit the stop button and we’ll stop recording.

Dane: Just 15 seconds to thank you for posting on YouTube a video about how
the Paperless Pipeline video touched your life. When I Google searched, I
put my name into YouTube, and a couple videos came up of people talking
about me, and you were one of them. I think I might even have teared up a
little at how much that meant to me that you spoke so highly of me in that
YouTube video.

That’s why that interview exists, is because I saw it on YouTube and I
wanted to reach out to you to say thank you for saying thank you.

Trent: Oh, cool. I didn’t know that actually. Yes, awesome. I saw that
first interview and I thought “This guy’s got some really cool stuff, and
more people need to know about what he’s talking about.” That’s why I made
that little video.

All right, so that wraps up session number 38 with Dane Maxwell. If you
found this enjoyable, I would love it if you would go over to iTunes and
give the show some feedback. You can do that just by picking stars, four
stars, five stars, or however many you feel is appropriate.

If you haven’t checked out my newest business yet, which isn’t even
launched, you can do so at brightideas.co. If you want to get to the show
notes for this particular episode, it’ll first be published on the Online
Income Lab at onlineincomelab.com/sessions038.

Thanks very much for tuning in. It’s been my privilege to have you as my
audience, and I absolutely love doing these podcasts. We’ve got some really
more terrific guests coming your way very soon.

[Recorded closing: Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for listening to the
Online Income Lab podcast at onlineincomelab.com.

Want more great content from the Online Income Lab? Check us out on
Facebook at facebook.com/onlineincomelab, and on YouTube,
youtube.com/onlineincomelab. Thank you for listening to the Online Income
Lab podcast.]

Hey everybody this is Trent Dyrsmid with the Online Income Lab podcast,
Session number 37. On the show with me today is a whip smart entrepreneur
by the name of Billy Murphy. He is the guy behind BlueFirePoker.com. And
this was just absolutely a joy of an interview to do. You’re going to
learn, in this interview, how he got his site up and running. How he
prompted it.

How he challenged the President of the United States to play and offered up
a $1 million prize, which was going to go to charity. And got just a ton of
press coverage as a result of that. That is just one of the really
brilliant marketing strategies that you’re going to hear. Then at the end
of the interview you’re going to hear Billy and I talk about what he’s
doing now, separate from the poker business, with e-commerce, and drop
shipping, and buying sites from other people.

This interview, you’re really, really in for a treat. And so please join me
in welcoming Billy to the show.

Hey Billy, thank you very, very much for agreeing to do this interview with
me. I think this is actually going to be a really interesting interview so,
welcome aboard.

Billy Murphy

Thanks for having me.

Trent Dyrsmid

For the folks who are listening to this, who don’t yet know who you are and
what you’ve done online, because you’ve had quite a bit of success, I want
to just give you a moment to tell them a little bit about your background.
I know you were a pro poker player before and maybe you still are now and
now you have this online business, BlueFirePoker.com. So just give us a
little history.

Billy Murphy

Sure. I played poker professionally, I guess, it was back about seven years
ago. I played for three or four years and then got into launching Blue
Fire. Basically found a need in the market for better poker training for
professional poker players.

What Blue Fire Poker does is we train professionals how to make more money
playing poker. And also aspiring pros, the people who are maybe semi pro
who want to become professional. We bring all the talent to teach those
guys how to make a living.

We take professional players, we record their screens and mike them up and
they lead players through exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing.
It’s almost like you’re looking over their shoulder as they play and
they’re taking you through the process.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Let me jump in. You said you identified that there was a need for
training for online poker. How did you do that?

Billy Murphy

Well, we didn’t actually find the need for training in general. It was
actually a relatively crowded market when we got in. We were one of the
last people in the training, but we noticed that more people were going
towards very high quantity of videos and pumping out a lot of videos, but a
lot of the people that people wanted to learn from weren’t available to
learn from.

Basically I put together a team of guys who were in high demand as coaches
and they were the types of guys you really couldn’t afford if you were to
hire them one-on-one. We got together a team of guys, instead of signing 20
guys and maybe one or two of them people wanted to watch, I think we
launched with five or six guys and that was it, as opposed to the high
quantity group. We barely put out any videos, but they were all extremely
high quality.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. You launched this, was it early in 2009?

Billy Murphy

Yes. I think it was in January, 2009.

Trent Dyrsmid

January of 2009, okay. At that point in time nobody knew who the heck you
were. You had been a pro poker player. You had gotten to know, I’m
assuming, so you had these four or five guys, I’m assuming, you got to know
them through your experience as a pro poker player?

Billy Murphy

I knew a couple of them. A couple of them I just approached out of the blue
and told them of this idea. Told them I already had a couple of guys in
mind, had ideas on the marketing side. Had ideas how to do it a little
differently than how all the other sites were doing it.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Did you guys get together? Were you the founder? Or do you guys all
call yourselves founders? And were all of these guys shareholders in the
beginning? What did it look like?

Billy Murphy

Yes. There were a number of guys who were partners in the beginning. Since
we only had a handful of guys. There are a couple of guys who were all
founders of the business when we started up.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Did it take a lot of money to get this business going?

Billy Murphy

No. It didn’t at all. We went really cheap and if I could do it over again,
I wouldn’t have gone that way, but I didn’t know anything about an online
business. I’m not technical at all, as you know.

I didn’t know any developing, didn’t really know developers. So we went to
India, I didn’t go there, basically online, looking for programmers in
India through, at the time went through E-Lance, and hired some Indian
developers for about $16,000. We built the whole business for about
$16,000. Probably total cost to launch was under $20,000.

Trent Dyrsmid

I just want to ask some questions about the platform because that seems
like a lot of money to launch. I have a membership site and I have lots of
training videos in it. I know it doesn’t cost much to put one up. So, when
you started, did you start this on WordPress? Or did you, like what
platform did you use? And did the content that you’re delivering, if I
understand it correctly, is just a sequence of ongoing training videos. Why
do you need to spend $16,000 for that?

Billy Murphy

I think there were cheaper ways to do it. We have a custom CRM. It’s an
easy way to manage all the members. I don’t know how much was available for
that in early 2009. I think there were some things and we looked at a
couple and just didn’t like the layout or the format or whatever it was.
Basically, all our site is, we have the video part of the site, which is
essentially the main part of the business, forums, blogs, pro page, home
page. Most of the site is you can get anywhere, but the main thing that
took all the building was the custom CRM.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. For anyone who’s listening to this now, just know that there are many
companies out there that provide that piece that integrate very well into a
website. The one that I use is called Infusion Soft and it’s far less than
$16,000. I can assure you it’s only a couple hundred dollars a month and
it’s really a powerful tool.

Anyway, let’s move on, I’ve got so many questions that I want to ask you.
All right, so you got started with — and by the way when you put your
glass down it clinks pretty loudly in the, so maybe you can try to put that
down a little quieter — all right, so you created this site with these
guys. You hired some people in India. You spent $16,000 and the four or
five guys they are the pros that provided this base level training content,
is that correct?

Billy Murphy

Yes. I think we launched with something like maybe eight videos. Then, we
did probably four videos a week.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Your niche is that you teach people to play online poker,
specifically. Not just poker in general, because online poker, it’s a very
different game, not that I’m any pro mind you, but when you’re playing at
the tables you’re reading people. When you’re playing online I got to think
that’s a lot different.

Billy Murphy

Yes. It is, it’s definitely a totally different strategy for online. It’s a
different level of play. The one misconception about live poker versus
online poker is a lot of people who are in poker overestimate the ability
to get live reads and they need to do that. More of poker is based around
betting patterns, more setting your opponents up to limit your own losses
and maximize your gains and pots.

Live reads in general, for me personally, I rarely focused on live reads
when I played live. I know most guys, it’s more around the strategy of your
play and your opponents play than actually seeing someone look away or have
their hands fidget when they’re going in the pot. Most of those things are
pretty overrated for the most part.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. This content that you put up there was it essentially you’ve got your
five guys, their playing and you’re recording their screen as they’re
playing? And then do they come back after and commentate on what they were
doing and that constitutes a training video?

Billy Murphy

Exactly. Yes. Usually, we’ll just do it with one guy. Each of the guys will
make their own video. Sometimes we’ll do commentary, but yes, it’s
literally, their screen is recorded as they’re playing online. Then they’ll
either come back after the video and voice over or they’ll do a live video
where they’re just talking through so you can hear exactly how their though
process is going.

Or else we’ve done Q & A videos on topics. We’ve done where they’ll analyze
certain situations that you come across in poker and teach you how to make
it more profitable for you.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. All right. That’s pretty easy to do. They were probably using
something like Screen Flow or Camtasia or any kind of screen recorded
software.

Billy Murphy

Camtasia, yeah.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Then you would upload those files, presumably to something like an
Amazon S3 and then you would present them through the interface of your
poker site so that you’re members could watch them whenever they wanted.

Billy Murphy

Right. Exactly.

Trent Dyrsmid

All right. Creating the content, not rocket science, you’ve got to have
some guys who know what they’re doing, record it, put it up on the site.
That’s relatively easy. Anybody can do that. Where I really want to get
into and what my researchers found for me is some pretty cool things you
did on the promotional side of things. So we’re going to get into all
those. Let’s talk about, so when did you actually go, when did you have the
idea and when did you go live?

Billy Murphy

I think the idea came probably a year earlier. It took nine months in the
development to happen and that’s why I mentioned I wouldn’t have gone to
India if I could do it again. Not a good process.

Trent Dyrsmid

I’ve been through it. It’s nasty.

Billy Murphy

Yes. It probably took a few months to talk to the guys, get the guys on
board and then nine months for the development, which even for a custom it
should of been two or three months max. It was probably about a year
earlier.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. About a year earlier, so in the first 90 days after you launched, if
you can remember back that far, what kind of results did you achieve? How
many paying customers signed up?

Billy Murphy

It happened pretty quick. We brought on guys that already had reputations
and followings in the poker world, everybody knew they were big winners.
The first day I think we brought in $30,000.

Trent Dyrsmid

Wow.

Billy Murphy

It was quite a few members right off the bat. We had a steady stream, a
similar amount coming in for the next week or so as people were finding out
about our site. A lot of that is front loaded. People signed up for a six
month membership, year memberships, but it was pretty much a burst of
members as soon as we launched.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. It sounds then that you were probably had achieved profitably right
within 90 days of launch, is that correct?

Billy Murphy

Yes, within a day. We launched, it cost me $16,000 for the site and maybe
a few thousand for other things, but we were profitable from, within 24
hours.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Now let’s just make sure that the audience understands what the
business was in that first day. You didn’t really need a big team of people
to fulfill, like people are coming and they’re signing up and they’re
watching videos. It’s not like you need a big staff or anything like that.
So, your costs . . .

Bill Murphy

There’s no staff at the time. We had a guy, helped us on videos, on the
technical side and there was no, at the time I was doing, I had a buddy
doing customer service. There was no big team on the business side of
things.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay, and $30,000 in sales in a day. How many customers did that equate to?

Billy Murphy

I think it was probably, 150.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. So that’s a manageable amount. It’s not like you’re bringing on 3,000
in customers in the first day and your email inbox is exploding.

Billy Murphy

Right. Right. It wasn’t too bad.

Trent Dyrsmid

All right. Now the guys, you said they were well known, did these guys all
have their own blogs and their own mailing lists, and their own following?
I still don’t understand exactly where the traffic came from.

Billy Murphy

Right. That’s the thing, there wasn’t, I wasn’t an Internet marketer before
launching this. I hadn’t done an Internet business. None of the guys had
any sort of, I don’t think any of the guys had a website, had an email
list, had an e-book out, any of that stuff that a lot of the Internet
marketers used to, “Hey, I’m going to mail everyone on our list to launch
the business.” We didn’t do any, there was no pre-mailing, there was no pre-
promotion, anything.

We used a different strategy and maybe it was good, maybe it was bad, but
we wanted to keep it 100% private because we knew the value that we were
going to put out, we wanted people to just blow it up the day we put it out
and surprise that no one had heard of this before. The first day we did a
press release and blew up in the poker forums, on the poker blogs, poker
news sites. They did all our marketing for us. We spent zero on marketing.

Trent Dyrsmid

Wow.

Billy Murphy

There were no affiliates. No pay-for-click. You can’t even do pay-for-click
for poker related stuff. So there was nothing other than word of mouth and
viral marketing for pretty much the whole first year or so. There was no
money spent on marketing.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Obviously everyone had reputations. Everyone was participating in the
forums leading up to this so, when you guys said, “Hey we’ve got this thing
and it’s available”, people were paying attention.

Billy Murphy

Right. Exactly.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. I have a couple of questions here that I always like to ask is, “What
went well”, which you just answered. The launch was pretty good. “What went
wrong in the first 30 days?”

Billy Murphy

First 30 days? If I can remember back I think, I’m sure our technical stuff
was a little, our video quality and all that type of stuff, I think in the
beginning some of the guys mics you couldn’t hear them very well, things
like that. I think we ordered some new mics that kind of stuff.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yeah.

Billy Murphy

I think we had all sorts of mini site issues from the development side. I
think for the most part those were the only things that were really wrong.

Trent Dyrsmid

No big landmines, just your typical growing pains of any new organization.
Little details all along.

Bill Murphy

Yes. A lot of little stuff that went wrong, but no major, nothing crazy.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Fast forward to today, where’s your largest source of traffic that’s
come into the site? Where does that come from?

Billy Murphy

Largest source of traffic? Now, we’re getting a lot from search results. I
don’t think most of our customers come from there, it’s still mostly from
any viral marketing we’re doing and a lot of word of mouth. If you put out
a good product that people are making more money from they’re telling their
friends, “Come check this out. Come do this.”

We just actually last night put out our 1,000th video. We ran a special
promotion, not promotion, but a special video series where we have 20 of
our pros going through and answering all sorts of questions that poker
players have asked over the years and put it together in this, I think we
have a 15 or 20 part series that we’ll be promoting.

That’s the type of stuff we do for marketing that spreads the word about
what we’re doing, who are Pros are, helping put our Pros out there and
getting people to know us. That’s for the most part, that’s been our
marketing the whole way, viral marketing and word of mouth.

Trent Dyrsmid

Back when you started if someone said to you, “Hey Billy, in order to be
successful you’re going to have to make a 1,000 poker videos?” How would
you of felt?

Billy Murphy

Yes, we didn’t know how many we were going to make, yeah it’s been a long
way to a 1,000. Yes, we’ve actually just recently started ramping up over
the last year or so into more videos. Because like I mentioned, we were
going with a couple of guys in the beginning and now we’ve grown to a much,
we’ve got close to 20 guys now.

Trent Dyrsmid

Twenty. My point of asking that question was I don’t want people who are
listening to this to get caught up in the excuse of “Oh, I can’t make 1,000
videos.” You guys made eight videos when you started and anybody…
Billy Murphy

I remember that being, you asked if anything went wrong, you could look and
say probably a lot of people didn’t sign up because they said, “Oh, they
only have eight videos, that’s not enough for us to sign up.” So a lot of
people just didn’t sign up initially.

I remember that was a big debate with a bunch of the other guys. We were
debating how many we should release and we didn’t want to put out a month’s
worth of content the first day and burn out of all our content and all
that. That was the one thing, where we launched very minimal, did not have
much on the site when we launched.

We didn’t really need a lot, there was enough there and we’d probably would
of made “X” amount more, but anybody starting out you don’t really need a
huge, huge library of anything if the quality’s there.

Trent Dyrsmid

That was actually one of the things that my researcher pointed out in
another interview that they found, they said you were quoted as saying
something to the effect of, if it’s not really awesome quality, don’t even
bother doing it. And so obviously that’s worked very well for you.

Coming up in my questions, we’re going to ask about when you challenged
Barack Obama and we’re also going to talk a little bit about how you did a
little contract with a guy that just got out of prison. Before we get to
that, you said something that made me want to ask, I’m going to jump ahead
in my questions, you talked about not wanting to overwhelm your members
with content and not wanting to burn through, I think was the word you
used, all of your content. So by that I assume you employ what we in this
industry call a content drip strategy, is that correct?

Billy Murphy

No. No we don’t. I’ve heard of people who do that and we actually don’t do
that. All we do is backlog videos from our Pros. They’ll make a couple of
videos at a time. There’s no three month, six month, twelve month system
where it’s dripped content. There’s not really a start here and end here
and part of the reason is there’s so many different games in poker that we
cover.

We do tournaments, sit-n-goes, cash games and different styles for each one
of them. And we have different pros for each game. Some guys sign up and
want to see maybe two or three of their favorite Pros. Maybe other guys
don’t have any interest in those videos, but they have two or three Pros
that they want to watch. Out of all of our Pros, maybe there are four or
five guys that cover a certain space and then they kind of have their own
followers.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Where I was going, where I thought I was going with that and so I’ll
lead in with this question, what are you doing for customer retention? Is
it simply because the niche that you’re in lends itself to never ending
learning? So that you continue to produce more videos or your pros do, on
an ongoing basis? The folks who have bought memberships to spend, what
percentage do the people buy a monthly membership versus say paying for an
annual?

Billy Murphy

Yes, it’s mixed. I haven’t looked at the breakdown in awhile, but it’s
mixed. I see more people probably sign up for the longer ones, but it’s
probably not that far off in terms of monthly or the longer term ones.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. For the folks that are on monthly, there’s a term in this industry
called “stick rate”, in other words, how long they stick with you.

Billy Murphy

Right.

Trent Dyrsmid

What’s your stick rate? Do you know?

Billy Murphy

I don’t know, off hand, how long. I think if I had to give you a ball park,
it’s got to be around a year.

Trent Dyrsmid

Around a year, which is exceptional. Most Internet marketing products have
a stick rate of two months, that’s it. Where I’m going with this is because
you’re providing them with new content on an ongoing basis that must be the
factor that’s contributing to that year long stick rate. Is there anything
else that you’re doing that you think that really causes them to want to
hang around that long?

Bill Murphy

Yes. That’s the one thing. We’re operating so much value for not a lot of
money. We charge $30.00 a month. If you want to hire the guys you’re
watching for a one-on-one coaching session lots of times you’d pay them
$500.00 an hour. We have so many customers, we can offer it much cheaper
and it’s really the biggest no brainer.

If you’re a poker pro and you’re paying $1.00 a day to maybe get any value
out of a video that we put out and you can make any more money at poker,
it’s one of those things, if you’re going to invest your money as a poker
player, it’s probably one of the greatest investments to be on a poker
training site, or get coaching because once you have a higher level of
knowledge you can make more money in the long term.

Trent Dyrsmid

It’s not just poker players, it’s good for business people too.

Billy Murphy

Right. Exactly.

Trent Dyrsmid

These pros, do you have to pay these guys a salary or a share of the
revenue? Or are they part owners of the company? I imagine they turn over,
you must not have the same guys all the time?

Billy Murphy

Right. We’ve had a number of guys who have moved on to other things. It’s
just hard cranking out videos for several years, especially when we had a
small team and most of those guys were making, sometimes two to four videos
every single month. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but you run through a
lot of different ideas and content.

We have the initial guys who helped found the company, a number of those
guys are shareholders and then for the most part we pay guys on a per video
basis. They make a video…

Trent Dyrsmid

What do you have to pay for a video?

Billy Murphy

It really varies based on the player. There’s different stakes, different
types of games. It can range from a few hundred bucks a video to a
$1,000.00 a video depending on the person.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes. Okay. Now let’s talk a little bit about some of these more unusual
promotions that you did. At one point, I think in 2009, you challenged the
President to something. Why don’t you tell us a bit about that? Tell us
what the challenge was and they why did you do it and what happened.
Because I think it resulted in you getting some coverage from Fox News, did
it not?

Billy Murphy

Yes. I don’t know if you’re familiar or any of your listeners are familiar
with all the poker legislation that’s going on at the time, it was a big
debate in the news. They wanted to totally outlaw poker and then the other
side wanted to regulate it and legalize it in the U.S. There was a big
debate in saying that “poker is a game of luck so we should not allow it”.
It’s basically a gambling, a lottery.

The other side, the Pro side for poker was no it’s a game of skill. There’s
a lot of skill involved. I came up with the idea that it would be good if
they thought it was a game of luck, we would offer a free roll and offer a
$1 million if they could beat one of our Pros. If they won, we challenged
Obama directly, then any other member of Congress if they were to win, we’d
just offer $1 million to the charity of their choice.

We actually got a couple of calls from, not directly from anyone, but
people’s representatives or whatever they were saying, “Is this serious?
Are you willing to do this?” We absolutely were. We had a representation
call us and say they had people who could potentially get this on TV if we
ended up doing it.

Fox news picked up the story, ran it, and it was only, probably, maybe six
to eight weeks after we launched. It gave us this big boost because a lot
of people still didn’t know who we were. Then all of a sudden the whole
poker community got behind this and just basically reaching out for the
poker community and a lot of people who would never heard of us, heard
about us through all the poker sites, news sites and all that.

Trent Dyrsmid

This was a potentially a huge win-win. If one of the guys in politics
managed to beat you, $1 million goes to charity. If nobody challenges you,
you get a ton of free press and the poker community, because you’re
becoming an advocate for the cause of keeping poker legal, they’re all
loving you, as well. That was a pretty brilliant stroke of genius.

How actually did you challenge them? Did you just put out a press release
and then did you call some reporters? What was the process you used to
bring awareness to this challenge?

Billy Murphy

I remember staying up all night and emailing every single reporters email
that I could find online. Obviously, if I can do it now it would be a lot
easier, I’d get a list from somewhere and do it. At the time I didn’t have
a list. I didn’t know where to get it and I would literally copying/paste
the press release to hundreds and hundreds of emails.

Trent Dyrsmid

Where would you get that list today?

Billy Murphy

I don’t know offhand, but I know people who do a lot of PR and have lists
if you want to get in touch with people from any certain news outlet
there’s contact information. I haven’t used it up to this point though.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Back then, it was a lot of heavy lifting, a sleepless night or two,
and you just went banana’s emailing all these people. I’m assuming you must
have issued a press release and then emailed a link to the press release to
all of these reporters?

Billy Murphy

I think, if I remember right, I think I put it on the front page of our
site, on the home page.

Trent Dyrsmid

Oh, okay. Good idea.

Billy Murphy

I think that was the only place it was, Yes, so I think I may have given
the link and then asked anybody who had any contacts for emails. We had a
guy try to introduce us to some people in the news. I probably sent out
hundreds, I thought more people would pick it up and then luckily, you only
need one big one, and then Fox picked it up and then everybody else picked
it up if one person picks it up.

Trent Dyrsmid

You know there’s a book that was just released a couple of days ago by a
guy named Ryan Holiday, have you heard about his book, Trust Me, I’m Lying?

Billy Murphy

Yes. He’s a smart guy.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes, he’s a very smart guy and so if you were to use his strategy where he
talks about leaking a story to little blogs and working your way up the
chain, I’m sure that would have, if someone is listening to this, and
thinks that this is a cool idea, go buy “Trust Me, I’m Lying, Confessions
of A Media Manipulator” by Ryan Holiday. You will learn how he has done
similar things to this over and over and over again. In particular, for
Tucker Max with his movie, “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell”. All right, so
that was a pretty smart idea. You got a lot of exposure. You got on Fox
news, National?

Billy Murphy

Yes. I didn’t even know it was up and then people were emailing me saying,
“You were just on Fox news” and I had no idea they had picked it up.

Trent Dyrsmid

Was this a video that Fox came and did with you? Or did they just mention
their press release on their home page?

Billy Murphy

Right. What we gave, it was probably a 60 second, 40 second to 60 second
talk on our challenge and they showed a picture of our website, I think a
picture of one of our videos maybe and then explaining the challenge, just
what we were doing.

Trent Dyrsmid

Let’s put this in perspective for the people that are listening. Prior to
this press release, nobody really knew who you were. Within the poker
community because of the reputations that you had mentioned earlier on the
show, you had some recognition. Do you remember what the volume of traffic
was to your site before this media challenge to the President versus what
happened as a result of the media coverage?

Billy Murphy

I know for the most part we were probably getting a few thousand hits a day
on average. I think we didn’t get as big of a spike as I thought, but we
did get a spike. Maybe we doubled or tripled in traffic for a couple of
days, but it was more, I think, of a longer term because Fox picked it up
and then it wasn’t a big online thing.

People were trickling through too. I think maybe even more people found out
about us by everybody covering Fox News covering it. Saying, “Oh my gosh,
Blue Fire Poker was just on Fox News”. The poker media picking it up. It
was a second round of a story because for the most part nobody had heard of
a poker training site outside of the poker community. It was a second round
of how did a poker training site get national media coverage? That was a
second layer of publicity for us.

Trent Dyrsmid

Because they were really damn smart, that’s how. Okay, sometime I think it
was after this, we introduced a guy by the name of Michael Vick into our
story of promotion. For those of you who are watching the video, Billy is
smiling, why are you smiling?

Billy Murphy

It was just another easy place to get free publicity. It was one of those
things that we knew it was going to happen 1 out of a million times where
they say yes.

Trent Dyrsmid

Hold on. First of all, nobody knows what we’re talking about here. Who is
Michael Vick and why was this so controversial?

Billy Murphy

Yes. Michael Vick was and is one of the very popular players in the NFL. He
was in prison for all sorts of things. I think the main thing stemmed
around the dog fighting and it was illegal to dog fight. When he was coming
out of prison, pretty much, there were stories about how there were no
teams, might not be any teams willing to gamble on picking him up again
because of the bad publicity.

He wasn’t even able to get a job. I think they had talked about, there was
a, I forget what it was that gave me the idea to do it, but I think they
had mentioned he was debating a construction job or something like that
until maybe a team picked him up or something like that. Then I got the
idea that “Hey, we can make him an offer.”

With any media publicity it’s a lot easier to get publicity if you can
create a story around a story that’s already in the news. It was already in
the news that “Hey, this guy doesn’t have a lot of job prospects right
now”. We said, “Hey, we’ll give him a job” and train him to be a
professional poker player.

We worded it in a way that he’s already a professional athlete, he has a
similar mentality to what it would take to be a professional poker player,
we can have our guys train him. I think we offered him a $25 million, one
year contract to be at Blue Fire, Blue Fire Pro trained to become a
professional poker player.

Trent Dyrsmid

Did he take it?

Billy Murphy

No. We never heard from him. Nobody never ever really got back to us on
that one. I didn’t even here where it was picked up, but I think my brother
called me and said, “I think you guys were just on ESPN radio. They
mentioned you guys on ESPN radio.” Then, just a number of blogs online and
other places picked us up.

I don’t even think I pushed that one in the poker community because it was
a little bit obvious that that one was a publicity play and I don’t even
think I promoted that throughout the poker community, but we got picked up
some other places. Trying to think, there was another show, can’t remember,
ESPN Radio News and one other really big one that picked us up for that.

Trent Dyrsmid

Did you use the same promotional strategy? Did you sit up all night and
email the reporters over again or how did you get the word out for the
Michael Vick?

Billy Murphy

Yes, for the most part. I used a lot of the people who responded to me the
first time and wrote back, “Hey here’s another thing we’re working on”.
Actually it was going to be on Fox News again and the only thing that held
it up was Roger Goodell’s wife worked at Fox News.

Trent Dyrsmid

Who’s that?

Billy Murphy

The Commissioner of the NFL.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay.

Billy Murphy

They didn’t want publicity around a stunt for one of the players that they
didn’t know if they wanted back in the NFL. That was actually what I was
told the reason why it wasn’t going to be on Fox again.

Trent Dyrsmid

Roger made a call and that was the end of your second.

Billy Murphy

I don’t really know the details, but his wife was involved in Fox News and
I guess they didn’t want to mess with that.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. There are two questions here that I have to ask, when you challenged
Obama did you have $1 million? That’s a lot of money.

Billy Murphy

We hadn’t made a million dollars as a business. I’m sure we could have come
up with it though.

Trent Dyrsmid

How?

Billy Murphy

We weren’t very worried about losing it. A number of our Pros make a lot of
money. We could have come up with it pretty easily. It wouldn’t have been
much hint losing it.

Trent Dyrsmid

You had a strong sense of certainty that the coverage and the new revenue
and so forth that you were going to generate would exceed a $1 million, but
nonetheless it was a risk because someone could have taken you up on it. It
might not of panned out the way that it did, but that’s what you get when
you’re a scrappy entrepreneur. Then obviously the $25 million that you
offered to Michael Vick, you guys had that available to you in some way,
shape, or form, as well?

Billy Murphy

Yeah.

Trent Dyrsmid

Interesting. This guy’s out of prison. Nobody wants to hire him to chuck
the ball around and he doesn’t even get back to you for a $25 million
offer, that’s a surprise. I guess he maybe had more in the bank than we
thought.

Billy Murphy

Right.

Trent Dyrsmid

All right. There was a point in time when one of your bigger Pros left the
fold I think and it doesn’t matter who he is, but what’s important is and
what I want the listeners to understand is, there was probably some kind of
impact on your business, what was your strategy, like was it really a big
deal? If it was, what was your strategy to deal with that so that you
didn’t lose the momentum that you had actually built by this point?

Billy Murphy

Yes. We had a number of our biggest names leave. A lot of the initial guys
have left and have gone on to other things. And it definitely hurts because
the customers they’re response is more of “Hey, I want their videos and now
they’re not offering them.” Then they get frustrated. They get upset. We
get a lot of emails. A lot of people want to cancel and things like that
happen, but we work hard to bring on new talent all the time.

Over the last year we’ve lost a number of our initial guys and then brought
on probably another five guys or something, some relatively well-known guys
over the last year. It’s hard to find guys that people want to see, want to
learn from.

It’s a major bump in the road when you have big name guys leave, but we’ve
still done really well with all the new guys that have come on. People see
the value that new guys bring. Maybe some guys leave as certain guys leave
the site, but then new guys join for the new guys we sign. It’s definitely
a big effect on the business.

Trent Dyrsmid

Well the smart thing that you’ve done there is you’ve never wrapped your
brand around one guy. If you only had . . .

Billy Murphy

We did it a lot in the beginning, but we . . .

Trent Dyrsmid

You didn’t have anything to lose in the beginning.

Billy Murphy

Right. Exactly. Yes, we’ve done a better job I guess over the last year,
18 months of expanding and promoting other guys. That is a risk that you
promote around one guy, if they leave then everyone feels like, if they’re
leaving, the site’s done. Obviously that hasn’t been the case.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes. Okay, so today you’re roughly a three-year old company. How much are
you guys doing in revenue?

Billy Murphy

Roughly, about $1 million a year.

Trent Dyrsmid

About $1 million a year. How many full-time employees do you need to make
this business go?

Billy Murphy

One full-time employee.

Trent Dyrsmid

Meaning you?

Billy Murphy

No. I have another guy, Ryan, who runs the day-to-day for the site.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. You’ve got one full-time employee. You’ve got several pros, which are
on contracts of some way, shape, or form so it’s not direct overhead per se
so, at this point in time it sounds like this is an exceedingly profitable
business.

Billy Murphy

Yes. Business does really well.

Trent Dyrsmid

Excellent. All right. Having built that, having gone through trying to do
something, you went into a crowded space, but you knew that there was a
demand for your product. You created a really high quality product and then
you came up with some pretty crafty promotional strategies.

The net result of that is that you’ve accomplished what probably everybody
listening to this show has accomplished, you’ve created this phenomenal
business and you’re sitting there in what looks like, in your house in a T-
shirt, I’m guessing that you probably work from home or from wherever, like
I do, what’s your lifestyle like?

Billy Murphy

It’s good. I actually do half days at home and half in the office. I have
another business that has a few employees, e-commerce store business. I
usually go into the office for half the day and do half a day at home.
Lifestyle’s good. Travel a decent amount.

Really, my goal in general, was playing poker for a living and starting a
business, was I didn’t want to be stuck doing anything I didn’t want to do.
If one day I want to go traveling, I can do that. My goal was to set my
lifestyle up so I could do whatever I want. That’s kind of what I’m doing
now, so it’s good.

Trent Dyrsmid

I can understand that goal deeply, I can assure you. It’s one that I’m sure
that the people who are listening to this particular interview are
probably, hopefully nodding their heads up and down saying, “Yes, Yes,
yeah that’s the lifestyle I want.” Not all of those people are ex-poker
pros and know a bunch of poker pros so they’re listening to this and
they’re going, “Well, that’s all fine and cool, but I couldn’t do that.”

You mentioned a minute ago, and maybe they could, but you mentioned a
minute ago that you’ve gotten into some e-commerce businesses, so maybe we
can talk a little briefly about something that you think would be more
believable to be achievable by one of the people who are listening to the
show. Maybe we can pick one of your businesses and talk about that.

Billy Murphy

Yes. Early last year I started to get into e-commerce businesses- can you
hear me okay, I’m getting a little feedback?

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes. It happens every once in awhile and we just, as long as you’ve got all
your stuff shut down that might be sucking up bandwidth this is the best
we’ll be able to do.

Billy Murphy

All right. Cool. Early, maybe March 2011, I started getting into the e-
commerce stores. I think the first store I bought off Flippa. I see you do
some stuff on Flippa. I looked through Flippa and I remember calling my
buddy and saying, “Hey, there’s this site that’s making close to a $1,000 a
month. I think they were asking something like $6,000 – $7,000 and I said
is there any way this is real? Can you buy a business for maybe six grand
that makes a $1,000 a month? It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Trent Dyrsmid

It’s pretty phenomenal.

Billy Murphy

What’s that?

Trent Dyrsmid

I said, it’s pretty phenomenal isn’t it?

Billy Murphy

Yes. Right. I said, there’s got to be some sort of catch I’m not thinking
about because I hadn’t done anything in that space at all. I remember
talking to him and I figured “All right, what’s the worst case scenario?
I’ll lose my money. Best case scenario, I’ll learn a lot. I’ve learned
where the catch was so it doesn’t happen again. And if it works out, I’ll
probably have a really good cash flow and could probably keep doing this”.

I ended up calling the lady with the site and actually talked her down to
$4,000. I bought a site for $4,000 that was making about a $1,000 a month.
Got the site. Started bringing in sales. I was waiting for something bad to
happen, just all the rankings to drop off, something, but it didn’t. I kept
growing the site and buying more sites.

Trent Dyrsmid

What’s the URL?

Billy Murphy

The URL for that one is AbsolutelyOrangicBaby.com.

Trent Dyrsmid

AbsolutelyOrganicBaby.com, okay.

Billy Murphy

Yes. Started popping up a bunch of new stores and then growing the store
business. I think by the end of the year we probably had 15 – 20 stores. A
lot of them were very, very small, it wasn’t like we were a huge business,
but just a lot of tiny niche stores that you could make some money in.

Trent Dyrsmid

Interesting. I’ve got, if you did your research on me and my listeners
already know, I bought a site, HowToCleanAnything.com and what most people
don’t know is how much money it’s going to make, I don’t know what
happened, but somebody turned up the rocket boost on that site because it
went, it was doing like $800 – $900 a month up until more recently. I’d
switched, I’ve been testing some different monetization strategies and now
it’s doing about $450. a week.

That site was worth, at the outset maybe $5,000 a year ago when I bought
it. Now it’s making almost $2,000 a month obviously it’s worth a lot more
than $5,000. So, I’m on the hunt. I want more of those because I don’t have
to do anything. I don’t lift a finger for that site and so to me the rates
of return, I created this thing called The Website Investment Project
because I’ve been thinking about, well there’s this audience of people that
are buying dividend stocks and all this stuff to get income, nobody in the
Internet marketing space is talking to these people.

This is the most lucrative investment opportunity that I’ve ever seen and
it doesn’t take a lot of money, and it doesn’t have a lot of risk and
because of Flippa, you have lots of liquidity. It’s all good. I haven’t
really looked at e-commerce sites yet, I’m really deeply interested to know
more about this so, the 15 that you bought, did you buy them all from
Flippa? Have you got brokers looking for them for you? This is what I’m
involved in right now, trying to figure this out.

Billy Murphy

So probably only about half of them we bought and half of them we started
from scratch. I think, I got probably the bulk of stores… I started
contacting people who had a lot of stores, like big e-commerce companies. I
emailed them and said, “Hey, do you have any sites that you’re not doing
anything with?” Just kind of scrap, throw away sites.

Trent Dyrsmid

Which companies? How did you find those companies?

Billy Murphy

Just tons of Googling, basically. Looking around, you can look at sites
like Hay Needle, obviously they’re a huge one, but there are a lot of
smaller ones that you can find people who have maybe 20 – 50 stores. You
figure if they have that many stores, there’s probably some that they don’t
want anymore, that are junk sites.

Basically anyone I could find who looked like they were a big e-commerce
player and I’d say, “Hey do you have any throw away sites? I want to buy
them.” The big reason was that there was so much that they’re not paying
attention to on the site, if they have 20 to 50 sites or however many sites
they have. Their 20th best site they’re probably not doing anything with.

Trent Dyrsmid

You’re right.

Billy Murphy

I remember one site in particular we bought a… if you want to hear a
story about a site I flipped.

Trent Dyrsmid

I do.

Billy Murphy

All right. I basically flipped the value big time on this because they were
literally doing nothing on this site. I bought it as a package of seven
sites. They weren’t selling anything. They were getting all sorts of
traffic and…
Trent Dyrsmid

And that was the attraction to buying that site, was there was traffic but
no sales and you knew that you could probably turn the traffic back into
sales?

Billy Murphy

Well, so on the package of sites, this site was almost like a throw in.
There were a couple of other sites in the deal that were making money and
this one I thought I could potentially make money with, I didn’t know. So
it was getting traffic and no sales. I said, “Why is this not getting good
sales?” and they said, “Well, the supplier -” and you’ll find this a lot in
the e-commerce space, a lot of suppliers won’t deal with online only
companies.

A lot of times you have to have a brick and mortar store. Why? I don’t know
why. We always try to convince suppliers we’ll make a lot of sales for you.
We’re looking to sell your products. A lot of people want you to have a
brick and mortar store.

What we did was started calling brick and mortar stores in the area. I
guess I’ll back up a little bit, they said we couldn’t do anything without
a brick and mortar store.

After a lot of phone calls back and forth saying, “Will you make an
exception?” they said, “No. You have to a brick and mortar store.” They
didn’t necessarily say we had to own it. I started calling people in the
area here with stories in the niche and basically saying, “Hey, would you
be interested in a partnership?”

The only partnership is we’re basically looking to get into your space. The
supplier said we need a brick and mortar store and we don’t want to
compete. It was actually, I think the first or second call, the person
said, “Yes, we don’t want any competition. We’d be glad to help you.” We
called the supplier and said, “Hey, we have a storefront, we have a
partnership.”

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. I got to jump in now. I want to make sure that I and my listeners
understand this. Okay, so you want to start selling whatever, widgets.
Supplier says, “I’m not selling you widgets at wholesale unless you have a
brick and mortar store.” So you go down, in your neighborhood, to the local
strip mall, you walk into the widget store or did you call? Did you walk in
or did you call?

Billy Murphy

We just called them.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. You called up Mr. Widget store owner and you said, “You don’t know me
from Adam, I want to do this partnership with you so I can sell my widgets
online. Because I don’t want a brick and mortar store, but I really want to
be in the widget business, if I have to I’ll get my own store, but here’s
how you can help me not have a store so that I don’t become a competitor of
yours, is we form this little partnership so that I can sell my widgets on
my website.” Is that basically what you said to these people?

Billy Murphy

That’s it. Yes, that’s all we offering. They said yes. We thought we would
have to offer more, that was or starting point, can you help us out. They
said, “Yes, we don’t want any more competitors. We’ll help you out.”

Trent Dyrsmid

What did that agreement look like? Did you have to have lawyers draw this
up? Did you shake hands? How did you move it forward?

Billy Murphy

One of my guys went down there and talked with them. He’s a real sociable
guy. Talked to them. Told them the situation and they agreed to do it. The
reason he went down there is, we had to give them pictures to show that we
actually had a store front. We took product, we bought product from them
and we took it down there and we took pictures in the store and then sent
them pictures.

Then actually went a step further, right so, we actually had to call them
back and say, “Hey listen, we thought this was going to be totally
uncomplicated,” but actually they had a representative from the company
that wanted to visit our store front. We’re like uh-oh, and so we called
them and said, “Hey, we’re sorry for the hassle, but they actually want to
visit. Is it okay if they visit?” They’re probably a little flustered, but
they agreed to it still. They visited and everything checked out, I guess,
so they let us do it.

Trent Dyrsmid

Have you had to do this for every e-commerce store you buy?

Billy Murphy

No. This is the only one. This is the only one that I purchased that they
wouldn’t let us… There are other stores that we can’t offer the product,
but there’s just, we haven’t gone this route for another store yet. We went
for this one because the major brand, if you went to our store that’s what
you’d be looking for. We had to have this on the site. That store went from
literally making zero, I think last month or the month before, it did like
$8,000 in revenue.

Trent Dyrsmid

Wow.

Billy Murphy

From a store that was not doing anything. It literally took a phone call,
if you break it down to just, that was what changed the site.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. The reason was, so the site had traffic, but you didn’t have the
product that the traffic wanted. You put on your scrappy entrepreneur hat
again, did this deal with Mr. Local Merchant. Got access to the product
that your traffic wanted and it instantly started to convert.

Billy Murphy

Yes. It was basically as soon as we got the okay, we started throwing all
the products out there they that they weren’t allowed to sell before. Then
we had — Yes, go ahead.

Trent Dyrsmid

Is that why you bought this site? Did you know in advance that this was
going to happen? Will you tell me the URL of this store?

Billy Murphy

I can’t tell you for this one, just because I don’t want the supplier to
know.

Trent Dyrsmid

Got it. Fair enough.

Billy Murphy

I don’t want them, putting us on blast about making a partnership to get
around a loophole.

Trent Dyrsmid

Fair enough. We’ll leave it, but, now I lost my train of thought. Where was
I going with that? Darn it all. Darn it all. Darn it all. Anyway you
basically took this traffic, sorry, now I know where I was going. You knew
in advance that this store needed this super-duper product and that it
would be a good deal? Before you bought this store.

Billy Murphy

Yes. They even told us. They said, they even told us, they said, “Yes, we
used to make good money.” I think they bought the site for $18,000. We
already knew it was a legit site. They told us, “Hey, the only reason it’s
not making any money anymore is our supplier cut us off.” I just said, “Why
did they cut you off?” We figured out a way around it. They didn’t, no one
said you had to own a store. They said you had to have a store.

Trent Dyrsmid

Oh, okay.

Billy Murphy

So that’s what we did. They didn’t see, I guess, the angle.

Trent Dyrsmid

They weren’t as scrappy as you are, which is why you’re making money and
they’re not. And what did you have to pay for this throw away store, by the
way?

Billy Murphy

It was in a package of like six or seven stores and this was one of the
throw-ins of the seven stores. So, I think in total, I paid $7,000 for
seven stores. I think it equated, broke down the values, this was worth
maybe a few hundred bucks up to a $1,000 as kind of one of the throw-ins.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Man this keeps getting more and more interesting. So you’ve got, now
are these stores all running on Shopify or Weebly or WordPress or what are
they mostly running on?

Billy Murphy

When we buy them we just get them on whatever they’re on. We start up most
of our sites from scratch on Big Commerce.

Trent Dyrsmid

On which?

Billy Murphy

We actually transfer a lot of, a lot of the sites that are on other things
we transfer over to Big Commerce.

Trent Dyrsmid

Big, I’m sorry I don’t mean to cut you off, but it’s Big Commerce?

Billy Murphy

Big Commerce, Yes. I think they have a [blanking] on their name. I think
they’re better known from another name, but I’m blanking on what it is.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. In any case.

Billy Murphy

The only reason I use that one is I had a buddy who taught me the e-
commerce stuff and he used Big Commerce for all his stuff.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Now you have these seven little stores. You paid roughly $1,000 each.
What’s the aggregate monthly revenue of these seven, right now? How long
have you owned them and what’s the aggregate revenue?

Billy Murphy

Well, I actually sold off, I bought them and then I instantly sold off a
number of them that I didn’t want to do anything with.

Trent Dyrsmid

At a profit?

Billy Murphy

I think I kept two or three of them. I kept that one and I kept the one
that was making a lot of the money and then maybe one other one. For maybe
half the price that I paid.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. Did you sell them on Flippa?

Billy Murphy

No. Actually my brother had friends who were trying to get into e-commerce
so he referred his friends to me and I said, “Hey, I have these sites I’m
not going to do anything with” just kind of sold them off to them.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. I ran an e-commerce my very, very, first online business back in 2005
or 2006. I don’t know if anyone on my blog even knows about this, but I
used to sell jewelry.

Billy Murphy

Nice.

Trent Dyrsmid

Fashion jewelry that I brought in from Asia. I’d pay like $0.50 for, at the
time, broaches, those things that girls put on their chest collar area.
They were really, really popular and I would buy them in bulk from India
for like, from Hong Kong rather, for like $0.50 and sell them for $15.00.
It was great until competition came and ruined it all for me, but I had to
inventory all that stuff.

I had to ship all that stuff. I had to do everything. It was horrible. Now,
I’m guessing you don’t inventory. You don’t touch. You don’t ship. You
don’t do any of that stuff. Can you explain to me how it works to run an e-
commerce store in today’s market?

Billy Murphy

We have 100%, I shouldn’t say 100% anymore, we had a 100% job drop ship.
Then, actually bought a site that sells wigs, we actually had to have the
inventory in-house because I think they were getting a lot of them from
China. That’s the only store right now that we’re not doing drop ship, but
all of our other stores we do drop ship.

There are obviously pros and cons to drop shipping. The pros are that you
don’t have to do anything in terms of, you don’t have to warehouse
anything. You don’t have to go to the post office to ship stuff out,
anything like that.

The downside is the margins. The margins are not great in drop ship. It’s
maybe, for the most part 20% to 30% margins. You have to realize that there
are no other expenses factored in yet. No costs factored in. There’s no
employee cost. There’s no, there any sites associated with or any fees
associated with the sites that’s not including them. It’s only 20% or 30%
on the product.

Trent Dyrsmid

What’s called your gross profit margin, when your only starting with 20 to
30 there’s not much left.

Billy Murphy

Yes. When you’re going from a business like the poker site where it’s very
high margins to a site where, most people I talk to in e-commerce are
squeaking out 5% – 10% margins on a lot of this stuff so it’s not, it’s
hard to make money in drop shipping. We’re actually starting to move away,
not necessarily away from it, but we’re looking now to create our own
brands in China on some of our sites that aren’t doing well.

We’ll then start competing with some of our suppliers. Then you basically,
for the most part, double up your margins. Then something a lot of people
don’t think about is drop ship margins.

You can’t compete on pay-for-click. You know, much slower. You essentially
have to scale through either, SEO, social media, or just branding in
general and it’s not very great to spend a lot of time creating a brand
around you drop shipping a lot of times, since you don’t have your own
brand.

We’re looking to go to China, start creating these brands. Then, we’ll be
able to compete for pay-for-click where, the reason you can’t compete is
because your competing against suppliers who have 50% margins. Well, if you
have 25% margin, you have to pay twice as much just to, essentially twice
as much to get the same ad space.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. I want to bring this back to the levels of what I anticipate the vast
majority of my audience is, for the person who’s listening to this, who’s
not yet making any significant money, and I’ll call significant a $1,000 a
month. They’re not even making a $1,000 a month, yet. They want to start
obviously, that’s why they’re listening, what advice would you give them to
get from, we’ll call it zero just assume they’re at zero, and to this first
$1,000 a month?

Billy Murphy

My biggest advice and it isn’t going to be to start a certain type of
business, but focus on one. I see a lot of people they want to start up a
hundred different sites when they start up. I think that kills a lot of
people who don’t understand the business yet. They try to do all these
different things and there are so many ways you can make money online,
right?

So they’ll try 50 of them at the same time and then they don’t have any
chance to have one of them be really good. If you want a business that does
well, that business has to be better than your competitors. And if somebody
is starting 50 different ideas at the same time, your competitors are going
to kill you.

I guess my best piece of advice is focus on one thing. Know it really well
and figure out a way to create more value than anybody else in the space.
You know a $1,000 a month would be really easy to make, almost in any space
you’re in, I think for somebody starting out.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes. I would agree. I know when I first started I was involved, like many,
many people, in the micro niche site game or they’re called MFA sites, Made
For Adsense, and the idea of the business model is very attractive. You
have all these sites and you get traffic from Google and they’re not very
hard to rank and then they make this money on auto pilot. So in theory it
was a great business model, but there are a couple of pretty big flaws in
that model.

Lose your Adsense account as happened to a friend of mine, you’re done.
Penguin comes out and you’ve built all your links in a spammy sort of
fashion and you’re done.

Then just in every single niche that you’re in, somebody who’s also going
to want to be number one for that keyword, they’re going to do it better
than you are because they don’t have 200 sites. They’ve got five or three
or one. You’re never, ever, ever in a million years going to be able to
beat the person who is more focused on that particular topic than you are.
So I agree completely with that advice.

Let’s say that someone wants to buy an e-commerce store because it seems to
me like here’s a way, because one of the biggest challenges is people who
are new, they see that first, you say you’re making a $1,000 a month online
is relatively easy. There are not many people who are zero who would agree
with you. They’ve been chasing shiny objects for awhile, they’ve been on
the Warrior forum, and they’ve been buying all these $10.00 WSO’s.

I actually think I read, one of my researchers pointed this out in another
interview you did, you’d meet guys back before you had the success who were
making money in real estate or they were doing this or they were doing that
and you would kind of — am I getting this right? — you would kind of
think, “Well I should do that or I should do that or I should do that.” You
were pursuing money for the sake of, pursing an idea for the sake of making
money only as opposed to is this something you actually, that you care
about or that you’re into or that you think you can do a better job than
everybody else.

Billy Murphy

Right. Yes. I found one person making money in real estate and I would want
to know everything about it from them try to do that, but deep down I
really didn’t have an interest. I had an interest from the money I could
make from it. I chased that idea for a little bit and then I’d either get
bored or I figured out I wasn’t going to be very good at that. I’d chase
something else. That’s the problem I think a lot of people starting out,
they chase the money instead of chasing where the need is, where they can
create value, and a lot of times where they would enjoy it.

It’s easier to create value if you love it and you do enjoy it. I think a
lot of people starting out they’ll see a million places to make money and
they’ll try and learn them all. They’ll try and be an SEO guy. They’ll try
and be a PPC guy. Then they’ll try and be a real estate guy. It’s very
hard, you’re not going to be really good at any of them if you try to do
everything.

That’s where I was stuck for awhile was I’d chase money all over the place,
then read books on one subject, then read books on another, pick people’s
brains. Then I’d realize I was almost a pseudo-expert on all that stuff,
but I didn’t really, I couldn’t really make a lot of money in any of this
stuff because I had a lot of book knowledge on a lot of subjects, but if I
were to enter into these markets could I really crush the opposition? No, I
would have got killed. Or at least spun my wheels for awhile and not made
the money I make.

Once I realized if you put all your focus into one thing and scale up you
can make a lot of money. Because chances are your competitors are either
going to be doing what a lot of new people are now is trying to do
everything. If your competitors (1:05:02) you just have that one, you’re
going to run all those guys out of business pretty quick and then it’s a
lot easier to find more opportunities in the space too when you know,
you’re just immersed in it 100%.

You can see all these spots where to make money where nobody else is
seeing.

When I was in poker it was the same thing, nobody saw, they saw this
crowded market where there was already tons of poker training sites, but I
think people see crowded markets and immediately think it’s a saturated
market. They’re two totally different things. A lot of crowded markets are
not saturated at all. It’s just a lot of competitors but maybe they’re not
creating the value that’s needed.

Since I was so immersed in the poker space, I knew where the need was
there. Maybe if somebody’s a trader, maybe there’s a certain need there.
Maybe if somebody does, somebody’s amazing at Facebook advertising and sees
a need there that nobody’s specifically focusing on.

Trent Dyrsmid

A recent guest of mine was a perfect example of that. A guy by the name of
Rusty Moore, he’s in the fitness niche. Very, very crowded niche. There’s a
million blogs about fitness and a lot of them are about how to bulk up,
body building. Rusty thought, “You know what, I don’t really want to look
like that, I want to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Or I want to look
like” and he’d rattle off names of actors in various movies. He decided to
position himself within that niche as the blog to go to, to get that
Hollywood look. He now has a mid six figure business as a result of it.

Billy Murphy

That’s awesome.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes. It’s pretty awesome to say the least.

Billy Murphy

That’s a perfect example, right? That’s like one of the most crowded
industries online. There are some niches that are probably untapped.

Trent Dyrsmid

I can’t help but ask then, why are you doing this e-commerce stuff and
China, and manufacturing and all that? It seems to be that poker’s your
thing. It’s working really well. Where you going? Is there a strategy?

Billy Murphy

That stuff almost happened because I had too much time available and I
wanted to get into a new business. I had a buddy doing really well in the e-
commerce space. I knew that business and he taught me how to do that. It
kind of came about because I had some time on my hands. A lot of people ask
me like why e-commerce business? It’s definitely not the route to go if you
want to make a lot of money really fast.

It’s definitely a slow route if you’re doing drop ship. It’s definitely not
a make money really quick route. I think, in the short term I just wanted
to build something up. I thought I saw all these people building e-commerce
stores. I thought we could maybe make them better.

Now long term I see it as now we have all these stores and we really need
to get back to focusing on “Let’s find one or two products that we can give
better than anyone else and build a company out of that”. That’s kind of
the route we’re going now and that’s a lot faster way to grow a company and
make it profitable than have super tight margins on drop ship.

Trent Dyrsmid

It also can, I was having this conversation with a buddy of mine, Chris
Guthrie, the other day who also buys sites and he had actually put a thread
up on this forum asking people who had bought more sites than him, should I
be buying sites all over the place or should I really be focusing in one
niche.

I think there’s a really strong argument to be made that you can have a
very good business if you own lots of e-commerce stores, but they’re all in
one niche. Then you can have one team of writers writing content for you.
You don’t need to have relationships with as many suppliers. You don’t need
to have relationships with as many advertisers.

If you’re building lists on all those sites you can probably actually build
one list and just segment that list according to where the traffic came
from. So you can end up with some real economies of scale with that focus.

There were some people that pointed out the flip side. They said, “You know
I buy sites all over the place. I’m a bottom up opportunist and I just keep
flipping and selling and flipping them and selling them.” I guess it
probably comes down to your personality.

If you like doing ad hoc stuff and you just like shooting fish in a barrel
everyday or whatever expression you’d like to use, then you can go all over
the place, but if you’d like to build something that will become longer
lasting, streamlined, and hopefully take less of your time over time, then
maybe the one nice approach is probably a better way to go.

Listen this is now the longest interview I’ve ever done. I could keep
going, but there is so many more . . .

Billy Murphy

I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Trent Dyrsmid

No. It’s a good thing. This has really been fascinating. I’ve got more
questions for sure, but I think I’m going to wind it up for today. Maybe
what we’ll do is we’ll let the listeners provide their comments and so
forth and maybe have you back for another interview in the future.

The last question for you then is if anyone wants to get a hold of you, is
there any way that they can do that?

Billy Murphy

Yes. They can go to my blog, it’s going to be, I think by the time this
airs it will be up, ForeverJobless.com. They’ll be able to contact me
through there, the contact button.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. ForeverJobless.com. What are you going to be doing with the blog?
What’s the strategy behind it?

Billy Murphy

Basically, it’s another thing I don’t really have a plan for long term. I
just noticed a lot of people wanting to learn how to make a lot of money
online. You mentioned, you brought up a point of a Warrior forum, a lot of
those forums, it seemed like there were a lot of people pitching, here’s
how to make money and they don’t make money. There are a lot of people
teaching, here’s an e-book on how to make money, but they only make money
through e-book sales.

I wanted to create, layout a lot of the stuff I’m doing, some of the stuff
that you talked about, how to build a business. I know you built a
business, I know some of the other bloggers have built a business, but a
lot of the make money space is all I guess more theory related and not on
people actually making money.

I want to lay out what I’m doing and what some of my friends are doing and
show people that it’s not really as hard as it seems. And here’s how we’re
doing it. Just lay out a lot of stuff publicly on how we’re making money.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes. Terrific. I think that’s a wonderful thing. I’m sure that you’ll have
a fantastic audience as a result. I’ll be one them. I’ll be checking it out
when it’s… What date does that blog go live?

Billy Murphy

Probably, I’m still working on writing content. I’m not a writer, it’s
taking forever, probably August 1st or 2nd.

Trent Dyrsmid

Okay. I’ll give you an idea that might help you with your writing. Is on
your iPhone you can get a little app called Dragon Dictation.

Billy Murphy

I’ve heard of that. I’ve heard of that. I want to try that.

Trent Dyrsmid

It works phenomenally well. So you can just blah, blah, blah, blah off the
top of your head. Then you can email that entire transcript to an editor
who can then turn it into a blog post for you. It’s still your words
because they came out of your brain.

I’ve done it for sometimes I just want to rattle off a paragraph and I
don’t feel like typing it and I’ll edit it afterwards, but it’s definitely
a way for you to be able to create content, which will end up being text
content. You can be driving, you can doing just about anything.

Billy Murphy

Right. I need to go get that today. I’ve been thinking about doing it
forever and as I’m struggling through writing a five hour blog post. I need
to get that.

Trent Dyrsmid

Yes. Okay. All right. Well, listen thank you again, Billy, so much for
being on the interview here with me. This has been one of the most
enjoyable ones I’ve ever done. Although I think I say that every time
because I keep meeting really fascinating people. That’s why I love doing
this so much. I hope you and I get an opportunity to meet in person one day
and cross paths again. Maybe we’ll even end up doing something together,
who knows, but thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate
it.

Billy Murphy

Thanks a lot for having me on.

Trent Dyrsmid

No problem at all.

Okay. That wraps up another episode of OnLineIncome podcast. If you enjoyed
this episode, pleased do head over to iTunes and give it a feedback rating.
If you thought this was a four star or a five star episode and you feel
like leaving any comments that would be just really wonderful.

The more feedback I get from the audience, the higher the show goes in the
iTunes store. Or the audience grows and the larger the audience the more
interesting and high profile guests I’m able to attract to be on the show,
which in turn helps the audience and myself.

So please do, go ahead and give some feedback.

If you’re listening to this anywhere other than the OnLineIncome blog and
you’d like to get access to the transcript or any of the other elements in
the show notes, you can get to this episode by going to
OnLineIncomeLab.com/session037.

Okay. Thanks very much for being a listener and if you’re a subscriber, I
thank you as well. It is my privilege to be able to have you as my audience
and I just get no end of joy out of producing episodes like this and
hearing the feedback and the questions from the folks out there.

Thanks so much and we’ll be talking to you again at the next podcast.

[Recorded closing:

Okay. That's it for now. Thanks for listening to the OnlineIncomeLab
podcast at onlineincomelab.com.

Want more great content from the Income Lab? Check us out at Facebook at
facebook.com/onlineincomelab and on YouTube, youtube.com/onlineincomelab.

Thank you for listening to the OnlineIncomeLab podcast.]

OIL 036: An Interview with Neil Patel

Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! This is Trent here from the Online Income Lab podcast and welcome to session no. 36 where you guys are in for a treat in this session. My guest is a fellow by the name of Neil Patel and he’s the co-founder of 2 internet companies. One called crazy egg and one called kiss metrics. And through his entrepreneurial career which is now spanned over a decade Neil has helped such large companies such as amazon, aol, gm, hp and viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 he was named one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Jouirnal and he was also named rather ranked as one of the top entrepreneurs in the nation by Entrepreneur magazine. So in this episode Neil and I are gonna be talking about how to get traffic for the individual bloggers. So if you’ve got a blog and authority sites something and
you’re trying to figure out post panda, post penguin, man what do I gotta do? How do I get more traffic to my site? This is the podcast for you. So please join me in welcoming Neil to the show.

Alright so on the show with me today I have Neil Patel and did I pronounce that correctly, Neil?

Neil Patel: You did.

T: Welcome very much to the show. I really appreciate you making the time to do the interview with me. I’ve seen your name all over the internet as you so humbly put your kind of a big deal so it’s hard to miss you.

N: Thanks for having me.

T: No problem. So in this podcast we’re gonna be talking a lot about traffic. Neil has a system called the quick sprout

traffic system which I’ve learned a great deal from and after going through it I really wanted to get him on the show. He’s

even got a shirt on that says I’m kinda a big deal. I need to get a shirt like that. My buddy Mike does one that says

capitalistic across the front. I love it. Anyway so I wanted to get him on the show to share with my audience some of the

we’ll call post penguin post panda strategies that are working for folks who wanna get traffic. But before we get in any of

that I’m sure that some of my listeners don’t yet know who you are. So I’m gonna turn the mic over to you Neil coz perhaps

you’re kind of the big deal I’m sure you won’t be shy about telling us a little bit about your background and who you are and

how you got to where you’re at.

N: Sure so I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve been doing this for almost 11 years and I think 11 now at 1:00. Started off

with the 2 different small marketing sites and stuff like that. Job boards. My first real business was a consulting agency.

We helped people build that traffic. Did that for a while hated the business. Found out it’s a lifestyle business. And then

from there we started creating software companies because the pay is that our clients are experienced here in the market. So

one of the first ones was crazy egg. So crazy egg is a heat map analytics that shows you how people interact with their

websites. So it gives you quite a bit of feedback on usability of your sites, where people are clicking, where they’re not,

where you can improve it. For example people are clicking on image that you got another clicking on you could go on there and

make that image with links working that way. You can make yourself more usable. Same with form fields. You have 10 form

fields and he knows that 90% only click the first 5. You can figure out how to strip your form fields from 10 to 5 or

whatever it is to boost your form fields.

T: I actually have some crazy egg experiments running right now. Just getting started.

N: Awesome. Then the next part of that coz we realized crazy egg would never be that $100 million company kiss metrics

and that’s where I spend all my times these days. And kiss metrics focuses on something different, right? So you have amateur

viewers on that site it shows you that which are great. They’ll tell you your paid visitor counts and stuff like that. But

at the end of the day your business is to make money. So we decided to do is say hey you’ve been using those tools and we’ve

used a lot of them ourselves. But nothing really helps you find your revenue. So what we provide with kissmetrics we help you

find what you’re lacking about, your customer, your revenue per user, churn, covered analysis, truth conversion rates over

time. We can give attractions like how many people are free users that upgraded to paid, all that kind of stuff.

T: So let me ask before we get into the part of the interview that I just talked about at the very beginning I wanna ask

you because I’ve built an offline like what we call the traditional business is what all I know. How challenging it was,

every business is challenging in the beginning. So are you a software programmer by training because you made 2 software

companies?

N: No.

T: So you don’t write any code?

N: I don’t know any code.

T: So let’s go back coz I think this is important for people to hear. When you came up with we’ll talk about kissmetrics

coz that’s the company that you’re putting all your focus into now, were you the founder of kissmetrics? Were you the

co-founder of kissmetrics?

N: Co-founder. My other co-founder is not technical leader.

T: Okay so you two guys come up with, you figured out that there’s this hole in the market that somebody, it’s a need

that’s not being served. How did that happen? How did you actually come up with the idea?

N: We were exchanging response and we were trying to attract crazy egg revenue grow up and all that kind of stuff. For

example it was really hard for us to figure out all options via our customers or our churn rate like that deal with the end

people are trying to attract and it was hard for us to figure out that per marketing channel. So people look at marketing

channel saying oh this platform is converting while this doesn’t convert when the customer sign up. Which marketing channels

worth more in the long run and we couldn’t track any of that and our only solution is we had a solution.

T: Okay so if I understand what you said if you can’t figure out the value of a customer in each channel you can’t

figure out how much you can spend to acquire a customer in each channel. Is that more or less the problem that you’re

solving?

N: That’s correct because you can find out the short run how much you’re using worth. If you’re selling something that’s

$10 a month and Google shows that something from *(inaudible) signed up and that’s great. But that doesn’t necessarily help

solve the problem because I’m not sure Google’s gonna tell you how many months that customer’s paying.

T: Yap that’s right.

N: So you buy someone from google adwords and someone from being *(inaudible). It’s not good. It could end up being with

the first that comes from google’s *(inaudible). Who knows but if that’s the case you can spend more for those customers.

T: Absolutely. Okay so you guys have these set of pain points that you wanna solve. Neither one of you writes code. I

automatically think well it’s gonna cost a fortune to solve this. Did you go and did it cost a fortune?

N: Yeah we raised a lot of money.

T: Okay so you raised a lot of money for investors. So when you went to investors to raise for this did you ever even

have a working prototype?

N: Not really. We had designs and stuff but were doing a lot of armory to get started.

T: Okay. So you had skin on the game and the investors then because of the track record that you created from other

things that you had both done you went to investors and said “look, our money’s in this deal. Here’s what we’ve done before.

Here’s where we think we’re going. Are you in?”

N: Yeah me and my co-friend are on it. We didnt’ get salary from our start up.

T: Yeah well that’s not uncommon. I didn’t get salary from mine for 3 years.

N: Well when you raise $4 million that’s correct.

T: Yeah that’s true. So that’s how much you’ve raised for kissmetrics so far as $4 million?

N: Yeah in behalf of 4 years I don’t take salary. I’ve fully invested.

T: Okay. Cool so you are absolutely committed and you’re treating yourself just like an investor which people, which

investors like to see.

N: Yeah. We’ve taken salaries in the past. Our investors actually tried us to take salaries because they’re all about

“oh no, you need to take care of yourself. You need to pay your bills.” They’re really understanding and that’s a good thing

about them. You really like to ponder really at the end of that we appreciate our investors still we don’t want us using all

their money to pay for our monthly expenses but we’re still in the *(inaudible).

T: And is kissmetrics cash flow positive or negative at this point?

N: Negative.

T: Negative. Okay. Alright so we could talk forever about that but I really wanna head off in the direction that I said

we were going to coz my current audience I think will be more interested in where we’re going but it is good for them to know

a bit about your background. So thanks for sharing that.

N: No problem.

T: The world of SEO has gone through a tough time or a challenging time. Lots of change in the last couple of months.

And I think it’s left a lot of people kinda wondering like what should I do, how should I get traffic, what works is this,

does SEO even work anymore. You know mass confusion and so I’m hoping that the rest of our conversation we’re gonna start

clearing up some of that confusion. So we’ll use a guinea pig persona to resolve our discussion around. So let’s say that the

person listening to this wants to create a blog of some kind so they got this passion coz I’m running a mastermind group

right now and I’m gonna get them all listen to this and all these folks wanna create a real online business. They’re not

looking for some sort of goofy scammy get rich thing. They wanna build like what I’ve done. They wanna build a blog. They

wanna get traffic. They wanna build a business out of it. They wanna get revenue. None of that happens of course unless you

get traffic. So let’s use that as kind of the coffee table of our discussion and so what in this first of all for folks who

aren’t super familiar with what’s changed, what has changed in your opinion since the penguin update came out for SEOs?

N: Sure I’ll make it easy once combined with those updates right coz it’s actually easier to discuss what was like a

long time before panda. What’s really changed is a few things. One is it takes longer to build. That’s the big one. Two you

can’t build links too quickly. If you build links way to fast it’s also harder can get ranking. Three you need to have really

good content. You can’t have junk content, sometimes you generate content to get slapped. What you really have to do is make

sure everything’s clean. So we’re talking about bad behavior on your site has nothing to do with bad rank. No junk, you gotta

get rid of all the trash, all the duplicate content. You gotta have quite better site architecture so that you can get more

pages crawl. And if you do all that kind of stuff and actually put value in your site you’re gotta be cool.

T: Okay so what do you mean by site architecture? Let’s be specific with that.

N: Your pages with a content you have to get them all indexed. So the way you cross into pages and stuff like that are

really important.

T: Okay. So I’ve got a post on whatever and I got another post on whatever it’s a good idea for me to be linking from

one post to the other. That’s kind of the architecture you’re talking about?

N: That’s correct. Assuming the post would be related.

T: Yeah obviously. Alright so you said it takes longer and then you talk about building links. A lot of people have been

building links for a long time and I know for myself I had this portfolio of micro niche sites which were a little basically

10 page sites that prominently making money with adsense. And they didn’t get de-indexed but they all got tumbled and I

eventually just junked them all and took my adsense off and so forth. And because I was building links in a way that was

working really really well up to that point and then it stopped. So in the realm of link building first explain what doesn’t

work anymore, what people should avoid. And then let’s talk about what is working.

N: Sure let’s a lot of the stuff that didn’t work but link building is purely a little too rich anchor text sites. So if

you turn around for dog food all the links would say dog food. You can’t have a ton of that. It doesn’t look natural. Second

thing is all those not related, right? So you’ve got links from computer hardware company going to the dog food site. Then

the other thing was a lot of them were bad links like the site would also link to Dr. Bagger sites, casino links and so on.

And I’d say the last thing would be the links were in the bad places, footers, side bars, places that should be within

content. So ideally your new links should be the opposite of all that. In content links, related sites, not too rich in

anchor texts so you gotta rotate it up. You shouldn’t be paying for links coz if you pay for a ton of links there’s a higher

chance you’re gonna get caught. Don’t build too quickly. So it’s like if you do all those kinds of things and you get links

from authority sites you’re gonna get better off.

T: Okay so how do you do that and scale it though?

N: You gotta hire a ton of people. There’s no automated way to scale it. And what you end up doing is going out there

and so start going getting links by hitting up people who link to your competitors one by one. It’s effective but it takes

forever but it works till today.

T: Okay so you’re saying that and I agree with you coz I don’t do this anymore but automated link building gone. Don’t

even bother with it anymore.

N: That’s correct. Automated, article spinning, all that kind of stuff, directories submissions are not as effective as

they used to be. It’s all about going after the quality links. For example if you try to link for dog food the best link you

can get is someone who already ranks for dog food and the top 1,000 results. So if one of those pages that rank in the top

1,000 links to you coz they’re all like *(inaudible) they’re more likely to boost up in the rankings really fast and really

quickly.

T: So how am I gonna find that page?

N: Use google dog food and then you look for the top 1,000 results.

T: And just scroll through and keep hitting them all one by one. Okay.

N: And when do you think that will link out to your competitors and you, you’re not asking for a link.

T: Okay.

N: A lot of stuff like that are going after and finding people who are linking to related topics but the links are dead

because people took down the site. So you go out there and you say “hey, this is Trent. I put this page on my site and start

linking to.” And then you can do things like social media marketing and infographics. Social media is still effective.

They’re trying to potentially devalue the links of infographics. I believe there’s a video with Mack.

T: Yeah I actually heard about that in an event I was at last night but let me go back just a quick second coz you

skipped over something that I think the audience might have missed. You talked very briefly and I think I read this in quick

sprout about getting a hold of webmasters who had broken links on their site pointing it out to them and then offering up a

replacement link to go to. Is that what you just said?

N: That’s correct.

T: So how does somebody go about doing that?

N: Spin worded code. We built a software that finds broken links. And there’s other software online that you can do like

broken links. If you do with broken links software you’ll find a ton of them. And you just scroll websites that talk about

subjects in your space and you’ll look for broken links and you email the webmaster in your niche and point him over to pages

in your website that they can setup that broken links that sends their visitors nowhere.

T: Okay so you’re actually kind of doing them a favor coz google doesn’t really like to see broken links on the site.

N: That’s correct.

T: Now don’t most webmasters already know that they have broken links? Like for me I run broken link checker on my sites

and so I know when I have a broken link.

N: You’re one of the exception. Even I don’t run one on my website.

T: Really? Okay.

N: Most I would say don’t run that at all.

T: Okay. So in my mastermind I told people that if you really wanna do well you wanna go where lots of competition is.

In other words you wanna stick to the super niches. Things like health, things like relationships, things like how to make

money in some way, shape or form. And so in the old days of micro niche sites ranking for that stuff would be really really

difficult but in the we’ll call it the new world there’s lots and lots of ways to get traction in this hyper hyper

competitive niches that aren’t necessarily SEO per se and I interviewed a guy just recently by the name of Rusty Moore who

has a site called fitnessblackbook and he’s got fitness products and he’s doing really really well. And he shared with me a

lot of ideas and one of those ideas and it’s in your quick sprout system as well is this idea of building relationships with

other bloggers that are in your niche. So that seems to me like a super super smart thing to do. It’s something that I’m

putting a lot more effort into here with my own blog because I naively when I started off thought that you could just work in

your little bubble and stick behind the keyboard and you know magic what happen. You need not talk with anybody and it just

doesn’t work that way.

N: Yap.

T: So what would be your advice? So someone’s relatively new, let’s just say they’ve got a fitness blog or a dog

training, it doesn’t really matter what it is, we’ll just say fitness for purposes of our discussion. And they’ve got 10

posts on their blog and they’ve really done a good job of kind of picking their particular sub niche of the fitness space and

they’re addressing a specific problem and so they’ve written content that addresses that specific problem. They’ve got a

persona identified like they’re really going after a targeted reader. But if they’ve got 10 posts on there and they could be

the best post in the world but if nobody knows about them it doesn’t matter. So now they need to get the word out. How do you

think they should go about doing that?

N: One to work with bloggers in your space. Tweet their stuff, email them, create conversations, get to know them a few

months before you ask them for anything. And if you deal with enough bloggers you will find out that some will be willing to

tweet your posts. It’s hard to get a link to it but they’ll tweet it. And the more tweets you get it does outrank certain

searches to look at social influencers. So I’ll definitely do that. The other thing you can do is link to their blogs,

retweet their stuff, by doing all that kind of stuff they’ll more likely link to yours. Make sure you do trackbacks so in

that way they can actually see that you link to theirs but by doing a lot of those kinds of things you’ll be able to boom

your site. Another thing you can do is bait them too, right? Like 10 of those or top 50 lists or tips or whatever you wanna

do or advice and include them and say “hey I mentioned you in here blah blah blah. You’re really respected. Thanks. If you

wanna retweet it or share it with your readers that’d be great if not no worries.”

T: Okay so you just covered off a whole bunch of stuff there real quick. I wanna drill a little deeper coz I think some

of the people who are listening to this might want a bit more details. So you gotta find other blogs in your niche. There’s

lots of different ways to do that. What would be your top 2 ways that you would recommend people find other blogs coz they’re

relatively new in the niche. Like they’re only 10 posts in they don’t know who everybody is.

N: I do google blog searches for keywords related to my space. So I go to google blog search. And also do technowriting

searches or blogs in my space.

T: Okay. And you like alltop.com as well?

N: All top works really well as well.

T: Okay. So there’s 3. So that’s how you can now find other blogs. And so what I would suggest is make a spreadsheet of

these things so you’ve got some way to keep yourself organized. Now you need to start reaching out with them. So what is,

you’ve never spoken to this person before, what would you suggest they do to start?

N: Start talking to them. Tell them that you’re a fan and like their content and give me some suggestions. Be one of

those guys who claim they do that. Give them some advice, tell them how they can make something better. Then that’s it. Then

do anything else there. Let them follow up, be involved, but all those emails make them later but more to this advice. That’s

how I would do it. I’d start creating conversation from there later on when you blog and you mention them or something that

they did that’s when you can ask them to tweet that.

T: Okay so send them an email, get a little bit of a conversation going, follow them on twitter, start retweeting their

tweets, make sure you put their @(at) name in so that they know that you’re retweeting their tweets. Perhaps if you’re

writing posts you might want to link to anyone of their posts. And now you talked about trackbacks now how do you make sure

that that’s turned on so that that’s working.

N: So you link to blogs that have trackbacks enabled on their blogs. So if you link to me coz I have trackbacks on those

show off and you don’t have trackbacks on coz I have trackbacks section in my comments and it works but if I didn’t have that

then your linking to a blog is not gonna give you credit for that way.

T: Okay so how do you actually find a blog that has trackbacks turned on?

N: So all you do is just go to the part of the blog with comments section and see if there’s an area for trackbacks.

T: Okay.

N: It’s just typically above the comments section right above. And a lot of times there’s nothing in there just

trackbacks.

T: It’ll just say the word trackbacks? And if it does you’ll know they’ve got their trackbacks turned on?

N: Technically yes like 95% of the time.

T: Okay so above comments. Alright. Okay so now you can start commenting on their blog. So you’re just basically doing

common sense things and to interact with them and form some kind of relationship and you wanna give to them first before

you’ll ask anything in return. So you talked about doing a bait. So tell me what you mean specifically by baiting another

blogger?

N: Baiting would me writing a blog post talk about a few blogs that you actually read and link it to every single person

in your industry by letting them know and ask them to tweet it and share it. That would be baiting. Putting it in the order

of the list.

T: Okay so I’m gonna write a post I’m gonna say “hey these are all my favorite blogs” then I’m gonna tell all of those

bloggers that they’re in this post and it’s on my blog and they’ll probably going to, espeically if I’ve done some

relationship building with them they’ll probably gonna give me a tweet out to their list because it actually helps them a

little bit to get that extra recognition. You’re kinda appealing to their ego.

N: That’s correct. It’s pretty much providing them with credibility, right? Your help pushing their credibility which

helps them.

T: Okay so by association you’re getting a little credibility as well. Alright so now you’ve got a little bit of a

relationship going on, at what point in a relationship you think it’s appropriate to start asking if you can guest post on

their blog?

N: You better know them for months before you do and you’re better off that they have guest post up there. And don’t ask

them to guest post unless they already have guest post on their blogs.

T: Okay so wait a few months for that. I mean what’s the harm in asking?

N: No harm but if you ask too early there’s a higher chance for them to shut you down. When you have relationship it’s

harder for people to say no.

T: Absolutely. Okay so in terms of networking within your space let me see if there’s anything else I wanted to ask you

about that. You talk a lot about collecting testimonials and building relationships, there’s some relationship tools of the

trade in your quick sprout system. Do you wanna talk about a little bit about either of those?

N: So let’s talk about testimonials or the tools and forms but it’s about collecting testimonials. When you do good work

for people you gotta ask for testimonials. You go “hey I’d love to get a quick quote on what you thought. I’ll put in your

picture next to it and your name and I’ll get you good post for your works out here.” The more that kind of stuff you can do

the better off you are. And more than testimonials you ideally want great case study. These case studies are gonna make you a

lot more money or are gonna get better conversions than a quick testimonial. Show off the case and then wrap it up with good

testimonials.

T: Okay so you wanna create a case study with somebody. How do you go about doing that? Like you got your fitness blog.

You’ve now done some work. You built a relationship with somebody who has a higher volume fitness blog than you do. What kind

of case study would you wanna do?

N: You won’t be interested in that aspect if you have a fitness blog and you have a reader who’s reading it and they

lost a ton of weight that’s when you do a case study. You wouldn’t do cases with other bloggers in your space.

T: Okay so anytime you can make an example of someone who’s been taking the advice that you’ve been giving them and

they’re willing to do a case study for you that’s gonna get you a lot of traction. It’s gonna engage the readers. And that’s

something that I do on my own blog. I have a thing called the website investment project where I purchased a website from

somebody else who was at that time that I purchased it it was only making about $400 a month from adsense. And I’ve owned it

for about a year and now it’s making over a $1,000 per month and so I wrote all this post about that so that people could

kinda see the journey and they see what the site is and the url is and I show them the traffic reports and all the things

that I did to make those improvements so they can see first hand that you’re actually doing what it is that you’re talking

about. Even better would be is if you could do that with somebody that reads your blog.

N: Yap exactly.

T: Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Alright so anything else on building relationships before we shift over to how to use

social media?

N: Nope that’d be pretty much it.

T: Okay. So what is your favorite way to use social media to help promote and get traffic to your blog?

N: My favorite way to use social media is through twitter and facebook. Well look at your social profiles and by that

use programs like tweet adder to build up twitter profiles and just put up tweetadder.com and it gives instructions on how to

use it.

T: I actually just started using it.

N: Use it for a month or so then you can start by tweeting your own sites and stuff like that your blog content. Next

thing would be facebook. I’ll go out there put on my facebook profile by writing good content and engaging with other people,

asking questions, doing polls, things of that nature. And so in that way I’ll put a link to my website and I’ll get more

traffic.

T: Okay so let’s go back to twitter for a minute and go to tweet adder and that’s a tool that I’ve recently used. And so

there’s a couple of ways that you can build your audience. You could search for a topic and then find people that are

interested in that topic. Or you could find a twitter user that already is in your niche and has a lot of followers and then

you could start to follow their followers and you can do that and you can kinda automate that with tweet adder. Do you have a

preference one of those strategies over the other? Do you think one is more effective than the other?

N: They both work pretty well.

T: Okay now with respect to tweet adder and there’s a number of instruction videos on it are there any best practices

that you would suggest in terms of maximum number of people you should try and follow per day or any of that kind of thing?

N: Follow up to a 1,000. Just don’t start removing your follow. Don’t unfollow people who don’t follow you back until 7

days.

T: Okay so you can follow a 1,000 people a day and you’re not gonna get on twitter’s radar?

N: If you only have 10 followers yeah you are good. If you have 1,000 that’s very fine. If you have very little then you

know don’t follow more than 1% or I would say conservative 5% of people following you.

T: On an each day?

N: If you have a 100 people following you you wanna start off higher like start following 30 or 40 a day. But if you

have a 1,000 people following you you just start off following 50 or whatever a 100 a day or something like that. So 5 to 10%

and then grow from there.

T: And so just for the folks to understand how it works it’s really really easy. All you do is it cost I think $55 to

manage a single twitter account. If you have more than one account you can upgrade it but it’s not very expensive.

N: You can get tweet adder coupons it’ll be cheaper.

T: Yeah actually I found one when I bought it and I got 20% off. And so you can search for a person and then they’ll

give you a whole list of all of their followers or a topic whatever your choice is and then you just say “well here’s all the

people that I wanna follow.” And then you can program some parameters, not program, you can input some parameters of how many

people you wanna follow and max number of days and how many minutes to wait between following and then you hit the go button

and that’s it. And it just runs on autopilot.

N: That’s correct.

T: So you’re gonna build yourself a big list of twitter followers. Now in terms of managing your twitter account how

many tweets a day do you think someone should do and should they just use tweet adder to automate that or are there tools

that are better?

N: Hoot suite for automating tweets and all that kind of stuff?

T: Hoot suite?

N: Hoot suite and just automate anytime anywhere from 1 minimum to 10 times a day. *(inaudible)

T: Okay so your original tweets, retweets and just snippets of your conversations. In your original tweets how much

should someone break down between tweets they’re specifically about your niche versus.

N: You should do that on your niche.

T: No quotes from famous people or that kind of, I mean I see a lot of that kind of stuff.

N: You could end up doing some of that kind of stuff.

T: What if I wanted to quote you?

N: When you have a small account you should just stick to being related towards your niche or quotes that you’re

related.

T: Okay alright.

N: Unless you wanna retweet.

T: You hereby have permission to retweet me as many times a day as you like.

N: That’s right. If someone just do that 10 times a day you’ll be perfect.

T: Now do you notice it? How many twitter followers do you have?

N: I have no clue. A 100,000 or something.

T: Now do you pay any attention to your twitter account? If someone let’s say somebody wanted to build a relationship

with you and they’re gonna start retweeting their tweets, are you gonna notice?

N: It’s too hard coz I get more than a 100 retweets a day.

T: So they’re not gonna get through the noise.

N: Under 100,000 followers it’s impossible to keep up with it.

T: Absolutely. So the tip there folks don’t start by following somebody with a 100,000 followers and think that you’re

gonna get their attention. You’re gonna have to build your social profile in other ways before you’re gonna get on to that

person’s radar screen. But if somebody has 5,000 followers.

N: That’s correct.

T: Yeah for me I don’t have a huge twitter follower yet but thanks to tweet adder I will have relatively soon. And

everytime I get a retweet I actually still take the moment and just thank them. Thanks for the mention. Appreciate it. Coz

it’s still one on one and I have the ability to do that based upon the size of my twitter list. But over time that will

become more challenging I suppose. So again before we move on to facebook so that’s how we’re gonna build our twitter

following. And that’s the content that we’re gonna send out. Do you use for example do you use analytics tracking links in

your tweets or is that just too much time and effort can’t be bothered?

N: Too much time and effort I don’t care enough. I just tweet.

T: Okay. And other than sending out, so other than building your list and sending your 1-10 tweets a day they’re

predominantly intended to get people back to your website. Anything else on that you think twitter’s exceptional for? And do

you use twitter let’s say that there’s somebody that you wanna start building a relationship with do you use twitter as a

means to do that?

N: I do. I’ll tweet certain people I want to.

T: Okay. Direct message or just tweet at them with an @(at)?

N: Better with everything.

T: Better with everything, okay. Alright. So now we’re gonna shift over on to facebook and talk a little bit about first

of all how to build a following. So let’s assume coz we’re not gonna teach you how to build a page on this podcast coz you

can’t see the screen but let’s assume that you built a decent page. First of all what is the goal Neil of a facebook page?

N: Every person’s goal is to fret, some people’s goal is to create engagement, some people’s promote their personal

brand, to promote their websites.

T: To promote your site. So do you try and capture leads on the facebook page or you just try to drive traffic back?

N: You should but I personally don’t.

T: You don’t okay. So is there a way that we can build a following on facebook in this fast way that tweet adder allows

us to do it with twitter?

N: There is. The best thing to do is go to tech punch in google how to get over a 100,000 facebook fans. And there’s a

guy James who wrote a blog post step by step that explains everything you should be doing on facebook. Just copy it to the T

and you’ll be surprised.

T: Really? Awesome.

N: Yap.

T: There’s a new one. See there’s my golden nugget of this interview. I get a golden nugget out of every interview. I

appreciate that. So for the folks that are listening coz they may be somebody I get a few people listen to this when they’re

driving in their car I should say quite a few people. Off the top of your head can you remember what any of those strategies

are? Anything we’re talking about here just now to kinda give them a little bit of a teaser?

N: I should have freak out most of them which is why I told everyone to go to tech punch to read it.

T: Okay I’ll make sure that I find the link to that.

N: But it’s good. I used to give it to one of my guys and I was like I wanna do some more facebook profile page and like

go and talk to him and he said okay.

T: And so how many followers do you have now?

N: 40 something thousand.

T: Ah you’re not there yet then. 40,000 still pretty darn good though. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

N: It’s not bad.

T: Okay so what are the practices? What are some of the things that you’re doing on your facebook page? How many posts a

day are you doing and what kind of things are you posting?

N: I post I try to do quotes to share wisdom, try to share stuff from my site, on my company’s sites stuff like that.

T: Are you building any humor into the mix?

N: Sometimes. Rarely though.

T: Rarely. Okay. Alright so now we’ve done some, we’ve talked at a very high level about twitter and about facebook and

about guest posting and building relationships. One of the things, well before I go with my next question, are there anything

else, any other strategies that you think that someone should, coz you only do so much, right? Like one person can only do so

much so let’s keep this focused on what one person could reasonably hope to accomplish. Is there anything else that you think

is important enough that it needs to find its way into this discussion?

N: No I think those are the major things. There’s a ton of strategies but like one person can only do too many things.

T: Correct. And if you’re listening to this and you want more specific strategies in Neil’s quick sprout system it’s 200

and some pages of specific strategies so you’ll get lots and lots there. Now one of those things that I picked up from that

was your section on analytics. And I really wanna just talk briefly about this concept called tracking links. So a mistake

that I was making before I had purchased Neil’s product was that in my sales funnel I’ve got my sequence of emails and they

all have links and those links are all taking people back to my website but what I didn’t think about or didin’t understand

is when you’re looking at your traffic reports in google analytics there are several sections. You’re gonna get what’s

called direct traffic. You’re gonna get referral traffic. And you’re gonna get search engine traffic. That’s 3 right? I’m not

forgetting anything?

N: That’s correct.

T: And what I didn’t understand when I looked at direct traffic I just assumed that that was everybody typing my url in

to the url bar of the browser or maybe clicking a bookmark. But it’s links in email falling to the direct traffic category as

well. So if you think about designing a sales funnel and if you’re unfamiliar what that term means sales funnel is just a

name for the sequence of email that someone goes through when they join your list and the reason that they’re joining your

list presumably is because you want to build a relationship with them and direct them to see a sequence of your content in

such a way so that they will either click your affiliate links or they will ultimately buy your product. But here’s the thing

that I really gotta give you credit for Neil. The tracking links if you’re not using tracking links in the links that are in

those emails you have no visibility at all into whether your sales funnel is effective or not. Am I getting that right?

N: And that’s something to do with google analytics. But yeah if you can go to google url tracking or like utm tracking

there’s actually create a link that google will give you that you could just replace your link code with that will help you

track your links, your email links and stuff like that so you can see what’s causing what.

T: Yeah it’s called the url builder and I’ve obviously gone through all my emails since learning this. It’s really

really easy to use. You just paste in the link that you wanna get to. You paste in some parameters that are kind of common

sense parameters like hey this link is part of my sales funnel, the delivery mechanism was email and you give the campaign a

name, whatever you wanna call it and then it pumps out a link on the bottom that you can then use in your email. And one

little ninja trick and I didn’t learn this one from Neil and so maybe I don’t know if this will be useful to you Neil or not,

I don’t put that the url builder gives me that the utm link. I then put it into a pretty link and I put the pretty link into

the email and the reason that I do that you might have and you know pretty link that little plugin that allows you to manage

links, you might have that link in 4 or 5 different places and if you ever change it you’re gonna have to change it in 4 or 5

different places whereas if you use a pretty link you only have to change it in one place. Now is there any reason, am I

missing something? Is there any reason why the campaign won’t track the link anymore if I’m taking the link from the url

builder and I’m putting it into a pretty link first?

N: It should work.

T: Yeah.

N: Smart way to do it right. I just thought manually changing the region every time.

T: Yeah I always try and think about yeah I can do this one time but what if I have to do it 10 times or what if I can’t

remember where all the links are and that’s the biggest issue. That’s why I use pretty link. It’s impossible to remember all

the places that you put all of these links. So if you just use pretty links in all of those places and then the pretty link

is managed through your blog through the plugin itself then you just change the url that the pretty link points to, now you

don’t need to remember all of those places and it makes life a whole lot easier. So you create this and then they show up in

the campaign section, is that correct?

N: That’s correct.

T: So then you can look in your analytics and you’ll have all these campaigns and now you’ve got that valuable

visibility into the sales funnel so you can see that you know hey this one is getting clicked a lot so apparently people like

that and this one’s not getting clicked very often. So that would tell you what the copy in your email was not very

effective, correct?

N: That’s correct.

T: Okay and then if someone is clicking those links so let’s say the copy in the email is effective someone’s clicking

the link but that particular page isn’t converting or has a low time on page or what have you. That would then tell you that

the page itself is not very effective.

N: That’s correct.

T: Okay I just wanna make sure I understand all these stuff.

N: Yap.

T: Okay.

N: *(inaudible) open rates because if you’re not getting a ton of opens and you gonna need your subjects up and

nothing’s gonna matter and you’re not gonna get clicks on the links coz no one’s gonna open your emails or your emails aren’t

being delivered at any people’s spam boxes which could also lower the open rates.

T: That’s true. Okay so is there anyway to know I guess you can’t really tell if your email is ending up in somebody’s

spam box, can you?

N: No.

T: Alright. In terms of subject lines give us Neil’s best advice on how to write subject lines that are gonna get your

email opened.

N: Writing it as if you’re writing subject lines to your friend.

T: Okay.

N: It’s more people that people are gonna click through when it seems very casual.

T: So avoid the all capital letters and avoid capitalizing every first letter and just write it like you’re writing to

your friend.

N: Yap.

T: I better go check my subject lines. I know I don’t use all caps but I definitely have some capitalized word word word

so I have to check that. Alright so where are we at here? We’re at about the 45 minute mark usually about the point when I

like to wind it up now. Is there anything else Neil that we should fit into this discussion coz again the point of this

conversation was to help people to understand what they should be doing to promote their blog and get traffic to it.

N: The last one would be don’t forget offline networking. It’s priceless to meet some of these people in person. So it’s

better talking to like blog world or conferences and stuff like that to meet other bloggers in the network. Coz you don’t

know how good they’ll be with the topic.

T: Okay. So what are the top 3 conferences in your opinion? Blog world?

N: It’s too hard to say top 3. People merely go and find conferences for the specifics.

T: That’s true. I was just thinking of blogging in general but you’re right it would be very specific to each niche. And

it’s not gonna be very hard to do. When you get into the niche start asking other bloggers, start using google, start

participating in discussion forums. You’ll very quickly figure out which are the top events that you should be attending.

What if someone doesn’t have the budget to go and attend those events? Is there a next best thing?

N: Yap. Volunteer at conferences.

T: Volunteer? That’s a good point so you can get in there for free.

N: You can go in there for free.

T: So hopefully if you live close then you don’t even have to buy an airline ticket. But yeah volunteering, great idea.

Okay. Alright so Neil if people want to get a hold of you how do they do it?

N: They can just go to quicksprout.com and go to my contact page.

T: Okay. Alright. Terrific. Well listen I wanna thank you very much for making some time to be on the show with me here

today. It’s been a pleasure to have you on.

N: No worries. Take care and have a good one.

T: Alright so that’s a wrap for session no. 36. If you’re not listening to this on the online income lab and you’d like

to get over to the blog to get access to all the links on the show notes and the transcript you can do that at

onlineincomelab.com/session036. And if you thought this was a really good episode I’d love it if you did a couple of things.

One if you’d head over to iTunes and give this show a feedback rating. The more feedback that we get the more exposure this

show gets. And no. 2 is if you have questions for either myself or for Neil make sure that you use the comment form down

below and leave whatever those questions are and you’ll definitely get answers. So thank you all very much. It’s been my

pleasure and my privilege to host yet another episode in the online income lab podcast. I’ve got just an absolute stack of

interesting guests coming in the next couple of weeks. So if you haven’t already subscribed make sure that you do. If you

join the RSS or the mailing list you’ll get automatic notifications of new episodes as they come out. Thanks so much and

we’ll talk with you soon.

OIL 035: An Interview with Chris Guthrie

Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! This is Trent here from the Online Income Lab podcast. Welcome to episode no. 35. In this episode we’re gonna be talking about stinky websites that generate monthly passive income. On the show is a fellow by the name of Chris Guthrie who, like me, has built as well as purchased existing websites. And the great thing about purchasing a website is you already know that it has traffic, it’s already making money and if you do it properly it’s not very hard to make the website make even more money. So in this episode we’re gonna talk about how to find those websites. What kind of websites that you would wanna buy. How to analyze if they’re good website to buy. How to verify their traffic and their earnings. And some of the tools and resources that both Chris and I use. So please join me in welcoming Chris to the podcast.

Hey Chris thanks so much for coming back on the show with me here to talk about how to buy a website to generate passive income. So I’ve been following your blog for a while and you and I have both bought sites and I know that you’ve more of them than I have actually but I gotta catch up so that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast with people. But welcome to the show.

Chris Guthrie: Yeah thanks Trent. Good to be back. And yap buying sites can be quite a bit of fun. A little bit of challenges but excited to talk about it.

T: Excellent. Well there’s nothing that I’ve ever discovered in business that doesn’t have a few challenges like always so we’ll work out way through I’m sure. So folks who don’t know who you are or haven’t heard of you just quickly, 3 or 4 minutes give us a quick bio. Don’t go far as far back coz all the warcraft and video games that you’ve stayed. You got started online doing what?

C: Yes I got started doing the Amazon. That’s really what allowed me to start making a good solid income. I was able to ultimately quit my job. I started with Amazon January of 2009. Got fired from my job in October in 2009. That time my Amazon income was starting to pass my day job and come out as sales rep for a software company, software/technology, software and hardware. Anyway so I just did that fine and it’ll be 3 years now this coming October so it’s kind of how I got started. And then just trying to sell my business more and more and make more money each year over year pretty much.

T: Alright. So I know there’s gonna be some folks who are listening to this who don’t have a clue what you just said when you said you got started with adsense or Amazon. They’re gonna think did he go to work for Amazon. So for the folks here who have come from the investment community and have no idea about what this whole concept of investing in websites is what did you mean when you say you got started with Amazon?

C: Yes so Amazon has an affiliate program that allows you to get a commission anytime you refer someone to amazon’s website and they buy a product. So the commission program works on a 24 hour basis with the track and click it will give you credit for the sale. Or started as a person add an item to their shopping cart. So it’s a short tracking cookie when compared to most other affiliate programs but because seems like most people inevitably buy from amazon anyways it works pretty well. So I set up their, I signed up for their affiliate programs and then I built websites that targeted different types of review related keywords in different types of niches where people were likely to buy products. And then when they come to the site and read my reviews or content about which product they should buy they kinda get pre-sell by the content that I’ve written there or someone else I paid to write, they’ve seen and then after doing that they click on a few link and I get a commission if they buy.

T: Okay. So for people who’ve never even heard of that concept before. Do you have an example URL that you wouldn’t mind giving up or would you like to keep your niches tight to your chest?

C: For that one actually I’ll give an example. I mean there’s this one it’s a site that I’ve used before and it’s one that I actually bought anyways. So it’s the first set I tried buying. It’s 3dtvreviews.org. And the site’s still making some money but I’ve really kinda collected it post google updates so I probably need to do some more linkbuilding.

T: Okay.

C: I bought that site for $500 and it makes money with amazon and when I bought it I’ve made about $7,500 or so from the site and I only bought it for $500 so it was a pretty good little buy for the first one.

T: Yeah no kidding for your very first one that’s a pretty phenomenal return on investment. So in a nutshell again for the folks who are brand new you started out by building websites that would get traffic from Google for a certain keyword like baby stroller review or whatever and people would find your website when they type that into Google. They would read the content that you wrote and then they would click a link, the link would take them to amazon. They would buy a baby stroller and whatever else they bought in the next 24 hours and then amazon would send you a commission as a result of those sales.

C: Yes that’s exactly how I started.

T: Alright. So I wanted people to understand that coz I know I always have listeners who are brand new to the space and don’t really understand what it is that we do yet. So you built a whole bunch of these things. You got an income that was an aggragated income that was higher than what your job was and you ultimately were able to go full time at it and at some point in that journey you thought “hey I’m gonna start buying sites instead of building sites.” So this is really what I wanna hone into on this podcast because I think that as obviously you do there is a really big opportunity there and I wanna flush it out. And I wanna see more that I can learn about it. So what caused you to think “hey I’m gonna start buying this things instead of building them?”

C: Yes you really know the 3d site is best example. I’ve had success with the overall review type niche because people who are searching for reviews are much more likely to be buying something than people that just search for general information type keywords. So I had really good success where these keywords were trying kind of a buyer intent and then they have a commercial focus on what they’re gonna be doing after they found information that they need. So I started looking for more niches to potentially go into and then I found the 3d tv site and it was already getting some traffic from google. It was on the first page for several keywords. And I can see the site hadn’t been updated since December and I bought in the summer so it hadn’t been updated for about 6 months. So I just kinda contacted the owner and often times you won’t get people to reply back. It’s really kind of, it’s almost like another game, right? Just where you’re out there contacting that have sites that are up and running and maybe they aren’t making money or getting a lot of traffic but most people will not reply to you. That’s just kinda how it is. But there’s this one guy that I sent an email to. We settled on a price of $500 because I could see how much traffic he was getting just by using some of the third party tools.

T: Which ones?

C: I used compete.com is one. And that tool always underestimates how much traffic is coming to the site. Pretty much always it’s just by how large a factor it underestimates. Like for example I have a site that shows compete traffic is already 10,000 per month but it’s more like a 100,000 so sometimes they will underestimate by different types of factors. That’s one good tool as long as you keep that in mind. SEMrush.com is another that I use and what that tool does is that it allows you to see what keywords the site is ranking for and then shows you what position the site has for that keyword. And then additionally roughly estimate the amount of traffic that that type of term gets as well.

T: Okay.

C: Some of these are free. It’s kind of researching a site as well. I could tell it’s getting traffic it’s only they haven’t updated it. He hadn’t monetized it either so it’s kind of more of a shot in the dark where as most of the time when you’re trying to buy sites, buy some more sites now because I want the time that I do spent be more well rewarded so now I’m really buying sites for $10,000 or more.

T: Yeah.

C: But you know you can start you need space. There’s different aspects of the research process you have to do. So with that site it was just more of a shot in the dark type of thing saying hey I see I’m at this site. I have $500 so he was like ok. He was a Stanford guy I could tell by his email address and so I figured that since he was still using a Stanford email address I assumed that he was probably still in college. So there’s lots of different assumptions that you try and make about and the owner of the site before you even contact them or why you’re talking to them coz you’re trying to figure them out. So you can make a deal and kinda be able to get actually something to close. So in this case some of the price and that’s just how we did that.

T: Alright. So I know that you have blog a fair amount about another site that is making more than this one is and I think I’d like to use that as our guinea pig for the rest of our conversation if you don’t mind. It’s a craft site so which one is that?

C: Yes it’s copycatcrafts.com. And I bought it from McQueens that she’s looking for advice from where to sell her site. Everyone pretty much has adviced flipper but the site really wasn’t making a lot of mioney at that time. It’s like making about $200 without her still being involved.

T: And that was $200 per month, right?

C: $200 maybe $250. And so I contacted her and she told me what price she wanted. Sometimes they will just come out and say what price they want especially if they’re like missed out on what price they want looking out there looking on to Google or trying to find different types of sites that are available for sale and you’re reaching out to them. They almost never have a price in mind because they’re not really actively selling them. That’s what I found with the different types of emails I’ve done but in this case she said she wanted $4800 and so it’s basically 2 years income. I negotiated down to $4000 but even looking at that the $200 per month you think that’s a pretty high multiple for a site. It’s some $10,000 and really the key with this site though is that it was getting roughly 200,000 page views a month and the only places at the site was being monetized was with the sidebar ad at 300×250 at the very top next to the content. And then a 720×90 ad at the very top above the actual logo and navigation area. So it’s completely outside the content area and neither really in the primary zone that you’re gonna be clicking ads. So I knew just from the amount of traffic that the site was getting and how poorly it was monetized that I could make more money just by putting new ads on it. And better locations. And I mean the original owner knew this is what but she was focused on trying to grow the traffic and just wasn’t as focused on that properly. She ultimately sold because she has another portfolio of sites in the more specific niche. But so I just bought it because she also mentioned that she had a writer that was helping on from time to time and I talked to her and she said she was fine with still hopping to write on the site. And so that’s why I bought the site for $4,000. And just passed the one year mark actually of ownership for that site and it’s generated $7,700 in revenue. And then expenses are roughly $100 a month for the rider. And so it’s kinda on an average of $500+ per month of income. Just an income stream that’s kind of on the side and it’s fun that I really don’t do that much with. I actually spend more time writing about it and talking about it that I have probably working on it.

T: That is phenomenal. And that is why I really wanted to get you on this podcast coz I thought that that is a terrific case study. I have a really good case study myself and if you’re listening to this you can read all about mine at websiteinvestmentproject.com. But where else can you make a $4000 investment to make $500 a month and that profit you do basically almost nothing for? I don’t know of any other places. I supposed you could try your luck in the stock market or you could get bonds or try and buy notes secured by real estate or what have you but all of those things in my opinion seem to have a lot more risk than what we’re doing. Because you made a really, this was the same experience when I had when I bought my site howtocleananything.com. You look at it you realize where the ads are on the wrong place.

C: Yeah.

T: So the fact that the site already has traffic the day you fixed those ads you get an instant boost to the income. It’s not like it takes 6 months. It happens right away, right?

C: Yeah.I wrote multiple case study updates on my blog and as I was writing those I was sharing what I was doing and then what I could do to improve the site. Even just by putting in the adsense unit inside the content area above like right beneath the toggle post added an extra $700 a month. And adding another in text provider that I really like using vibrant media that did an extra several hundred dollars a month as well. And that was just installing some java script. So for me it was really this one was really easy and I mean it’s not to say that this is an easy process coz it certainly just the process of actually finding a site worth buying is difficult. Ensuring that the traffic source is like where it’s getting its traffic from won’t dry up. So there’s certainly risk on that. I bought a site for $6,000 that 90 days later it got banned from adsense so I mean there’s certainly some bad ones from time to time. And adsense got that site restored but it’s still quite a bit at risk as well.

T: Yeah but it’s risk that you can mitigate through education.

C: Yeah I think that’s a fair statement. I think that if especially if you’ve already been running sites and that helps where if you kinda can see how are people doing and if you read what they’re doing that’ll help coz you can kinda tell which sites that are being sold on different types of marketplaces are kind of that you can look at their transaction and see that they are selling the same types of sites over and over again whether it’s like facebook paid like websites and all those are kinda popular right now. I mean those are based on not necessarily traffic that will continue coming in and so rather new figures are skew so there’s a lot of stuff you have to think about when you’re looking at those to see where the money is coming from, where they’re getting their traffic. Those are kind of the 2 pretty much most important questions you have to ask.

T: And that’s one of the things that I like about adsense is because you can’t game ads. So let’s say that there was a seller who was trying to scam a buyer and they were artificially jacking up traffic and clicks with adsense and you can correct me if I’m wrong I mean you start doing what’s called click fraud which is hiring a bunch of people to just click your ads and your account’s gonna get shut down pretty darn quick. Is that correct?

C: Yeah you can’t really, it’ll be difficult to inflate your adsense earnings. There’s something called smart pricing which is where adsense or google looks at the overall account and how well advertisers are getting the best bank from their back from the ads on your site. And they might as a whole on your entire account will be the average of your adsense earnings. It’s something we have to be aware of.

T: I just wanna be clear that the audience understands the point that I’m making. When you say it’s difficult it’s difficult to inflate your adsense earnings what you mean is it’s difficult for the seller of a website to artificially inflate the adsense earnings so as to sell it to you for a higher price than you should be paying for it. As the new buyer if you do things to increase optimization or you do things to increase traffic it’s relatively easy to boost your adsense income but you’re doing it legitimately. You’re not doing it in a fraud form kind of way like a malicious seller might wanna do.

C: Definitely. I’d be more concerned about the traffic source and where the site gets traffic than the adsense earnings not being accurate because it’s easier to kinda verify that than it is coz sometimes be certain that the way that site has built links or hasn’t built links will contain where I can google. Those are questions that are more concerning than have they gained their adsense earnings.

T: Let’s dive in to that. And so when you’re looking at traffic reports what are you looking for to ensure that the traffic is legit traffic and it’s gonna be sustained when you become the owner?

C: So I pretty much always make sure I get access to the google analytics data before I buy. At the very least screen shots but you’d always wanna get actual access where they can grant you email address just so to be like a gmail account. Or one that you have google analytics account already tied to. And then be able to look at all the different types of terms that it’s getting traffic for. Individually look at the ranks that it’s showing at google to see if the site’s getting traffic. Use all the tools that I’ve mentioned like compete and SEMRush. Those are the ones that I use as well. The other thing too is really looking at the traffic, looking at the different types of sources so if it’s 95% of the traffic comes from google then you know ultimately that’s gonna tell you that there’s a little higher risk with that site because if anything happens to the rankings whether they drop or something happens with the new google update then you could potentially have your income wiped out or significantly hit. So those are the types of things that I look for. I’ll use that crafting site as an example. That site actually gets about 35% of its traffic from google. The other chunks come from stumble upon, pinterest, with pinterest being a growing source, facebook and yeah I think that’s pretty much it. And roughly off all that traffic 25% people that come to the site are returning visitors. There’s lots of people that keep coming back. So when I look at that site when you see an overall traffic graph that has a bunch of chunks all split up into roughly equal portions it feels a little more safe in my opinion.

T: Absolutely. And I would assume because of the niche that this is and I see in Pinterest that you mentioned and folks I’m sure most people have heard of pinterest but if you haven’t it’s a very very popular social networking site where people are essentially sharing a bunch of pictures of stuff that they think is cool with other people and it’s ridiculously popular at this point in time. So the fact that yours is in 97% of Pinterest audience is female so your site copycatcrafts clearly caters to females and is image heavy so it very much lends itself to being a good candidate to have people wanna pin the images and then get traffic back in. Is that correct?

C: Yeah I think that the actual numbers for the demographics I think it might be like 68% women. I was trying to find some data a little while ago but I know that a much larger portion of the audience is female and that site as well I’ve seen the demographics it’s more females that are into crafts and stuff like that. But yes I mean certain type of traffic sources will be easier to get for different types of niches. And that’s a thing you can think about when you think of different kinds of ways to increase the traffic is you can see all the site isn’t getting that much traffic from pinterest and it should be and then you might see that it’s not really using anything that can take advantage of that traffic source so that’ll be like a potential opportunity.

T: Absolutely. Okay. I’m just making some notes to my self here which sources to target. So let’s go back to the do diligence process. So you wanna verify google analytics and again if anyone if you don’t know google analytics it’s just google’s reporting software that any website owner can use to give you reports of how much traffic you’re getting, where all the traffic’s coming from, what keywords are people using to get to your site. It’s a free piece of software that you just install. So you’re getting access to the seller’s analytics and so you’re having a look through and you’re really giving yourself comfort that the traffic is coming from a diversified engine sources so you don’t have a single point of failure and ideally a diversified range of keywords as well if for the what’s called organic traffic. What are some of the other things that you’re doing Chris in the do diligence process to make sure that you’re gonna end up with a site that is what you anticipated it to be?

C: I’m mainly looking for consistency among all those things. So there is traffic, income source, level of income, buy income source. That’s a lot of web I do and so using like the example site that ended up being a bad buy. I mean I’ve since got it reinstated with the adsense and it’s still making money now but that site for example it had some huge drops in traffic and then some huge pikes and the seller told me that it was because of a virus that they had on their server. They was pretty good at hosting and I knew that at that time that there was actually a virus as you would good buddy hosting and it was affecting some sites so I can tell just from looking at neither that happened and seeing the time period that it was affected I could tell it was from this virus. But then looking at just some of the, seeing that the traffic was kinda up and down that was really kind of the first clues that I kinda got a little too eager to buy. And I was able to buy it at a much lower multiple than other types of sites that I’ve been able to buy but of course it ended up not being the best. So look for consistency among those things. I mean if there is a site that has traffic that goes up and down based on a seasonal change because the sites only topics only focuses on a specific topic that people are interested in the winter or the summer. Or is it some type of a change because you know that Google penguin and panda updates occurred around those same times and then also new traffic drops then that can usually be indicative of like a much bigger problem with the site owners built their links to the site or how they were kinda getting traffic before. So those type of things I usually try to stay clear of. And really I try to find people that are more passionate about the site. I try to find people now like me basically. I find people that are interested in what and they are really interested in building a really nice site in the first place.

T: And they just burned out of it?

C: Yeah. And they’d rather take it as far as they want and they wanna sell. People wanna sell for multiple reasons whether they want just to take money off the table or they’re tired of it, whatever and those are the types of sites that I try to find but it’s still if there is I guess.

T: You know from an investor’s perspective whether you wanna buy real estate, stocks, websites, whatever you have to look at a lot of deals.

C: Yeah.

T: That’s where the scale is. It’s knowing what to buy and what not to buy. You talked about looking at the links so again for people who don’t necessarily know what that term is, when other sites link have it like a clickable link and you click that link and it takes it to your site. So if there’s a link on facebook and it’s linking to copycatcrafts.com that’s considered to be a backlink to copycatcrafts. Google rewards you for having a lot of links to your site but depending upon your linking pattern if it’s a manufactured pattern meaning you both a bunch of links or what have you you can actually be penalized for it. So in your do diligence Chris when you look at the links pattern to a site what tools do you use and what are you looking for?

C: Yes I use a tool called ahrefs.com. So it’s kinda like the code for a link actually in the html so that’s the tool that I used and you can basically you can also use open site explorer, that’s an SEM or an SEOMoz tool. So if you have a premium subscription you can get a lot larger picture of all the links but basically you are looking for the different types of sites that are linking to the site that you’re interested in buying and if they’re completely unrelated or if you go there and you see that it’s a blog that has a bunch of different types of content and they’re linking to other types of random sites then you can kind of tell that they’ve paid to a blog network to build links with. So basically it’s looking at it’s almost like so now all you have to look at the site that you’re looking to buy but now you’ve got to look at the sites that have links to your site so you can confirm that the links are natural and not paid, etc. because anytime you find those and you know you’re gonna run a risk of maybe a potential google update in the future. This kind of links that they built through some paid mechanism so that’s something else you’ll look for. But basically it’s looking for the consistency among the niche. So you have a site about monitors are they getting links from other types of gadget tech type sites or are these just random blog farms of random general information. And you can see that when you’re looking through those tools. You can actually click through, you can see the links of all the different kinds of sites and then click those links to see where they’re coming from. And then each of those sites I have mentioned SEMRush, ahrefs.com or open site explorer they all have premium versions that allows you to see more data.

T: So this is in real estate term this is kind of like checking out your neighborhood. You don’t wanna go buy a really great house in a crappy neighborhood because it’s gonna be difficult to get a quality tenant and rent it or resell it. So when you’re buying a website you wanna make sure that it’s neighbors in other words the sites that are linking to it are in the same niche, in the same category because if they are that’s gonna be a strong indication that those are what we would call a more natural links and google likes to see that kind of stuff. Whereas if you’re getting links to your crafting site from a blog that has a gazillion links on its sidebar and it’s a blog about puppies then possibly that’s not the kind of link that you’re looking for. And if you see a lot of that coming to your site that would be red flag for you, right?

C: Yeah I mean even using a crafting site as another example. When I was looking at the links to the site if you actually went to the site right now you can kinda see there’s a little button that says I was featured on copycatcrafts and so what we’ll do is we’re highlighting other people’s crafting projects and then linking back to provide credit for them for what they’ve done and then we tell them hey here’s this button you can put on your site. This is a pretty common link building tactic or just a way to kinda get people to share back links to the site. And it’s not as effective in niches where people are really familiar with this type of practice but the people who are linking back to that site they’re just crafting bloggers and they have their own blogspot blogs and they just kinda do it for fun. And so the links back to that site are coming from different types of blogspot blogs. They’re people’s personal crafting blogs because they did a cool project then we put them on the site. So those types of links I could tell where there’s no real danger there.

T: Yeah. No kidding that’s a brilliant little idea. I like that very very much. There’s one of my nuggets for this podcast. Alright so how many sites have you bought by the way?

C: In the past 12 months I’d buy close to a dozen but I’m trying to scale it up and frankly I haven’t bought nearly as many as far as I’ve want to and that’s probably because I shifted to only buying larger sites. I bought one site for $10,000 in January and then didn’t really focus on other business, software business basically. So that’s one of things. I’m always looking for sites to buy that are high quality and all that I still have some plans to probably some capital to buying some more sites but yeah I mean it’s not something I’m trying to push really hard unless it’s a good fit now because last time I did that I had a bad buy. But you know that’s something I should mention too is that it is risky to buy these sites because no matter how much homework that you do and all that there’s still a risk that the site can fall apart. But the goal here is you find a site that’s high quality and do want it. Someone wants to get rid of it for whatever reason. And then you’re able to improve the site’s earnings and/or traffic and then hold on to it. It’s like be a nice source of income pretty soon property or maybe sell later down the line but for now I pretty much just hold on to the sites that I buy.

T: Okay. So where were gonna go next in our conversation is a little bit more detail on how to find them. And the other thing too that I wanna just talk about very briefly before we get into that is the exit strategy. And you just mentioned it there in passing but I wanna repeat it so that people really understand. When you buy one of these sites you are buying it because it’s producing a level of income and in my case with howtocleananything.com I’m very happy coz I don’t have to do anything on that site than just keep getting the check every month. But you don’t have to buy them solely for the purpose of getting monthly income much like a piece of real estate you can buy it and you can fix it, motivate it, fix it up, get more traffic, make it convert better, have it have more earnings and then immediately flip it if that is your interest. And because all sites that are earning income, self or a multiple of that income you can actually profit quite handsomely by doing that. So before we get in to more on how to find these sites, Chris have you flipped many? Is that something you’ve done?

C: I usually don’t buy to flip the first larger sites that I sold. It was for 6 figures, it’s a 6 figure deal. That was one that I used broker actually to help sell that site. But now when I’m buying new sites I don’t really generally sell them but if you do wanna sell them one thing you can do and I’m not an accountant so I’ll just say this but you’d wanna talk to your accountant is that I believe you can get a lower tax rate so be taxed than capital gains tax, right, if you hold on to the asset for at least a year as opposed to just buying and quickly selling it. So you can pay the 15% tax as opposed to the whatever tax rate you’re in. But that’s something that you wanna confirm with your accountant because frankly when it comes to buying and selling websites there’s a lot of questions about what type of business that you’ve been hit because that’s a bit cool to do that often. So there should be better tax advantage to hold on to it much longer. But the other thing too is if you’re buying and you’re flipping quickly you’ll have a less income history with the changes you brought it to improve so any potential buyers might not really see the improvements that you’ve made for a longer period of time. So and then I just prefer to buy the whole and grow that monthly income.

T: As do I. I mean wouldn’t it be nice to have a $100,000 a year income from your portfolio of high quality sites and you don’t really have to do a lot everyday. Like in my case in howtocleananything.com site’s making me about a $1,000 a month now. And it occured to me about a week ago I thought why am I not buying more of these sites? Coz if I had 10 of them or I bought a few bigger ones then I would have this very nice passive base level of income that would allow all sorts of lifestyle freedom that would be very nice to have without having to do all of the work that’s associated with all the traditional business or a job. Okay. So let’s dive a little deeper into how to find them. So if you’re looking for a site now what process do you go through. Coz there’s basically 2 ways you can kinda go to an auction like flipper.com and you can try and buy one there and there’s lots for sale on flipper. Or you can try and buy them privately by just seeking someone out. Do you have a preference for which way you like to try and do it?

C: Because of my blog makemoneyoutofinternet.com where I’m talking about this stuff I generally try to avoid flipper but it’s only because at the time it’s more difficult sometimes to cut through the crap. So I guess it’s something I mentioned is that I contacted flipper and say hey I wanna build a research tool on top of your api and said the private api they had to get permission to use and I built the tool that cause them and does all the research process for you like looking to see at how much traffic the site is getting, if it has a link to some of the different types of paid directories like yahoo directory, best of the web, if there’s a link from dmoz.org which is one of has the most trusted human edited directory. And so the links from there are usually more difficult to get unless you know someone that’s in charge of that category. So anyways that’s the tool that I’ve built site finder pro is what it’s called and that’s the tool that works with flipper. And basically I wanted to build that before I really start to get into looking more at flipper. So I mean once I do begin I go to flipper and that’s the tool that I use and help build to make the research process faster. Maybe it’s because I hate having to look through a lot of sites and try to find ones that are worth it etc, etc. The same can be said for when you’re looking for sites researching different types of niches and just kind of reaching out to owners that aren’t even necessarily selling them because you’re kinda playing the same looking game anyways. But you know then you’re contacting people that might not necessarily be already selling. So it’s kinda like I kinda you’re going out you’re hitting the garage sales or you can go to the store and you can go and there’s only so many items available and lots of people wanna be fighting for them. And so it’s kind of why to. And also the main reason to is flipper has history of sites you buy and I don’t wanna let them know what sites I’m buying because I talk about it so much. I don’t want them low when I’m buying.

T: Yeah and for many of the listeners who are listening to us thinking that didn’t make a lot of sense.

C: Pretty audience are listening to us talk right now.

T: They’re not gonna be active bloggers in the industry like we are and so there would be no reason why they wouldn’t wanna buy from flipper or they would have different reasons. They wouldn’t have that one because they don’t have a blog audience that would wanna go and copy everything that they’re doing. No one would know what they’re doing and so if you’re listening to this I wouldn’t be deterred from flipper for the reasons that Chris said. Now with that said I love the analogy you gave. You can go to garage sales or you can go to the store. I thought that was ideal. Store there’s more of a selecion. You know everything’s for sale but you’re competing against other buyers and that could end up if you’re paying a higher price. And then you can go to the garage sales but there’s more work and you’re not competing against as many people and then maybe you can get a lower price. So let’s talk coz I think the flipper you’ve given the name site finder pro and if someone wanted to buy that by the way where do they get it?

C: Just sitefinderpro.com.

T: Okay and I’ll put a link to that in this episode. And if you’re listening to this episode on my blog there’d be a link there for you. And if you’re gonna go to the garage sales, if you’re just gonna try and find sites that are owned by people how do you do that?

C: Yes so there’s a few different ways but the main one really is and this is something too that I kind of trying to think about this year as I go on and start buying more more sites, if you want upright with one specific niche or area there’s a few different advantages and there’s something that I could have mentioned earlier but if you’re buying sites in all those different types of niches it might be easier to find sites to buy because you aren’t that specific on what you’re looking to buy. But then when it comes to actually hiring people to run the sites it’s near impossible to find someone that can talk about crafting that can also talk about finance topics, right?

T: And I wanna jump in again for the new listeners we’re not talking about hiring full time employees here. We’re just talking about hiring contract writers and where you pay on a per article basis. So if you’ve let that get in your way oh I don’t wanna hire people you don’t have to hire people. You could write the articles yourself but you’re not adding the overhead. You’re not saying oh I’m gonna pay you a salary or whatever. You’re just gonna say I need you to write articles about banana beans and I give you $20 or $30 or whatever it is that you can negotiate with that writer. Sorry to cut you off but I really wanted them to understand.

C: It’s fine. So yeah if you’re looking at a specific niche then it’s really similar to the process of doing keyword research for a type of site you’d like to build yourself except when you’re doing the keyword research and using google adwords keyword research tool it’s just free and you can just type that into google and you can search that up. But then you’re putting all these different types of seed keywords to see how often that it’s registered in the search. And then you maybe heading over to google doing the searches yourself and then seeing what sites rank for them. Now if you’re looking to build you’ll be looking at how can I build the site that’s better than this. Instead you’re saying ok here’s the site that’s ranking. Does it look like it’s high quality site? And then a matter of contacting the ower saying hey would you be interested in selling this site? This is something that I do. Here’s my phone number that’s something else I would include because people are more likely to respond to the emails I found if I include my phone number because they think I’m more serious. And that’s a lot of idea. I thought about actually using an almost like a pen name because people will see my name and they’ll search me in google and then they’ll find my blog and then they’ll see my articles about buying websites. So it’s not like it there but that’s something that won’t really affect unless you’re talking about this topic. But sooner it’s kind of a lot of what it is, right and then it’s really a lot of hit and miss because you’re contacting people that aren’t listing their site for sale. It’s not on flipper so they’re not really inclined to reply back to you. They might if you can convince them that you’re interested in the topic. Usually I’ll say that in my introduction email yeah I’m interested in this topic because I usually am because I don’t want to build the site myself. So I mention this topic rather than building my own site perhaps I could buy yours instead. Are you interested in potentially selling? And then after they reply back or don’t their response is usually what will you offer and I say well I usually value sites based on a multiple of the monthly income. And so once I get them thinking about the income based on a monthly multiple as opposed to here’s just some arbitrary value that may or may not be based on how much the site is generating then you’re able to actually value it based on something that is more concrete. Like I’ve had people that have said sure my site is available for sale for a million dollars and I’m like oh okay so your site must be making roughly $50,000 to a $100,000 a month? And of course it’s not so there’s people that you’re gonna run into. So it really kinda comes down to there’s a lot of different ways you can kinda try and find sites to buy anywhere besides like looking at the brokers what they’re selling and what is available on flipper it’s gonna be more work. Because you’re out there trying to find properties that aren’t necessarily available for sale.

T: But couldn’t you just outsource that? Obviously I’m thinking about exactly the same thing right now and I’m thinking to myself well why don’t I just have my va, my virtual assistant who speaks perfect english and lives in the Philippines and I pay her I think around $5 an hour and just say here’s the niches that I’m interested in, here’s access to my keyword research tool so anytime that you see a site on the first page that you think that looks and kinda has some criteria that I’d lay out for her. Go ahead and send them an email.

C: I think it’s possible but the actual like evaluation process is almost like another learned skill that you definitely would have to teach because just being able to identify a site worth buying is by itself can be difficult as well. So I do think it could be taught. It’s something that is certainly if I can make it easier for me to find more sites that are worth buying if I have my va working on it but it’s always if I’m gonna be risking as much money as I’m risking I wanna make sure I’m investigating it a lot. So if you do that then definitely make sure that you’re always kind of in the final say.

T: Well yeah really she’s just generating potential seller here. She is just generating potential seller leads for you. So if you said hey email everybody who’s on the first page for this search terms just coz they reply or don’t reply to the email doesn’t commit you to having to buy the site or not. You could see the reply and think okay they’re interested in selling. Now you’ve got a much shorter list of sites to look at coz like you said earlier not everybody replies. So let’s say that your va sends a 100 emails and you get 6 replies now you only have 6 sites to look at instead of a 100. And therefore maybe you missed an opportunity but if you told her to send an email to every site on the first page of google’s results for those given niches which you would pick seems to me like it will still save you quite a bit of time. Am I missing something?

C: No I think that makes sense especially if you did the research on specific keywords or you told the va what you want to have done. And then said exactly that contact these sites in the first page that can work.

T: Yeah.

C: It’s almost like you got to make sure to train them to write emails that didn’t sound it was coming from the va. Coz like I get a lot of those emails that I can always kinda tell especially it’s more common they’re looking for links or hey I’ve this article that I wanna publish on your blog that links to my payday launch site. I usually get lots of those so those types you make sure you train your va to sound more like a serious business rather than someone who’s kinda…

T: Or just give them a template.

C: Yeah.

T: Now I’ve lost my train of thought. I hate when that happens in the middle of the podcast.

C: One thing to consider is that looking at when you’re actually getting to the point of evaluating the site people kind of it really varies so it’ll vary between I usually try and get sites one or two years income but ideally more like a year’s income. And so it would be after whatever expenses there might be. And that number of course can get up or down based on the factors that we discussed before, the quality of links, the quality of content, how long it’s been making money, if the money’s been fluctuating, etc. And that’s something as well to think about when you’re looking at the site. And also to ever since the google updates certain sites are getting lower income multiples now than before because people are so afraid of what google might do next. So like different sites that are making money specifically by adsense and there’s not really clear other path that they can make money those types of sites aren’t selling for as much just because they think oh okay this site might get hit. So it’s kind of if you’re thinking okay I’m willing to take that risk you can maybe go to those types of sites and buy those instead.

T: Yeah I remembered my thought. In a conversation you and I had a number of months ago on this topic you’d mentioned to me that when you were reaching out, and I hope I’m not giving out a trade secret here, you would send them an email saying you were interested in advertising on their site.

C: Yes so I haven’t done that too many times but that is something that you can do. You can email and say you’re interested in advertising and if you have something that’s related to that niche you could advertiser. And you could kind of use that like a one way to start your relationship. Because I mean it’s kinda like you’re invited to somewhat, you’re the friend, you’re the plus one that’s invited to a party of someone’s house and you’ve met the person and you’ve talked for a bit whereas if you’re doing just a cold email it’s like you’re the door to door salesman. So I mean if you go with that different angle then you can get a better response especially if you want to know them.

T: And where that would take you, coz the listeners may not be connecting the dots yet, is if you’re wanting to, if you’re saying to someone look I’m interested to advertising on your site and they say yeah okay I’m interested well show me your traffic statistics and how much do you want for the ads. And once you see how much traffic they’re getting now you’re in a position where you can make a bid for that site and then you could there’s nothing stopping you from replying to them and saying you know what, actually I’ve changed my mind. I’m more interested in buying your site here’s my offer.

C: I haven’t tried that before but I think that I mean you had to maybe approach it in different way. I think you’d have to definitely almost do more on a relationship building process. You can even say I run this site in a similar niche and I’m looking for related to your whatever your site is and you can say I’m interested in buying some advertising space and they can give you some raise maybe you can even buy some ad space for a month. Then you can say hey I really like the quality of traffic that I got from the advertisement would you be interested in selling your site just because I already run a site similar to it. And then you could talk about the valuation, etc.

T: Yeah I kinda like that. That’s good idea. Alright now you talked about a little bit before and I wanna kind of flash this out again for the audience about being in one niche versus being in multiple niches. In your opinion Chris what is the advantage of let’s say that you’re gonna wanna own 10 sites just to pick an arbitrary number. You could be in 10 different niches or it could all be in one niche. What are all the advantages of going into one niche with all 10 of your sites?

C: Yes I think the biggest advantage is that well there’s a couple actually. So it’s hard to say one way or the other what the bigger one is but one would be that a writer that’s working on one site can potentially be writing for the others. So it almost could be like you could hire an editor in charge of other writing content or finding others that can help write the contents so they could have other contract workers that they work with being content created. So that’s something that’s much more possible when you have all around the same niche than if you have it kinda all over the place. And right now mine is like all over the place coz I just look for investments that are good and I buy them rather than this governing okay it’s good but it’s not in this niche. But the other advantage too is if you’re all in very similar niche then you could potentially be you might be able to work with the advertisers and those advertisers are gonna be able to buy ads on all of your sites. Then also too you gotta put yourself in their shoes. They have this certain budget and they have to buy for a certain amount of page views or traffics or uniques or whatever and if they can work with one person who has access to a million uniques a month as opposed to 10 different people that collectively only do a 200 uniques a month then they’ll obviously gonna be more interested with the larger conglomerate of sites than they are with just individual one of sites because it’s more work for them. And so likewise the advertisers for some of the sales of private ads in some of my sites that I bought and it’s something that because I’ve other aspects of my business and I don’t have this isn’t that one niche isn’t my core business because I don’t have a bunch of websites around it. I don’t really have the time to pursue going after advertisers who really try and foster those relationships whereas if you have a huge bunch of sites within the same niche that’s gonna be more fruitful and perhaps better worth your time. So I mean I guess that kinda comes in the series of dues to when you should hire more of a full time type employee or maybe manager of your sites but that’s something that wouldn’t really be relevant until you’re making enough money to really pay for them and fully recognize their value but yeah.

T: And there’s one other thing that you didn’t mention. Building a mailing list. You wanna talk about that?

C: Yes I mean if you built a list within a specific niche then you’re gonna be able to sell products or different types of services across that entire list whereas with just one then you of course you’ve got 10 email list manage around 10 different topics and you gotta find 10 different types of products you could promote as an affiliate from different types of vendors so there’s a lot more at it in that regard and that’s kinda where I’ve been thinknig about what niche that I might want to focus on specifically but as of now I’ve just been buying high quality sites as I see they’re good investments. Because on the worst case scenario I hold on to them for a year and then sell them for more than I paid for them. Have inevitable benefit from the money that I got and then be able to use that money to buy, to put in towards maybe the niche that I do decide to focus on later.

T: So if you’re listening to this what I would encourage that you think about is first of all get started. Don’t be worried about mapping out the grand plan for building your empire until you’ve at least bought one site and made a little bit of profit doing it. And maybe your first site’s only gotta cost you a couple hundred dollars and maybe it only makes $10 or $15 a month. The point is you will have started and you will have gotten into the process, you will have gone through do diligence, you will have gotten your hands wet at maybe hiring a contract writer or maybe doing a little writing yourself. You will have been in business with the goal of making a $100. To me people when they’re starting and not doing something they get overwhelmed at the prospect of you know well I’ve gotta have 10 nights on sites and build the mailing list and editors and writers and uuff don’t think about that stuff. Just think what can I do to make $100 a month. Now once you’ve done that then you can definitely start to think about the future of your business. What you know is this, you just wanna have 3-4 sites and you’re gonna run them all yourself and might make a $1,000 or $1500 or $2000 or whatever per month and that could be a very nice little part time gig and that’s all you want. If that’s the case I don’t see any problem with being in more than one niche. But with my CEO hat on I always think about how can I scale this in other words make it bigger and bigger and bigger in efficient fashion. And the things that Chris has just been talking about are really really important things for you to consider. You know I like the idea of being in one niche because it allows you to get a lot of sites. It allows you to have fewer advertiser relationships. It allows you to have fewer writers and editors to deal with. It allows you to have fewer mailing lists to manage so you start to get what we would call economies of scale. Chris is there anything, we’re rolling up on an hour almost already which I can’t believe, so is there any other final comments that you wanna make and then I was gonna ask you about tools and resources but you really kind of covered that throughout the podcast. And then for anyone that wants to how to contact you but before we get to that any other final comments that you would wanna give the listener who’s not doing this yet and is absolutely fascinated by the idea of how can I make an extra couple of hundred dollars a month passively?

C: Yes the biggest thing is just beyond listening to this podcast and reading other blogs and all that. It’s really doing even more research on the process. There’s like a lot of different things that you can consider when you’re buying a site so just do diligence in general and researching the site, etc. There’s a lot of things you can look at so spend some more time looking around the web and see what other people are doing as well when they’re buying sites is helpful. I have half a dozen blog posts about buying posts and use examples you could read as well. So just keep doing more research. Biggest thing is I wanna make sure that you know that there is risk with any investments certainly with some of these sites that you buy. You can buy a site and they can fall apart if you haven’t buy one that is worth that is really high quality site so that’s something to consider. And then yeah I guess the other thing too is if you wanna learn more about how I’m making money online I talk about different types of things like this. It’s all through my blog it’s makemoneyontheinternet.com.

T: Alright Chris thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure. And I’ve learned a lot. And we’ll talk to you again soon.

C: Alright thanks Trent.

T: Alright that wraps up this episode of the online income lab podcast. If you’re listening to this anywhere other than the online income lab you can get to the podcast and see all the show notes and the links and so forth that we were talking about at onlineincomelab.com/session035. And if you’re listening to this on iTunes or anywhere I would love it if you would go to iTunes and give a feedback score of 3 stars, 4 stars, 5 stars whatever you think is appropriate for this particular episode. That is really really helpful. It helps the podcast to go up in the iTunes store ranking which allows me to get more of an audience which in turn allows me to attract even more spectacular guests who will come on and share all of their knowledge with you. So please do take a moment and do that. If you have any questions for Chris or for myself about this episode please just use the comment form that’s down below and both he and I will be moderating those comments and we will give you answers to anything you’ve got. Okay so again thanks so much. It’s been my pleasure to be your host for this episode of podcast.

OIL 034: An Interview with Christa Meola

Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! This is Trent here from the Online Income Lab podcast. Welcome to session no. 34 with my guest is a woman by the name of Christa Meola out of New York City. Christa’s a professional photographer who started her professional business in 2004 and then in 2009 her 2 brothers dragged her kicking and screaming online. And it has been an absolute whirlwind of success for her since and in this podcast you’re gonna learn exactly how she did it all. Many of the mistakes that she made. How her belief systems were getting in her way. How she was probably the biggest skeptic of anybody. But despite all that managed to create a business that has allowed her to double her income every single year. So please join me in welcoming Christa to the show.

Hey Christa! Thanks so much for coming on to the show.

Christa Meola: Ah thank you for having me.

T: So listen, I was referred to you, in case the guests are wondering as how Christa and I came to be on this podcast. She’s a professional photographer who has incorporated an element of internet marketing very successfully I might add into her business. And because hers is a niche and a passion that’s so far away from the traditional making money online that so many people associate with internet marketing I really wanted to get her on the show because I thought it would be a really terrific interview. So again Christa, thank you very much for making the time to do this.

C: Thanks.

T: So you’ve been a pro photographer since 2004. You were I’m assuming booking gigs and running around and shooting pictures and all probably time and materials type work and you did that until around 2009 when you discovered the internet. Did I get that right?

C: That’s correct. Yes I started in business professionally meaning making money in 2004. I started photographing since I was like 6 years old I always had a camera with me. And you know I did it through it school in college and everything but as a professional as a paid pro when I mean got my first DBA and started charging people money was 2004. And so yeah I was pretty busy booking clients doing well and each year after that kept doubling my income. So I was good at it. But I didn’t have generally have an online presence but my 2 brothers, I have 2 of them, are pretty much web freaks and they’re like “ooh let’s do a website for you.” And I said “Alright.” So I did have a little bit of a website which basically just had my phone number and my portfolio. That’s it. It was really simple. And that was also 2004. But I really didn’t give it the attention it deserved until 2009.

T: Okay. Now so the listeners who don’t know you yet and they’re thinking they’re only 2 minutes into this podcast and thinking why am I listening to this. Let’s jump a little bit to the conclusion and then we’ll talk about how you got there. So in 2009 you created some information products about how to shoot buodoir photography, is that correct?

C: Let’s see. No, the blog was started in 2009 and first product came in 2010 so very shortly after.

T: Okay and your first product I think in my notes I think it was like you did 55,000 with the first product and then 65,000 with the second product, is that right?

C: That’s almost correct. I would say my first product was live workshops so I marketed it online but they were in person workshops.

T: Okay.

C: Which just by the business model you can’t really have a lot of people in the room with you shooting so about 20,000 each. So the first product you’re talking about that I launched for $55,000 was an online workshop. And that was launched in spring of 2011 and then it was launched, well wasn’t launched again but I did it again in the fall for $65,000. So it’s the same product but it was timely. This is 6 weeks course in buodoir photography.

T: Okay so that’s what I wanted the audience to know was that here you are in this we’ll call it a relatively uncommon niche in the world of internet marketing yet you’ve managed to have what I consider to be a very sizable amount of success. So now that they know where we’re going let’s back up a little bit to 2009. You’re getting on the internet your brothers’ making a blog for you. Tell me a little bit about that time and why you agreed to let them make a blog and what you were kinda hoping to accomplish with the blog?

C: Okay I’m probably, I don’t know how many of your listeners really have like a phobia when it comes to like technology but I really just didn’t want a blog quite frankly. My brother talked me into website in 2004 just so I could have my portfolio online. However in 2009 I was dating someone who was very much in social media, etc and love to blogs so he just like “why don’t we just create one for you?” And for me it felt like pressure to me. I’m like “I don’t have anything to say on a daily basis. And who am I talking to and who really cares.” It just felt very narcissistic and like busy time like who’s really gonna come to the blog. So anyway before I knew it it was actually quite fun and then I had for me it was this personal outlet so when I shoot for clients I’m really shooting for them. And then I never really did anything with the images at all. But then I would blog around so that part became sort of like for me so once I started blogging honestly with wordpress I didn’t have to know SEO. I didn’t have to know anything. Before I knew it like I had a following and people started commenting and asking me questions. And then I don’t know how to put this Trent. I became a bit of a leader in the industry and people were looking to me for informaiton. And so there’s your product. I’m really huge on information products. And that’s what I have to offer and people wanted it. So really I just felt like I was responding to demand. It was also gonna make my life easier to put it into a product instead of keep answering same questions over and over again on my blog.

T: Okay so let’s back up a little bit. You made the blog live and at this point in time it didn’t sound like you did any market research or identified your target audience or a traffic strategy or nothing. You just started posting your content in any way that you felt was how you wanted to do it, is that correct?

C: That’s absolutely correct. I didn’t know about keywords or SEO or I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even do google analytics like I had nothing on the site.

T: Okay. So you did it basically for if you were taking a business class. You did absolutely everything wrong in the beginning and I’m bringing this up for a reason. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. What I’m trying to illustrate rather is for my audience is that so many people let so many fears and excuses get in their way. “Yeah I don’t know about this. I don’t know how to do keyword research and that. I don’t know about analytics. And what would I write about?” And all these things and so they don’t take any action. And tap your brother on the back or brothers whichever one it was for giving you a little kick on the rear to get you on. And then you kinda realize “hey, this is sort of cool. I kinda like this.” And your passion happens to be shared by a number of other people who by one way, shape, form or another started to find your blog. And I’m gonna guess do you look at your analytics now?

C: I sure do yeah.

T: Okay. So do you have a sense back in 2009 or 2010 like where was your traffic coming from? Was it coming from search engines? Were you just inadvertently targeting keywords that were what we’ll call long tail keywords and you ranked for them? Or was it coming from social networks or just people telling other people about your blog? How did it happen?

C: I think how it started was I began in some photographer groups not online. Like I said I wasn’t in forms or anything like I was not geek online yet. When I was a member of a certain photography group and we’re just getting to know people and people will look you up and so photographers came to me more so than clients if you know what I’m saying. So that’s where the traffic really started blowing up. It just kinda built from there. And I did shortly after let’s see way 2010 where I learn how to tag your images with this. Very minimal stuff like certain keywords to put in to your copy. So I was somewhat aware of that. And then when I got on facebook in late 2009 that’s where everything started. So most of my traffic was from facebook which was a collection of photographer people and friends, buddies and stuff. So it just grew that way.

T: Okay.

C: And then I started to be asked to speak at certain conventions so of course then they all looked you up online, right? Now isn’t it that your going to a convention and someone’s speaking you look them up.

T: Absolutely. So let’s talk about facebook for a minute. So before facebook came along do you remember how much traffic you were getting to your blog each day back then pre-facebook.

C: Well I wasn’t tracking it but I could tell you I got from like 2 comments to 10 on a good day on a post.

T: Okay. Alright.

C: So you can extract me with that out.

T: Yeah not a ton of traffic but reasonable amount. Maybe a 100 or 200 visitors a day. So facebook comes a long you got your friends list presumably and then I’m guessing you put up some kind of facebook fan page and people started liking it. What did you do on facebook?

C: It’s just a personal page and I were just blogging and put the link up. And honestly people came from everywhere just because it’s photography. It was just like really fun content and I blog about things I was passionate about. So it wasn’t just buodoir photography. In fact it wasn’t in the beginning. Some family pictures, I keep pictures of kids. And but then I blog about my travels I had. Or like anything that I was photographing that was inspiring me. And sometimes I actually started my blog on tips on how to feel relaxed and sexy in front of the camera. So that was a good one to start with, right?

T: Absolutely. You know there’s a really good message there in what you’re saying is that like again one of the things that people lets down in their way is they go “I wanna do a photography blog but somebody’s already doing that so I shouldn’t do it. Or there’s already 10 other photography blogs so I shouldn’t do it.” But what you did which was brilliant was that you injected a heavy dose of just your personality into your blog. You didn’t just make a blog about tips you just described to us all these things that you shared and doing so you let people get to know you and it was that they connected with. And that’s one of the messages that I try to convey to people is the most unique thing about your blog is just gonna be you and so put you out there. And so obviously yours is a terrific example of that.

C: Thank you. And I have the same questions on my mind. Do people care what do I write about? What is this useful for, etc? But if you’re gonna think “Okay I’m just gonna share my passion.” And people get inspired by that for sure. So I definitely say quarry yourself into your blog absolutely. So don’t question it. If it inspired you and you find it inspiring or your passionate about that topic it could be totally unrelated. Don’t know if you know the bohemeth thepioneerwoman.com. Do you know that? Do you know that site?

T: No I don’t. Is it thepioneer?

C: Thepioneerwoman.com it was one of my Times’ like top 5 blogs last time. It gets enormous traffic and it’s a woman who blogs about her life on the ranch. Basically her kids, how she homeschools, the recipe she makes.

T: Yeah.

C: And then photography. It’s like the weirdest hodgepodge but again one factor that brings it all together is you and if you’re passionate about it. So I can blog about a recipe or hot guys in Italy that I’m meeting in travel. Always random topics but I’m the one that’s continuous and the photography is high quality and I have a dose of fun sense of humor. And I find a way to be useful that’s why I like to offer tips.

T: Absolutely. And I think that is an absolutely brilliant strategy. The pioneer woman is she the one who calls her husband the marlboro man?

C: Yes that’s it.

T: Okay so I had heard of her. Yeah I heard she posts just 3 or 4 posts a day. She just goes crazy. She’s out there living on this ranch and apparently making a killing.

C: Well she’s making a huge killing. She’s got a couple of books out. She’s incredible. I don’t know how she does it. She does blog a few times a day.

T: She’s not the only one with a book coming out but we’ll talk about a bit about that some more later in the podcast. And it’s not me. Not yet anyway. Alright so I wanna talk a little bit about the mindset. You’ve given some clues already as to your mindset. You didn’t exactly go charging into this thinking that this was gonna be the next great thing for your business. You were very reluctant it sounds like in the beginning but what was it that happened in your mind that you thought “huh maybe I could actually use my blog to help my business.” Or when did that happen? And what caused that thought to occur?

C: Yeah that happened in fall of 2010. I was ending my lease on my studio in Los Angeles which my business had been very successful but it wasn’t brick and mortar business so you know and I really wasn’t relying on the blog to bring in any work or money. It started to become a little bit easy for clients to find me and recommend me to others so increased word of mouth, yes, but I wasn’t really relying on it yet. So in late 2010 2 things: one of the women I really admire Marie Forleo, you can find her at marieforleo.com.

T: I know her.

C: She’s an online marketing genius.

T: Yes she is.

C: So I’ve been tuned to her a little bit. Again I don’t really follow blogs but she was one, she’s from Jersey, she’s a Jersey girl and she just resonated with me like her straight up style. And I had been teaching and I like her teaching style so I let it inform a little bit in that area. And then I saw she was doing an online marketing course and I was like “ah really marketing anything online.” But for some reason I was drawn to it and I said I should just do this. And I didin’t know what the outcome was gonna be. Didn’t know why. I wasn’t asking questions like that. I just said for some reason I felt like I have to do this and I did it. And she was the one who got me over my fear of having a data capture on my website even. I thought “oh yeah download now free tips” that sounds so wanky. It’s a different get up. “Do you wanna make money online?” Those were her exact words “get over it.”

T: Yap.

C: Do you wanna make money online? And so the reason I had to say yes to that is coz I was moving and I went to Italy to live. And I thought I’m not gonna have all my clientele in the pacific palisades and Los Angeles and Malibu going where I don’t even speak the language. So I better figure out how to make some money online.

T: That is brilliant.

C: Yeah. So that was the beginning of it. I can go on and on but what’s the next question?

T: There’s a point again that you’ve made that I wanna make sure listeners really understood. When you’re setting out to do something that you’ve never done before no. 1 you gotta have a really big why. If you don’t have a big why then when the challenge is coming the motivation will go wane. So your really big why was you were moving to Italy and you weren’t gonna be able to make money in the way that you had. You wanna live in Italy, presumably you wanted to have a roof and food and so you had a very very compelling why to figure this out. So that is a fantastic take away. The other thing that I wanna ask you, what did you spend, if you don’t mind my asking, to take Maria’s course?

C: Maria’s course back then was $1,500.

T: Yeah $1,500. So and I knew it was expensive. It’s even more expensive now and I bring that up for a very specific reason. Coz I recently launched my most expensive information product. It was probably 10 times more expensive than anything I did before and it was the most successful in terms of revenue and has been most fulfilling in terms of the engagement with my customers because when people put their money where their mouth is they’re committed. You weren’t kinda thinking I’m gonna guess you weren’t looking at Maria’s course going “well, I’ll give this is a try and if it works great. If it doesn’t.” You spent $1,500 you’re pretty committed to putting in the effort and then when you put in the effort and you see the potential you get the results.

C: Absolutely.

T: Okay.

C: That’s 100% true. And that’s kind of way I have my own information product priced highly. First of all, because I feel like it’s worth easily multiple times the value, I mean in value, like how much it’s priced at like at least 10 times. And I know people are gonna make that money back and more so but also I want results from my people. I want testimonials where I could say “yeah they took the course and now they’re doing xyz.” I don’t want slackers. I want people who are invested so again that’s another reason why it’s priced the way it is. And yeah if Marie’s course was let’s say $49 maybe I wouldn’t have taken it so seriously.

T: Yap it says something. As a society we associate quality with price. When you go into a store and you wanna buy a toaster and there’s a $19 toaster, a $47 toaster and a $99 toaster, we all think the $99 toaster is gotta be the best quality toaster. And so there’s a percentage of the people that are gonna buy that.

C: Absolutely.

T: And there’s one of the things that I don’t like about the internet marketing space is that so many people give away stuff, give give give give give. And I know there’s some listeners who probably bristle when I say that. “What do you mean that’s a problem?” The problem is this is because when you get something for free that’s the amount of value that you associate with it and so if it whatever it’s teaching you doesn’t work then you don’t stick with it very long and then you go find the next guy’s free stuff and the next gal’s free stuff and free stuff and free stuff and free stuff and a year later you got a hard drive full of free stuff but you got no revenue coming in the door and that’s a huge huge problem with our industry. And it’s one of the reasons that I charge for my products and I applaud anyone that does. So what do you charge for your information product by the way?

C: Well last time that online workshop went it was $695.

T: Okay.

C: So I’ll be adding a lot of content for the one I’m doing in this fall so it’s gonna be a little bit more than that. And I’m gonna have a lot more bonuses and stuff like that so it’s gonna be so far above better than the last one. And by the way also driving at the price because it was sold out first time. I know it was an online course and you could kind of have unlimited people but for me in my first two I wanted to make sure the community was manageable so I had only a 100 seats available. I also felt like it would help sell it out if they knew it was limited quantity. So I just sold out both times at a 100 seats and now I know that I can raise the price.

T: Absolutely you can.

C: My audience has grown so much since the last time I offered it that I’m speaking to all new people that I haven’t spoken to before.

T: That is pretty awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about coz I was really kind of one of the points that I really wanted to make sure that we covered here in this interview was the product creation process. So when you, let’s go to the point where you’re gonna create this first workshop. You have this idea in your idea and you think well you know maybe I could sell some of these for $695 each. Did you go and create the whole product first or did you go to your list coz I’m assuming you built a list at that point in time from the opt in on your blog and from your facebook page and so forth correct me if I’m wrong but did you say…

C: I didn’t have a list at that time.

T: You didn’t have a list?

C: I did not. I just started the list a year ago believe it or not. Again I’m always late to the party, resistant and it’s usually Marie who’s like and she actually said and I won’t curse but she’s like get an mf thing mailing list. So I finally started one and you know it’s I don’t know. It’s grown. In a year I got I think 6,000 or so names, 6,000+.

T: That’s pretty good. Nothing wrong with that at all. So let’s go back. So how did you sell a 100 seats if you didn’t even have a list?

C: Well my users are engaged man. My viewers that come to my blog are engaged and I offered something that was not an offer. It’s not out there. There’s no online buodoir photography course when I was doing it. And or certainly one not done by me. And I made it like the dream product like how I created the content was your initial question. How I did it was what am I asked the most. What are people’s biggest fears, trip ups, biggest mistakes, questions, all of that would be like their dream program because by this point I know them so well. I engage with them a lot. I read their comments. I talk to beginners and or pros that have been in the business for 10 years let’s say but feel creatively still or like they’re just good but they’re not great or they’re not making the money they want or whatever. So I just knew what those all were and I just kinda organized it and like kinda reverse engineered the content based on that.

T: And did you make all the content first and then try and sell it? Coz this is a really important point. Or did you say to your community this is what I’m gonna deliver meanwhile you know you haven’t created it yet it’s just all in your head and here’s the buy button? Which one did you do?

C: There was a buy button before the product existed. I knew the outline of the product because I was promising all these stuff and I had to explain and describe the product. Here’s what’s gonna be included, it’s gonna have video tutorials. It’s going to have behind the scenes footage, live interaction with me. We’re gonna talk about working with women, lighting an equipment, post production, building a business and on and on. So I had basically the outline, I knew what it was gonna be intel but there was a buy it now button on my website before the first content was created. Absolutely. Then I was like “holy cow! I better get this together.”

T: That’s why I asked that question because when I started I did it the dumb way. I spent I’ve created a membership site called Niche Site Mastery and I spent the better part of 6 weeks, 12 hours a day making all the content. Having no idea at all if anyone would ever buy it. And in hindsight that was just so stupid. It was unbelievable. With my most recent product which was called Samurai Mastermind I just knew that I had all the stuff in my head about what it made my blog successful and I thought to myself I wanted to have a better delivery mechanism. I wanna do this live. I want to interact with people. I wanna give them a homework and agendas every week and all these stuff. And so like you did I just put up a buy button and it was far and away the most successful product launch that I ever had. And I’m explaining this coz I want the listeners to not get caught up and thinking that you gotta spend all this time creating a product and writing and shooting all the videos before. That’s backwards. You wanna get the money first. You wanna do the outline then you wanna say this is what I’m gonna deliver for this price because the best survey in the world is a buy button.

C: Exactly. And the other thing that I think is important note to your listeners I think some people might hesitate coz of the overwhelming fear that no one will buy it or that maybe 2 people will buy it or something like that and I for sure had that. I didn’t have a mailing list. I thought maybe people won’t go for this at all coz it’s kind of a new thing, it’s an online program. Maybe people won’t understand it or they’ll be like I don’t know. So everyone has fear that during the launch that no one’s gonna register or buy your stuff. And I just framed it in my head like “okay this is beta. Whoever signs up it’s bonus. I’m gonna do this anyway.” Another important key is keep the spending low. I’m gonna do this so like low to no budget and I’ll just consider this my beta. So if 10 people sign up then I’ll find out what they love and what they didn’t and improve it the next time. So I just kinda said I’m doing it and committed a 1000% to it. And now I didn’t have to worry about people not signing up. In fact I took the pressure off myself and said “you know what? If no one signs up it’s okay. This is my beta.”

T: It’s such a fantastic attitude and thank you for sharing that. The other thing that I found I’m sure you found this as well is when those people all do sign up and all that money shows up in your bank account man oh man was I ever committed to making sure that this is by far the best product I have ever created. I mean I spent the bulk of every week preparing for the next week’s webinar writing the ebook and doing the webinar and getting everything as good as I can possibly make it and in each webinar I ask how I did, did I suck, was it good, was it bad, what could be better so that I can take that feedback and improve the product for the next time around. Is that kind of a similar thing that happened to you?

C: Absolutely. And no matter how much you’re selling a product even if it’s a $10 downloadable pdf you never wanna put anything out there that’s not up to your own high standard. You know what I mean? So that’s very different mindset than trying to make it perfect or waiting till it’s perfect. They’re all the planets in line. You know what I mean? There’s a distinct difference between the two. You gotta try your best and make that the highest quality product possible but yet you’re not gonna let yourself hesitate because of fear or not 100% knowing what you’re doing. You know what I mean? Or you don’t know who wants it or if it’s gonna sell. That’s a separate issue.

T: I’m so glad you brought that up because the way you were starting off saying you only want to put out a product that’s just like awesome. I’m thinking “oh but wait a minute. This is gonna give people a prowl.” And then you immediately cut it off by saying no no no I’m not talking about perfection. There’s an interview that I listened to a while ago on mixergy and Andrew Warner, the host there, was talking to a founder whose company had been funded by why combinator which is a micro vc type firm that put like a 30 grand and a bunch of little companies and the mentors, the guys with the money who were given the money to the young entrepreneurs said basically this message “get it out the door. 80% done is good enough.” It’s a waste of time and effort and energy to try and make a perfect product because no product can be perfect until you get your customers’ feedback and a customer can’t give you any feedback until they see some version of the product so 80% is good enough.

C: That’s a great point. Yeah that’s actually really valid. And I’ve taken the feedback and now it’s gotten refined and it’s going to be even better next time. But you’re right if I kinda waited until what I thought was perfect it’s a. Unachievable and b. it would have never happened.

T: And then you’d still be doing time and materials photography like everybody else and not having the location independence that the internet gives us so my hats off to you. I gotta tell you you’re pretty damn smart cookie. Did you go to business school or did you just learn this on the go?

C: Oh my goodness, no I didn’t go to school for that. And I didn’t go to school for photography either. I have a communications degree but I don’t know I just surround myself with good information and good people and I don’t know I kinda cut through the clutter a little bit and I put my big girl panties on as Marie Forleo says and just knock and do it.

T: Yes.

C: I think people get bug down reading too much information, reading too many blogs and listening to a lot of podcasts and getting this online information and that product but they don’t really focus on doing.

T: I could not agree more. I had a conversation with I think he’s probably my most successful student I’ve ever taught by the name of Matthew Newton. And we were just doing a private skype a couple of weeks ago and he said “you know Trent I love paying attention to what you’re doing on your blog. Penguin updates and this is nice coz I always know you’re gonna do well coz you’re in the GSD club.” I know GSD is Get Stuff Done club and I’d laugh coz I thought to myself for those of you who may not know me well or wonder I don’t spend a lot of time like writing out business plans I just start doing, doing doing doing. And you gotta expect that you’re gonna fail a lot of the time, a lot of the time but every time that you try something that doesn’t work out you’ll invariably going to learn something from that. if you wanna cal it a failure fine but you’re gotta learn something from that. Whereas the other person who’s sitting and just reading ebooks all day long and buy $9 WSOs all day long and reading blogs all day long and just reading and studying and waiting and I kinda have a friend like this and I try and motivate him but so far I’m not doing a very good job. And they just get caught up in this forever loop of analysis and fear and I don’t aside from bulking them with a hammer I don’t know what to do. So if you’re listening to this and you’re in that loop and if you’re a woman put on your big girl panties. If you’re a guy put on your big boy boxer shorts and go and do something. I’m actually reading a guy’s ebook right now coz I do like to pay attention to what other people are doing and his goal is this: make a $100. Your first $100 is gonna be the hardest you ever make but once you’ve made a $100 if you’ve never made any money working for yourself before you get somebody to give you a $100 for something that you did that is a profound moment in your evolution coz now you’ve got monetary feedback. The universe is saying “hey your business exists for a reason now just go do more of it.” And instead of running around trying to come up with business ideas that are gonna make you a gazillion dollars if you’re at zero why not just pick something that you can think you can make a $100 doing? And then figure out if that works, figure out how to do it over and over again.

C: Yeah agreed because it’s so important to build confidence but it’s also important to get information on what people want from you and what you know you excel at sharing. So that accomplishes both of those goals. I agree with that, keep it simple, keep it little stakes, easy to manage.

T: You don’t have to put a lot of money at risk with a business where your goal is a $100. You don’t have to put a lot of time at risk it doesn’t have to be overwhelming and hopefully that will reduce the analysis paralysis and the fear. I mean hey I’m just trying to make a $100. And God love your friends and family but they can be your worst enemy when it is when you’re trying to do something, when you’re trying to create a business for yourself that they don’t understand. I wanna make money on the internet and they’re gonna be “oh I don’t know. Sounds like you’re getting scammed. Sounds this sounds that blah blah blah.” So was this a problem for you Christa when you were starting off among your photographer brethren friends, colleagues. Were they looking at you like you were a nutbar going what are you doing girl?

C: No coz I was the skeptic. No I honestly I’m in the practice of really not asking my family were done much about what I’m doing but I have very smart friends. And like I said my 2 brothers were ahead of the curve in terms of online stuff. So they were helpful in that respect. But I agree with you. Skeptics in general or whatever you’re doing just follow your own path, follow your passion, surround yourself with smart people who’ve done it before. You wanna model people who are doing what you wanna do. Not aunt selling so in her kitchen has no idea anyway.

T: Yeah that’s the thing. Most of your friends who are gonna give you all that wonderful advice on business have never created one themselves. Tony Robbins is famous for saying success leaves clues. And there was an interview that I listened to yesterday and these guys talked about this concept of consciously copying. What they weren’t trying to say was just they were in the vending business and they’ve come up with this vending machine that puts out health food instead of all the crap that most vending machines put out. They didn’t wanna copy anybody in their vending business but there was elements of other successful businesses that they really wanted to copy and then they would innovate for the last 5%. So I had a point in the beginning of that but now I forgot what the point was.

C: Well to me actually just pick up on that. It could be a different topic but in terms of modeling instead of copying is what I would say.

T: Yes.

C: Coz when you model someone I think you take their mindset and their strategies but the content is completely your own. I think that gets lost a little bit today. I think it’s totally and Tony Robbins is huge on that. Just modeling don’t try and re-create the wheel or reinvent the wheel. Just you can model someone but you know the content comes from you.

T: Correct.

C: That’s the big difference.

T: I think that’s the point I was trying to say. Thank you for saving me on my own show. Alright so let’s talk about some mistakes coz we all make them. I make lots of them. What were some of the things and you reach anywhere you want from where you got online to now, what were some of the big blunders that you made?

C: Big mistakes are made okay. Probably waiting so long to get online. Not putting google analytics on right away. That’s a huge mistake. Not starting the mailing list sooner. Letting my stealings about narcissism in terms of blogging and data capturing cheesy. Letting those unhelpful beliefs stand in my way. So I’d say those things would be the biggest mistakes. Let’s see. The big one that I’m making continually is my inconsistency. I know we need to be on a regular blogging schedule and all that stuff so I continue to make some mistakes but you know what I let myself off the hook a little bit on that.

T: Yeah I’m the same. I’ve gone better. You know what saved me coz I was all over the map. I got a google calendar and I created an editorial calendar. That’s it. I put on now weeks in advance I know what I’m gonna be blogging about. Talk about reducing the stress big time. Coz a blog’s like a baby it needs to be fed 3x a day. Well babies wanna be fed 3x a day but mine gets fed 3x a week. I used to wake up on Monday going what am I gonna blog today?

C: Well there’s always a lot of stuff I wanna blog but it’s just sometimes I’m lost on my list of things I have to do right now. But I need to get ahead of the curve and schedule a lot more blogs than I currently have. So yeah. And part of me I wanna talk about what I’m inspired about today and not what’s on the schedule so that gets in the way a little bit. But in terms of other mistakes I think I err a little bit on the side of keeping things low budget and probably could have invested in certain educational materials. A little bit more invested in fleshing out the content a bit more. Hiring the expensive search engine guy or whatever, things like that. I still haven’t done it. I’m still not doing SEO. So those are things I need to actually to step it up with.

T: Yeah I interviewed a guy by the name of Rusty Moore who’s in the fitness niche. Well by the time people are listening to this they’ll have been able to listen to his. And for whatever it’s worth Christa coz this was a big eye opener for me coz currently I get 18% of my traffic from search Rusty gets 75% of his traffic from search which means that 3/4 of the people who enter his sales funnel from his blog which is all of our sales funnels start are coming without him having to do anything. And he’s got 360 posts now roughly. He’s getting 10,000 uniques a day 3/4 of which are from SEO. For me that was a big “ooh wow I really wanna get on that.” Coz what if you wanna be able to turn your blog into something that’s a little bit more passive. If you’re not targeting SEO over a sustained period of time and you stop bloggin what happens to your traffic? It goes down.

C: Right.

T: So for whatever in that it was a big eye opener. It was a big reminder for me to get a little bit more focused on SEO.

C: And now it is for me as well.

T: And that’s one of the things and I’m happy to give you a copy of this Monster ebook which I’m writing. I’m actually writing it literally as we speak. We’re at 13,000 words and 49 pages so far and it’s not in anyway close to being done.

C: Can I ask you a little bit about it or are you gonna talk about it later or is there information on your blog and all that?

T: It’s actually the written material that goes with the Samurai Mastermind. So for these folks that paid me a $1,000 to be in this group this is what they’re getting. I am probably gonna do some other things with it afterwards coz the Mastermind is far more than just an ebook obviously but I’m very happy to you’ve been kind enough to be a guest so I’m very happy to furnish you a complimentary copy of the rough draft. And actually you can maybe help me coz I need to get hooked up with someone to make it look prettier. I can write out the content and put it in screen shots but I need someone to make it look pretty and that’s not my thing. Anyway we’re digressing from the podcast topic here.

C: Sorry.

T: Okay so you put up a sales page you said people to coin that Jerry McGuire show me the money and they did. You used scarcity which is a, you need to use scarcity and it needs to be legit. For me I did the same thing I only wanted so many people in the mastermind coz I didn’t wanna get overwhelmed in the first time through. And then you created an amazing product. Now how did you deliver your product? The first one was a workshop but then you created the 2nd one was a digital version. So was it a membership site or they would get a password and watch all the videos or what was your delivery mechanism?

C: It was wordpress site that was password protected so there were 6 modules released each week at the same time like on Monday morning. So that week’s content I had the video hosted on vidler. And so that week’s content there’d be some tutorials that were basically key notes that I just recorded in screenflow I believe is the name of the program and edited myself. It’s all super easy, simple, like for dummy’s type program that I know anyone can. And so it doesn’t look like a blog but it’s actually a wordpress blog so there’d be those screenflow tutorials based on keynote presentation and people will be able to comment on that and ask questions and I’d be in there everyday just pop and answer some questions. And then they go onto the next behind the scenes video that had the same topic that week and then we’d have a lot of call. I think last year I used instant teleseminar for the live calls.

T: Okay.

C: Once a week. And I think that’s it. Try not to complicate and keep things simple.

T: I agree simple simple. Simple is best. And are you still using like when you released this, are you gonna release this product again?

C: Yap this fall.

T: Are you gonna use instant teleseminar again or have you found a different vendor that you’re gonna be using?

C: I’m gonna take a peak at a couple others. Just to get better sound quality, to have more people.

T: Yap okay. And have you any particular reason why you don’t use something like go to meeting?

C: No I’ll take a peak at that one.

T: Yeah. There’s a way and if you can’t find the link you can get it from me. For any of the listeners if you wanna use it there’s a link that I have that allows you to sign up for $75 a month and you can host up to a 1,000 people per session. Whereas if you go to their regular sales page that’s $500 a month. So if you want that send me an email and I will send that link to you.

C: Okay. Excellent.

T: Alright. So where are we now? 45 minutes before this call you were thinking what are we gonna talk about for an hour. We’re already at 45 minutes and I could keep going.

C: Right.

T: So let’s talk a little bit about what we talked about before the call. So I’ll lead in to that with so where are you working on now?

C: Oh right thanks. Well I’m writing a new book so it’s another product that I created myself. The first book I wrote was self published and available on my site and did really well.

T: What’s really well so people know?

C: Made me $50,000.

T: That’s really well. Was it a kindle book or how did you publish it?

C: It’s actually a hard cover book that I researched printers. Well I’m a photographer that stuff’s important for me. That the quality is great, it’s hard cover, it’s glossy, it’s gorgeous. It’s pictures of women for buodoir photography so I wanted it to be really gorgeous looking book which it is. So I guess it attracted the publisher who contacted me peachpit press to do another book so we signed that deal earlier this year and now my deadline’s Sept 1st. It’s already on amazon for pre-order which it’s like I gotta meet this deadline. And it’s called The Art of Buodoir How to Create Stunning Photographs of Women. It’s really awesome for me coz at first when I started out I was just resistant as we’ve talked about and then responding to demand people would ask me the same questions over and over again. They actually asked me to do workshops so I just responded to that. And the online workshop came about because I wasn’t giving really big, you know, I needed a way to make money while living in a foreign country. And I didn’t think I could do a bunch of live workshops in Italy. I did one and it was well but anyways. Everything I do was responding to demand. So I don’t know for this book to be, it just lends credibility to kinda what my path had been so it’d been a nice little surprise.

T: It’s been a phenomenal sounding journey but let me ask you this question. If someone had said to you alright and you’re not even online yet here’s what we want you to do, we want you to create a website, we want you to get a mailing list, we want you to make a workshop, we want you to sell tickets to the workshop, we want you to put videos online, we want you to author book and get a book deal, we want you to do all of the next say 2 years, what would you have done?

C: That would have freaked me out. I would have just, you know, when people go into overwhelm that’s the most debilitating mindset. Even fear is better than overwhelmed. Overwhelmed just makes you go shut down you don’t know what to do so you do nothing. That’s probably what I would have done. So again like everything that I’ve done you don’t necessarily need to know the outcome. You could have a target you could have a goal but you don’t have to know exactly what the end of your year or your product launch is gonna look like necessarily.

T: And I agree. I asked that question because again for the people in the audience who are listening to this show and thank you for listening by the way, I wanted to inspire you with this episode. I went into this episode thinking that this was gonna be an episode about product creation but you know what? This is an episode about following your passion and not being afraid to fail. And for that I really applaud you Christa because you’ve got a phenomenal story. You’ve made a huge success of yourself out of something that you were passionate about when you were 6 years old. And I don’t obviously know what the quality of your life is like but I’m gonna guess you like what you do. I’m gonna guess you have a pretty good life and you’re a pretty happy person and that’s what fires me up is talking to people like you. I know that for me that’s my particular passion is building businesses that are online. And that’s why I do this show because I love talking to people like you and I hope to inspire other people to get the fear out of the way and just go and say “you know what? I’m gonna figure out how to make a $100.”

C: Right. And I have to say there’s no better I think subject than to inspire your viewers, your readers because I knew nothing, I was resistant to everything. I had the beliefs that weren’t helpful and I just kinda let myself do it and yeah it turned out great. So yeah I hope that inspires your people.

T: I’m sure that somebody listening to this and if that’s somebody is you I want you to email me trent@onlineincomelab.com to go and do something and especially if you’ve done something. If you don’t email me for 6 months I want you to email me coz I wanna hear your success story and I wanna get you on the show as well. So Christa we’re gonna wrap it up here 10 minutes early as a matter of fact. I just really wanna thank you for making the time. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. So last thing where can people get a hold of you?

C: Christameola.com

T: Say that again. The skype faded out for a minute there.

C: Sure it’s christameola.com. It’s just my name c-h-r-i-s-t-a-m-e-o-l-a. And thank you so much this has been a really interesting discussion for me. It actually made me feel good because I forget sometimes where I started and it’s nice to know sometimes when you just dive in it turns out well.

T: Absolutely. Alright Christa thanks very much for being on the show. Folks if you’re listening to this on iTunes I would appreciate it greatly if you would give the show a rating. If you thought this was a 5 star episode go ahead and give 5 stars. If you thought it was 3 or 4, whatever it was, please give it a rating coz when every time when someone, a listener, gives the show a rating, the show goes up in the rankings, I get more of the audience and I can attract more really cool guests like Christa to be on my show. If you are listening to this somewhere other than my blog and you like to get to the page that this is on so you can see the links and the transcript and all that kind of thing you go to onlineincomelab.com and this is gonna be episode 34 so you’d go /session034. Again it’s onlineincomelab.com/session034. If you have questions that you would like other myself or Christa to answer that’s where the comment form on the post will be for. We’ll both be keeping an eye on it. I usually get my guests to make the first comment and subscribe to comments so that all the follow up comments they’ll get a little email so you can get an answer directly from them. And last thing I just wanna say thank you. It’s my privilege to be able to be the host of this terrifcly fun show. It’s my privilege to be able to run the blog that I do and make a living doing it and without all of my readers and listeners and subscribers and customers I couldn’t do that stuff. And I just can’t imagine what my life would be like if I couldn’t. So again thank you all very much. It’s been my pleasure. We will see you in episode no. 35 very very soon. Talk to you later.

 

Trent: Hey everybody. This is Trent here from the Online Income Lab
Session Number 33. In this session, we’re going to be speaking
with a guy by the name of Tim Bourquin, who is the founder of
TraderInterviews.com, a site that’s making about $300,000 a year
through a subscription model and his content delivery is by
interviewing other experts in the stock trading space.

This is an absolutely fascinating interview. You’re going to
learn how Tim came up with the idea, how he promoted it, how he
tested different pricing strategies, how much work it does, or I
should say doesn’t, take him each month to run the site, and
just a whole bunch of really great stuff, so please join me in
welcoming Tim to the show.

Hey, Tim. Thanks very much for doing the interview with me. It’s
a real pleasure to have you on the show. You’ve got a site by
the name of TraderInterviews.com and that’s what we’re going to
be talking about in this interview.

Tim: Okay.

Trent: First of all, the whole point of my doing these podcasts is to
demonstrate to people that success is achievable. Especially
online, you don’t have to be born in some super big name family
and you don’t have to start off with a whole ton of cash. You
can literally just come up with a good idea and begin to market
it and so forth. I want to give people kind of an idea of what’s
possible. I always ask this at the beginning of an interview,
how much money is TraderInterviews.com making?

Tim: Yeah, this year we’ll probably do close to $300,000, maybe a little
bit more than that. We did $285,000 last year, so we’re looking
to be better than that this year. It does ebb and flow based on,
kind of, the membership pushes we do. I have a secondary
consulting business that also depends on the amount of time that
my brother and I, who do the site together, can spend on it, but
that’s what we’re looking at for this year.

Trent: That’s a pretty phenomenal number.

Tim: Yeah, it took a while to get there. We’ve had the domain since ’99.
We really didn’t make it a true site until really about 2005
when we really started to put the work into it. I should
probably back up and say that this is not the first content site
we’ve done. We had one in a totally unrelated space called
Endurance Radio that was all about triathlon, mountain biking,
marathon running that we monetized and eventually sold before we
did this. I did a lot of my experimentation on that site and
took some of that knowledge, tweaked it a little bit, and turned
it over to this trading site that we have now.

Trent: Real quickly, the other one that you just mentioned, how long
did you run that for and how much did you sell it for?

Tim: Yeah, we did that for almost 2 years. It initially started out as me
out mountain biking and then stopping and talking to other
mountain bikers about what they were doing.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: Found out that a lot of them were in these XTERRA triathlons where
they’d mountain bike, swim, and run, and it was on trails, so we
started talking about nutrition and training and equipment. That
quickly turned into me being the capitalist pig that I am and
how can I monetize this. Can we make some money here? Can we get
some sponsors? Can we charge some premium membership for that?

Eventually it got to the point where I was just a very casual
mountain biker. I was not in this as seriously as all the guests
I was interviewing, as most of my listeners were, and so it got
to the point where it was like my interests lie elsewhere. It
was kind of a fad for me.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: I still get on the mountain bike, but not nearly as much as the
people that were listening to the show and I was interviewing.
In some sense, I felt a little bit guilty about that. I was kind
of just the talking head for that show and it wasn’t really my
passion as much as the other people were and it was for them. I
think we sold it eventually for about, I’d have to go back and
check the figures, but it was around $40,000. It wasn’t a ton of
money.

One of the things I’ve always told people is that we all hear
about Google, or Facebook IPOing for a billion dollar valuation
or $20 billion or whatever it is, and you hear about Instagram
selling for a billion dollars to Facebook, and that does a lot
of damage to 99% of us out there who will never get that kind of
valuation for our companies, but we may get $30,000 or $40,000
for a site we started as a hobby. That’s a nice payday for 99%
of us out there.

Trent: It is. It is indeed.

Tim: Those numbers don’t make the news, but for people who are in this as
individuals, who have no employees, who work from home, if we
can do that once or twice a year and make money with other
sites, we can make a living for ourselves doing that. I think
that’s important to know.

Trent: Absolutely. I’m glad that you raised that point. Let’s get a
little bit further into TraderInterviews.com. It sounds like the
previous site and this site both use a model that I use and I’m
using it on my next Bright Ideas. It’s the interview model.

Tim: That’s correct.

Trent: Instead of spending years becoming an expert, you kind of get
expertise by association.

Tim: Yes.

Trent: Are you a trader? Do you trade?

Tim: I do trade.

Trent: You do trade, okay.

Tim: I started out the site because I wanted to talk to other traders
about how they did it. I have this video on my homepage where I
talk about the fact that I literally put an ad in the paper
asking if there were other traders out there that wanted to meet
for coffee and talk about trading. This was in ’96.

Trent: Wow.

Tim: There just wasn’t a lot of stuff out there. I put the tiny classified
ad in the paper and said, “I have no idea if anyone’s going to
read this, but does anybody want to come have some breakfast and
talk about stock trading?” That’s how the whole thing started.
The interview, I love the interview as content.

Trent: Yeah. Me too.

Tim: I think it creates content quickly. It’s naturally keyword rich just
because you’re talking about the subject. You don’t have to
think about where to place keywords. It’s going to happen
naturally in the conversation. I love interviews as a content
method.

Trent: Yeah. I do as well. I find them exactly what you said, they’re
fast, they’re fun, and you get a ton… People are going to
Content Authority and Textbroker and all these places and
spending a lot of money to get kind of average articles.

Tim: Right.

Trent: Whereas you can just do an interview with someone and then you
can either pay your VA to transcribe it or you can use dictation
software. I’m just exploring now, where you can just literally
hit the play on the mp3 file and the dictation software will
transcribe the whole thing for you. I have not tested that yet.
I’d be curious to know if you have. I’m looking at something
from Dragon Naturally Speaking. It’s Dragon Dictate, I think is
what it is. It’s only like $150. Have you tried that software?

Tim: I have not tried that, although our transcription service that we
use, that is overseas and is really inexpensive, I can tell uses
it because there are times when no human being would listen to
that word and type out the word that came out on the transcript.

Trent: Oh.

Tim: It’s not perfect. It’s great for quick transcription that you want to
get up quickly, but it’s not great for the reader, I will admit
that. For people that really want to print out the transcript
and read it, it’s not terrific.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: It’s okay. The technology is getting better. It’s not quite there yet
though.

Trent: What are you paying per hour or per minute of transcription?

Tim: It’s an entire range. Literally if I just want something quick and
fast and I don’t really care what it looks like in terms of
quality, we pay about 25 cents per audio minute.

Trent: Yep.

Tim: For something that I want almost article ready, that I would use,
that I really want to look well that is not only just the
transcription itself, but the person doing the transcription
goes in and edits out half sentences, dashes, and things like
that.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: When we talk, we don’t talk in full, complete sentences. It’s a mess.
You get these transcripts back and it’s just awful. It takes a
lot of work, and I’ll pay about $4 an audio minute for something
that’s really heavily edited and I want to be totally article
ready.

Trent: Wow. All right. My first question that I jotted down in my
notes was how Trader Interviews came to be. You’ve kind of
answered that already. You were really passionate about trading,
much like me. I’m really passionate about figuring out ways to
automate income and have it come in online, because then you can
go have this lifestyle and play and do things that are really
fun to do and the income keeps coming in. I thought, “Well, it
would be smart for me to talk to other people because I know
some stuff, but I don’t know everything.” Every time I interview
someone I get to learn a lot more stuff, which I’m sure I’m
going to do in this interview.

Was that the same thinking for you or was there a different
reason? Did you know right away that you were going to make this
site or were you just kind of doing this because you just wanted
a way to pick people’s brains?

Tim: It was early on that I decided almost everything I do I want to try
to figure out how to make money from. That’s just my nature as
an entrepreneur.

Trent: I hear you.

Tim: I’m sure after probably the second day or our second meeting, I
thought, “How can I make some money off of this?” It’s a good
industry that fits for a lot of reasons.

One, you’ve got a very passionate audience out there that is
really digging for information. They want to find out more about
how to trade, how to find good stock picks, how to trade the
futures market, how to trade corn, grains. They’re really
passionate about it. Traders are passionate about the craft and
they want to find out more information. Second, there are a lot
of experts out there, a lot of traders I could find, interview,
and that could help me create the content for this, so they had
that as well. Then third, you’ve got the audience base and
sponsor base, if you want it, that is willing to pay for access
to your audience. I think those three things are key. Passionate
audience, a lot of people that you can create content with, and
then something people are willing to pay for.

In the trading space, much like the business space, people are
willing to pay for it because they can make money with that
information. That’s not to say that you can’t create an
interview site about art appreciation or something, but you’re
going to have a much tougher time monetizing that audience.

Trent: Absolutely.

Tim: If the information you’re providing is something they can see as an
investment, like I’m going to pay $500 a year to make $2,000,
you’ve got a winner there and that’s really what you want to do.

Trent: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I have a cleaning website that I
bought. It has nothing to do with how to make money, but it
doesn’t require any work and it just makes us money on
autopilot, so that’s fine. Any time that I’m teaching people, if
you’re going to create sites, do it around some way to either
advance their career, get a certification, start a business, get
a better job, or anything that ultimately leads to them making
more money because you’re going to have way, way more leverage
in what you can do with that traffic.

Tim: Right. The user can easily see the path to how they’re going to get a
return on the money they’re spending with you.

Trent: Absolutely.

Tim: If it’s a hobby, certainly you could do a podcast about model
airplaning because people are spending money on that hobby. It’s
a little bit tougher. Your price point is going to have to be a
lot lower. I can charge a lot for Trader Interviews because the
opportunity to make a lot of money is there if they’ve got a
trading account.

Trent: Absolutely.

Tim: Yeah.

Trent: You’re passionate about stock trading. You obviously want to
interview other people. You want to monetize that content in
some way, shape or form. Go back to 2005 and tell me about the
strategy that you had back then in terms of what you thought you
were going to build. Then now fast forward to 2012, tell me a
little bit about how that strategy has changed and maybe some of
the things that worked really well that you didn’t anticipate
and some of the things that you thought would work which ended
up sucking.

Tim: Well, I think the first thing we thought of was a monthly membership
because that’s what everybody else was doing. It seems to be the
most common way to get members, to charge a price every month.
We tried that. We tried a lot of different membership models to
see what works best, both for our users and for the
profitability of the site. What we found was, and it’s obvious
now that I think about it, if you charge a monthly membership
where you’ve got an archive of content, such as interviews,
PDFs, whatever information that you’re selling, if they can sign
up today, cancel, and a year from now sign up again and have
access to everything you’ve put up in that year, why bother
spending money every month?

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: The trouble we ran into was there was no urgency to sign up because
whatever you got today was going to be available tomorrow, next
month, next year, really, because we keep all the archives there
from the beginning. That was an issue we dealt with right away.
We thought, “Let’s make just the four most recent interviews
available each month so that if you cancel tomorrow and you miss
next month, those interviews are no longer available when you
come back in Month 3.” That creates some urgency to sign up
today and stay a subscriber. When you’re not a subscriber,
you’re missing the content that comes in during that time.

Then we thought, “Well let’s try a different level of membership
so that if they do come back and they do want all of the
archives, they pay more for that ability to go back in the
archives,” so we created, what was back then, a lifetime
membership. You sign up, you pay one time, and you’re a member
for life. You get all the content we’ve ever done plus
everything we’re ever going to do going forward.

We tried a bunch of different things in between that. We tried a six-
month membership. We tried an annual membership fee. In the
trading industry, there are so many services that charge a
monthly fee. You’ve got data. You’ve got your software. You’ve
got sometimes your chat room.

Trent: It adds up.

Tim: You’ve got a content site like ours. In that particular space, people
are really tired, I think, of paying a monthly fee every month,
so they get really exhausted with that. We found that the best
return for us and the happiest members were our lifetime
members. Now, after so many years of testing all kinds of
different membership options, basically, we have an annual
membership and a lifetime membership. That’s it. That’s all
we’ve got.

We make the lifetime membership about three times the annual
membership, so you can pay $500 for a year or you can pay $1,500
for life. We find that most people take the lifetime membership
because they want to be able to pay one time and never have to
worry about paying again. We’ve found that works for us. Now,
it’s expensive, again, but because it’s in that trading space
and people are used to paying for knowledge, education, and
learning, it works for us.

I don’t know that that kind of price point works for a lot of
people, but I think that everybody should consider the lifetime
option because I think they’ll find that the people really like
it.

Now, when we say lifetime, the first question is, well, are you
healthy? How long are you going to be around? I joke about that
and I say a couple things. Let’s say tomorrow I go out and get
hit by a bus. You’ve already got 280 interviews that we’ve done
over the years. I could never produce another interview and it’s
going to take you a long time. You’re going to get plenty of
value out of that existing set of archives that we already have
in there.

I also say, really what lifetime membership is about is who
forgets about it first. Do you forget about your lifetime
membership to Trader Interviews first or do I forget to put
content up? That’s not really how it works, but you get the
idea. It’s that I have a lot more people to interview. I put up
one new interview a month. At some point, I’ll decide to sell
the site or stop doing interviews, but long before that I will
have said we’re not taking any additional memberships either.

I think people feel, for the most part, that they know I’ve been in
the industry for 15 years already, I’m well known in the
industry, and I’m going to be around for at least 15 years more,
but also, if for some reason they didn’t get a single new
interview after the day they signed up, there is so much great
stuff in the archives that they feel that that value is there
for what they paid already.

Trent: Yeah. It’s interesting because for my new venture, Bright
Ideas, it’s the same idea. I look at Mixergy. Andrew Warner runs
a site called Mixergy and he charges $25 a month. Really, the
customer of Bright Ideas is a small business owner, somebody
who’s doing, like I used to do, a million bucks a year. More
than my next breath, I wanted to hear from all the people who
were doing $2 million a year because they clearly knew some
stuff that I didn’t know. If I’m doing a million bucks a year,
can I afford $1,500? Yeah, I can if there’s enough value.

See, I’m learning stuff already. I didn’t think about doing
something at that price point. Maybe for me it won’t be $1,500
initially. Maybe it will be less. I didn’t at all think about
lifetime access. I just thought about subscriptions. Very
helpful.

Tim: It was a pure data-driven decision for us because we found that
people in the trading industry, three to four months is about
the range of what you’re going to keep somebody on a monthly
subscription. We were running about six months before people
would cancel. I think that’s just because people come in and out
of the business.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: It was six months based on what we were charging, which I think was
about $49 a month.

Trent: Wasn’t much money.

Tim: Yeah. Or the annual, or the lifetime, it just made more sense to
capture those people and get them the lifetime memberships. We
didn’t have to convince them every month to re-up.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: There was no pressure on their part to re-up. They knew they were
members. I think it took a lot of pressure off both sides.

Trent: Tell me about your customer specifically. This goes into your
promotional strategy, so I’m kind of leading into my next
question about how did you promote it. I’m assuming that you
defined what I call a persona of who specifically you were going
after. Is that the case? Is that who you ended up getting?

Tim: Yeah, with one exception. Typically, with any type of subscription
site or membership site, you’re going to get the newer folks in
that industry.

Trent: Yep.

Tim: Typically our sweet spot was newer traders, people that had just
opened accounts that were looking for information about how to
trade, whether it be stocks, futures, options, currency, or
whatever it was. It was typically the newer trader, but not
always. We do have a good segment of our membership that are
veteran traders as well that want to hear from other veteran
traders.

I think the big surprise for us was how big international was. At
least half of our members now come from outside the U.S. That
was shocking to me. I really thought that most of our members
were going to be U.S. just because I think, as Americans, we’re
going to get U.S.-based members because that’s just the way it
is but the internet is worldwide. It’s the World Wide Web. We
get a ton of subscribers in Asia, Europe, Australia, and all
over the place. It’s literally everywhere. We spend a lot more
money now marketing overseas in terms of sites that we advertise
on and email lists we do exchanges with that have a good, strong
international presence because we have so many of those people
that are our members now and they like to become members.

Part of that, I think, is because trading is a little more
mature here and overseas maybe it’s a little bit behind, so
they’re kind of getting ramped into that now where we were maybe
three or four years ago, so I think that’s part of the reason we
get so much international.

Trent: I want to take a little sidebar here if I could. I don’t mean
to steal your answer, but this comment you’re making is really
important. For anyone listening, I listened to an interview and
these guys had built, I forget the name of it, but it was a
Facebook app. Basically their whole model was to get paid, I
don’t remember exactly what it was, but they had a certain price
point that eventually this app had a certain amount for free,
and then the rest you could get paid. It was like Guitar Hero.
That’s what it was. They could take any song and you could like
play it on your keyboard and play along with it.

This was the huge error that they made and they weren’t able to
anticipate it. The vast majority of their traffic came from
Indonesia where they couldn’t monetize. They ended up having to
shut the service down because ultimately they had this huge
volume of subscribers who were super passionate about it, but
they were at an income level, an economic bracket, that was so
far below what any of their models were when they were building
the business and the business plan, that it was this major ah-ha
for them.

I only bring that up because it was kind of relevant to what you
said. I’m assuming that stock traders around the world are not
kids playing video games, so it’s not super relevant to your
business. I did want to bring it up just for the benefit of the
people who are listening to this in case somebody out there was
thinking, “Hey, I’m going to charge $10 a month and I’m going to
get all of the USA,” and then it turned out you got all these
people from Indonesia and they can’t pay $10 a month.

Tim: Right. I think that you really have to make that decision before you
get into this. As much as you’re passionate about the subject
you’re passionate about, you have to know are there other people
out there who are just as passionate, is that audience big
enough for me that if I only get a couple percent of those
people can I still have a viable site, and are people willing to
pay for that? I think you have to decide those things and figure
those things out beforehand, before you get into it and spend
all this time.

Trent: You identified and you thought early on that your persona was a
trader who was relatively new to the business. Is that still the
same, your customer?

Tim: It is. I think it is. It’s been a while since we’ve done a survey,
but my sense is that people who have been trading for a long
time, are making money, and are profitable are probably a better
subset for me to go out and try to interview rather than be
customers. Although I do know that we have members that are
probably great fits to be interviewees for us because they are
experienced, they are well established, and are making money
doing this.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: Trading, another benefit is that it can be a lonely business. You’re
at home, trading on your computer all day long, and to be able
to hear other traders talking about how they do it is a benefit
to them to.

Trent: So far we’ve figured out how you got into the niche, we figured
out how you create your content, and we figured out how you
monetize it. That’s all fine and dandy, but if nobody ever comes
and nobody ever finds out about it, nobody ever buys it, it’s
all for naught. That’s the big thing that I think a lot of
people are fearful of when they think of starting an online
business. I know I was in the beginning. How am I going to get
any traffic?

Let’s spend a good amount of time going through your promotional
strategy, how you took this thing from zero to the roughly
$300,000 that it’s going to do this year. You’ve got the site
up. You’ve got how many interviews. Before you ever started to
promote anything, how many interviews did you put in the
archive?

Tim: Well, it was a free site first. I thought it was going to be an ad-
based site. I thought we’ll have E*TRADE, we’ll have Ameritrade,
and we’ll have Schwab be the sponsor of the show. They spend
millions on Super Bowl ads. Surely they can spend a couple of
grand on my tiny site to get the right audience.

The trouble was that initial idea of monetizing with ads, I
spent so much time on the phone trying to talk to advertisers,
trying to get advertisers to re-up for the next period, and
trying to find new advertisers that I got to the point where it
was like I got into this business to talk to other traders and
here I am all day spending most of my time on the phone talking
to advertisers. It just wasn’t what I wanted. I’ll be honest,
the membership model didn’t occur to me until later.

Trent: Okay.

Tim: Initially it was all about going out and trying to get search engine
ranking by having the transcripts in there, every interview was
transcribed, and we would try and get Google juice from that.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: It worked to a certain extent. Our site was built a long time ago. I
think the base of our site was built in ’99. I have a brother
who’s a software engineer, thank God. He takes this thing and
makes it do all kinds of magic now because we’re not on
WordPress. If I had to start over again today I would use a
WordPress kind of template that is built for search engine and
is built to have plug-ins. We’re just too far along at this
point to have to do the work to switch it over.

Initially, it was a free site. We got the traders that we talked
to oftentimes had lists of their own. Maybe they had a service
of a chat room or something like that, so they would email out
to their list, “Hey, I just got interviewed by Trader
Interviews,” which is another great reason why interviews work
because the people you interview…

Trent: Yep. Absolutely.

Tim: Eventually we got to the point where our selling point was the fact
that the traders we talked to are people that don’t have lists,
they don’t sell anything, they’re just traders at home, nobody’s
ever heard of them, but they’re making a million dollars a year
trading. That became less of an ability for us to do that
because our selling point was nobody talks to these guys except
me and that was why you needed to become a member.

Initially, it was they put it out to their list. We had a light
box capture email, so we built our email list. If you’re not
building an email list, you’ve got to start doing that. That’s
probably old hat. You may hear now, these days, “Oh email’s
dead. It’s all about social media.”

Trent: Heck no.

Tim: It’s complete nonsense. Email is where we make 90% of our money
still.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: Email works. Now I think, jumping ahead, what we found works best for
us is doing list exchanges with other sites that are not so much
competitive but maybe complementary to what we do. If somebody’s
got a great blog and they’re building a list about trading,
we’ll go send a message to our list about them, they’ll send a
message to their list about us, and we grow our list that way.
We both kind of grab each other’s lists of people that are
interested in like products, and we grow out that way.

Trent: When you’re doing the list swap with the financial blogger, are
you getting him to mail you a squeeze page where you’re just
trying to get the email address?

Tim: Correct.

Trent: Is there an affiliate commission for that guy down the road if
they buy?

Tim: Not usually. You can negotiate the deal anyway you want, but
typically it’s, “I’m going to collect emails, you’re going to
collect emails, and we’re done. Everybody’s happy.” You can
certainly do something where we’re each going to collect
affiliate commissions on each other’s stuff. That’s certainly a
way to do it. I’ve always just found the easiest way is just,
“We’ll message for you, you message for us, and we’re both
happy.”

Trent: Can you give me the URL of a squeeze page that if I was a
financial blogger I would mail to?

Tim: Do you mean for us?

Trent: Yeah. You’re trying to build your list and a partner’s going to
mail for you. Can you, off the top of your head, rattle off a
URL?

Tim: It’s a long one. It’s the same squeeze page though that we are
collecting emails on already. If you go to TraderInterviews.com
and you click on, I think it’s “Get the Free Interview,” it’s up
at the top, on the right-hand side of our site, then you’ll
click on our squeeze page. It’s really quite ugly, but it works.
We’ve tried different pictures different places and text
different places. This is what works for us.

Trent: Yeah, well that makes sense. Simple, simple, simple. Just put
the email in, hit the button, and you get the free report that
you’re promised.

Tim: Right. In our case, I always recommend giving away what you offer as
a member. We used to give away a free e-book about trading to
get people. We found it’s not a good example. Let’s give away
our best interview. That’s another thing I always talk to people
about. Don’t hold back.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: The free thing you give away should be one of the best things you
have on your site. Don’t hold it back for your members. This is
what they’re going to decide the quality of the content of the
rest of your site is, so don’t give them your substandard stuff
just because it’s free. Give them the best interview you’ve got.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: That’s what gets people to get members of your site.

Trent: Yes, I think that as well. You only get one chance to make a
first impression.

Tim: Right.

Trent: How much of the traffic now is organic? Do you know?

Tim: We have very little actually outside of our membership wall, so that
hurts us in some sense. We don’t get a lot of Google search
engine traffic these days. It’s not something we focus on. We
really focus on building our email list and promoting the site
that way. I would say maybe 20% of our traffic comes from search
engines and 80% comes from webinars that we do, email list
trades that we do, a little bit of advertising that we do on
Facebook and our squeeze page on Facebook, and that sort of
thing. Mostly it is the webinars we do and the email exchanges
that we do.

Trent: How do you find people to do an email swap with?

Tim: Well, I know a lot of people in the industry already, but I’m always
surprised. I’ll go to a site that I’ve never seen before that’s
come up in the last 3 months and it’s somebody that knows a
little bit about internet marketing, so they’re creating and
building an email list. Let’s say they’ve got 2,000 people in
their email list, but if it’s the right 2,000 people… I’ll
email to 5,000 people on my list and they’ll get more out of it
than I do, but I’m getting the right kinds of people. That’s
really what I’m interested in.

Even somebody with a small list is valuable to me if it’s the
right type of person. If it’s a blog about trading, they’ve got
good content there, it looks like they’re writing good stuff,
and I can see they’re building an email list, I’ll just approach
them and if I don’t know them already, which sometimes I do, or
at least I know a friend of a friend who knows them, I say, “How
about I’ll send a message to my list, you send one to your list,
and we do this about once a week?” This is how we grow our lists
each time.

Trent: Do you find that most times people are fairly open to doing
that, even if they’d never heard of you before?

Tim: I think so. Of course they do a little background on me. They’ll ask
around about me or they’ll go to my site. They’ll sign up for my
squeeze page and see what I offer them and that I’m not offering
free iPads and trying to bait and switch. They’ll kind of see.
You can tell. Look, we all go to somebody else’s website and we
can tell if it’s a big giant pile of doodoo or if it’s a decent
website. People make these connections pretty quickly. I think
if they do a little bit of research, they’ll find that you’re
legitimate and be willing to do something with you.

Trent: How big is your list now?

Tim: It’s about 15,000.

Trent: If you find somebody who’s got a 2,000 list, how do you mail…
Typically, I haven’t done a lot of list swaps yet. It’s
something that I want to do more of. If you’ve got 15 and he’s
got 2, how do you strip yours out so that you’re only mailing to
2,000? I have people who approach me and say, “Trent, I’ll swap
you for 500 clicks.” I don’t exactly know how they’re going to
promise to get me exactly 500 clicks.

Tim: Right. This is what we do too. We do this when somebody’s got a list
of 200,000 and I want to go to them. They’ll be like, “You have
15,000.” Two things I’ll tell them. First of all, I’ll tell
them I’m not trying to boost myself up or anything but I
guarantee my list of 15,000 will do about what most people’s
lists of 50,000 or 60,000 does because we write good emails, we
have great open rates, and we don’t spam them.

Trent: What’s your open rate?

Tim: It depends on what we send, of course, but anywhere between 17% and
36%.

Trent: That’s good.

Tim: Somewhere in that range.

Trent: That’s very good.

Tim: Not bad. It all depends on what we’re doing. If we’re doing something
where we’re emailing a lot, like every week, or twice a week
sometimes, then our open rate goes down. You’ve got to find a
balance in how much you email. That has a lot to do with it.
Your subject lines have a lot to do with it, what you’re
offering has a lot to do with it. If you respect the people on
your list, you respect they’re email inboxes, you’re going to
perform better than most people that don’t.

You want to find somebody who has a good sized list. What I will do
is I’ll say, “Look, I think to give you 500 clicks, I need to
email out to about 6,000 people.” I use AWeber. I’ll segment my
list and we’ll send 6,000 out. Let’s see how that does for a
day.

Trent: How do you do that in AWeber? I used to use AWeber, I don’t use
it anymore, I’m on Infusionsoft now. How do you go to 15,000 and
tell AWeber, “I only want 6,000″?

Tim: You can segment by date they joined. I can say, “Give me everyone
that joined between yesterday and three months ago,” and that
will give me 3,000.

Trent: Got it.

Tim: Let’s go back nine months. You can do it by date. You can do it by
location. If you’re in auto responder mode, you can say,
“Everyone who’s gone through my 12 autoresponder messages and is
now just free-floating out of my autoresponder chain now, give
me all those people.” Just see. You play with it until you get
the right number.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: I just did this last week with a guy who had a good sized list. It
was about my size, but I gave him maybe 30% more clicks than he
got me. He’s going to email it to a portion of his list again
this week to get that equal. It may take a couple of days, a
week even, to get that about even, but if you openly communicate
about that and you say, “Look, let’s each try to give us a
similar amount of clicks regardless of the size of our overall
lists,” their list may perform better or worse than yours and
you send until you get to that even point, until everybody’s
happy.

Trent: When you’re contacting these people for the first time, is it
an email or a phone call?

Tim: Usually an email for the first time, but I have no problem picking up
the phone. A lot of people won’t pick up the phone. If they’ve
got a phone number on the site, I call it a lot because a lot of
people don’t call. They get tons of emails. They hardly get any
phone calls.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: I see this all the time. I give out my personal cell phone number
that rings in my pocket on every single email I send. I send an
email out to my entire list of 15,000 saying that I’m going to
be at the Traders expo in New York, here’s my cell phone, and
call me when you get there.

Trent: Nobody calls.

Tim: Like two.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: Nobody calls. They just don’t call anymore. People are like, “You’re
crazy giving out your cell phone number.” Well, hardly anybody
calls me. The people that want to, get a hold of me. They can’t
believe it. I literally answer, “Hello?” It works. It goes a
long way to build trust and for people to know that if they’re
spending $1,500 with me for a lifetime membership, they can call
me on a Saturday morning and I answer the phone.

Trent: Yeah. I put my cell phone number on all my sales pages and
stuff as well and I think maybe I’ve had five phone calls in a
year.

Tim: Now, what really turns me off is I see people try to hide behind a
moniker. Someone on LinkedIn will send me an invitation that’s
like Mr. Trading. Why would I want to connect with you when
you’re unwilling to give me your real name?

Trent: Yeah. That’s lame.

Tim: For me, right there, that eliminates a lot of credibility. I won’t
sign up for anything where I don’t know who the guy is, or who
the person is, behind the site. I won’t do it. That’s just me.

Trent: Yeah. That’s one of the things that I’ve said in my coaching
and I’ve probably written about in my blog posts, is that people
are worried. They’re like, “Well, there’s already a fitness
blog, there’s already and trading blog, or there’s already an
internet marketing blog.” Yeah but there’s not one by you.

Tim: Right.

Trent: That’s the unique selling proposition. The more competition
there is in a space, the more it just tells me that there’s lots
of opportunity for more people to bring their own unique view,
their own unique style to that space. Goodness knows, people
have heard me say this, the world did not need another make
money online blog before I started the Online Income Lab.
Everyone would have been very happy if mine never existed. Some
people who read my blog can’t stand me and they write me hate
mail and I stick it on my wall. Then there are people who love
me and they write really wonderful things too. You know that
you’re making a difference if you’re getting both of those forms
of feedback.

Tim: I see that as a huge newbie mistake, it raises my antennas
immediately when somebody says, “There’s nobody doing this right
now.” My first thought is, “Then that’s a problem,” because
there’s probably a reason that nobody’s doing it.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: Not to say that you can’t be the groundbreaker in some brand new
industry where nobody’s doing it and you’re first, but that is
so extremely rare that I would say if you don’t have immediately
at least two or three competitors in whatever podcast or content
site you’re going to put out, you need to really look closely at
why that is because that’s a problem for you. It’s a good thing
to have competitors out there. There are only 50,000 people that
are good for my site. We’re talking about a worldwide audience,
folks. The pie is big enough for you and a million other sites.
I promise you.

Trent: Yep. Absolutely. How many paid members do you have right now?

Tim: Just over 1,000.

Trent: In the grand scheme of millions of people who are wanting to
learn how to trade stocks in the world, you have 1,000.

Tim: I haven’t even come close to scraping the surface of this yet.

Trent: Correct. You could say, “Well Tim Sykes is already out there.
He’s got his super-duper big site.” I can’t even remember his
URL. “It’s too full. I can’t get into it.” Baloney!

Tim: Tim Sykes is a character. This space, there is so much competition in
the trading space.

Trent: Oh, yeah.

Tim: There are tons. Everybody’s got a chat room, everybody’s got a
newsletter, and everybody’s got a thing.

Trent: Yep.

Tim: My thing was that I do interviews. There are other people out there
that do interviews and they do them for free. That’s another
thing too. People are like, “Oh, somebody’s already doing that
for free.” Believe me, if you do something, you can get people
to pay for it too. Just because someone’s doing something for
free doesn’t mean the market’s not there for a paid product.

Trent: Correct. I could not agree more. Just because you know that
there’s a free product out there doesn’t mean that the person
reading your blog or sales page or whatever already knows.
There’s already stuff that you don’t even know about.

Tim: Right. Even if they do know. There are probably people that are
members of my site that knew that there were free places they
could get interviews, but they can’t get the quality of
interviews that I do and they can’t get the people that I get to
do interviews with me. There’s a value that’s put on something
that’s paid that this is a higher quality product and it is. You
have to make sure you deliver on that. At the same time, people
are willing to pay for access to what you have for them,
regardless of whether or not there’s free stuff out there.

Trent: There’s a big psychological trigger. When you pay for
something, the propensity for you to actually use it or listen
to it goes up so much more. I think I wrote this in a post the
other day. Someone was ragging on me because I was charging to
train people and other people were doing it for free. I said to
him, “Dude, there’s enough free information on the internet that
anybody who wants to be a gazillionaire can go and do it. Why
isn’t everybody a gazillionaire already? It’s all free, it’s all
available, but it’s all over the place.”

Tim: I would tell you that the person who takes the time to write you an
email about that will never pay for your stuff, so don’t even
bother.

Trent: No.

Tim: I usually don’t even respond. Once in a while I’ll get an email that
says, “You’re full of crap.” Okay. Thanks. Thanks for that. I’m
glad you had time to send me an email like that. That person
will never buy your stuff, no matter what you try to do to
convince them, so don’t bother with it.

Trent: Nope. This wasn’t an email. It was a comment on my blog, so I
wanted to respond to the comment on the blog.

Tim: That’s another thing, too. I’m heavy handed with my comments. If you
don’t add to the conversation, you’re done, delete. I don’t
care. This is not a democracy. This is my site.

Trent: Yep.

Tim: It’s my business. I can do whatever the hell I want. If you don’t
like it, go comment on somebody else’s blog that lets you spew
your crap. To me, you don’t add to the conversation. You can
disagree with me fine, but use your real name and tell me why.
Have a decent conversation. If the first thing you jump to is,
“You’re a jerk and this is why,” then go pound sand. I’m going
to delete your comment.

Trent: Yeah, everybody who blogs, everybody gets those guys.

Tim: Yeah.

Trent: I’m at a point now where they amuse me because I know that
person is very unlikely to ever be successful at anything other
than bitching and complaining.

Tim: Yeah. Just delete them.

Trent: That’s their thing.

Tim: I never understood the idea that we’re bloggers and we’ve got to
allow all viewpoints. No I don’t. It’s my site. I can do
whatever I want.

Trent: Absolutely.

Tim: If I don’t like your comment, I’m going to delete it. If you don’t
like it go somewhere else. It’s just insane to me. This is your
site. You don’t allow someone to come in your front door and
start screaming at you.

Trent: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a great metaphor. I like that. All right.
I was going to ask you if it was on WordPress. It’s not. I was
going to ask you how you control access, because with WordPress
there are all sorts of membership options. Obviously you’re not
using any of those, so yours is all custom development, I’m
guessing.

Tim: Well, we do use aMember to do the backend of our site.

Trent: Oh, you do? Okay.

Tim: We used that from the beginning. I don’t think we’ve ever upgraded it
from that. Again, I’ve got a brother who has tweaked this thing
so much that it’s almost self-aware. Our software is so
customized just because at like 11 o’clock on a Saturday, I can
go, “Hey, Mio, wouldn’t it be cool if our site did this?” Within
half an hour, he’ll have a mockup and it’s going.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: I’m very lucky that way. Again, if I had to start all over again, I
would use stuff that’s off the shelf and just use plug-ins and
that sort of thing because there’s so much available out there.
You don’t need a lot now.

Trent: Yeah, there is. All right. Where are we here? We’re 41 minutes.
We’ve got enough time for some more questions. How about your
sales funnel? Right now, having recently switched to
Infusionsoft, which is like AWeber times 100 in terms of
horsepower, and listening to some other people… There’s a guy
by the name of Jermaine Griggs of HearAndPlay.com. It’s a site
where he teaches you how to listen to music and then learn how
to play music. He’s doing $10 million a year and it’s all
automated.

Tim: Wow. See, I never would have thought that that site had that kind of
potential. That’s fantastic.

Trent: Me neither. People are passionate about it. I listen to this
webinar with him and he’s using Infusionsoft. We use this thing
called Tags to indicate what people are interested in. After I
listened to this, the first thing I did was I wanted to be ill
because I realized what horrible, horrible job I had done with
my own email list. With AWeber, you can’t say to someone, “Tell
me how you want me to communicate with you by clicking this link
or filling out this form.” A while ago, I sent a survey to my
list saying, “Do you want me to send you an email every time I
publish a post?” Sixty seven percent of the people said yes.
Well, guess what? I kept doing it, but I was pissing 33% of the
people off every time.

Tim: Yeah.

Trent: That was one of the reasons why I realized, especially after
listening… I had been on Infusionsoft for about two and a
half, three months by the time I heard Jermaine’s talk. I was
like, “Oh my god, I’m doing such a brutal job of this. I’m
sending people emails who don’t want them too many times and
people who want them more often, I’m not sending them enough.”
I’m literally in the process of reworking my entire sales funnel
so that it is much more of the users tell me what they want and
then they get what they want and it all happens automatically.

Tim: Yeah.

Trent: What are you doing in your sales funnel?

Tim: Nothing like that. You’re right. Mine is very simple. I haven’t
gotten it. That’s probably where my shortcomings are and where I
need to improve, is not really using those kind of sales funnels
the way I should. My sales funnels are very simple. I now have
probably 30 autoresponders in AWeber that go out once a week on
a Saturday morning. When somebody joins my list, if I do nothing
else, they get 30 weeks of content without me touching it.

We’ve tried a couple of different things. I’m thinking about how we
used to do this. We used to do it where, again, the software
would run everything, and after you got about the first four
autoresponder messages, you were offered a sale, 25% off of the
lifetime membership or 20% off the annual membership. That
worked okay. We still do occasional sales where we’ll put the
site on sale.

Right now, my plan is just to give them good content every week.
Every week, along with that content, is a pitch for why they
should join the site. Some of those autoresponders are, “Here’s
a half of an interview we did that was great of last week,” or,
“Here’s a partial transcript of the interview we did two weeks
ago.” Some of that stuff is built around, “Hey this content is
great. I need to go join.” We give them plenty of chances and
links and opportunities to go join.

I’m still working on that. This is an area where I still, I
think like a lot of people, have frustration about at what
point, is it after the fifth email, is it after three weeks,
where is that kind of sweet spot where they’re ready to join?
They’ve seen what we do and they’re at the perfect position
where I need to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Trent: That’s exactly what Infusionsoft allows you to do.

Tim: Right. Maybe I should go join. I haven’t looked at it in a long time.

Trent: You should, man. It is unbelievable. Bright Ideas, when I first
came up with I want to do this interview site, I want to
interview smart business people who are killing it so that other
business people who are at the million bucks can figure out how
to get to $2 million, I didn’t know exactly who my target market
was going to be. If you think about just small business, well
that’s too vague. I’d never make a dent.

I spent all this time trying to figure out, “Is it going to be
this industry? Is it going to be that industry? Is it going to
be this revenue size or that number of employees?” I never got
anything that really lit me up. Then I was like, “Wait a minute.
What about people who are the right size to use Infusionsoft
and/or are already using Infusionsoft, but don’t know how to use
it properly? What if I just interviewed a bunch of people…”

Infusionsoft’s doing like $40 million a year, so they’ve got a
lot of customers. They’re growing like mad. There are a lot of
people using them. I’m a big advocate because it’s awesome. That
really helped me to identify, “Hey maybe my Bright Ideas are all
going to be around, at least initially until I get some serious
traction, how to really kill it with Infusionsoft.”

That’s why I’ve been watching all these webinars and doing all this
stuff. I’ll tell you, my funnel, the way it’s designed now is
like, “Hey, welcome to the funnel. Here’s how you pick a topic.”
At one point, I show them my cleaning website,
HowToCleanAnything.com. On that landing page where the video is
that I give a tour of this website, and I think that’s like
email number 2 or 3, there’s a form. It says, “Hey, do you want
to know how to build a site just like this one? If you do, fill
out this little form.” That person, vis-a-vis, say, the other
people that watch that video, they’re sticking their hand up and
saying, “Yeah, I want to buy something now.” By making them an
offer only on email, whatever it is 3 or 4, you’re not being
overly aggressive because they said they wanted to buy
something, they wanted to get that training.

Tim: Right.

Trent: Whereas all the other people, they don’t fill out the form and
you just keep on giving them more free training materials so you
don’t come across like you’re trying to sell them stuff too
soon.

Tim: Well, here’s the thing on that too. I hear that a lot. I don’t want
to shove my product down their throat right away. The problem
with that though is, and it’s different for everybody, but most
people err on the side of not selling soon enough. They think,
“I’ve got to show them six months of content and show them how
great I am before I even ask, ‘Hey, how about joining my site
and paying for some of his stuff?’” By that time, you’ve trained
them to do is to just get a bunch of free stuff from you.

Trent: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Tim: My thing for people is always, you can’t be afraid to ask for the
sale in Email 1. Every single piece of content you send out
should be good content, but never, ever send a piece of content
out without also asking for a sale. When I say asking for a
sale, it could be to join your site and pay money right there,
but it could also just be asking them to do something. You need
to train your email list so that they know, “Every time I get an
email from Tim, he is asking me to take some sort of action.”
Never, ever send an email out that doesn’t ask people to take
action because you have to train them to know that when you send
email, it is to either click a click, take a survey, or read an
article. It is to do something, not just read the email and the
email body and click delete.

Trent: Yep. By that, I assume that the vast majority of your emails,
do you put the content in the email or do you get them to click
back through to the site?

Tim: Always click them back to the site. Never, ever put the content in
the email itself. Maybe partially, but my feeling is you always
want to get them back to the site for one reason or another,
either to read what you’ve got or some other action. Sign up for
a survey, sign up for a webinar, or whatever. Always bring them
back to your site. Never put everything in the email itself.

Trent: Plus, from an exit strategy point of view, which I’m going to
get to, those clicks are going to result in more traffic to your
site, which goes into your analytics. If you get to the point
where you ever want to sell your business, you want it to look
like you’re getting as much traffic as possible. If you’re not
asking someone in an email to come back to your site, that’s
traffic that you’re not getting into your analytics report which
is going to effect the valuation of your site when you go to
sell it.

Tim: Yeah. You don’t know which emails are effective. If you don’t have
them click or take some sort of action every email, all you know
is that these emails got delivered. You might know the open
rate, but that’s it. You’re not going to know if they clicked,
because there’s nothing to click in the email, you’re not going
to know if they liked your headline, if they didn’t like your
headline, or if they thought the offer was a good offer. By
bringing them somewhere, having them click to go somewhere
outside of your email, there’s a whole set of metrics you can
then gather about that email so that you can get better at
making those emails in the future.

Trent: Yeah. Absolutely. Two things that we’re going to talk about and
then we’re going to wrap up. Ongoing maintenance of a business
like this, how much work does this take you to run now? You said
you’re publishing one new interview a month. That’s not a lot of
work.

Tim: Yeah, we’ve got so many in the archives that are good now that I’m
down to about once a month. I always promise a little then over
deliver on that, so I’m usually doing two a month now. I always
want to over deliver and under promise.

Trent: Yeah. Under promise, over deliver.

Tim: I have to find the interviewee, which in this business is not easy
because you have to find a trader who wants to talk to you and
tell you about how they trade, which is not always easy, so I
really have to do some hunting for that. That takes a lot of
time. I actually have to plan, schedule, and do the interview,
edit a little bit in terms of audio, which I don’t have to do a
whole lot now, I’ve kind of got that down to a science. Get
transcripts back and kind of clean up the transcripts a little
bit. I would say I’m maybe spending three to four hours a week
on the content itself, doing all that, and then another three to
four hours marketing the site and trying to find new lists to go
out to and that sort of thing. You’re looking at about six to 12
hours a week on that site right now. That’s kind of average.

It really depends. I’ll go a week where I’m maybe on vacation
and spend literally zero time on it and then come back and spend
12 hours or 15 hours the next week. It really depends. It’s kind
of what you want to do. We’re at that point where I can spend as
little or as much time on it as I want, which is really where I
want to be.

Trent: That’s the whole reason why I love internet businesses and why
everyone who’s listening to this podcast is probably listening
to this podcast, because they want to get to a point where they
can have a business that keeps bringing the money in even though
they’re not going to work every day.

Tim: Right.

Trent: You mentioned something that I was meaning to ask about earlier
and now you’ve reminded me. How do you get your guests? For me,
pretty simple. For you, they’re way off the radar.

Tim: Yeah. It’s the hardest part of the business, but it’s also why people
are willing to pay what they pay for it.

Trent: Sure.

Tim: A lot of them are people that I know specifically from the industry,
so I’ve met them at an event or I’ve met them through a friend
of a friend who’s a trader. I’ll ask a friend of a friend of a
friend to do me a favor and help me get this person to talk to
me on the phone. It takes some time to get these people. There’s
nothing in it for these folks, most of them, to talk to me, so
why the hell would they?

Trent: You don’t pay them?

Tim: No, I don’t pay them. A lot of times, they are doing their friend who
knows me a favor and just talking to me on the phone. Other
times, they’re passionate about trading so they like talking
about it. They don’t get a chance to talk about trading a lot,
so they’re willing to talk to me about it. Maybe they had a
mentor or somebody that helped them initially and this is kind
of their way of paying that back to the industry. Everybody kind
of does it for their own reason.

That was a common question that I got from people when I started
talking about doing interviews as a business. Why would somebody
talk to you? I think people underestimate the ego factor of
being asked to be interviewed.

Trent: Oh, yeah.

Tim: There’s something there.

Trent: Absolutely.

Tim: Everybody’s got an ego.

Trent: We all do.

Tim: I think they underestimate that. They underestimate the fact that
people don’t have to be prepared for it. It’s a topic they know
already. It’s not like they have to prepare slides. All they
have to do is get on the phone or Skype with me and talk to me
for 30 minutes. There’s not a ton of work involved for them.
It’s actually a lot easier than people think to get people on
the phone.

Now, if you want to go out and you have a media property about
how to get promotion and your first interview is Oprah, you’re
going to have a tough time. If you set your sights kind of in
that middle area where you can get connections, where people
know you, that’s going to be your easiest thing. Then eventually
you probably could work your way up to Oprah. You’ve got to be
realistic about it too.

Trent: Yep. All right. Final thing, the exit strategy, which any
veteran entrepreneur will tell you they actually define at the
beginning when they’re creating the business because so much of
what you’re going to create, how you’re going to brand it,
position it, name it, and all that stuff depends on what are you
going to do with it when you don’t want to do it anymore. Tell
me about how that went for you guys.

Tim: This is the toughest part of having interviews as a content base of
your business, in that you become the site probably more so than
another site that is kind of nameless, faceless, just puts up
content. At the same time, the reason people sign up is because
you’re not nameless faces. They’re connecting with you and your
experience and your knowledge. It’s a tough balance.

We’ve owned longer than any other site we’ve had. I usually get
bored with a site after about two years and want to dump it and
move on to something else. We’ve had this site for a long time.
Two years is around the time when I’ve started a site, built it,
and sold it off. Started a site, built it, and sold it off. I am
not ADHD or anything, but I get bored quickly. The moment I’m
bored with whatever I’ve started, I pick up the phone and try to
find a buyer. That’s just what I do.

Is that the best way to try and have an exit strategy? No. The
best way is probably to have a buyer come to you and then you
start the negotiation. It’s usually not the best negotiating
point to call the buyer and say, “How about buying my site?”

Trent: Yeah, definitely not.

Tim: That’s probably not the best position to start with, but that’s how
I’ve sold every one of my businesses, websites, trade shows,
conferences, and things that I’ve started.

What is the exit strategy? I have to admit, I haven’t thought a
lot about it for Trader Interviews. I figure at some point, my
sense is that I’ll sell it to maybe a brokerage firm who wants
to add the list of archives into their educational portion of
their site to help generate more trades for the company. That’s
probably where I see it going. At some point I’ll have to kind
of extricate myself. Maybe bring in a guest interviewer
occasionally to kind of extricate myself as the host and the
face of the site.

It won’t be easy. It’s easier to get rid of a site where there’s
not one person who’s the name and face of it. At the same time,
you can’t build a site that is nameless and faceless as easily.
It’s kind of a weird thing that you have to deal with when it
comes to that.

Trent: Well, I think you can start off as an individual, as we all do,
and then you can expand the team. Instead of about Tim, it’s
about us. Then there’s you at the top of the list and other
people. Eventually you just keep on moving yourself down off the
list until you’re not on the page even at all anymore,

Tim: Right.

Trent: Then the user base is accustomed to the interviews by this
person or that person or the other person. Are you doing a lot
of networking or any networking now with people in the target
buyer audience to say, “This is what I’m doing,” just so that
you’re on their radar screen?

Tim: I’m doing that anyway because I’m still affiliated with the Traders
Expo, which is an event I started and sold in 2004 to Money
Show.

Trent: Yeah.

Tim: I still go to all those shows. I do a lot of video interviews for
them. I help them with the website. I spend a lot of time on
MoneyShow.com. I’m still in that business. Kind of indirectly,
I’m in contact with all those people anyway. At some point, I’ll
take advantage of that network and reach out to some people that
I think are buyers and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about moving on
from this site. What do you think? Can this be of value to your
customers?”

Almost always, because you are the face of it, it’s going to
include some sort of employment agreement where you have to stay
on for a while at least afterwards to kind of make that
transition. That transition period may take longer because you
are the name and face of the show. As long as you can develop
that network from the beginning so that you can have a feel for
who would buy this, I think that’s smart. At some point I’ll
have to start thinking about that more.

Trent: Yeah. Well, Tim, I want to thank you very much. We’ve closed in
on our hour here. I want to thank you very much for making the
time to get on Skype with me to do this interview. If anyone
wants to get a hold of you, they’ve heard the URL already. It’s
TraderInterviews.com. Are there any other URLs where people
would want to be able to get a hold of you or any other methods?

Tim: Sure. I’ll give you my email. I’ll give you my cell phone. I give it
out to everybody else, why not?

Trent: All right.

Tim: It’s Tim@TraderInterviews.com. Here’s my cell phone 949-677-4905. I
love talking about internet marketing. I can’t spend all day
doing it, but if you call me we can chat for a few minutes and
talk about making money online.

Trent: All right, Tim. That’s awesome. Thanks very much.

Tim: You got it.

Trent: Okay, folks. This is a wrap for Session Number 33 of the Online
Income Lab podcasts. If you’re listening to this on anywhere
other than my blog, to get to this interview, it’s
OnlineIncomeLab.com/session033. If you are listening to this on
iTunes, please go and give some honest feedback of what you
thought of the episode. Hopefully it’s a four- or five-star
episode. That’d be wonderful if you would do that. If you’re on
the blog, if you think this is something that your friends or
your social network buddies should hear, if you click that tweet
button, that Facebook button, or the Google+, or any of those
buttons that you want to, that would be absolutely terrific.

I want to thank you for listening. It’s really a pleasure for me
to do these interviews. I love the fact that you’re a reader and
a subscriber and I look forward to producing more content for
you. If you have questions, just use the comment form that is
down below this episode. I read them all myself and I reply to
them all. If yours is a hate mail, I’m just going to delete it
so don’t even waste your time.

Tim: Exactly.

Trent: All right. That’s it for this episode. We’ll talk to you again
soon.

Announcer: That’s it for now. Thanks for listening to the Online Income
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Online Income Lab podcast.

Trent: Hey everybody. This is Trent with Session Number 32 of the
Online Income Lab podcast. On this episode, we are going to be
talking with an email marketing strategist who works with some
pretty big name corporations by the name of Nathan Betz. I ran
across Nathan originally when I read about him on the
KISSmetrics blog. He had an article which talked about six ways
that you’re undermining your email marketing campaigns. I’ve
talked on the blog a lot about tactics in the past. In this
episode, we’re going to talk more about strategy. It’s so
incredibly important to get it right because if you don’t get
your strategy right, all of your tactics won’t matter and your
email marketing will not be effective.

All right. Let’s jump into the episode and welcome Nathan to the
show. Oh, and one last thing before we jump into the show, make
sure you hang around until the very end of the podcast because
we start to talk about some very specific tactics that you can
use which work well with the strategy that we spend the bulk of
the time talking about. All right, Nathan. Well, thank you so
much for joining me on this call to talk about all things email
marketing. Welcome to the show.

Nathan: Thanks, Trent. It’s great to be here.

Trent: I ran across you when you had written a guest post on I believe
it was KISSmetrics, if my memory serves me correctly. That’s the
blog that is owned by, now I’m having a brain fart, Neil Patel,
who is a very smart, well-known guy. I really liked your article
and that’s why I asked you to be here on the podcast with me.

In today’s show what we’re going to talk about is email
marketing strategy as opposed to email marketing tactics. Let me
just clarify what I mean. The tactics, we’re not going to get
into how to set up AWeber or how to set up an autoresponder, per
se, like the actual technical details. Instead, we’re just going
to go up a level and we’re going to talk about strategy because
strategy is so incredibly important. Maybe, Nathan, you want to
chime in because you’re more of an expert than I am and that’s
why you’re on the show. Why is strategy so important?

Nathan: Strategy is important because it answers all of the big
questions first. I like to think of life as a series of
questions and if we ask the important ones first, then when we
drill down and get into the details, we’ve already kind of
established the principles. We’ve already taken care of the
50,000-foot view and now we’re just kind of filling in the data
here and there.

When it comes to strategy and emails, the strategy is answering
questions like, “Who am I speaking to? What am I selling? How am
I going to approach my audience? What do I want them to do as a
result of reading this email? When am I going to send it? How
best to appeal to them?” Like you say, they’re not tactical.
They’re just dealing with the first things first. Then once we
have those things taken care of, then we can drill down into the
tactics. What word I am I going to use? Blah, blah, blah. All of
the tiny little stuff. Strategy is so important.

Let me just add this. Strategy, for some reason, seems to be one
of the most overlooked things in marketing, especially in small
companies or small departments within companies. All they want
to do is send the email, they want to build the site, they went
to send the letter, and they’re not really asking the big
questions of why is it that we’re doing this? Who is it that
we’re trying to reach? Strategy is key, but strategy is
frequently forgotten. That’s kind of why I harp on it. It’s what
I always talk about with my clients. They’re happy with that.
I’m happy with it too. It’s, again, first things first.

Trent: I couldn’t agree more. Obviously, I’ve been an email marketer
now for maybe just over a year. I didn’t think a lot about
strategy in the beginning because I didn’t really know who my
audience was and I didn’t know what I wanted to say to them.
Everyone said, “Hey man, you’ve got to build a list,” so I
thought, “Oh, okay, well, I’d better build a list.” In my
previous business, we didn’t do any email marketing at all. I
never had a single email address, and that was a huge failing on
my part as the CEO of that company, but I just didn’t know any
better.

Nathan: Right. Well, we learn things a step at a time.

Trent: We do indeed. I find for me the best way, of course, to learn
is to do. I think I would have been remiss if I had read all
these books on email strategy and spent months and months
studying it before I ever put up an opt-in form. I wouldn’t
encourage any of the listeners here to go that route.

The reason I asked you on the show is because I was really
impressed, like I said, with what you wrote in that article
about strategy. The thing with email marketing is, from my very
basic understanding of it, it can be the most powerful tool in
the world to do good or evil, to build the relationship or to
destroy it. I have definitely made some mistakes in that regard
and now I have to fix those mistakes. I’ll tell you, it would
have been a whole lot better had I not made them in the first
place.

Now, one of the things that I forgot to do, no one knows who you
are. I forgot to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit
about your background and what you do and who your clients are.
I think it’s important that we talk about that for a moment so
that the listeners have context for the question of “why am I
listening to this guy?”

Nathan: Absolutely. I’ve been writing for a very, very long time. I
kind of discovered that I was good at it in college. Then
immediately after that I was off to a job in a publishing
company. I started doing a lot of long-form writing and fairly
technical writing to a fairly educated set of people. Then I
started interacting with a lot of friends who were starting up
companies. I was living in Orange County in California at the
time. It was around 2005 and things were hot. They needed people
to do some writing for their customers, to help them connect
with their customers, to make the match, to persuade people that
the services they were offering were the services that the
customer needed. I just kind of gave it a shot. I dabbled in it
before and fairly successfully, but not as my main thing.
Honestly, when I got married, I realized, “Man, I need more
cash.”

I started doing this on the side, one thing led to another, and
pretty soon I quit the publishing company and just started doing
this full time. Basically, what I do is I help companies and
individuals and educational institutions. One of my big clients
right now is Johns Hopkins University out here in Baltimore,
Maryland. What I help them do is identify who it is they’re
speaking with and kind of develop a way for them to have an
electronic relationship with them or a relationship in print in
a way that encourages the audiences to think positively about
the company that I’m representing, to engage with them, to take
action, and to make transactions.

Trent: How do you do that? If you want to use Johns Hopkins as an
example or maybe to make this more relevant to my audience, we
could make me the guinea pig, anybody who’s a blogger and owns a
list. How do I do that?

Nathan: How do you do that? Well, you determine what it is… Are you
talking tactics or strategies right here?

Trent: Let’s go with strategies. Let’s just keep it up at that high
level.

Nathan: Good. Here I could even refer you to some of the principles
that I outlined in that blog post that kind of caught your
attention, Trent. Even though these questions are oriented
toward email campaigns, actually these principles apply to any
form of communication that any business owner is ever going to
do. In fact, it even governs the communication I have with my
family. It comes down to basically asking six very, very
important questions of what you want to be accomplishing and how
you want to be interacting with folks.

Trent, if I were advising you personally, the first question I
would ask is, “Why is it you that you are interested in
communicating with people? What is it that you want to tell
them? What is it about yourself or your company or your
enterprise that people need to know about? What makes you
different? What makes you unique? What’s motivating this
communication?” That’s kind of the first thing I’d advise. Ask
why.

Trent: Let me answer that because this is an area where I’ve made a
pretty big realization as of lately. I credit Pat Flynn for this
because he had a post recently that really had an influence on
me. Everyone in this space hammers home the point “the money’s
in the list. The money’s in the list. You use your list to
monetize. You use your list to promote products. You use it that
way.” I think most everyone just assumes that that’s what you
do. I did it. I definitely did that. It worked to a certain
degree, no question, but there’s a price to be paid in the long
term for any maybe short-term gains that you realize as a result
of that.

Pat’s approach, which I really liked, was he uses his email to
build the relationship. Build, build, build the relationship and
think about when people are coming to your blog, what are they
trying to learn? What are most of them trying to figure out?
Where are they in the learning cycle? Then how can you use a
stream of emails to help them move through that pipeline of
learning? Monetization is the natural result of that. You’ll get
paid and Pat gets paid very, very well. That was something that
I didn’t put near enough thought into because I didn’t know any
better. Everybodytells me to get a list and promote offers to
the list, so off we go.

Nathan: Right. This kind of comes down to another principle which is
considering very carefully who it is that you’re writing to, and
who it is that you’re communicating with. A mentor of mine once,
actually very early on when I was writing, he said, to use your
words or Pat Flynn’s words to build that relationship, “Unless
you can envision the person you’re writing to in your mind’s eye
and really develop a relationship with that person, form a
relationship through the email, through the book, through the
brochure, where you become trusted to them because you’re
offering them useful information and you’re doing it in a way
that they can respect. It’s not bombastic. It’s not hitting them
over the head. If you can convince one person through forming a
relationship with them, then you can influence a million
people.”

That’s one thing I frequently recommend to my audience and to my
clients. Write to one. Write to one person successfully. What is
it that’s going to move them as a person, not as an email
address, but as a person? That goes a long way. Then you’re not
destroying the relationship in the long term. Like you said,
you’re not burning bridges. You’re not shooting off one or two
emails. Those two emails, while they are getting a little bit of
bang for the buck upfront, you may be ending up alienating more
people in the long term than you are gaining people in the long
term. That’s counterproductive and that’s not what we want to
do.

Trent: Oh, yeah. There is absolutely no question. That is a powerful
thought. If you can influence one person, you can influence a
million. I’m just in the process of reexamining, literally after
I stop recording this podcast with you, my entire email sequence
because I think I might end up junking a whole bunch of it just
because I’m starting to realize that I need to speak to my
audience more like I would just be speaking to a friend of mine,
only I’m using email as the medium to do that. I think I’m
pretty guilty of not doing that so far.

I tried to, but in hindsight, having read your article and
listened to Pat, and just looking at the data of my own email
activities, it’s becoming fairly obvious that I think there are
two distinctly different ways that you can choose to run your
list.

There’s the camp that says, “Mail it every day. Send an offer every
day.” There’s the camp that says, “No, that’s not the right way
to do it. Use it to build the relationship.”

Nathan: Yeah. That gives actually another interesting question. Whether
or not someone sends an email every day or whether they send it
twice a year really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish
and it depends on the audience.

There is a list that I used to subscribe to. It was a prominent
copywriter. He would send out great information every single
day. It was the kind of thing you read and every single day
you’d get an epiphany. I’m sorry. For the life of me I can’t
remember who that was now. It was a few years ago.

In that case, a daily email worked because it was a daily
thought that I needed as someone who was as entrenched and doing
a lot of writing. He knew who I was and he knew who he his
readers were so he did it every day. If we’re pitching a
product, a service, podcast, webcast, or something like that, a
daily email is just a pain.

Trent: Well, I would agree with you 99% of the time, but I’m thinking
of AppSumo as one exception to that rule. AppSumo promotes an
offer every single day, but they tell you that upfront. Everyone
who gets on that list is expecting that, so they’re okay with
it.

Nathan: Right. I think that’s an exception that proves the rule. What
that’s doing is you’re establishing that bond with your audience
early, you’re understanding them, and they’re understanding you.
There’s none of these surprises. That gets back to the principle
of knowing your audience and, in a certain sense, getting them
to know you, making this bond early. Then, yeah, the
relationship goes smoothly because everything is known. There’s
no, “Ha! Got you,” which people hate in an email, which makes me
mark it as spam all the time. I suspect I’m not alone.

Trent: I think that’s mistake number one from your article. You don’t
have a clearly defined idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.
What comes next?

Nathan: Well, the second question, which we’ve also talked about, is
“who am I trying to reach?” When it comes to building your list,
let’s say you already have your list. You have to think, “Okay,
what is it that holds this list together? Who are the people
that I’m talking to? What are their values? What are their
expectations?”

Trent: How do I find all that stuff out? That’s great to ask the
question, but how do I get the answer?

Nathan: There’s a number of ways to get the question and it depends on
how you’re building your list. One way is if people are opting
in to an email or something like that, you already know a lot
about them. You know that people want information that you’re
offering. Well, let’s see.

Trent: For example, I’ve got, in my case currently, my lead magnet is
an invitation to a free video course where I’m going to
basically teach people how to replicate what I’ve done with my
blog. The mere fact that they’re opting in, they’re raising
their hand to say, “Hey, I want to do what you’re doing.” Not
every single person is going to be a carbon copy of the other.
I’ve got a bit of a persona. I know that they’re probably
working for someone else. I know that they probably would like
to have a successful online presence. I know that they would
probably like to be able to quit their job. Just based upon blog
comments, I know that more of them are men than women. How do I
learn more? Should I be putting emails into my sequence that
say, “Hey, how can I help you further? Tell me more about
yourself”? What do you do?

Nathan: That’s one way to do it. You mentioned blog comments. Social
listening is a really good way to find out more about your
audience. The same people who are opting in are probably the
same people who are having similar conversations elsewhere on
the web.

Trent: Social listening. You’ll need to tell me what that is.

Nathan: That came out a lot when Twitter was first changing the world
we live in. That is when a company, say PetCo or Kmart, they’re
listening to what their customers are saying about their
products, what they’re saying out there in the Twittersphere,
what they’re saying on their blogs, what they’re saying in
LinkedIn conversations perhaps, forums of various kinds, and
comments at blogs that discuss the type of things that you’re
doing. What you can do is develop a persona based not on direct
interaction that you’re having with the people on your list, but
with people like them elsewhere. What you’re doing is
triangulating your way to developing a fuller persona for them.

Trent: Let’s give a practical example of that. Somebody is reading a
blog about how to make money on the Internet, so they’re reading
my blog or somebody else’s. How am I going to use Twitter, for
example?

Nathan: One good way is to follow hashtags that are common in the
audience that is following the kind of conversations that you’re
having. I don’t know what hashtags might be common there or what
keywords might be common. You just do searches on those, you
follow those conversations, and you find out what’s important to
those people, to the people who are using those words or those
hashtags.

Trent: Got it.

Nathan: That’s one common way. I had a client who was doing a lot in
certain aspects of public safety, so I just started following a
lot of keywords and started following a lot of hashtags and
setting up searches to find out what’s important to these people
because I want to meet them where they’re at. I don’t want to
talk to them about what I think they’re concerned about when
actually they’re concerned about something else. I simply did
that by hashtags [inaudible 21:43] and all that kind of stuff.
You find out a lot of information very fast, but it does take a
lot of reading and a lot of listening upfront. Then you kind of
get a good feel for it and you can move on.

Trent: Yeah. Part of the research phase. All right.

Nathan: Yeah.

Trent: Now we have a handle on who we’re trying to influence. The next
step is we’ve got to figure out what we want to say to them?

Nathan: Yeah. That’s one way to ask it. What do I want to say to them?
The other one is you can ask it from their perspective and what
is it that they need. What is it that they want? Again, this has
to do a little bit with the personas, and figuring out who it is
that we’re trying to reach. Yeah, what is it that we want to say
to them based on what we know about them? If you have a blog and
something moving about how to make money on the web, kind of
pick your messages. Pick what you want to say and stay with
those things.

For example, based on what you want to accomplish, which is
question number one, why am I doing this in the first place, and
based on who it is that I’m in this conversation with, which is
the second question I talked about in the blog article, who am I
trying to reach, develop maybe five or six, or probably better,
even less than that, three or four key things that are important
to them and that drive your business. Then focus religiously on
those key messages.

Whenever you send an email, make sure that it ties back to some
of these key ideas that you’re trying to convey, the key actions
that you’re trying to inspire in the hearts and minds of your
readers. What that does is create brand consistency and it
creates a sense of expectation in the part of the people you’re
talking to as to what they can get from Trent. You get all these
multiple brand impressions with them too, with these emails and
on the blog and these tweets. They’re all really talking about
the same types of things. Over time, that creates quite an
impression and people are much more willing to engage and
transact at that point.

I kind of summed it up as one reason why people’s email
campaigns and why their electronic communications aren’t working
is essentially they’re mixing their messages. Today, they want
to talk about widgets, tomorrow they want to talk about
doomaflatchies, and the day after that they want to talk about
thingamajigs. Eventually what happens is nobody knows really
what it is that you’re doing, they don’t know what your core
offering is, and they don’t know what differentiates you.

Trent: I talked earlier about making mistakes in my own email
marketing. I think that’s definitely one of the areas where I’ve
done it. In listening to Pat recently, he talked about, as I
mentioned, where your prospect is or your subscriber in the
learning curve of they came to your blog for a reason. They’re
trying to learn something. They’re trying to learn how to make
money online or build an authority site or whatever it is. You
need to think about, especially when you’re designing your
sequence, maybe not so much for your broadcasts but with your
sequence, how you’re going to help them move through the class,
so to speak.

Your sequence isn’t going to last forever. Maybe you’ve got 10
emails. Maybe you’ve got 20 emails. At some point, you’ve taught
them everything that you want to teach them with respect to why
they signed up in the first place. It might behoove you, and
this is kind of a question I’m asking you, to segment your list
in such a way so that maybe the folks that are in this sequence
aren’t getting any broadcasts from you yet because the
broadcasts might be a mixed message. I don’t know if congruent
is the right word, but it’s not in line with the sequence that
you very carefully created for them to go through. Maybe there
are 10 steps that you want them to go through.

Nathan: Yeah. I think that’s right on the money. If you know your
audience, you know what you want them to do, and you’ve set up
your sequence to kind handhold your audience to a certain point,
but if you’re creating dissonance by shooting out other stuff
that is not cogent to this initial relationship-building stage,
you’re really shooting yourself in your foot. I couldn’t agree
more.

During that initial phase in the sequencing, definitely just
keep to that. Let the message build, get them to where you want
them, and then they could be part of the blasts or the ongoing
communications. I agree. Don’t mix those messages early on.

Trent: Obviously some tools, this is a little bit tactical of course,
make doing that a whole lot easier than others. I know that with
Infusionsoft I can segment like mad and even let my subscribers
self-segment. That’s one of the things that I’m going to, as
I’ve learned about that capability, build that more into my
system, where I say more or less, “Hey, welcome to my list. I’m
going to give you 10 emails. This is what I’m going to teach
you. By the way, if you want emails every time I publish a blog
post, go fill in this little form or even just click this link
and that will notify my system that you want those broadcasts,
even though they don’t go in with the reason that you signed
up.”

If at some point you’re thinking, “Hey, I don’t want those
broadcasts anymore,” you don’t want someone to unsubscribe from
your entire list. You want them to be able to just re-segment
themselves so they’re only ever getting what it is that they
want to get from you.

I don’t have personal experience with every tool on the market.
I know a lot of people use AWeber; I don’t know if there’s a way
within AWeber to do that or not. We won’t get into that in this
podcast, but I would encourage people to, if they can’t figure
it out, call AWeber and ask them. Say, “Hey, how can I segment?
How can I do this better?”

Nathan: Yeah. Those tools are great because, like you say, they allow
people to really self-select. They’re helping themselves and
you’re helping them help themselves by self-selecting there.
That’s going to help you address your audience’s needs a lot
more specifically because by selecting this list and not that
list they’re telling you something about themselves. That’s
going to help you hit them later on.

Trent: That’s exactly why I switched. AWeber, I was only spending $50
a month. Now I’m spending $300 a month. It was for precisely for
that one… There’s a whole bunch of extra functionality which I
get, which is a total bonus, but that was the big reason I
switched as I’ve realized that I need to do a better job of
letting people tell me what it is that they want to hear. It’s
one thing to have the capabilities, but then you also have to
figure out how to map it all. I didn’t get that right at the
first attempt either, which is, again, why I had to go back and
make it better.

Nathan: The learning cycle never stops, does it?

Trent: No.

Nathan: I’m hoping that one day I wake up and I know it all.

Trent: Yeah. For any of my subscribers that are listening to this, I
promise to do better.

Nathan: Trent promises, everybody!

Trent: I am going to make it so that you only get what you want to get
and you don’t ever get anything that you don’t want to get. It’s
really important. I’m in this for the long haul and I want
people to think, “Oh, wow. Cool. Trent sent an email. I really
want to open it,” not, “Oh man, another one? Really? Delete.”

This leads us to, you called it reason number four, your style
is putting people off. Why don’t we talk about that? Clearly, we
know that my style has occasionally put people off and I
probably will continue because not everyone’s going to like you.
That’s just the reality.

Nathan: Yeah, you can’t please all the people all the time. We
shouldn’t expect that everything we send is going to be warmly
received by us. By and large, we need to make as much of our
audience as happy as we can. A lot of this comes down to if we
send that email and it really turns people off, that means that
we haven’t asked an important question. That is, “How is my
audience really thinking? What is it that they value?” This gets
back again to who is it we’re trying to reach.

Once we know who we’re trying to reach, if we can learn to
really think like them, put ourselves in their shoes, it’s
really almost a Zen-like experience that as a marketer, or as
someone who’s at least engaging in marketing activity, really
has to turn themselves off and kind of really sit there at your
desk, put your feet up, and stop thinking like you. Just think,
“If I were a person, I’m working, I’m trying to find a way to
have more time to make money on the side, eventually to work
independently, I have two kids, I have a dog, I have a mortgage,
I’d really like to buy a vacation house in Rehoboth Beach in
Delaware.” Just put yourself into that person and think, “What
kind of email am I going to want to receive?”

The example I included on this most recent blog post was a great
email from Lowe’s in which they’ve got their audience really
well figured out. That is people with fathers, which is
everybody, and people who wanted to do something for their dad
on Father’s Day but for whatever reason they didn’t get around
to it, they didn’t do it, and now they’re feeling bad. Lowe’s
put themselves in the shoes of that person. That, by the way,
was me this year.

I get this email. I believe it was actually sent early morning
on Father’s Day at 6:02 a.m. Eastern Time. You wake up, it’s
Father’s Day, you’re thinking, “Oh man, I didn’t do anything
this year.” I got an email that says, “It’s Father’s Day?!
Relax.” Then what they do is this short little paragraph,
“Father’s Day, it snuck up on you, didn’t it? Don’t worry. If
you’re reading this, you still have plenty of time to snag an e-
gift card for Dad. Even better, online.”

What it does is they manage to understand who their audience
was, what they needed to do, what they wanted, and then Lowe’s
really delivered. It immediately caught my attention. I didn’t
happen to act on this particular email, but I think it’s a great
example of how someone can understand their audience and then
write and communicate with them in a way that is going to
inspire the audience to action.

Trent: You gave another really great example of that in the article of
Apple coming out with their campaign for the college kids. I’ll
let you tell the story. Talk about knowing your audience. It’s a
perfect example.

Nathan: Yeah. Apple is really good at everything they do. I wish I
could be like them. I got this email. This was on June 18th, so
a little less than a month ago. It was on a Monday morning. I
was at my desk at the time, I get an email from Apple, and it
says, “A special offer for college students.” I take a look at
it. I like to learn from this stuff, especially from people who
do it well, so I took a look at this email.

What really caught my attention, Trent, was I looked at the date
stamp. Think about this. This is an email intended for people
who are going to be going away to college. The date stamp is
Monday, June 18th, 2012, at 10:57 a.m. Eastern in the morning.

Let’s reverse engineer this a little bit. Apple knew that the
people they needed to appeal to in this email, they’re basically
high school seniors or people who are in college. This is
basically the time when these high school seniors have just
graduated, like literally three days ago, June 15th, that
Saturday or that Friday.

Trent: They partied all weekend

Nathan: They partied all weekend. Now it’s Monday morning, late
morning. They’re kind of waking up from their stupor, they reach
over and they pick up their phone because that’s the first thing
we all do in the morning, and they open their email and here’s
this email that says, “A special offer for college students,”
from Apple. These kids who just got a boatload of graduation
money, they’re about to run away to college, and they don’t know
what to do for the summer.

Anyway, they get this email that says, “College prerequisites:
buy a Mac for college and receive $100 to spend on apps, books,
music, videos, and more.” Mac knew exactly who they were going
for. They knew when to time the email. They knew it was going to
inspire these people to action. I don’t have access to Apple
stats, but I guarantee you they got action based on this email.

Trent: I’m sure they did.

Nathan: Reading this email, it was like epiphany after epiphany. I got
so excited, so I wrote about it in my blog post.

Trent: What we’re really talking about here is knowing your customer.
I guess we backed up a little bit, but it’s this concept of the
persona. For the audience that’s listening, I want to introduce
this idea to you. You’re wondering, “Well, I don’t know who my
audience is.” Nathan, you can tell me if I’m going off on the
deep end on this, but it would seem to me like it would be a
really good idea to get a pen and paper out and define, “Well, I
want my audience to be a guy between 35 and 40. He is single, he
lives in a city, and he’s got a dog.” If you keep all of your
messages congruent to what that guy would want, first of all,
that guy’s going to respond. You’re going to attract more of
that guy because that guy has friends that are like that guy.

When he tweets, when he social shares or does whatever he’s
going to do, because you’ve got so specific with who you’re
going after, you can ignore everybody else, and you can really
laser target yourself in on that exact person. Then you can
write all of your messages like you’re literally talking to the
dude with the dog who lives in the apartment in the city.

Nathan: Exactly. Trent, I don’t think you’re going too far at all. That
is just a great thing to do. You sit down, write out the list,
and then talk to that guy. Like I said in the beginning, if you
can win him, you can win a million like him.

Trent: Yeah. There are lots and lots of guys like that guy.

Nathan: There are a lot of guys living in cities with dogs between 35
and 40.

Trent: Yeah. If you have a list of 30,000 devoted people, you’re going
to be doing pretty well. There’s easily 300,000 of those guys,
or many more than that, I’m sure. Keep on moving strategy-wise
here.

Nathan: All right. Again, just a quick recap. It’s why am I sending the
email? Why am I communicating? Who am I trying to reach? What do
they need and how am I going to do it in terms of style?

The fifth question is I write a blog post, I send an email, and
I communicate in whatever way is most appealing to my audience.
This is a key thing, especially about direct-response writing of
any kind or marketing of any kind, really what people want to do
is they want to act. The interested party does not just want to
read about the widget. They want to find out more about it and
they want to take action regarding it. Whether that’s just more
information gathering, whether it’s a transaction, or whether
it’s an actual monetary purchase, they want to do something. The
web and the electronic media is action oriented. It’s not
primarily information oriented.

The question is, “Where am I going to direct recipients to this
communication who respond to the call to action?” You could
write the most persuasive email in the world, but if you don’t
give people something to do at the end of that email, then you
have just moved everyone to passion and then you’re spilling it
on the ground. They’re inspired. Help them do something.

One of the best ways to do that is have a landing page where
they can transact in a way that allows them to follow up on the
interest that you stoked when you sent them the email, the blog
post, whatever it is, the tweet, or the Facebook message. Give
them a place to go to do what they want to do. Chances are they
will do it, even if it’s a small proportion. In direct response,
the percentages for success are actually pretty low. The good
response may only be 1%, 2%, or 3%. The difference between 3%
and 0% is infinite. Again, when we write these communications,
we have to do it in a way that immediately directs them to the
place where they can engage in the transaction you want them to
engage in.

Trent: I just wanted to jump in here with a thought. If you’re
listening to this and you have a new blog and a small list, the
transaction you want to drive them to is not a monetary
transaction. It is, “I want you to tweet this for me. I want you
to share this for me. I want you to help me get a bigger
audience.” If you’re giving people really good quality stuff and
you’re writing to address the specific problems of a specific
audience, meaning your persona, they’re going to help you out. I
just tried something the other day and I’m getting more retweets
than I’ve ever gotten before.

Nathan: Yeah. Let me give you another good example here. Again, if
people want to keep score, this is in the blog post that Trent
and I are talking about at KISSmetrics. That’s the blast from J.
Crew. First of all, they know their persona. The persona here is
probably 20-something women with fairly good income who are kind
of hip, kind of relaxed, but also kind of traditional. It’s an
email about clothes for their wedding or for their bridal party.
The action they inspired here, the call to action is, “Shop the
latest Weddings and Parties Collection.” When you click on that,
it takes you specifically to J. Crew where you can do all that
kind of shopping.

One interesting thing, and this is exactly what Trent is talking
about here, is right after that in smaller print it says, “Know
someone who’s engaged? Forward this email to a bride-to-be.”
There, they’re hitting two audiences. The first audience they
want to inspire a financial transaction. For the second
audience, it’s people who aren’t necessarily a woman in their
20s who’s going to get married in the next three or six months.
That audience is people who know people who are in those shoes.
All you want to do is forward the email. You click the email and
it forwards it to your friends. You’re inspiring people not just
to buy something, but to share the message.

It’s not a surprise, Trent, that you got a bump in traffic or a
bump in retweets by crafting tweets in that direction, knowing
what you want them to do, and then they’ll do it.

Trent: So long as the relationship is in place.

Nathan: Right.

Trent: Which goes right back to the beginning of our whole
conversation.

Nathan: Right. Actually, let me jump in and say one thing at this
point. When we’re communicating with people where once we’ve
built the trust and now we’re trying to inspire transaction or
inspire an action, and this is tactical but it’s something
everybody always forgets to do, so forgive me, that is tell them
what you want them to do. If you want them to click, then tell
them click. If you want them to retweet, then say retweet. If
you want them to buy, then say buy. If you want them to shop,
then tell them to shop. People are busy. They want to do
something, so tell them to do it, and the chances are, they’re
going to take up the suggestion and they’re going to do it. No
need to beat around the bush when you’re communicating online.
Just ask.

Trent: Yeah. They’re on your list for a reason.

Nathan: Yeah. They’re interested already.

Trent: They volunteered to be there. We’re closing in the hour. We’re
at three-quarters of an hour here so I’m going to start winding
up, but I want to get a little tactical here for a minute. First
of all, how do you figure out when you should send an email?
Clearly everybody gets a lot of email every day. It’s a never
ending, relentless waterfall of messages. Sometimes very clearly
you’re going to be better to send than others.

How I’ve solved this problem is I start to think about my
persona. Who’s the guy opening this? I know that he’s got a job
during the day, so lately I tend to not send the emails during
the day. I’ve tended to send them typically at 9 p.m. Eastern,
which would be 6 p.m. Western. I’m kind of getting that evening
bit for both coasts. I wouldn’t call that an overly scientific
approach. It was more like a common sense approach. Is there a
better way of doing it than that?

Nathan: Trent, the way I do it is a lot the way you do it. I suppose
you could do it more scientifically. Again, this gets back to
the principle that was relayed to me by one of my early editors,
and that is just know your audience. If you can get inside their
heads and think like them, that’s going to be a lot more
valuable than some guy somewhere telling you that people of a
certain kind prefer to read emails at a certain time.

You know your audience better than most people probably do. If
you time emails in a way that is commonsensical to you,
commonsensical to them, there will be a response. For men
between 35 and 40 living in the city, it’s common sense. Don’t
send it Friday night at 9 o’clock. You don’t need a scientific
study. You don’t need a Gartner research paper that you pay $400
for to tell you that. That’s common sense. I’m just going to
pull an example out of nowhere. If you’re trying to inspire
people to, I don’t know, buy Thanksgiving-themed napkins, don’t
do it in December.

Trent: Well, yeah, I think that one’s fairly obvious.

Nathan: It’s fairly obvious, but that principle really applies. All it
requires is a little bit of hard thought upfront. Just think,
“Who am I trying to reach? When’s a good time to do it?” The
chances are that things are going to work out in that way.

Trent: Let me just share with the listeners a tactic that I have been
experimenting with, with Infusionsoft, as of late. I have my
entire subscriber lists including customers and non-customers.
What I chose to do was take two groups of 100 people and I
tagged them within my database as Split Test A and Split Test B.
You can do a couple of things if you segment your list this way.
I was doing it to test subject lines. Before I send to the whole
list, I want to know which subject line had a higher open rate.

You could also do this if you really are a data geek and you
want to test times of the day to send. Let’s say that you have
3,000, 5,000, or 10,000 people on your list. You take a couple
hundred of them and you could send one at 5, and then another
group at 6, and then another group at 7 and figure out which of
those got the highest open rate, all else being equal. Same
subject line, same everything. Once you’ve figured it out, the
next day you could send it to the rest of your list. Then you’ve
got another variable. Now it’s not the same day of the week
anymore. I would say don’t get too wound up in the split
testing.

Nathan: Right. Yeah, I should have mentioned that earlier actually.
Split testing is valuable, but you can’t put all your trust in
it. Split testing can only happen after you’ve, again, done some
of that hard thinking first. Go with your hunch, test it, and
then follow the results of your test. Testing alone isn’t going
to solve the first question of “when should I send it?” You have
to come up with those variables first and that’s the thinking.

Trent: On the tactics vein, let’s get into some specifics, some tips
for writing the actual emails themselves. Let’s talk about the
subject line. Obviously your open rate, more than anything, is
going to affect how well you do or don’t do. First of all, in
terms of open rate, can you give any insight into what you think
a good or an average open rate would be so that people who have
lists can kind of benchmark themselves?

Nathan: Well, I’ve got to caveat that by saying it really depends on
what the action is that you’re trying to inspire.

Trent: Well, let’s say, for my example, each time I publish a post on
my blog, I send an email out to say, “Hey, there’s a new post.”
The subject line will be phrased such to create some curiosity
about what the post is about. Let’s use that as our use case.

Nathan: I would say depending on your audience, if you can get 30% to
50%. Thirty percent would be great. I think that’s not hard to
do if these are people who are really interested in following
you and they’re not just passive, sitting there. Twenty percent,
again, depending on the quality of your list. That’s just the
open rate. Then as to how many are going to click through, that
number’s going to go down. I’d probably peg the numbers right
around there.

Trent: All right. Now, in terms of the subject line, have you ever
seen any data on the effectiveness of long subject lines versus
short ones?

Nathan: Short ones pretty much always win, as far as I’m concerned.
That’s for a number of reasons. One is a lot of people are using
mobile devices these days and it may not display a long subject
line. If they don’t get the whole thing, then they may not click
it. This is something that kind of sneaked up and bit me on the
rear because I’d gotten into the habit of writing emails for
recipients of people who were reading in Outlook or in Gmail or
something like that. Then the smartphone revolution came along
and it just took a while to break the old habit of writing
longer subject lines.

Trent: That’s a good point. I still write long ones myself. It’s
funny. I open many of my emails on my phone, yet I was writing
emails thinking people are going to open them on their computer.

Nathan: Isn’t it weird? Trent, I was the exact same way. I’m still
breaking myself of that habit. What’s a good length for a
headline? Traditionally, that number has been eight words for a
subject line or a headline. That goes back to Caples’ Tested
Advertising Methods, which was originally written in the 30s.
People just respond better to shorter headlines, to shorter
subject lines.

Keep in mind, what is it that a subject line is meant to do?
Number one it’s meant to tell them what to expect and it’s meant
to do it extremely rapidly. If you write a long subject line and
people think they’re going to have to give any thought to it
whatsoever, you’ve already lost them. Keep it short and keep it
to the point. Keep it under eight words. Nowadays, man, shorter
is even better.

Trent: All right. Let’s talk about column width of the text width
within the email. In the internet marketing space, and I have
done this and I think I’m going to stop doing it, where we have
these newspaper column widths, skinny and long. Some of the
guys, for example, Neil Patel, he doesn’t do that. For me, I
kind of just like it better. Have you seen any data on that?

Nathan: I can’t give you any specific numbers on that. I can tell you
the data that comes as a result of watching a lot of good people
who are doing good marketing, and that is medium-sized chunks of
text. A lot of people are chunking text these days. The reason
for this is that they’re using the email to get you somewhere
else. They’re not doing the heavy lifting with the email. The
email is just to get you to click something else.

What I’ve noticed a lot of people doing is a very short blurb,
maybe no more than 75 words, squarish, not long and skinny.
Again, in the age of smartphones, people’s attention spans,
which were already short, are getting shorter. If they see a
long string of text, even if it’s narrow, if it’s long, it’s
intimidating. What they want is something glanceable and what
they want is something immediately actionable.

A lot of the examples that I used in my recent blog post simply
do not have lots of text. It just has a catchy headline with a
short paragraph of maybe two or three sentences, a call to
action, a link, and you’re done.

Trent: What about an image?

Nathan: Yes, an image. Use the image that is going to appeal to your
audience frequently. Using faces. People look, first of all, at
eyes if you have something that relates to actual people. The
image placement can really be any place. The eye tracks along
the left first of all, at least in our culture, because we write
from the left to the right. It has that tracking pattern. You
can put the text on the left, if the text is winning enough. If
it’s not winning enough, you can put an image there that’s going
to capture the attention and the eye will track to the text
maybe on the right.

Definitely have the text above the fold where people can see it
so they don’t have to scroll to see the text. You want to
immediately start conveying meaning to them from the very first
second.

Trent: Interesting. I can think of two very successful marketers who
do exactly the opposite of that. Wide text, long text, lots of
words, no images. If I had to guess, it comes down to the
relationship that they have with the reader. I’m on both of
these guys’ lists and right from email number one. Maybe they
haven’t checked their sequences in 18 months. Maybe this has
been the same email for the last 18 months.

Nathan: Well, it could be. Another thing is, a lot of the email stuff
that I’ve been doing recently is going from medium-size to large-
size organizations to fairly broad lists. In cases like that,
where your audience is not quite so narrowly selected, then you
have to be quick. You’re fishing with the net and not with the
hook there. You’ve got to get those people’s attentions somehow.

I suspect that in the cases you’re talking about, Trent, he
knows his audiences upside down and backwards. He knows that
what they want is information and a lot of it. Just the facts,
man, and no pictures necessary. What I want is the info. Again,
like you say, it really comes down to knowing your audiences,
knowing what they want.

Trent: All right. We’ve got to start wrapping this up now because I
try to keep this around an hour. If someone wants to reach out
and connect with you, Nathan, how would they be able to do that?

Nathan: I’m a classic case of, and this is very embarrassing, the
cobbler’s shoes, where really the best way I like to communicate
is via email. My email address is nabetz@gmail.com. I’ve been
working with a lot of folks and doing a lot of things, and none
of them are my own projects, but I seem to be doing fairly well.
The best way, again, to reach me is just writing an email.
Nabetz@gmail.com.

Trent: All right. Well, that’s terrific, Nathan. Thank you so much for
being on the show. I really appreciate it. I look forward to
speaking with you again.

Okay, folks. That wraps up the interview. If you’re listening to
this anywhere other than the Online Income Lab blog, how you can
get to this interview is OnlineIncomeLab.com/session032. When
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iTunes. That helps it go up in the iTunes store, which in turn
brings more people to listen to the podcast. The more of an
audience I have, the most interesting the guests that I can get
to come on the show. Thank you so much. We’ll talk to you again
soon.