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Ready to make passive income online?

I've created a growing passive income online with no previous marketing skills or online experience... 

I've made a special video for you to explain exactly how I did this. 

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Cate Rosales Podcast
Blog

Growing a Facebook Group to Build Your Blog Business w/ Cate Rosales

So many people start a blog and think...my blog is my business!

In fact, for many bloggers, their website is just a marketing tool. 

Your community, audience and people you are serving are your business.

STOP!

Now, re-read that last sentence.

And there are 2 ways you can really have more control and speak to your audience regularly:

  1. Email list
  2. Facebook Group

Cate Rosales from Sweet and Simple Life joins the podcast today to talk about how she has grown her Facebook group to over 23,000 people. We chat about:

  • How she started her blog and decided what niche she wanted to focus on
  • Why creating a "warm audience" is so important & how to do this
  • Tips and tricks on growing a Facebook group and why you should probably start one today
  • And much more

Growing a Facebook Group to Build Your Online Business

Cate Rosales

From Sweet and Simple Life

Cate Rosales podcast

Make Time Online Podcast on iTunes - Online Entrepreneur Tips

Listen to the full Cate Rosales podcast episode

Subscribe & Download

Never miss out on a new episode! Subscribe using your favorite app for listening to podcasts.

Best tips and tools mentioned

There are tons of little tips and tricks mentioned in the podcast. Here are some of the main ones and tools mentioned in this chat...

  • Having a target market makes it more appealing for other brands to offer sponsored content
  • The direction of your blog can change but try to focus on solving problems for one audience
  • Affiliate marketing tips- Share tools, solutions and things you personally love to avoid being salesy but still help others
  • Focus only one a few things that you personally use and think your audience will enjoy and understand (avoid overwhelm by creating content around just one product/ program to start)
  • Build a relationship (a warm audience) with your readers helps to promote higher priced products
  • An email list (1-1 chats) and Facebook group (community) are both important to grow and earn from an online business
  • Use approved schedulers whenever you can to automate things- Publr on Facebook
  • Learning SEO- Debbie Gartner's SEO books (very affordable and super helpful info- get $20 off with that affiliate link)- Mike Pearson's Stupid Simple SEO

How to grow a Facebook group to build a "warm audience"

Facebook groups are a great way to get access to your target market. You can ask questions with the people that your website serves and create an intimate space where they can interact with each other. 

Tips for setting up a Facebook group:

  • Use relevant keywords within your Facebook group name

Growing a Facebook group tips:

  • Make everyone feel special and have a voice
  • Tag everyone's name when they join and let them share their experience and opinion (there is an option on Facebook to do this)
Cate Rosales Podcast
  • Engagement is the most important thing! Facebook then recommends your group to other people
  • Create some daily prompts i.e. questions/ polls/ weekly goals/ tips/ sharing stuff etc.
  • Put your Facebook group on all social media & everywhere you are online (blog posts/ email lists etc.)

Full Cate Rosales podcast transcript

Cate Rosales 0:00
I would say my facebook marketing and my email marketing work hand in hand to build my business. So if my blog disappeared, unfortunately off the face of the planet and Instagram went down and Pinterest crashed, you know, as long as I have my Facebook community and my email community, those are really the things that really helped my business keep burning and so I think they they work together really well. But you’re right, they do kind of do two different things. Your Facebook group is really your community where you where everybody can learn from each other, grow together, support each other, your email list, it’s just me and you.

Mike Beatty 0:31
Hey, guys, it’s Mike from Make Time Online, and today we’re joined by Kate Rosales from sweet and simple life.

So Kate’s main blog, sweet, simple life is all about helping people that want to become a blogger. And it’s particularly focused on like, the whole Helping out mums and she really talks about choosing your audience and serving your audience a lot. But I’ve realised I’ve made two massive mistakes on this podcast. One is the question I asked First of all, which is terrible for me. And like I normally like to, like find some little thing that I can ask people about at the start of the podcast and I just

Unknown Speaker 1:21
did really bad

Mike Beatty 1:22
there. As you’ll see myself, I was gonna edit this out, punk left it in. And secondly, I didn’t ask her how to pronounce her surname. But you know, you see it online all the time. But so I hope I didn’t butcher that name. Kate, I’m sorry if I did. Anyway, Kate has won she actually then we will check in at the end as well. And she actually has four different blogs and has been doing this since 2015. And kind of like growing this huge Facebook group. And that’s actually how I found Kate and was really interested in kind of like picking their brains and learning a bit more about how she’s growing her blogging, business or whatever. Today, and just getting some of her tips on how she grew this Facebook group really so if you’re interested in anything to do with how you go from someone that knows nothing about blogging to starting a full time business using blogging, then this is 100% a great chat for you. And also if you’re interested in anything to do with ever using a Facebook group and little spoiler alert, you probably should be interested in it. If you just want to get like the top tips. You can as usual, skip the last few minutes and I’ll summarise for you if you’re in a rush but if not enjoy this one guys. So Kate, can you let us know what was it like growing up with a twin brother?

Cate Rosales 2:48
Oh my I I so wish that I had told you this in detail before, but my twin actually passed away when he was a baby. So I didn’t actually grow up with him.

Mike Beatty 2:59
So he’s torey I just read it on your page and I just thought that must be. I’m so sorry.

Cate Rosales 3:07
We didn’t grow up together. So I you know, I didn’t I didn’t actually get to get to know him. But um, yeah. So you

Mike Beatty 3:13
had three sisters though.

Cate Rosales 3:15
The three sisters.

Mike Beatty 3:16
Yes. Oh, nice. So big family. You grew up with? Yeah, two

Cate Rosales 3:19
older sisters and a baby sister.

Mike Beatty 3:22
Yeah. Very cool. So, when was it that you actually how did you actually get into blogging? What was what was the lightbulb moment that made you realise? Okay, I’m going to try this blogging stuff out.

Cate Rosales 3:36
Yeah, I mean, there was a few light bulb moments for sure. But I actually started when I was really young. I started over 10 years ago just because I loved writing. So I found out that you could, you know, start a blog for free I think it was blogspot or blogger or something like that in 2010. So I started just writing down thoughts and experiences and you know, kind of like my journal because I love to write. So I had a few hobbies. vlogs over the years, and I loved every second of it, but I wasn’t actually really trying to make money if I’m being perfectly honest, I just love to write. And then in 2015, then I started thinking, you know, I’ve got a job I don’t love, but it pays the bills I love to write, but I don’t really know how to make money writing on my own. I had done a little bit of freelance writing, and did some blog writing for my prior boss, you know, but I just didn’t really have the experience of how do I like earn money from my own blog working for myself. And so I just decided, I found out I was pregnant with my first baby, and I just really wanted a flexible schedule, because I’m going to be a mom, you know, and I need a little flexibility so I can take care of my kids. And so that’s really where I started just digging and trying to figure out if I could really make money blogging, I had already been blogging for a while I had been working from home but for somebody else, and I had a business degree. So I just kind of started brainstorming and trying to put all of these tools that I have Together, you know, can can you actually make money blogging? Is this something you can do started digging and testing. And then sure enough, you know, based on some experience that I had with blogging and business, I was able to start earning money relatively quickly within a few months. And so it just kind of lit a fire under me like, Oh, you can make money doing this thing. I’m not giving up now, you know, so then that kind of that was back in 2015. And so through two babies, and and a lot of chaos and a car accident that almost killed my husband. We’ve had a crazy couple of years. But it has been just magical because no matter what, I just worked hard and kept on blogging, and I’ve been able to make a business out of it. And so I think once you start once you make that decision, like I’m gonna, I’m gonna start blogging, make some money, see if I can make this thing a real business. And once you start making money, the whole process is kind of fun and challenging and addicting. And, and you just don’t want to stop though. That’s where we’re at.

Mike Beatty 5:57
I mean, you must have gone through so many things. likes into since you actually started doing it. But um, I know if I would listen to this, the question that would pop into my head would be like, well, how did you stop making money just a few months in with blogging because there’s so many people that obviously do give blogging a shot sort of thing. And, you know, they can do it for years without seeing any income. So what was it that kind of made you realise, like, this is what I need to do to make some income like early on?

Cate Rosales 6:24
Yeah, you know, and that’s a really good point, because it is tricky. A lot of people will blog for years and not make any money. Others will just kind of get lucky and start making money right away. So I will just start by saying that I did have a lot of experience in online business and admin work and marketing. And so that was I worked in I worked for a financial advisor. And so my marketing experience, my business experience, my writing experience that was all kind of finance based. And so I had to just find a way to twist that knowledge that I had to work for my blog, which was focused on helping moms work from home. And so I just kind of had to fix Right away to twist what I already knew and what I had gone to school for, to try to earn from home. So I started with just writing blog posts that I thought moms might be interested in. You know, and I was a little bit more broad mommy blog focused back then. And then ironically, some a couple of companies brands reached out to me and asked if I could write a sponsored post on my blog for them, and they would pay me for it. So I’m like you pay and people there, you know, they’re gonna send me free products. And all you got to do is write a couple, you know, quick little review on your blog, and we’ll send you 100 bucks. I’m like, that sounds great. I’ll do that. You know, I’ll do that all day. And so it started off very simple like that. I and I didn’t have a huge following. And I didn’t have a big blog. I was a relatively small blogger. But I think because I was focused and I kind of understood how to write good content and how to write content that moms are actually searching for. I think that just kind of worked together in a way that brands were able to locate my blog, which was an absolute, you know, simple minimalist, you know, mommy blog, and the Fancy. But there was just something about my tone and my content that made brands feel comfortable reaching out and paying me to do sponsored work. So a lot of people say that you have to have a larger following to do sponsored work. But my experience was kind of the opposite. I just had a target market and and some good content on my blog. And then brands came to me and offered me those sponsored opportunities. And so that’s how I got started those first few months making a little bit of money. But then I didn’t really just want to do sponsored work. I also wanted to just earn from the content that I wanted to write out of my heart. I didn’t always want to be earning from necessarily promoting a product that I was paid to promote, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I decided to look more into affiliate marketing at that time. So a few months into blogging, I started getting into affiliate marketing. And if anyone has known me for three seconds, they know that that’s like my specialty affiliate marketing is where it’s all that for me. So that’s kind of what I have built my business on. Because I really enjoy just writing content based on it. Things that I use and love, and then sharing tools and solutions and recommendations with people. And then if you need it great, and if not, you know, move along no hard feelings. And so you can kind of write great blog content without being salesy. And I think that’s why I’ve really fallen in love with affiliate marketing.

Mike Beatty 9:19
Amazing. Yeah, I’d love to dig into more about affiliate marketing and stuff. So we’ll come back to that. But you mentioned there like you originally when you started, you kind of had this more like money based audience and niche is so is that the same blog that you actually have now that you still use today?

Cate Rosales 9:37
It is the same blog. Yeah, I just niche down a lot over the

Mike Beatty 9:41
years. I think that’s the thing as well, you know, they change so much how they you can start on one path and they can go in a completely different direction to where you where you wanted. So yeah, it was it kind of made you realise you wanted to sort of divert the path a little bit and, or was there a moment that kind of made you really realise this is kind of more the route I’d rather go down.

Cate Rosales 10:04
You know, honestly, the moment for me, I always knew that I just wanted to help moms and women kind of, you know, take charge of their life, take control of their life live their best life intentionally. That was always my aim, which is kind of why I did the the mommy blog, I was already working from home so I wanted to kind of help people with what I knew about you know, so so that was always kind of part of it. But I really just always wanted to help people with what they needed. I wanted to teach people what I knew, and give that if you’re frustrated, I want to help you if you need tools, I want to come up with solutions for you. Right so when people started taking notice of my blog and leaving comments on my blog or leaving comments on Instagram or Facebook, wherever they found me and saying, you know, I really appreciate this post. It was really straightforward. Can you help me do what you’re doing? I started realising this trend of people don’t really want to learn about my you know, my breastfeeding and my my baby bottle recommendations. wasn’t what people really wanted to focus on. In my case, people liked my teaching style. And so I just slowly but surely found this this groove where people wanted me to teach them how to do what I was doing. And so although I was always including content that was like mom focused and mindset focused and business focused, you know, working from home focused, and I was able to kind of narrow down and help people just start monetizing their blogs based on my experience. And because that’s what people wanted, just by a miracle, it just skyrocketed because I just listened to them. They said, This is what we want from you, and I gave it to them. And that’s kind of where I was able to like really niche down, figure out what my target audience was and what they wanted from me, and then give it to them. And that’s, that’s really the secret to it all.

Mike Beatty 11:47
And that is so cool that you managed to do that because I think that’s such an important part as well, isn’t it is realising and recognising what people actually want and what they’re interested in, rather than just carrying on pumping out the same content is what people actually want. And yeah, so obviously you just kind of touched on affiliate marketing there. What would be like some of your sort of basic tips for someone that’s just kind of like I’ve heard of affiliate marketing before but I don’t really know exactly like what to do what have you. What did you find words like early on for you?

Cate Rosales 12:21
Yeah. So early on with affiliate marketing, I think the best thing to do is promote products that you’ve actually used and love. Because that’s kind of what we all do anyway. Right? Well, I love my car. You should buy that. I love this iPhone. You should buy it. I love this coffee creamer. You got to try it right like we all kind of do that all day every day anyway with our friends and our family, our online friends. And so I think that finding a product that you use and love that that genuineness is going to come out in your content in in your voice. I use this I love this. Here’s my experience. Here’s my results. You know, if you want to check it out, here it is. I mean more than 85% of Worldwide companies have an affiliate programme. So pretty much everything you’re using trying buying, they have an affiliate programme. And so if you just reach out to any company, any product that you’ve tried or love, and ask them, if you can join their affiliate programme they’re gonna let you in because they want to promoting their stuff too. And so start there, start with choosing a couple of products that you use and love and then promoting those to your audience, even if that audience is small, if it’s something that your readers or your followers could benefit from, start with sharing those things. And that kind of will help you like get your feet wet and learn how to how to do affiliate marketing in a really genuine natural way. And that’s kind of that’s where I would start and of course, it goes a lot deeper than that. And I’m not sure if you want to dig deep into it, but that’s where I would start.

Mike Beatty 13:44
Yeah, no, I definitely was. I just kind of thought it’d be good to get that sort like base so we understand just when I like it, and would you recommend sort of promoting tonnes of products or would you think like is best is to focus on one, two or three or four What would you recommend?

Cate Rosales 14:01
Yeah, and the bit in the beginning, you should definitely just focus on a few because it can become so overwhelming. I mean, there’s dozens of affiliate networks, there’s hundreds of thousands of affiliate programmes, there’s terminology that is very difficult to understand. And so in the beginning, just start with a few things that you personally use and think your audience can enjoy or benefit from. Again, it really does come down to your audience and who they are, right? So it’s really about whether or not they’re going to want to try this product, not as much about how much you loved it, but will they love it too, you know, so that’s where I would, that’s definitely where I would start. Just a few is fine. I do affiliate marketing strategy for a living. So I’m in over 300 programmes and I’m in all the major networks and that’s a tonne of work. So I don’t recommend doing that. There’s special situations where that’s okay. But most of the time, you know, five to 10 programmes is ideal. Once you’re solid and you have a really solid affiliate marketing strategy and a warm audience that really responds to your content and your recommendations, then you really want to start aiming for products that pay a higher commission or actually cost a little bit more so you can start earning more money. And so that’s kind of where you go from, you know, just recommending products that you use and love to recommending products that anyone in your target audience can enjoy benefit from, you know, they pay 30 40% commission or the products or three, four or $5,000, then you’re going to earn a lot more money. And that’s ultimately what you want in your business is to be able to have a profitable business. That’s where we’re working toward.

Mike Beatty 15:35
That’s actually something I’ve heard before actually, I’ve heard some people in like Facebook groups and things before say something along the lines of you know, I like the idea of affiliate marketing, but it doesn’t work in my niche. And I quite often hear people say that sort of thing. You know, I there’s not really an affiliate programme that works in my topic, you know, so there might be I don’t know what an example could be, maybe like gardening or the Oh, something like that. But, you know, someone’s sort of says, I see like other people doing it, and I can see that the programme they use, but how is it gonna work for me? Would you say it works in like any niche

Cate Rosales 16:13
it’s gonna work in about 99% of them. So I’ve never I haven’t personally come across anyone that I’ve trained in any niche, even some very unique ones that couldn’t make money or couldn’t find an affiliate programme because everything has an affiliate programme. So, you know, I have a student who does, you know, tarot reading and witchcraft and that’s, that’s, you know, relatively trendy right now, but it’s not necessarily something that’s so mainstream that there that everyone has an affiliate programme for it, right. But there are affiliate programmes out there for all of these products, tools, services, you really just have to do a little digging. So if you’re, if you’re defeated before you even start and you just say there’s, there’s nothing out there for me, there’s no programmes for me, then you’re not going to be able to find what you need. But if you really start digging, starting with the products, you use yourself Of course, but then asking in Facebook groups and asking, you know, amongst your friends or your circles, what people use what people love, what brands they follow, and then do a little bit of digging on Google. I have an affiliate marketing list that I add to daily that has thousands of programmes in every niche you can possibly think of, because there are just so many programmes out there and all sorts of funky and quirky areas of blogging and content creation. So there’s definitely an affiliate programme out there for probably 99% of bloggers you just might have to dig a little bit more if you’re in a unique market.

Mike Beatty 17:35
Yeah, I think I think you might as well as no matter what what niche or audience that you have, I think is doing it from your own personal experience is going to make you kind of stand out whereas I think some people are sometimes just a like, I can win a review every single possible thing I can think of and, and kind of like just hope I get some, you know, someone clicks on my Amazon links and just start Yeah, That that hope doesn’t take you very far. So yeah, I want that. That’s where I really like this conversation to go is kind of digging into more what you have done to grow that, you know, you said you’ve got some like more targeted strategies and things like that. But yeah, what what did you find kind of worked for you to really get a more more of an understanding about what your audience wants so that you can help them really what are some of the things that you’ve done there

Cate Rosales 18:29
and understand what my audience wants, I’m gonna say the most important thing is to put yourself into their shoes because most of us when it comes to our target audience, I personally have found that our target audience is usually who we were a year or two ago before we had some Rude Awakening or some beautiful awakening or something that helped us to grow or change. And that’s usually what makes us step into something new and wants to help the person that hasn’t quite gotten there yet. So that makes your job really easy, right? My audiences, you know, whoever I was a couple years ago, and I’ve come through this phase doing XYZ, and I want to help them accomplish the same thing. And so that’s the easiest way to figure out what your target audience wants for sure. But then if your target audience isn’t necessarily who you were a few years ago or a few steps back, and it’s somebody else, then you have to do a little bit more digging, then you really have to start serving your audience asking around in Facebook groups or Twitter groups, doing some market research, using Google Trends, using keyword search tools to see what people are looking for see what’s trending, see what advertisers are willing to spend money on when it comes to key terms. Hopefully, that’s not too deep. But there’s, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of steps to it. If you don’t already know who your target audience is. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah, if you don’t already know who they are and what they need, then there’s a little bit more legwork involved in a little more research. But most of us know who our target audience is and what they need because we’ve been in their shoes and we’ve we’ve come out of them. And we want to help them come to where we have have gotten. And that makes our job a little bit easier. You can just easily jot down, you know, what, what are their main pain points, their problems, their issues? What are they searching for on Google every week, and then you know, jot down those notes and then start looking for affiliate programmes that fill needs for those people, or just creating great content that fills needs for those people. And then if you’re if you’re good at optimising that content and filling needs for your people, then they’ll start coming to you, which makes your job really easy.

Mike Beatty 20:28
Yeah, I definitely Well, I really want to dig into like Facebook groups. That’s it. That’s kind of how I found out more about you and everything I saw you’ve got this massive group, I just thought well, how did you do this? This is amazing. So I’m guessing as well is that that’s some that’s that’s a massive way that you’ve probably found out more about what your audience wants having that group of people obviously know you. And then you could like ask questions and things like that and kind of engagement. Yeah. Yeah, well, first of all, I’d like to hear like, why you even started a Facebook group. Like if someone’s listening to this, they’re thinking, is there any point? You know, if I’m in a dog niche or something like that, and I’m training dogs? Is there any point in me even starting a Facebook group, I just wondered if you would like, share why you started it. And if you think it’s worth it for anyone,

Cate Rosales 21:22
why did I start my facebook group? You know, I’m just, I’m a huge marketing nerd. And I started digging into the best marketing tools and Facebook groups kept coming up over and over again, I was in Facebook groups and I engaged in them, especially, you know, mommy groups and stuff when I was a brand new mom. And so I knew there was some power in those numbers, like those communities that are very niche specific. But being a marketing nerd and just loving all things marketing, I started digging into the power of Facebook groups, and they’re such an incredible marketing tool, just like you said, I have my own access to a huge group of people. I can do marketing research. any day of the week, day night, share my opinions asked for opinions. You know, I just have been plugged into this incredible community that basically tells me what they want, and I deliver it to them. So it’s such an incredible marketing tool. The question that you asked though, you know, if I’m in the dog niche or something, is it worth having a group, if you just think of the fact that there’s two and a half billion people, I think on on Facebook, and millions of Facebook groups on every topic you can think of under the sun, you’re not as unique as you think you are. And there’s people out there that want what you’re offering, and they want to they want that community, right. They want to feel understood, whether it’s to reach a goal or accomplish something, learn something, have community commiseration, you know, they want that they want that, that group setting, you know, a private Facebook group is really it’s very, you know, tight knit and intimate and it’s much more intimate than say, you know, like a public Facebook page or a Twitter account. And so it just brings This really intimate element to the community members. And so I don’t think that there’s, I mean, there may be a topic that isn’t really popular in Facebook groups, I’m sure there are a few. But again, I think most of the time, if you’re not defeated, and you come in with an open mind and recognise, there’s people out there, that one what you’re offering, there’s gonna be a space for you, in creating a Facebook group. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also an incredible marketing tool and a great way to connect with your target audience. So it’s not something that I would I would pass up on.

Mike Beatty 23:33
Yeah, what I’ve heard about it for ages, but it’s just one of those things. You know, like when you’re blogging and got like an online businesses, there’s so many parts and just like, what should I be focusing on like now? And I don’t do I actually do feel like I probably have

Unknown Speaker 23:51
put it off

Mike Beatty 23:52
for a long time just because it feels like it’s one of those things. That’s going to take up a load of time, you know, Facebook, social media, and does that mean a hand I’d be on there all the time and let you know. So yeah. How did you kind of start getting the ball rolling? Like, how did you do? What were some of the things that you did to kind of get your group like to engage people in your group and actually, like grow the community.

Cate Rosales 24:18
I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, and type a person. So I want everything to be perfect for a moment one. So I did my research first, right and then set up the group with my very specific target audience in mind. For anyone that doesn’t know that the group is called becoming a blogger, because my goal was to help people become a blogger. And so I was very clear and specific, this is who I want in the group. And so I think that’s step one is really letting your target audience know from your group name, your group description, your your welcome message when they join your group, letting them know exactly who this group is for because like I said, there’s a group for everybody. There’s a community for everybody out there. You need to let your audience know and also, you know, the the Search Engine, the Facebook search engine, let them know what this group is about so that they can share it with people as well. And so starting there is just really setting everything up so that your target audience can find you when they’re searching for Facebook groups. Because there’s a search function, you can actually search by keyword for a Facebook group. And so I wanted the word blogger in my facebook group, so anyone who wants to be a blogger would search for it and my name would, my group would pop up. And so that’s kind of your foundation is just setting up the group that way so that it’s easy to be found. But then the next step is really making everybody feel like somebody in your group. It’s one of my favourite quotes of all time, be someone that makes everybody feel like someone and that means so much to me. So everybody that joined my group, I greeted them by name. There’s actually an option in Facebook groups. If you’re on desktop, there’s an option to tag every new member by name. And so if you just tag all of your new members by name, greet them by name, welcome them to the group. You know, ask them What they want to get out of the group or why they’re here, how they found you, whatever it is you want to do to get them engaging with you. And that’s really the best way to get started just to let everybody who joins even if it’s one person, two people, 100 people, just let them know, you’re welcome here, we’re here for you, what can we do to make this group the best group for you. And once you give people that little bit of personal attention, it really goes a long way. And even if the group is very small, you know, there’s power, even in small numbers, if it’s a small and engaged group, that’s just as good as a giant, silent group. You know, just getting that engagement from the people in your group is the best thing that you can do. Giving them personal attention is really hard to get it. So that’s really what I did in the beginning is just giving every It was hard work that giving everybody that joined my group, personal attention really went a long way.

Mike Beatty 26:50
So this chat is kind of like for people listening, but it’s also really for me, kind of Yes, A big reason why I started doing the podcast is like it was I, you know, I want to try and help people as much as possible. Also, it’s kind of like free coaching for Mike. You know, like you just said you can tag new members love

Unknown Speaker 27:15
it. How do you do that?

Mike Beatty 27:18
Because I’ve seen people do that in Facebook groups before, you know, they sort of say, welcome to everyone that’s joined in the last week or month, I guess you can. Can you choose that how long a time span is if they count as a new member, or is it just

Cate Rosales 27:32
actually not a timespan? It’s just a limit of 100 people and so you up to that hundred people. So for an example, I usually get over 100 new requests a day. So I can’t always tag everybody because it will only tag up to 100 people. But I’ll send you a screenshot later after this but essentially on the on the homepage of your Facebook group. When you get a new member on the right middle side of your screen on desktop. There’ll be a little option with a little button that says welcome your new members. Buttons just as welcome or tag by name or something to that effect. And as soon as you hit that button, it automatically creates a new post. And then it tags all of those people. And then you can create your your welcome message, you know, tell us about yourself, I always just do a very simple intro, make it really easy for them. Don’t intimidate them, just say welcome to the group. So happy to have you here. Tell us about yourself, you know, these people,

Mike Beatty 28:23
these people must be spending hours going through and tagging order individual people.

Unknown Speaker 28:30
Oh, that makes so much more sense. Now let’s just say

Unknown Speaker 28:33
it out.

Cate Rosales 28:36
So quick and easy. And just one of those really powerful things that if you can, not only does it give you an opportunity to get people engaging in your group immediately, but you get to send a notification to their phone, the moment that you tag them, they’re going to get a notification and it’s going to pull them back to your group when otherwise they may have just completely overlooked it, you know, so it’s a really good way to get engagement right away.

Mike Beatty 29:00
Yeah, no, I’ve noticed that on Facebook as well as like when someone actually tagged me in something, you always get notified of it as well. So it’s like, I’m just I’d usually click it, even if I’m not going to respond or whatever, you know, if it’s just if it is. Yeah. always see it anyway, don’t use I guess that’s the huge advantage. So that’s some of like, encouraging some engagement and things like that. But then, how do you go from, you know, I’ve got some people’s new people joining the group and I’ve, you know, tried to make them feel welcome. Things like that. But then how did you go to actually like growing your Facebook group? Because yours is like over 20,000 or something now, I think.

Cate Rosales 29:42
Yeah, I think we have about 23,000 now, and it’s been two and a half years. And so it’s, um, it hasn’t it hasn’t been an insanely long time, but that the growth comes with a lot of hard work for sure. Yeah. But I will say that when you’re trying to grow your group, the most important thing I know we already kind of touch on it. But the most important thing is engagement. Because if you’re getting a lot of engagement in your group, Facebook is going to recommend your group to other people. And that’s just all there is to it. So, if you’re getting a tonne of engagement, I remember when my group was just me and my three sisters. How am I ever going to grow this thing? You know, I think that first hundred members is probably the hardest hundred members you’re going to get. But really, once you start getting a little bit of engagement, Facebook is going to start recommending your group to other people. So the way that I figured that out, was just asking my group members how they found me and most of them were saying your group was a recommended group on on my homepage on Facebook. So I’m like that’s, I mean, that’s crazy that the group is it’s just a regular Facebook group. It’s nothing special, you know, but there was something about the engagement and the growth happening kind of hand in hand, that every time we were very engaged in our group, we got a lot of superfast growth. And so it’s really just about getting that engagement, letting Facebook know this group is the real deal people Hearing gauging all day every day, and you should show the script to more people, right. So they’ll show the group, they’ll recommend your group to people just on your sidebar, you know, in Facebook, yeah, but also when you’re in other similar groups, meaning groups that that your friends are on or other people’s friends are on, and that the recommendation will actually come up inside that group. So I’m scrolling through one of my favourite Facebook groups, and then a recommendation comes up, you know, join these groups. And so I don’t even have to go looking for recommendations they’re just right there in my face, you know, Facebook advertising at its finest. I don’t have to go looking for a recommendation. It’s it’s right here in front of me. And so that’s a really easy way I didn’t have to do work really to go seeking people I just engaged with the people that were already in my group. I think that creating some form of you know, prompts or ways to get people to engage on a daily basis is incredibly helpful. Because like you’ve mentioned before, do I have to be here all day, can I you know, can I step away from my computer for five minutes, basically Groups are not that easy to grow if you are not sitting in front of your computer engaging. So those daily prompts make it really easy for you to get people talking a little bit even if you’re not online. And so again, it comes back to figuring out what your target audience wants, right? So if they if it’s a fitness group, and maybe they want accountability, so do you know weekly weigh in or weekly tip or goal posts or something like that, to get people commenting on that thread, just a very easy task, one simple thing that they should do in that comment thread. And that’s your engagement. So you don’t necessarily have to be online. You just have to be facilitating that conversation so that people can get what they want out of your group. And so once you get that engagement going, then the growth will start happening. But another thing that I did when my goal was growing my facebook group because it was just a big part of my marketing strategy. I kind of ignored everything else and I just focused on growing the group so all of my BIOS on all of my social media, they were all you know, if you want blogging tips, join my group because my group is a blogging group, right? Anybody that is listening. So whatever it is you want mommy tips you want dog tips, whatever it is that you want, whatever it is you’re offering in your group on all of your social media BIOS, everywhere you are online, invite people to your group. I even at the end of all my blog posts, I invited people to my group, you know, if you want more free blogging tips, join my group here. That was my call to action. At the end of every blog post the end of every email, I was just very serious about giving people that opportunity to join that group. And again, there’s just something about a private Facebook community that I don’t know if it’ll always be this way, but it’s just something that people love. And so give them what they want. They want to be they want to be in a Facebook group, give them the link, because they will join you.

Mike Beatty 33:44
Do you think it’s what do you think’s more important Facebook group or email list? Because I hear that, you know, that’s another huge thing. And I guess they’re very similar in a lot of ways, but obviously a Facebook group, you can actually get people engaging with each other. So it’s not just you You having a one to one chat with someone? It’s more like a community, isn’t it?

Cate Rosales 34:05
Yeah, that is the beauty of a Facebook group is the community aspect. email lists are wonderful too. And I actually use my facebook group to grow my email list, which might, might be a conversation for another day. But they’re both very powerful. I would say my facebook marketing and my email marketing work hand in hand to build my business. So if my blog disappeared, unfortunately, off the face of the planet and Instagram went down and Pinterest crashed, you know, as long as I have my Facebook community and my email community, those are really the things that really helped my business keep burning. And so I think they they work together really well. But you’re right, they do kind of do two different things. Your Facebook group is really your community where you where everybody can learn from each other, grow together, support each other. Your email list, it’s just me and you, it’s me and you chatting, I’m sending you an email, you’re responding. I have something to share with you. You tell me what you think of it. My email list is me and you and then my face. Group is me and my whole community. And so I think they both have a very important place in your marketing strategy. You know, just slightly different, if that makes sense.

Mike Beatty 35:08
Yeah, no, yeah, totally. And I actually is speaking to a lot of people, they, they often say, like, email, email list is the one thing that you own more so than anything else, you know, like, I guess even Facebook group, it could probably get like deleted or your account could get blocked or whatever, you know, so don’t totally own it. But like you say, you’re kind of using them together. So anyone that joins your Facebook group, you’re also helping promote people to get onto your email list and things if they’re not. So it’s kind of Yeah, you can see how everything kind of like, into twines together, but

Cate Rosales 35:43
it really does. Yeah, it really does. Yeah, I think that one thing that I always recommend, if you do think about opening a Facebook group, you have to have or you can have up to three security questions to kind of screen people joining your group. And I think anybody that wants to create a group but also wants to go there email list should definitely consider making one of your screening questions that doesn’t necessarily have to be a question. But making one of those entry points, offering people to join your email list for extra tips, freebies, resources, bonuses, whatever you want to offer to them. And that’s one of the ways that I was able to grow my email list to I mean, just like my facebook group, I, you know, I probably get hundreds of requests every week just from my facebook group, because you join my facebook group, you’re taking the time to fill out these questions anyway. You want what I have to offer, join my email list, it’s a little more personal as well. And so making that one of your screening questions will definitely help you grow your email list as well as long as you have something valuable to offer them.

Mike Beatty 36:43
might might question again, so I have I have that as one of my questions. But then

Unknown Speaker 36:48
how do I get

Mike Beatty 36:50
I just then accept should I be like copying and pasting these into like an Excel spreadsheet or?

Cate Rosales 36:56
Yeah, I forgot to do that. Oh, my God. For me, I love her. She is my saviour. That’s time consuming. So there are there are apps, I can’t think of a name off the top of my head because I don’t use them. There are apps that will grab all of that information from your questions. Yeah, but then somebody still has to go through unless the only question is what is your email address? And that’s the response, you know, then you can just kind of use your Excel file to separate that but most of the apps that do grab all that info for you, they grab all the information in kind of a scattered format. And so there probably is a tool out there that’s wonderful that I just don’t know of yet. But you know, yeah, if you can have your VA do that for you or or an assistant of some kind that’s gonna save you a lot of hassle in the beginning you got to do it yourself. I did it myself in the beginning too. But you know, once you once you’re able to hire a little bit of help, it’s it’s gonna save your life.

Mike Beatty 37:51
Well, yeah, I’ve just been pressing except to the moon. Hang on. I can’t see the email yesterday was I I probably lost those ones, but at least I know from now. We’re learning game, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Are there any other things or any other like, I don’t know, something that I haven’t even asked about, I don’t know, obviously like engagement. And so obviously your title just to like summarise quickly your title was super awesome because that’s Facebook can actually like almost scroll that and see what your keywords are and things like that just like any other platform, I guess. Getting them getting the community to be engaged and so like using personal names and things like that, and then the daily prompts and things. Whether it is I guess it just depends on the niche and things like that as well. But it’s something every single day to try and get people to post common share responds those sort of things. And then obviously, growing your group, like you said, posting on different social media channels on your blog posts, email lists, whatever you actually have go in as well. Have I missed anything else? Is there something else that you wanted to kind of like,

Cate Rosales 39:04
add to that, you know, there’s a few things that I do occasionally. And I, what I really try to do is just make my group feel like they are the exclusive group that’s getting something no one else is getting kind of like you do for your email list. That’s your exclusive community, they get, you know, bonuses that nobody else probably gets. And so one thing I do try to do for my facebook group is do exclusive trainings just for them. You know, again, it will depend a lot on your niche and what your community wants from you. But I try to do exclusive trainings for them and just give them some extra bonus tips that I don’t really share anywhere else. I try to give them discounts on things, special promotions that I don’t share anywhere else, you know, promo days. Again, that will also depend on your niche, but at the end of the day, everybody kind of likes to either talk about themselves or share what they’re working on or share what they’re selling. You know, so give them an opportunity to do that. And you know, not that promo threads are you know, for everybody For every group, but it’s really just getting creative and figuring out what your target audience wants, and then finding a way to create opportunities for them to get what they want out of this group. So when it comes to my blogging group, everybody wants to start their blog, grow their blog, get more traffic, make more money. And so that’s what I try every week, I tried to give them those opportunities to either share their stuff, offer their services to somebody, give them a discount on a training or a course that I provide so that I can help them get to that next level of whatever they want to accomplish. You know, so, I know I’m just like harping on the same thing, but it’s really just all about serving your target audience. If you know what they want, and you’re willing to give it to them and you’re willing to put in that work, it ends up being worth it by far because that was definitely my turning point was growing my facebook group and growing my email list. That’s really what made me see that this is not just you know, making a little bit of money from sponsored work and affiliate marketing, you can turn this into a very profitable business as long As you’re serving your client, just like any business,

Mike Beatty 41:02
that’s very true. Oh, one thing I just want to add there is I noticed I did a poll like straight away. And without really thinking that I was doing something good It just seemed like it was a natural thing to do. So genuine was interested in what people wanted from the group.

Unknown Speaker 41:20
I

Mike Beatty 41:21
guess that’s a really good way to get engagement as well and like put like feedback straight away doing like polls and asking questions and things as much as possible to see what people want because he actually was a different answer to what I actually kind of expected. But good luck, honestly, obviously, my group is still super small. And so a lot of the people that were getting in were actually, you know, like, like yourself, I think you’re in the group and you know, some people that are like already, you know, proper full time bloggers and business owners and things like that. So I guess doing that on a regular basis is a really good way to kind of see where your groups at and what they’re thinking about Time,

Cate Rosales 42:00
definitely, like you said, we think we know what our people want, but we might not. And then we, we might get to a point where we’re growing and we’re learning, right. But then we forget our people are still, you know, maybe back here at the starting point. And we’re, you know, trying to educate them on these advanced things. Maybe they’re not there yet. So really listening to them when they speak is insanely important, which is, again, kind of goes back to those welcome threads. When you ask them what they want out of that group. Listen to them. They’re telling you what they want, definitely listen to them. And then when it comes to your engagement, like you said, with your polls, that is the easiest thing that you can do. Everybody wants to share their opinion. I don’t know anybody that scrolls past a poll, if you give them a poll option, they’re going to they’re going to tell you their opinion, we like to share opinions. And so I think that that’s a really easy task. Anytime you can give your audience an easy task to do that gets them engaging, and then also get them speaking to you so you can really learn how to listen to them and give them what they want. It’s going to benefit both of you as long as you’re really listening. Learning from what they’re saying.

Mike Beatty 43:01
I’ve noticed that in your group is like, you have a lot of things which are very easy to do, you know, so like your

Cate Rosales 43:09
data, keep it easy.

Mike Beatty 43:10
Yeah, like your daily tasks and stuff. It’s almost like, I could just drop a link. And then, you know, click on a few other people’s and share it or whatever, and you and it’s just like really easy things to do. Whereas I’ve noticed that in some other groups where it’s like, I have to really use my brain right now.

Cate Rosales 43:29
No, blogging is so overwhelming and when it comes to your and Well, I mean, any niche that you’re in, but when when you’re in an overwhelming position, and you can find a community that’s refreshing, it’s the biggest compliment that I’ll ever receive when someone says, You’re because my favourite, it’s so refreshing. It’s so positive. That’s all that I want. You know, we’re here to keep it simple for you and keep it refreshing. And so you have to do that for your audience, no matter what niche you’re in, no matter who you’re serving. You know, make it easy for them. And that’s what I really just pride myself in. No matter how complex of a topic we might be. Dealing with, I’m going to make it as stupid easy as possible. Because I don’t want anybody struggling even if it’s complicated. I’m going to make it as easy as I can. And I think that’s, that’s kind of what leads to your engagement and your growth, because that’s what people want. give them what they want. And they’ll keep coming back.

Mike Beatty 44:16
Yeah, so true. So have you got any other like tools or trainings or things that you’ve taken that has just been like you would 100% recommend people, other people do as well?

Cate Rosales 44:28
Yeah, I think that learning SEO is gonna be so important. If you are trying to build a blog if you’re trying to build any type of online business, learning SEO is going to be the one thing that I think and it’s the one thing I wish that I had done a lot sooner. You know, I understood like basic SEO stuff from my day job, but nothing as deep as it truly is, you know, the technical stuff, the deep stuff that’s really important. If you want favour from search engines and the mighty Google, you know, you really have to To understand SEO and implement on every single blog post, and it’s not as complicated as it sounds, once you know what you’re doing. And so taking a course, you know, Debbie Gartner. I’ve know, I know you’ve had her on your podcast, she’s wonderful. She has insanely affordable books. That’s what I use. I still check off all my points from her list every time I do a blog post. I know Mike Pearson has a really popular really, really strategic Stupid Simple SEO course. You know, just taking advantage of those opportunities to really invest in your business so you can learn how to be strategic and not waste any time because I think most of us try to do things like the cheap quick, easy way and then wind up being really sorry, so just make those two investments.

Feeling called out right now.

Yeah, you get it though, you know, and we kind of start blogging because it’s, it’s affordable and there’s not a lot of overhead and, you know, there’s a lot of reasons why you start your online business Of course, you know, but then eventually get to a point where you just recognise like I can’t bootstrap everything, I can’t do everything for dirt cheap, sometimes you just have to invest in something that some knowledge, some education, some tools, you know, things that you don’t have at your disposal. And so that’s where I would start SEO is so important. If you’re, if you’re growing a Facebook group or you’re trying to grow social media accounts, use a scheduler anytime that you can, most social media accounts, Facebook groups, Pinterest, there’s approved schedulers for every social media that you can think of, they’re usually very affordable. So you know, automate everything that you can because we got to focus on money making things and not those admin, you know, menial tasks. So using a scheduler, learning SEO, and then at the end of the day, just listening to your audience and giving them what they want, I think keyword research, which falls into SEO, but I think understanding keywords and what people are searching for so important, it’s another thing I wish I had paid attention to in the beginning. I’m just you know, right about all these things I think everybody wants to read about. And that’s not necessarily what they want to read about.

Unknown Speaker 47:06
Do your keyword research.

Mike Beatty 47:10
I see on the whole schedule thing I’ve noticed in Facebook on the Facebook group, I can just write a post as normal. And then there’s like a little clock and I can then do that schedule schedule. I didn’t even realise that was a thing. And I was like, oh, man, that would have saved a lot of time. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it. Or maybe there is a better tool to do it. I’m not really sure.

Cate Rosales 47:30
Yeah, I think the scheduler in Facebook is perfect. They call it the native scheduler because it’s it’s within their own software that you can schedule stuff, and that’s great. But there’s schedulers that allow you if you have regular prompts, like let’s say every, you know, Wednesday you do like an accountability thread, then use a scheduler where you only have to post it once and it will recur every Wednesday for the rest of your life. That’d be the one that I use for my facebook group is called bubbler and it’s p UB out our I don’t think there’s an E and they’re super, super affordable, so easy to use, and I have all of my daily prompts because I used to do them manually every day. You know, like, this is so time consuming. I’m not making any money and I’m doing all this work, you know. And then I found this magical app and I use it and you can schedule I think it’s six to nine months in advance. And so I have all of my prompts scheduled, you know, that far in advance. So I don’t got to do any work. It’s all done for me.

Mike Beatty 48:30
So useful. Definitely. And yeah, just one other thing. I asked this towards the end of the podcast to pretty much everyone that comes on here. So if you could go back in time, let’s say probably like 2014, then I guess before you actually started this blog, so you’d already you knew about like blogging for free, and you knew there was a thing and stuff and people were doing it and obviously it

Unknown Speaker 48:55
sounds like a job. What was your job again? Something

Cate Rosales 48:58
I was an admin manager for a financial advisor. Oh, wow.

Mike Beatty 49:01
Okay, so yeah, you obviously already knew a lot of marketing side and loads of them. You probably knew way more than what most people would that kind of stage. But what would you if you could give yourself 123 pieces of advice you can choose how many? If you could go back to that day that 2014 before you started this, what would you What would you recommend to yourself?

Cate Rosales 49:29
Honestly, I would recommend

thinking about who I want to serve and how I want to help them and then not veering away from that. And so, just what I mean by that is we spend a lot of time trying to make what we want to do fit into what actually works, right? I want to be a I don’t know a mommy blogger and so like try to make a profitable business come out of this or I want to write about mental health or weight loss or whatever it How do I make How do I make the business fit, and it’s very forced. And it costs you so much time and so much sanity. And I heard a, I heard a podcast or interview recently, and I wish I could remember who said it. But essentially, they said, if you just you want to write about what you want, and you think, you know, I just want to write about my passion, and I’m going to figure out a way to make it work. He said that your passion is going to be a lot less motivating if you’re not making any money, but you’re working your butt off. And it really made me think because I worked my butt off for I didn’t, I’m lucky that I made money pretty quick, based on my experience, that if I didn’t have that, that business and marketing experience, I probably would have blogged for years with no results. And so what he said really stuck with me. I do think you should write about what you love, but I think you need to tailor it to your target audience. And so if you can’t mix what you love with what your audience really needs from you, then find a way to just serve your audience and Then have your hobby blog on the side. But your regular blog should be focused on serving your target audience because every business owner they’re not I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Joe Dirt but I always think of it. This this movie Joker with David Spade old school movie. No, it’s super funny super funny and you should watch it old school movie. So he ends up coming across this guy out in the desert and he’s like a firework salesman and and Joe Dirt he says, You know what, where’s like the good stuff you’re just selling these like snakes and sparkler fireworks. And and the guy says, Well, those are the only ones I like, and and Joe Dirt and he’s kind of just like this, like goofy like white trash type dude. And he’s like, well, that’s a problem. It’s not about you. It’s about the consumer. And it just always stuck with me. I was young when I saw the movie, but it always stuck with me. You can’t be successful if you’re just thinking about what you like, you have to think of your target audience. And so if that’s something that is serving them, but maybe not necessarily something you love Focus on them because your job is to serve them. And if you serve them, then that’s how every business makes money. And so if I could go back to square one, I would stop trying to, you know, make my own experiences and my own. That’s the stuff that I would want to write about. Stop trying to make that fit into a profitable business and make it fit with SEO, and just listen to SEO. Just listen to listen to Google and listen to your target audience and listen to Google Trends and the people they’re asking for solutions online. Those are the people we want to serve. And so I would, I would really make that adjustment and really think of this like a business I need to listen to my target audience, give them what they need, and invest in my business, right, because you can’t, you can’t run a business without making any investments at all. So treat it like a business, serve your target audience, invest in it like a business. And then also try to be strategic as much as you can and pace yourself and be realistic because you’re going to burn out if you’re really pushing yourself beyond what you’re capable of, you know, are trying to do everything when you really don’t have the time or capabilities to do that. You really need to pace yourself and try to have some fun with it. Because I mean, life is short. So I think part of the joy is yes, you got to work hard, you got to put in that work and learn and invest. But also just remember to enjoy it and have fun with it. And, you know, make the best of it, even when times are a little bit hard because there will be hard times, you know, blogging is not, it’s not easy, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it

Mike Beatty 53:33
hundred percent. And so if someone’s listening to this, I just want to get in contact with you, Kate, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

Cate Rosales 53:39
Yeah, so my my main website is sweet and simple life calm. That’s my blog, which you can comment on or comment or contact me through my contact page. And then my facebook group is becoming a blogger. So you can just type that into the search engine on Facebook and it’s the only one to be able to find me there.

Mike Beatty 54:00
Amazing, I could just keep chatting to you for ages because I know there’s so many things that I’m gonna learn more when I talk to you, but I’m very aware it’s very late where you are. It’s actually like, half midnight with you, isn’t it?

Unknown Speaker 54:14
Yeah, I mean,

Cate Rosales 54:17
your day is just getting started is

Mike Beatty 54:18
Yeah. But you know, thank you so much for your time, Kate. Really appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker 54:22
Oh, no problem.

Mike Beatty 54:28
I really feel like I only scratched the surface in that chat. I feel like there’s so much stuff that we could learn from Katie. So I am definitely gonna look to get her back on the podcast again at some stage. But anyway, I’m just going to share five takeaways that I took from the chat today and hopefully that can help you as well. So number one, is that a reason why Facebook group is such a good thing to stop any like blogger online business owner is that it’s basically like an exclusive community and people Pull love exclusive communities, you probably are part of exclusive communities, you know, you’re probably already part of different Facebook groups and things like that already. And it just means that you can share inside information and information that people might not necessarily get on your blog or your website or other social media channels. And you can make it really tailored to actually helping the people inside your group, which is, leads on to number two, which is all about trying to encourage engagement from your Facebook group as much as possible. And there’s different ways that you can do this. But the thing that stood out for me is that Kate said that you can tag new members by name, and create a post to actually welcome them to the group. You may have seen this before in Facebook groups, but sometimes you can join a group and you will never even see the group. Again, it won’t even come up in your feed. Whereas if you tag people by name, it’s just one of the Facebook algorithms. It goes into a notification so you’re always going to see that And then if you click on a link, then you might actually be if you can welcome them in a nice way and try and help them share something about themselves, then they are going to be more likely to engage early on. Number three is about growing the group. And Kate again gave loads of little tips there. But the thing that stood out for me was how you can use other social media platforms, your blog, your email list, things that you’re already have going to encourage, or promote and grow your Facebook list. Which leads on to number four and five, which is kind of Kate’s final things that she said that if he was to go back in time, what she would do, what she would tell herself of all of her knowledge that she has now. Number one, number four, then is who you want to share focus on who wants to serve, not share. So the main point of this really everything that Kate talks about in this whole book Cost all links around this one point, if you listen to it again, you will see everything is focused on. She focuses on serving her audience. She doesn’t write content, she doesn’t do things. Because she wants to one she does kind of want to she’s kind of chosen what what she wants to do. But she does it actually help people. And so things like asking questions, your Facebook group is great for that you can have a poll and ask questions, find out what they actually want, and then create content on that to help them number five is to invest in your business. This is also a tip that Kate would give ourself where she went back in time. And I have always been guilty of this and I try and help people as much as possible for free without like, making people have to pay for things. But there are so many things out there that can either save time or shortcut your learning curve by a long way you know, so Rather than, but you can learn everything you want about SEO, for example, on Google on YouTube completely for free. But by taking one course, you can actually Fast Track your learning so much more and get more precise, accurate information that can actually help you. Rather than having to like piece everything together yourself. Obviously, though, any course or training programme or tool or anything that you use is not going to mean your business is going to be an overnight success, you will still need to do the work. But investing in your business helps you to save time, and grow your business faster. Anyway, I’m going to stop rambling. And I really hope that you enjoyed this one, guys. Thanks for listening in to this episode of Make time online. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast in the App Store. keep changing for the better guys. Take care

Podcast Summary

There were so many words of wisdom from Cate in this chat. You can learn more about how Cate has grown her Facebook group in her article here. 

But here are my main takeaways:

  1. Facebook groups are like your own "exclusive" community with inside info not found anywhere else
  2. Increase engagement to grow your group
  3. Use other social media platforms to share your Facebook group
  4. Serve your audience and think about how you are helping them all the time
  5. Invest in yourself. Courses can fastrack your learning and get better info.

Cate also has a ton of her own blogging courses but I would definitely recommend her affiliate marketing course. I took it myself as it was part of this year's BC Stack and just found so many little useful pieces of helpful info such as...

  • An affiliate program that everyone should use (and I wasn't)
  • The best performing blog posts for affiliate marketing
  • One hack that will increase your affiliate conversions that you can use today

Click here to check out Cate's courses (affiliate link)

What were your main takeaways from this podcast? Any questions or something you'd like to add? Drop a comment below

Read More
John Wall Podcast
Podcast, Online Business

Online Marketing Tips and Tricks w/ John Wall

Ah marketing!

If online business was a game of chess it would be the Queen (your execution is king FYI).

It's the one thing that can mean you will be able to make money even if you were selling dog crap in a bag. But do we spend enough time taking it seriously?

John Wall, from Marketing Over Coffee, joins the podcast to chat about:

  • What are the best social media platforms in 2020 (and what are the best long term platforms)
  • The 3 types of content that you can put out into the world
  • Some sneaky tips for improving your marketing today
  • And much more

Online Marketing Tips and Tricks

John Wall

From Marketing Over Coffee

John Wall Podcast

Make Time Online Podcast on iTunes - Online Entrepreneur Tips

Listen to the full John Wall podcast episode

Subscribe & Download

Never miss out on a new episode! Subscribe using your favorite app for listening to podcasts.

Key takeaways

Why John loves working from his home office

How setting up a podcast has helped scale his business. 

The three main types of content are audio, video and written. You can reuse all types of content into the other formats quite easily. 

Full BLANK Podcast Transcript

John Wall 0:00
So that that’s a big thing, right? There’s, you really just have your three levels of content, right? You’ve got text, audio and video. And so you can make those and put them out over multiple channels. You don’t have to tie yourself down to a single channel. You know, that’s one thing that we always tell people to do is that work from the top and go down. So when you create videos, you can peel the audio off of that to make an audio programme or a podcast and you can transcribe that so that you’ve got text. So instead of just like making random stuff up, make your content and then hit it on all three of those channels.

Mike Beatty 0:33
Hey, guys, it’s Mike from make time online. And today we’re joined by John Wall, from marketing over coffee, podcast, and trust insights.

If you have any interest in marketing, or tech or any of that kind of stuff, then john is definitely the person to listen to, and find out a bit more about because he’s had a podcast now for over 14 years, called marketing over coffee is him and Christopher pen that run the podcast, but he just knows literally so much about marketing in general, which is the whole point of his business and everything that he does. This chat is just so good. We don’t just touch on one topic, we kind of probably through my fault because I just had so much that I wanted to ask him, but we kind of touch about social media trends, we talk about marketing campaigns, running ads, and we also hit a little bit on SEO, but also as well. I touched on their podcast as well and how it’s really helped them and their business grow into what it is today. So if any of that sounds like something that you’re interested in, definitely have a listen to this one because it’s just full of so much value. And as always, if you want to just if you’re in a rush and you just want to find out some of the time Top Tips from the episode skip the last few minutes and I’ll summarise the chat. Enjoy guys. So, john, can you tell me about a day or moment when you kind of realised the whole nine to five wasn’t for you?

John Wall 2:16
Yeah, that’s a great question because, for me the voyage from cubicle worker to entrepreneur is such a huge thing for me because I’m really not born or bred to be an entrepreneur. And this was something I realised so much later in life, that kind of everything that had been trained into me was the go to school, get the job, you know, do what the boss is telling you. And the whole system is built to track you like that. And it wasn’t until, you know, I had been through maybe four or five startups. And I was even okay with the other startups in making a tonne of money for other people. Like I thought that was just the way that was gonna work. But then there was a break as I got to the last two or three startups where I realised Wait a minute, these people don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just making this up. You know, it was one thing if I was, like part of the PayPal mafia, where, you know, those people had had two or three exits, and they were teaching people how to do the machine. But I was like, no way that I’m working for people who are just faking as they go. And I’m actually have a better idea of what the heck we should be doing. And so the big, the thing that made the difference was when you realise that it’s not about how hard you work, it’s how much risk you’re willing to take. That’s the that is the critical thing right there. Because everybody believes it’s about working hard, and it’s really not it’s how much risk are you willing to take? And so, yeah, so for me, it was reaching a point where I was so frustrated that my desire to do more outweighed the fear of breaking off because I, you know, fear has been my enemy. If, because I see people now that are smarter, that are not well, they’re not smarter, they’re actually less smart because they don’t see the risk in front of them. They’re oblivious to it, but they take more risk. And you know, those are The successful entrepreneurs that you see in their 20s people who are just don’t care about the rest of the world, they take a chance and they roll the dice.

Mike Beatty 4:07
It’s such an interesting way that you kind of said that I’ve heard like people say, obviously very similar things before. But it’s more the risk that you’re willing to take. I think that’s such an important aspect of it. Maybe people don’t always quite grasp, particularly like when they’re in their early like I say, I feel like sometimes younger people are more willing to just take a risk because they almost have like, less, less risk. So in some ways, you know, if you’ve got a family member or a spouse or something like that, then it’s like, okay, just do whatever, it doesn’t really matter. You haven’t got a job anyway. So just kind of roll the dice on that.

John Wall 4:45
Yeah. And that’s it. And so that is a critical thing. You’re really never better. It’s never a better time to take all that risk. Then very early in your career. Like you said, when you don’t have a family and you can just crash on people’s couches. You know, you don’t even need rent if you’ve got the stomach. for it. But yeah, unfortunately, I think, for us, at least in the States, I can say is that just life is too easy for a lot of young people, you know, you, you have a whole map laid out for you as far as school job to the next thing. And so you don’t have that fire because I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs that are incredibly successful and they’re very young. There are people who are. Yeah, Christopher Lochhead. I’ve known for years is a guy who, you know, he said, he knew that if he didn’t become an entrepreneur, he was going to be working at this nursing home, he was out for the rest of his life, like unless he sucked it up and rolled the dice and risked everything he was going to be trapped. Because he had nobody else that could take care of them. And so yeah, it’s just another thing that helped a whole lot with that is when you learn more about entrepreneurs and read their biographies and see what they do you find that there’s these people who have made millions and they lose all of it, they lose everything. And they do this two or three or four times even because they realise that it’s all about How much risk you can take and they’re not afraid to crash. And so then once you learn that, oh, somebody made a million and they completely, you know, ran it down to zero and somehow survived, it’s zero for another year long enough to get to the next thing. That’s the kind of stuff that gives you the, you know, the kind of will to give it a shot and to take away the fear and know that you want to take a chance.

Mike Beatty 6:21
Yeah, no, 100% I think, yeah, you’re so right. And the whole fact how I think that’s something that a lot of people miss, and it’s something that I always try and get across on this podcast is just the fact that quite often the people that I’m speaking to or whatever then then, it’s not like they just started this and they just went smoothly down this path and they were instant, you know, making seven figures a year or whatever it is. That doesn’t really just happen. In fact, in zero people that I’ve spoken to Has that happened, they’ve tried staff failed at things kind of had to work things out. So what was kind of like you’re in into this whole online marketing space and everything like that. How’d you kind of figure all that stuff out?

John Wall 7:03
Oh, yeah, that that goes way back. So after I graduated from University with a degree in economics, I went into the insurance industry for about five years. And during that time, that was just when computers and laptops for employees were taking off. And so I was fortunate enough to go to a company that was doing tech events. So we were doing events for Microsoft and Oracle, and, you know, a bunch of the other bigger tech events. And so it was fantastic. I went from kind of just doing this cookie cutter job to Okay, every six weeks, let’s crank out another event for a tech company. And so we get to learn about email and websites and SEO and search marketing. And and it was just always iterative, always moving because we had at the peak, we had about 80 different events that were running. So it was just this constant churn of of playing and adapting. And it was cool for me in that it was still early enough that we had both electronic and the old school stuff Like I was actually printing catalogues, we would drop like 250,000 conference brochures, you know, when the mail was getting ready to drop because that was still pulling at that time. Now it’s nobody does, you know, paper brochures anymore for anything because the money’s not in it and email is just more efficient. But uh, yeah, I kind of got to see a tonne of the whole marketing lifecycle lifecycle. And yeah, it was just a happened to be in the right place at the right time to get that experience.

Mike Beatty 8:26
Yeah, hundred percent. That’s, that’s pretty useful. But obviously, there’s so I really want to get your thoughts on, like the current best sort of social media trends and things like that, because there’s always like, the current thing isn’t there? You know, just just for an example like at the moment I know a few people that are constantly raving about Tick tock, you know, tick tock, tick tock there and you got to jump on Tick Tock and I mean, you just watch Gary Vee. You see that sort of stuff all the time and I just kind of want to get your opinion so obviously someone that is so into marketing Probably sees all these different ways that people do marketing as well. I just want to sort of, I’d love to hear if you’ve got any stories or examples of exactly that, like, what are the best kind of social media platform at the moment?

John Wall 9:14
Yeah, on the social side, I mean, it’s always moving. And I think everybody understands that when a new network pops on the scene, there’s this land grab, you know, you can go in there. And the first, you know, the first one or two people in your vertical that crack the code of what kind of content are these people looking for? If there’s a match between the content and the market, you know, there’s people that become rock stars, I mean, you get you look at like Chris Brogan, right he attacked early on Twitter. And now he has the three 400,000 followers and it’s just a continual business asset to him you know, he can always go back to that and get the traffic so yeah, it’s you know, can you jump into Tick Tock now and grab the land before you know there’s no more land left to grab or before you know, they pull a Facebook and throw Where you have to advertise to get access to the audience. There’s some weird things with tic tocs. I mean, one right out of the gate is just that it’s based in China. There’s a lot of us firms that it kind of baulked at that the fact that and the fact that it’s, the government does have access to that data, they want to grab it at any time. So privacy is kind of an issue. And then there’s, unfortunately, there’s shiny object syndrome with that, too. And that, you know, I mean, these are funny videos. It’s not like, this is the great way to, you know, to teach people how to do brain surgery or, you know, do very, you know, cutting edge things. This is kind of like, if you’ve got a neat thing to throw out there in 15 seconds, then yeah, you know, this is great, you can do it. As far as success with stuff, I haven’t seen any case studies of people that have said, you know, yeah, we did Tick Tock ads and you know, we totally blew it out of the water. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s not happening somewhere. I just haven’t heard about it.But yeah, tick tock seems to be at the height of hype.

You know, what we always talk to everybody about marketing and marketing campaigns, is you really need to just find this stuff that’s working and continue to optimise it. You know, that’s, that’s the big thing. If you’ve already got programmes that are working to some degree, you really shouldn’t jump into another arena until you’ve found a point where you’ve maximised what you’ve already got. You know, like, if you’ve got your website, there’s no point to me messing around with Tick tock, if you don’t have you know, your own website and some videos on your own website working for you. Because you’re always going to own your own website, you’ve got SEO advantage that happens for years and brings in revenue at no cost. Whereas again, tick tock, you know, in six months, you know, the next thing could come along, or I could get throttled down with ads and you could, basically that that time is lost. There’s no way to get that time or money back.

Mike Beatty 11:51
Yeah, well, that’s the on that whole whole idea. I definitely want to go into a little bit more about like, how to maximise what you’ve already got, and you just sort of touched on Own Website and everything there. But I’d love to sort of get your opinion on the main sort of marketing strategies that you see is more like long term because tik tok, I think, lots of people talking about it. And I would probably like agree with you, I think eventually it’s kind of one of these short lived things, this time in five years, will it still be bringing people loads of traffic? Maybe, maybe not. But there’s a good chance that the same sort of style of videos will just move to another platform. And so that whole idea, I’m sure can still work in in the future. But what would you say is more like the stable long term like where do you need to have? Like you say maximising your own content? What platform should you be on? What what sort of things should you be doing to like make sure you are marketing efficiently basically.

John Wall 12:54
Right? Well, you just made a fantastic point about the video you know, the fact that Okay, so you make these videos for tik tok, but yeah, they can also go on YouTube and they can go on other platforms and whatever the next platform is. So that that’s a big thing, right? There’s, you really just have your three levels of content, right, you’ve got text, audio and video. And so you can make those and put them out over multiple channels, you don’t have to tie yourself down to a single channel. And, you know, that’s one thing that we always tell people to do is that work from the top and go down. So when you create videos, you can peel the audio off of that to make an audio programme or a podcast. And you can transcribe that so that you’ve got text. So instead of just like making random stuff up, you know, make your content and then hit it on all three of those channels. I mean, the ultimate goal is that you make one piece of content and it gets to go on every channel so that you can spread it out to the maximum amount. And then the other thing is, where do you want to focus on that content? What’s the purpose of it? And there’s really only two types of content that you can come up with. One is anything that generates awareness and so marketers get really excited about this. This is kind of any kind of stunning Or you make the cool video, you know, something that just gets passed around and your name is attached to it. So and those are fine, but that’s an endless treadmill, right? I mean, that’s like every week, you’ve got to come up with a fresh piece of content. And unfortunately, after maybe a month or two, odds are it’s pretty much dead. Like if it hasn’t hit, it’s gone forever. And that work is is, you know, has vanished. So the other thing to look at is how your customer interacts with you over the lifecycle of you know, their time being customer and create content that fits in to that whole path. And so you want to make some content so that they can find you and figure out what’s going on. But then you probably want to have some content that actually training them as far as either teaching them about what the product is or ways to use the product. And it because the the fantastic thing is any content that you come up with that plugs into that customer’s journey, you can actually make it more efficient for the customer to get through their, whether it’s faster or that they spend more as they go through it. That’s the kind of stuff that pays off for you for the rest of your business’s life. Right. I mean, if, if you’re, if you managed to come up with a video that prospect gets to watch, and that, you know, they kind of move from looking into the product to starting to ask about getting a demo, instead of having a sales guy, like make five calls over three weeks to make that happen. If you can create a video that makes that happen in three or four days, now you’ve cleaned up the, you know, the funnel for the rest of the life of your business, and you become more profitable, right when you’ve dropped that, and that’s just going to keep paying off. So an example what that is, we, when I was working at a software company, we had a bunch of white papers that, you know, we would spend two grand getting this white paper done and written up, but it would sit out there for seven years, it would pull out, you know, four or five leads a week, every week for years and years and years and years. And, you know, we hated it. We were tired of it. But it didn’t matter because it was brand new to the prospect that saw For the first time, and it did get them to say, Okay, this is what this is. And yeah, I want to learn more. And so that’s, you know, if you can get to content that’s just continually generating value for you, that’s where your marketing spend, you know, really up levels, as opposed to just trying to, you know, crank out the next cool thing every week.

Mike Beatty 16:17
Yeah, no, that’s very, very valid. And I guess white papers are pretty good for that as well, aren’t they? But this like, really boring? essay? Is No,

Unknown Speaker 16:25
yeah.

John Wall 16:27
No, definitely not. And it’s changed too, you know, he kind of used to be years ago that a white paper would be like this 40 page document with a bunch of, you know, prove it. And now really, white papers tend to be like, you know, three or four pages and just a couple key features. And that’s just an understanding kind of who your prospects are and how they are, you know, there’s certain industries and verticals where people do want to read, you know, there’s certain CEOs that on Sunday want to sit down and read through some stuff, but you really have to kind of dig in and figure out who your customers are. Do they want to just watch a 22nd video would they rather read something with a rather listen to something, you really have to do the work to kind of get to know them to figure out what’s right

Mike Beatty 17:06
at the right time. Cool. So, just to kind of put this into context a little bit, most people probably be listening to this are going to be like, I don’t know, if you want to call them solopreneurs bloggers, you know, typically like a small business that like their own business owner, and they want to try and create something for themselves sort of thing. So there’s obviously like you said, the three main types of content text audio video, if this is someone listening to this, they might just be out at the moment, you know, probably not too far on lockdown or COVID and all that sort of stuff, but they probably could be out and about, and I think you’re right, okay, so what any text video audio, like you said, though, originally was kind of like maximise the, like what you’ve already got. So if it’s someone that is, so far, they’ve just kind of learned. They’re just writing so they went Got text, they’ve only got a blog post, you know, but they probably have got a bit of content out there might have 30 to 50 articles or something out there. What would you kind of recommend to them? What would be a good thing for them to actually focus on like today just make more? Or do they now I started thinking, Okay, let’s Can I repurpose content? Can I maybe make audio video? What would you recommend to them?

John Wall 18:25
Yeah, you can go in any of those directions and do the big thing is just pick one and do it. But to kind of give more specific action items to that. So one would be make sure that your website analytics are working for you. And so, you know, the majority of people we work with go with Google Analytics, just because it’s free, you can get up and running. And you want to set up some goals in there. So you’ve got checkpoints. As far as you know, most people usually have like a low ask like sign up for my newsletter or something, you know, something to get them engaged and just on the mailing list, and then maybe request a demo or request pricing or something or hit the shopping site, whatever. And so you want to have goal set up in Google Analytics. So you can see when people get to these checkpoints. And then the other thing is you want to set up the UTM codes, the referral codes, so that you have a link setup for Okay, so this is, you know, if we’re doing any advertising on this platform, this is the link that we use for the content. Because the that way we can look in Google Analytics and say that, okay, you know, we got 500 visitors to this page from that channel. So then you can start telling which channels are doing better for you, you know, where you’re getting the traffic from? Can I stop you there?

Mike Beatty 19:34
Because you’re afraid that someone’s actually spoken to me about this before? And I’ve got to be completely honest, I don’t even know what that means. UTM codes that as in, I think I have an idea that I’ve seen that sort of stuff on Google Analytics before. But I’m guessing if I’m thinking that, I’m guessing is probably going What was he talking about UTM codes. Can you like explain, like what that is and how you set that up on the website?

John Wall 19:56
Yeah, sure. Sure. So that’s all over in Google Analytics. You You have channels there and you’re able to in the URL, you can start naming different channels. So you can say that, you know, it’s a podcast. You know, the content is a podcast, it was advertised on Facebook. If you Google UTM builder, you can find a webpage where you would just type in the the fields you want. If you go through the Google Analytics, training, their free training, that can kind of teach you all that stuff. And then of course, we provide, you know, those services if you don’t just don’t even want to get involved with that. But once you’ve got those URLs built, that will when you look at the Google Analytics report, they will be sorted by those categories, right. And so just as you’re looking at number of visitors, it’ll say, you know, podcast blog, excuse me, podcast, blog, YouTube, whatever. And, and it does come out of the box. The configurations a little bit messy. So you might have to make some changes to that. Because they usually have paid ads listed as social and you want to do some corrections. But you don’t have to get too crazy with it. But even if it’s not, you know, configured 100% correctly, you are able to see that, okay, here’s all the social stuff. This is where you know how much traffic that’s broad. And that’s all you need to know to be actionable is like, what’s the number for that channel?

Mike Beatty 21:22
Right? Okay, so it kind of just shows you where your traffic is coming from. So Google Analytics still works like Google Analytics, but you can actually set up kind of like where the source source is coming from. Doesn’t Google Analytics kind of already do that a little bit as well, though, it shows you social referral, organic and things like that. But I guess you can be more specific with exactly where it’s coming from.

John Wall 21:50
Right, exactly. And the big one is to also have it cross with those goals. So you can say okay, we get this much traffic, but the big understanding is that oh, you know, other The 85 that came from Facebook, 10 of those signed up for the newsletter, and two of them have made it all the way through for a demo. And so that’s where you can really start to optimise. Because then you’ll look at the list and say, okay, you know, Facebook seems to be doing better than all the other channels. If we double our spend on Facebook, can we double the results. And so you go ahead and do that. And that’s really the levelling up of it. And what you’re gonna want to do is, instead of starting new programmes, you just keep doubling down until you finally hit a point where you’ll get diminishing returns, you know, you’ll reach a point where you can’t spend any more money, you’re getting all the traffic you’re gonna get. And then that’s the point where you start to say, Okay, well, let’s try another marketing programme over here. And you do that next programme and you look and you say, Okay, so here’s the acquisition cost for this new one. Does it beat the Facebook one? No, but it is going up in the right direction. So let’s keep spending money on that. And, you know, eventually you have hopefully five or six different channels that are all bringing in traffic and you’re always optimising and and keeping them going, but you know where the business is coming from.

Mike Beatty 22:59
Yeah. No, that makes that makes a lot more sense. So if I’m, when you’re actually starting, obviously, you want to focus on one, like you said, you want to try and get that to. Once you realise something’s working, you almost double down on that and scale it to whatever level was going to go to. Before you actually figure that one out, though, I’m guessing Well, I don’t know, I don’t know what the right answer is here. Would you recommend people sort of dabbling in different platforms? So you might have some Pinterest ads, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, you know, doing a little bit, almost like throwing stuff at the wall and just seeing what sticks? Or would you recommend just being like, nope, Facebook’s the best go with Facebook?

John Wall 23:42
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. Because one thing we have found is like, if you spread your money along 10 things you’re just gonna do marginally poor, probably on 10. And so there’s a whole bunch of stuff Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mayer’s did this book, traction and number of years back and I got into that in their research and the way you want to do it There’s about 19 different Well, we actually have 20 that we go with 20 different channels, you know, types of campaigns that you can do, and you want to pick three, you know, you just limit it to three, you do those three, you do a first pass of the three, and see if any of them are winners. And if you have a winner, then you keep dumping money on it. And so let’s say you do the first three, you get no winners, you just jump to a whole nother set fresher three. If you do the first three, you have one hit two losses, you keep the win. Maybe you keep one of the second ones if you liked it, and you swap in a third one. But you know, and then if you find you do make some money in all three of them, that’s fine, you stick with the three, but then that’s the big deal is that once you’ve got three you like you keep pouring money and keep working those because they normally all have a learning curve. You know, like with Facebook ads, you’ll tend to do maybe you do okay the first round, but then suddenly, you’ll learn more advanced bidding strategies you’ll learn, you know which times of the day work better than others and you’ll get more profitable as you go. So you definitely want to keep pushing on the channels that are working. And learn more about them. Because that’s a far better use of your time and resources than just rolling the dice on something you’ve never tried before.

Mike Beatty 25:08
Yeah, actually, on this exact point, someone did ask me this the other day, they sort of said, but I don’t really have anything that I’m selling. That isn’t I don’t have any products myself. And so why would I even consider doing like any kind of ad spend? Because I’m not sending them to a page which is gonna give me instant cash, I guess. And like, it makes it harder to track. What would you say to someone like that? Is that is there is there any point in doing it First of all, and kind of like what was your take on that?

John Wall 25:41
Yeah, what did they give you more information? I mean, what were they trying to do them? What is it that they actually sell?

Mike Beatty 25:45
Well, I think that’s that was the thing like they use more affiliate marketing is like, there that’s what that that’s how they make their income sort of thing. So it’s not their direct products, but they do have affiliates and things like that that are part of

John Wall 25:59
the They’re driving traffic. So those are always, you know, I mean, I hate to say, but a lot of those are just always race to the bottom, you know, I mean, you’re always competing, it’s everybody else is doing the same stuff. And you need to find a better way to drive traffic. But normally for those it is, it’s just most traffic wins. So yeah, definitely try ad spending, because if you can find offers and things that work that, you know, funnel more traffic into those affiliate programmes, you know, you’re going to take and get there ahead of everybody else and get the thing that’s just such a tough market though, because, you know, not only is everybody competing against you, but really your partner even kind of has an incentive to if you get too successful, they will want to try and figure out what you’re doing and back solve it. You know, that’s like the Amazon vendors, you know, all these people that would go they would just look at like the five most popular products and then cut their own deal direct with China to have you know, things made they make millions, but unfortunately, like three months in Amazon notices that Oh, hey, you’re doing this, we’re gonna take the deal to China. And you know, and suddenly that that Money vanishes. So, yeah, that that whole world is amazing as far as affiliate chasing and, and there’s I know, there’s folks that make, you know, six, seven figures, they make huge money on that stuff if you know what you’re doing. But yeah, you know, advertising can generate traffic and that’s it. So if you’re doing affiliate stuff, it’s definitely worth trying something, you know, you may find better ways, but it’s worth a shot. Cool. And

Mike Beatty 27:23
yeah, I mean, I think there’s, we could go down the whole ad spend route and everything but I would, I think you’ve kind of got so much experience that with your podcast and stuff like that, I just feel like you’ve got so much marketing. Like you’ve got a probably like a little insight into loads and loads of different things. So something that I saw briefly spoke to you about before we kind of got into the chat was a little bit about and you’ve mentioned it a couple of times, is that free SEO you know, if you’re putting out content that gets found on Google, I think it kind of just a lot of people understand that just makes sense. It’s almost like the most passive way to do marketing because You can kind of create content sits on Google, and it’s gonna keep bringing you traffic in for the foreseeable future, hopefully. So what would you kind of like recommend for people? Like, have you got any, like quick tips or quick wins for people that already have some content? And they might be getting a bit of traffic from Google? What would maybe be some of your advice to them?

John Wall 28:23
Yeah, you know, sooner or later, you’ll get to a point where you do want to buy a dedicated SEO tool, subscribe to something that’s going to give you some SEO insight. And the big win you can get with that is something that you’re able to put in all your competitors domains and see what content of theirs is doing. Well, that’s the the quickest and fastest way to really kind of ramp things up. Because we see this all the time you know, you look at your site, you’ll be able to see how the SEO vendor is spidering you so you’ll able to see which content of yours is the most popular in which Google likes the most and what’s coming to the top and a huge benefit is finding stuff that’s broken, you know, you may not realise that there’s pages that aren’t being spidered. because something’s wrong or whatever the reason that it can’t get to it. But then to be able to look at your top three competitors and say, Okay, these are my competitors, top five pages, what are what are these pages doing? And what are they doing right. And most of the time, it’s something that you can easily copy, you know, if it’s some kind of resource about the industry, or about a buying guide, or whatever, you can see what it’s doing, you can clone that content, make it better, upgrade it with, you know, more recent stuff and try and optimise it so that eventually you steal that traffic away from them, as well as Google. And even that constant refreshing of content is a big deal to you know, just making sure that the pages you’ve got all the links are good. And you take the time every six months to go in there. And you know, make sure that everything’s straight and refreshed. That will have Google come back and spider it again. And that gives you a chance to jump back up in the rankings because yeah, if you keep it pruned and keep doing it, right, it’s just an ongoing source of traffic. fact that you don’t have to pay for so it’s, it’s one of the best investments you can make.

Mike Beatty 30:04
Yeah. And you kind of briefly mentioned they’re using a tool, have you got any tools or any kind of like services or something like that, that you could recommend that people actually, you know, that kind of helps with SEO and improving your search traffic?

John Wall 30:22
Yeah, we’ve worked for years with h refs. HRF calm that’s they have done the best job of spidering the web, I mean, basically only Google churns through more content than they do as far as you know, scanning and what’s out there, but there’s a bunch of other tools out there sem rush and and a few other ones out there and so it’s just a matter of what works for you but they’re all pretty much the same and that you you know, you give it your site and it will come back with what it spidered and show you as far as which pages are hot and and things to work on. The better ones give you a list of like, okay, here’s the stuff you need to work on right away. You know what you’re gonna get the best bang for the buck for So yeah, h refs, as you know, they’ve been partners with us for years. So we don’t have much incentive to look elsewhere.

Mike Beatty 31:06
And we briefly touched on this before we hit record as well as the whole AI, artificial intelligence or something. And I mean, I don’t really know a whole deal about this. So I’d love to kind of get your take on how you kind of see this moving. Because I think, Well, I think everyone kind of knows, like, artificial intelligence and stuff is becoming more and more ingrained in our life, we’re even realising it or not. So how do you fight? How do you think that’s going to affect the future? and machine learning and things like that as well? What’s your take on that?

John Wall 31:42
Yeah, so that’s, you know, a bunch of the work that Christopher Penn has done. My partner at trust insights, is about artificial intelligence and machine learning. And so we’ve put a lot of effort into figuring out how this stuff can actually go into marketing campaigns and how it can measure and measurement is a big chunk of it. You know, the fact that we have more computing power than we’ve ever had before. This allows us to do things like, you know, grab 48,000 articles on whatever topic you want, and have the system come back and tell you like, okay, here’s the most common topics, here are the keywords you need to have, you know, doing that kind of analysis can really help you out as far as determining what to what to write, when to write it, and how good your own stuff is, you know, what are the topics that are really that come to the top in certain kinds of content? Yeah, we’ve done a bunch of work on this front, because it just really helps focus and get to the bottom of what’s going on, you know, we’ve never had this much computational power available to us at this price range. I mean, because really, artificial intelligence was coined in 1956. You know, this idea of AI has been around forever. But back then they were, it was all being done with the idea that Yeah, at some point, we will have the computational power to do this. And we’re just fortunate enough to be lucky enough to be alive now when we finally have the tools to make this stuff happen.

Mike Beatty 33:04
So why can you kind of explain what it Christopher pen? Isn’t it your Who? Is he on your podcast as well? Is that right?

John Wall 33:11
Yes, he’s so he’s co host of marketing over coffee with me. We’ve been doing that for over 12 years. And he was actually at shift PR, doing a lot of analysis of PR and advertising. And about two and a half years ago, he realised that, hey, we can do this analytic stuff for all marketing campaigns. And so he spun off and created his own firm with Katie robear, who was also at shift with and she’s actually the founder and CEO, but she was the one that convinced him to break off and get this going. Yeah. And so about a year into I had been doing so much stuff with marketing over coffee as far as, you know, generating interest and finding folks that are interested in analytics, that it just made sense to go work with those guys because the podcast is basically the number one driver of business for the firm for trust insights. So yeah, the like, for example, talking about h refs, like we’re a fan of them, because they actually can export all the data. And so we will run reports, dump all the data, and Chris will run it through, you know, machine learning algorithms to come up with insights as far as what needs to be done or how things are working. They even go beyond the tool. So yeah, so it’s kind of funny how all this stuff like the podcast and Chris and Katie’s analytics, and, you know, this has all come together to finally become trust insights.

Mike Beatty 34:28
That’s mad. That’s crazy. That’s happened, isn’t it? And yeah, well, the whole it’s kind of touched about touched on there, how the podcast is kind of what has given so much for the business as well. And can you kind of like explain because I think there’s something that’s still so maybe not talked about enough. And like, just even just recently, I’ve just been mentioning different things about you know, like, different stats and things how there’s, I think it’s like 600 million. blogs in the world and 30 million YouTube channels and there’s only just 1 million podcasts and things like that. There’s a lot of people that are still completely unaware of how podcasts actually make anyone money or a lot. Why do people do them? And so, just wondering if you could just share your take and experience

John Wall 35:17
on it? Yeah, well, you did you hit a great point. And that, you know, people say there’s a million podcasts or, you know, whatever that number is, but it’s still tiny compared to other forms of media. You know, there’s so because, yeah, so there’s that many out there. But there is, you know, there’s no SEO podcast about the Toledo, Ohio area, you know, like there’s still tiny little niches that are completely underserved. And that’s always been the magic of podcasting is that, you know, you can get content that is just focused right on the stuff that you’re interested in, and you can get it from, you know, the people that are right there. Like in the very early days, a huge thing was podcasts from the directors and producers of TV shows and movies. You know, there’s a certain brand, a fan that just Like wants to dig into a show or a movie as much as possible. So to be able to find out, you know how Battlestar Galactica was made, you know, to be able to get a podcast that talks for an hour about how an episode is put together, like that’s the kind of content you can’t find anywhere these days, you know, that really kind of super deep dive super niche. And so, yeah, for us, it was always about creating a community of people that are just interested in marketing and tech, you know, there’s just so much going on with marketing in tech. Every week. We’ve got stuff we can talk about on the podcast that’s changed since last week. And so over the years, we built an audience of folks that are just watching this space and interested. And so it’s became a great resource for us to just talk about what works and doesn’t work. I mean, that’s always kind of the joke is, you know, like your family never wants to hear about what you’ve got going on in marketing automation, right? I mean, it’s just the complete conversation killer. To be able to have people you can talk with about this stuff is Yeah, it’s it’s a wonderful thing and it really can help improve your life. workday, you know, make you more effective. Hmm,

Mike Beatty 37:02
ya know, 100%. And to be honest, that’s a big reason why I started this podcast as well as just I still don’t know, I’ve said this numerous times, I still don’t know anyone that does this sort of stuff in real life, you know, they’re just internet friends, you know, happy what sort of you messaged and stuff of that and maybe had a Skype call. But, you know, just everyone has just kind of been met through different connections and things like that. And so it’s a really hard thing. And like, sometimes it’s just like, I just all I want to talk about and no one else will talk to me because I don’t know anyone that is into this sort of stuff. So yeah, that’s for me. That was a huge thing.

John Wall 37:40
Yeah, no, that isn’t it. That’s that’s the the joy of the software is to be fortunate enough to be alive at this time where Yeah, you can work on the stuff that nobody has even in your company to you know, you’re working for a company is like, nobody else in the building understands exactly what you do. You know, a few of them at least understand the results. And they’re like, yeah, we need to pay to do this, but they don’t even know how or why it all works. So, yes, you’ll be able to talk to people where you can, you know, make jokes about segmenting lists or what went wrong with Excel yesterday, you know, the those are, it’s a very small group. But once you can finally find your tribe, it’s a wonderful thing. Hundred percent.

Mike Beatty 38:14
So, john, I’m just going to try and pick a date always ask a guest. The questions was the end of a podcast and it’s I didn’t really what were you doing before this then? Did you have a nine to five? Or did you have what was your? What was your normal day looking like before this?

John Wall 38:32
Yeah, you know, nine to five was pretty much up until 2010. You know, I had done like, come around 99 2000 was when I started doing internet startups. And so there was like a 1012 year stretch where I was going into the office and doing the marketing and demand Gen stuff. And then the last two kind of more regular gigs, were totally virtual, you know, things had moved to that point where I didn’t have to be in the office because these companies were small and trying to get off the ground. And they just realised that it was just better not to, you know, be paying 250 grand a year for some office space, you know, they could just like, let everybody have their most awesome home office. And, you know, we could go down to Mexico to party once a year for a company meeting. And that was still like way less money than buying a building. So yeah, the last two were just kind of like classic marketing roles, but out of a home office. And over time, the podcast kind of kept chewing up more and more of the outside of work time. And so then when finally, Chris decided to break off with Katie and start trusting sites, that’s when it at that point, I was working. We had a start up event here. Oh, that was event tech stuff, you know, badging and lead retrieval at trade shows. And that did was kind of coming up for about three or four years, but we weren’t able to get any venture funding for the advance space just was not exciting enough for anybody. And is still alive. But you know, now with everything going on right now with COVID, we had to shut the servers down just because there’s zero events, nothing’s happening at all. And so that and it may not bounce back. I don’t know, we’ll see. I mean, we do have events that are ready to go for when things turn back on. So, you know, things will come back at some point. But yeah, as of like, two years ago, once I got rolling with trust insights, it was like, Alright, yeah, this is where I need to be, especially because it was, you know, it’s kind of the classic marketing stuff. Plus, the podcast is right in there as a main part of the job. So it’s good. It’s part of my day job now. Cool. And

Mike Beatty 40:31
yeah, so Well, the question I want to ask then is, if you could, with all the knowledge, everything that you know, right now, if you could go back in time to a day, and you give yourself up to three pieces of advice doesn’t have to be three, it could just be one, so it might just be something. And just while you’re thinking about that, I want you to think of a really bad day. So this could be a day like a Monday morning that you would go into your normal job and you were just like, oh, man, this sucks. And you sort of get there You stepped in a puddle when you get there. And you know you get into work and you are there the future you and you can talk to yourself of everything that you know now what would be just like up to three pieces that pieces of advice you’d give to yourself?

John Wall 41:15
Oh, three pieces. Yeah, it kind of knowing what I know. Now, you know, of course, I always joke like the easy one with that is like, say something like hold Apple until 700. Yeah,

Mike Beatty 41:22
someone else has said that before.

John Wall 41:25
Is it? Yeah, like that’s the easy one, right? That would just solve everything. I could just dump all the money into it and go. So that’s an easy one. You know, unfortunately. I don’t know. I guess if I went back and gave myself advice, I would listen to it. But the problem was, I don’t know if it would have the same impact on my young self. You know, I had to go through some of the beatings to understand why I am here now. But I think you know, an easy one would be the take more risk. You know, don’t be afraid to take more chances and swinging for the fences and a big one would be to go back You know, to like around 2005 and just be like, Hey, if you’re not working on your own asset, you’re just making somebody else rich, you’re just working on somebody else’s dreams. Like you need to figure that out. Because Yeah, I was trapped into the illusion that the people above me knew exactly what they were doing. And that it was going to be kind of the classic journeyman apprentice thing that they would teach me how to find the magic. And then, you know, realise that no, people actually just making this all up as they go along. And that, you know, and there’s, there’s nothing, because I think that’s one thing that’s interesting for all the startups that I’ve worked with, there’s a very small number of people that I still work with from some of those previous startups. You know, like, I thought there would be a lot more of kind of, you know, and there has been some of that where you do get pulled from company to company to company by people who are successful. And so that’s a cool loop to get into. And if you can get into a strong loop like that, where there’s a track for you all the way to CEO, that’s a very cool thing. But yeah, just take more risk. That’s That’s it. That’s awesome advice.

Mike Beatty 43:03
It’s something that I wish that I had learned as well like you imagine getting that advice when you were sort of 16 or something and just build your own asset. And if you could just do that the whole time that you were an adult, but great advice. Anyway, thanks so much for coming on the show, john. I’ve really appreciated your time. And I could honestly just keep picking your brain all day. I know I could, because there’s so much knowledge that I could get But no, thank you so much.

John Wall 43:28
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Yeah. And hell, I’m glad to come back anytime. So if you want to kick more stuff around and be glad to do it.

Mike Beatty 43:37
So there you have it. JOHN wall certainly knows his stuff about marketing. And I’m just going to quickly summarise five of the key takeaways that I took from the podcast, which can hopefully help you as well. So number one is that the social media trends and different platforms such as Tick Tock at the moment, they quite often come and go and it’s sure like Tick Tock is probably Really right now forgetting, like traffic and eyes on you and awareness and things like that. But equally as he kind of spoke about is maybe not always the best platform for everyone. And it really does depend on kind of like what your brand your business what your focus is on. And that kind of leads on to number two, which is that there’s really only three types of content that you can ever produce, text, audio, and video. And so it’s up to you to kind of figure out, which is your main focus going to be on and eventually that probably, you will want to kind of like repurpose content and put it in all three formats, whether it’s gonna be text, audio video. Number three is that there’s really only two types of styles of content you kind of put out. One is like the awareness phase, the people that are interested in your niche and your brand in whatever your business is and Kind of you’re making them aware of what is going on. And then there’s to kind of more like the life cycle and teaching and helping to provide real value and develop what your customers sort of journey is going on. So those are the kind of like the main types of content that people can really put in any form of marketing. Number four is just we kind of dove into a little bit more about setting up goals and things using like Google Analytics, you shouldn’t just have Google Analytics running, you should always have kind of like a focus of where you want to get your customers, the users where you want to get them to, whether it’s a paste, for them to join up to a mailing list, whether it’s the shop, whether it’s a product, whether it’s a course whatever it is that you’re, if it’s a affiliate product or something like that, whatever is your goal, you must, this is something you can do right now. And it’s really not hard to do at all just literally go to Google Analytics and you Find the bit where it says goals, just google setting up goals on Google if you don’t know how to do it, because it really is very simple. And it will show you it will give you a real insight into not only how many people are achieving the goals that you want them to achieve, but where they are coming from. So he even spoke a little bit more about setting up like UTM codes and things like that. And so you can actually see where people have come from, whether it’s from Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, your blog, or podcast, and then you can actually start to figure out what is bringing you the most results. And then number five, is just what he would say to himself if he was to go back in time, take more risk, and work on something that you own and work on your own building your own asset. And I think that is something that I’ve learned as well over the years and I think it’s just something that at the end of the day is what everyone wants to achieve at some point in their life actually creating their own asset and something that’s going to help them in the future. And something that is theirs that they’ve built, basically. So if you do want to get in contact with john or find out a bit more about what he does, definitely check out his podcast marketing over coffee. And also check out trust insights.ai, which is his main website, and where you can find out all about their services, what they actually provide over there. I’m gonna stop rambling now. And I really do hope that you enjoyed this one, guys. Thanks for listening in to this episode of Make time online. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast in the App Store. keep changing for the better guys. Take care

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Leo Emery Podcast
Podcast, Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Secrets w/ Leo Emery

​Everyone is looking for that silver bullet to help their online business. ​

And because Leo is a straight shooter, here's what he said is the secret to ​internet marketing...

Put your head down, ass in the air and be consistent

​Leo from Net Wise Profits joins the podcast to chat about:

  • The power of failing forwards
  • ​The one thing that Leo always works on and it helps his business continue to grow (I bet it's not what you think)
  • Some of his best tactics and marketing secrets
  • And much more

Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Leo Emery

From Net Wise Profits

Leo Emery Podcast

Make Time Online Podcast on iTunes - ​Online Entrepreneur Tips

Listen to the full ​Leo Emery podcast episode

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Full BLANK Podcast Transcript

Leo Emery 0:00
The I think the secret for making money online if you want to use a lack of a better term is just you know, just head down ass in the air. cold hard. I’m gonna do this determination no matter what it takes, because you got to have that because when I first started on line and I started some businesses, I even sold my car to keep one of my companies going

Mike Beatty 0:25
Hey guys, it’s Mike from make time online. And today we’re joined by Leo from net wise profits.

So Neo has been in the whole online marketing game for years now. He started in around the year 2000, as he will explain on the podcast, but he also has a website where he has numerous websites and and has had numerous websites and he’s also stopped a podcast called net wise profits, which is probably going to be out around the time that this episode is published actually may already be able to definitely check that out as well. Just kind of given all affiliate marketing tips and things like that. And he is just someone that has just been through, it’s got such a story that you probably can relate to a lot about starting out and not finding things that works and things like that. He’s going to explain all that in a minute. But if you are interested in anything to do with affiliate marketing, online marketing, just the mindset as well behind what goes into it, and also just some little tips in there things to do with speed, YouTube, SEO and things like that is all mentioned in this podcast. So if that sounds like interests, you definitely check, check this one out. It is quite a long one. So if you want to just jump to the end and get my takeaways which may also help you. You can do that in the last few minutes but if not, enjoy it So, can you tell me about a time or day? It might have even been a moment when you realise the whole nine to five world wasn’t for you?

Leo Emery 2:14
Oh, I had I had a lot of days like that. I think it was every Monday

cuz I, I did I, you know, I did this kind of silly I one day I said, How many jobs that I have when I was a kid like growing up and going through my 20s and I’ve probably had 50 or more jobs because everything from you know, from working construction to sales jobs and everything in between. And I noticed a pattern one well until I grew up, and you know, matured a little more as a young kid. Of course, I thought I knew more than the guy that owns The company, you know, but I just I didn’t, I didn’t see that I was getting, I thought I and I still do to this point, I was more valuable than I was being paid for. Like, I felt like, you know, back then if you know you’re making X amount of dollars an hour and going, I’m worth more than X amount of dollars per hour, you know, and also I wasn’t feeling challenged. I didn’t find it exciting, you know, and I also looked at my, my family’s own history, and my uncle started as as a car salesman. But then he and his buddy pulled their money together, and they bought a car dealership. And then so they worked their way. You know, my father started as a welder. And then he worked his way up to president of the company, you know what I mean? So, I had that work ethic already. As a mom I didn’t really follow it that well.

But it was there. And I just remember one day going, when I really got serious about things, because I was in doing you know, I was doing radio, doing design, everything like that, and I’m going, no matter how hard I work, I’ve always got to ask somebody else. Can you pay me more? Because I think I’m worth more and I got tired of someone else telling me that you’re only worth this much money every year. We don’t care how hard you work, how great you do your job. Yeah, maybe we’ll give you a bonus. And I said, there’s got to be some way that I can be in charge of my own financial destiny if you want to use you know, that term. And then I just one day I just said you know what? There’s this. I remember buying my very first computer and being in the basement of my parents house. showing you how clueless I was when it came to computers and everything like that when something went wrong, I turn it off and turn it back on. I consider my computer a big frickin Etch A Sketch.

Mike Beatty 5:13
still the case today, isn’t it?

Leo Emery 5:15
Oh, there’s been times when I’ve wanted to skip my computer across the yard. Okay. So yeah, with

that it’s been 2000 it’s 2000 2000 batwoman. And I didn’t even I really didn’t even kind of know of the internet. You know, I just knew that computers were the were this was kind of the way to go. And to my even my naivety back then. I didn’t know that you had to be connected to get online to get on to the internet. I thought you just plugged in your computer and away you go kind of thing. Yeah. So I wasn’t even connected to the internet when I was in my parents house. You know, I mean, they’re, they’re, you know, they didn’t have computers. They didn’t grow up with that stuff. Dad’s idea of a computer was the Casio calculator that was his, his computer. And then when I moved out, I was like, oh, that guy now of course, hanging out with friends and getting to know more and more what’s going on. And then that’s when I started, you know, getting into the radio and in engineering and all this kind of stuff. And then of course, you just basically just fall into it. Yeah, you know, that’s when I kind of got online was like the year 2000. And then, for three years, I became a millionaire. No, there’s three years ago, screwed over by every pots wannabe guru telling you that you just spend money on my course and all your dreams will come true. Well, I’m sure I put a lot of gurus kids through college.

Mike Beatty 6:50
Yeah, I mean, it’s such a common story, isn’t it? You know of people when they first jump online and you know you I think, because you don’t know so many Yeah, you don’t Know You don’t know what you don’t know what you don’t know. And also, you are getting fed this story all the time of why this course and all your dreams will come true this month. And it’s being fed over and over again that it just I think, and in such a fast paced world and that was always the internet and you hear all these amazing stories of people that make millions of dollars online and stuff and you just end up believing that’s what it is. And so you can see why so many people fall for it.

Leo Emery 7:30
You still hear that story today. I still have people emailing me every day, you know, asking me is such and such a course for real. And 99.9% of the time my email back is go get runaway, but as far as you know, and because I think a lot of people, and I think as time has gone on, more and more people are either unsatisfied with where they are, maybe they’re not happy With their job, you know, maybe they saw, gee whiz, I’m this old and I thought I’d be a lot further along in my life or my career. Yeah. Or other people just have their backs against the wall financially gone, you know, there’s more month at the end of the money every time you know, and it’s like, shit if one bad thing happens, they don’t have the resources to to, to weather whatever little storm that may be, you know, it could be as simple as a simple problem with the car breaking down. Well, if that car breaks down, they don’t have the money to repair it. How did they get to work because maybe they’re out of the loop for when it comes to the bus service or this or it just becomes a domino effect. So I find it more and more to do more and more people are susceptible to that. Hey, give me the 4995 I know this superduper little trick and secrets and and away you go. And it’s just the same crap. just you know, 20 years later,

Mike Beatty 9:02
yes, like packaged differently.

Leo Emery 9:04
Yeah, it’s just packed. Like that kid that had that crypto currency company they found him dead and he had like 250 million dollars but it was just the same Ponzi scheme just done up to date to to now use electronics and everything but it was just the old fashioned Ponzi scheme. Yeah, you know, and it crypto I don’t even I don’t even I don’t even understand it. I sit there and go, I don’t get it. Well, you shouldn’t know because I’ve I don’t get it. I ain’t getting into it. And I don’t have the time or energy to try to figure out that crap. Because to me, it’s just Yeah, I don’t know. And I’m probably could be totally wrong. I just because I just see so many companies just imploding every time when it comes to crypto as well. How can you? Why would you get involved in such a volatile thing? You know, well, it’s so much money to be made. Well, yeah. Okay. They said that about the pot industry too. But every company’s working in the negative and every guy that’s investing is like holy crap. I’m losing my shorts here. Well, yeah, it’s an unproven market. Why don’t you wait five years? No, I want to make my money right now.

Mike Beatty 10:09
Yeah, well, unless you have a thing as always that you hit, we always hear it. If you get in early, you know, that’s where you make the real money and stuff. But what was it? What? How did you then realise? What was the first thing that made you realise how to actually be successful online? Or like what was your first taste of success? Like, what actually did you start doing to make some money?

Leo Emery 10:33
First realise that all these gurus are idiots and liars. And if you’re listening, you are idiots and liars.

And I think that was the first where I had that. I think, if I were I think it was sitting on the back deck, and I finally said, You know what? There’s that saying, No, if you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result You know, you’re getting the same result, but you’re expecting a different result. Obviously, what you’re doing is not working. So I finally just said, Okay, I gotta stop falling for all this. And I think that was the term we always use that shiny object syndrome, you know, or the grass is greener on the other side kind of thing. And I said, I need to find somebody that actually knows what the hell they’re doing, and actually gives a shit about me. And I did, I stumbled across literally, I can’t remember how, but I’m in Canada, and there’s a gentleman back in the early 2000s named Corey rudl. And that’s where I found my mentor. And he actually cared about my success, not what was in my pocket book, Chair less what was in my pocketbook. And Cory is like the guy he was one of the founders of internet marketing because he’s the guy that created the long page sales letter. You know, those sales letters seem to go on forever. She’s the one that designed You know, and, and all this kind of stuff. And three months after being mentored by a real mentor, not a want to be Putz guru. I made money. And then 18 months later, I was full time affiliate marketer. Well, to me, I think that obviously that was my aha moment. But I think my biggest aha moment was like, you know, and I think it’s hard to admit that I was, I was, uh, you know, I can’t believe I got I thought it was a smart guy. I can’t believe I got screwed over for three years. I thought I thought I was you know, I kind of thought I knew my stuff. You know, I wasn’t you know, you know, I’m not the guy who can pull the wool over my eyes and everything. Well, apparently I can. And, but it was just, I think what it came down to, and I think the other thing too, was at the same time I started I did that. personal power course with Tony Robbins. And I started, I started so that those two things kind of happened at the same time because I said, Well, I saw Tony Robbins is a guy that you could trust. And he obviously knows what he’s doing. So I, that’s why I ended up in Vancouver was to go get his course. And then that’s how I stumbled across Corey. So it kind of all kind of happened at the same time without any design or effort on my part. As usual, I’m just kind of stumbling through things trying to figure stuff out gone as well. sure it’ll work out I’m sure. And that I think what happened was is that when I started taking Tony Robbins course, that opened my mind up to a lot of things, and a lot of things that I saw and completely unaware of when it came to. Okay, whether you understand it all starts with me. The rest of the world at this point does not matter. It starts with me because when now that it started With me, I can I can wade through all the negative stuff and push that aside, I can probably see a lot of the Yeah, that’s another shiny object, I probably shouldn’t go for that. And what I learned was the reason why a con artist is so good at what he does, because he tells you what you want to hear. And he was telling me that if you just follow this, I’ve got this super duper secret, and in 30 days, you’re gonna make money. Well, that’s what I wanted to hear. Because that’s what I wanted to make money because it’s the internet it’s supposed to happen. You know, you’re supposed to push a couple buttons and sit back in the beach and have a Mai Tai (Lopez) and then go check your bank account, you know, because that’s the way the internet works. Yeah, not so much.

Mike Beatty 14:46
That was how it was. Oh, that’s what

Leo Emery 14:47
it was like. And that’s why every day I go, how come it’s not working.

Mike Beatty 14:54
So then, what is the secret then? What What is this all magic. You give me 4995

Leo Emery 15:02
I know the secret to making money online. And you know what the secret to making money online is? There is no secret to making money online never has been never will be. Yeah. But that’s what people want to hear. Because like I said, going, circling back to what I was talking about earlier, there’s people that have their backs against the wall, financially and they’re, they’re struggling and they’re there. They’re looking for answers, and they’re genuinely looking for help. And I truly believe the majority of people that are out there, hopefully have, okay, once they understand truly what’s involved, too. When I say make money online, I’m talking about building a business online. I’m talking about building something that’s going to solve or answer all your financial needs and wants. I’m not talking about, you know, all these goofy little tricks or anything. I’m talking about actually building a business online. That takes time, that’s not going to take 30 days, that’s got a, and you got to kind of have in your head, okay, this is going to take me six months to 12 months to source out to get things going. And I may or may not make revenue in those six to 12 months, that’s six to 12 months might be just the building up my foundation. But the cool thing about the internet is kind of like once you slowly start that little ball rolling, and if you stay consistent, and I think the toughest thing on being online is because you’re whether you have family or not, or whatever, you still kind of doing it alone. You’re kind of sitting there staring at the screen by yourself kind of figuring this stuff out. But if you can stay consistent each and every day, and I’ve always told people, I could care less, what step you take every day, but as long as you’re taking one positive step, no matter how big or how small, you’ll get to where you want to go. You know in and out The consistency the I think the secret for making money online if you want to use a lack of a better term, and it’s just, you know, just head down ass in the air, cold hard. I’m gonna do this determination no matter what it takes, because you got to have that because when I first started on line, and I started some businesses, I even sold my car to keep one of my companies going because that was my determination. I’m not gonna make this fail. But understand, you’re gonna screw up on a regular basis. I will probably screw up later on today. I will probably screw up tomorrow. That’s fine. That’s all part about of succeeding. You know, but as long as your as the term goes, as long as you’re failing forward, meaning you’re learning from your screw ups. You’re doing fine. Don’t worry about it. Put it in the past. Don’t look in the rearview mirror. You can’t change the past. Interesting

Mike Beatty 17:54
story I see about that. Just gonna jump in quick. Yeah, I’ve literally just been screwed. Growing up this this last week, and the whole week, it’s just been. It’s been a pain in my ass. Honestly, it’s just everything. You know, like every little thing that I’ve done. It’s like I’ve taken one step forward, one, two steps back, that whole thing has been happening. It’s basically just long story short, I’ve installed a plug in WP rocket, which is supposed to help make your website superfast blah, blah, blah. It did it. I was like, Oh, this is great. You know, it’s really sped up my website. It went from like four and a half seconds down to 1.58 or something like that. I just installed that two weeks ago. Did you know so? Yeah. Anyway, I then have super happy about it. Then I checked the mobile speed. I was like, hang on. My mobile speeds really dropped. And I didn’t understand why. And so I got into an email conversation with their support, right? And then realise, oh, I’ve unchecked mobile caching or something. Yeah, that simple little thing. I did that and my mobile speed went crazy fast. Suppose that every page was under a second as well, how is that even possible? Anyway, that lady then that was in a conversation with from the sport, found I had this HTML daemon or that what this means like a dash HTML with inside the coding wrap stuff, right? I had too many of them on certain websites and she was like, that is not from WP rocket. There’s something else going on. So then I had to like solve with it. And then so I went to Thrive Themes support a lot without any idea what’s going on here. I think I even messaged Wealthy Affiliate support and like, I just ended up like I was saying, it felt like this one step forward, two steps back every time I emailed someone about something, it was like I was just moving backwards.

Leo Emery 19:43
You and I were working in parallel, because I had a week last week. Two weeks ago was that week, but then it started.

Mike Beatty 19:50
Yeah, the crazy thing is like now I’ve actually got my website superfast, like from what it was is more than that. It’s like 63% speed percent. From what I realised, I’ve just written a review on WP rocket. I thought I’m going to I’ve been starting YouTube recently so I thought I’d do one on there. And it’s like, oh, okay, this is actually this pain in my ass week has actually turned into something quite good because I can actually give real feedback to people actually show them what has happened and be like, Don’t do this. And you know, that is actually ended up being something that’s really helped to move forward. So I completely That’s crazy. I’ve just experienced what you’ve just explained. Explain basically, yeah.

Leo Emery 20:32
Well, that’s crazy. We’re having a parallel life because for months because my main websites not hosted at wha and I talked to Kyle and he goes now your site’s way too freakin big to transmit. Not that the transfer go It’s just that you know, don’t bother. You’ve got so many your index so if it just cause a horror show, your host so with that one,

Unknown Speaker 20:54
I’m actually with Hostgator I’ve been with them okay forever, and I I love them. They’re the everyone. Some people bitch about them. Well, you’re gonna find just the many people that bitch about one thing is they do praise the other thing. So it’s like, yeah, whatever it works for me sorry for your problems. And I was trying these different because my website speed like I use gt metrics, it actually it actually monitor does give you true website speed, the insight page insights from Google doesn’t actually check your page speed. It just tells you what’s wrong with it that’s causing low page speed. So my desktop speed is always 9899 no problem. I get to my mobile and I’m like, geez, I’m 60 something. I’m like what you know, so god damn it. And I know Google as goofy as they are. They’re using that information to trash my site, because their heights it’s not fat. So I was trying these different plugins and I’m putting different code right into my HTTP access code and all kinds of crap and I’m going to He would go up a little bit and it’ll go down and I’m going, I’m going to need a helmet because my head’s getting really sore from banging it on the wall. And then I came across WP rock and I said, Well, this is a paid one. What the hell, you know, get hurt.

Mike Beatty 22:16
We sold 18 days free as well. Like you can get a 14 day guarantee sort of thing didn’t even

Leo Emery 22:22
which is why I jumped in on it. I was Oh, no,

that’s right. You get Yeah, that’s right. 14 days you can get it but I said, Okay, here we go. So I got rid of all that crap that I had in there. took all the code out of my access file, did everything put WP in there? Is it okay? This is it. Either this is working or I’m going to get a daytime job. This is like and in two days, I’m like, okay, because I wanted to kind of let it marinate for a day. And I was like you and then I was going through the process of because I use Microsoft 365 I think they just call it 365 now When I open up my computer the morning we cannot access your files yes it does I I am holy crap I’ve lost like I can’t access any of my word my Excel nothing I’m like are you freaking kidding me? Jesus Christ so now I’m while I’m working with WP now I’m trying to contact Microsoft, which is that’s a horror show in itself. I said, You know what, I’m just going to go old school here. I’m going to turn everything off, shut my computer down, restart it. And then I found updates and everything like that. And while I was doing the WP saying I was doing the Microsoft thing finally got the Microsoft thing sorted out like whoo see my files again? Hallelujah, you know, God, and then I was like, okay, so I go to gt metrics. My I’ve got a green score of 99 and 97 and I go to pay insights and I met 91 for mobile and 99. for desktop, I first thing I did was email WP rocket. Oh my god.

Yes, that my site is thanks to you.

Mike Beatty 24:15
Yeah, it was I think I use web page test.org or something like that as well, because gt metrics for the free version anyway only does desktop I think. And so I use UI web pads, something like that to measure mobile speed as well.

Leo Emery 24:31
I have their paid version of GT. Oh, cool. And I also use, I also use their a image fi for for images that are like that, because they that that plug in automatically. And I think this also helped big time with my PageSpeed because I was compressing my web my images before I upload them, but the preferred mind you this is back 2010. But now it isn’t last year to Google is really keen on web p style images. Well image file automatically converts your images, compresses them and automatically converts them to web P. And yeah, that’s why I think that had a good reason why my PageSpeed site speed got even quicker because I was like you when I was at gt my speech PS was like a whopping four and a half seconds. Like a good Oh, no rocket scientist, but I know that ain’t good. And then once I got everything done, I got as low as point 755 for pace fee, but, but I averaged about one second now. 1.2 Yeah, it’s it’s funny. I know, I these are the things you should do. But every couple of days, I’ll go back to GT and I go to page insights, just so I can see that green number and go,

Mike Beatty 25:50
well, it’s still there. Yeah, that’s exactly what I did last week.

Leo Emery 25:54
You know, you just want their confirmation. Okay, crap, still working. We’re good. We can You know, cuz it’s funny with internet, you’ll do something and it’ll be working, working, working. And for some reason, it’s like, well, why did things just fall off a cliff again? I didn’t do anything different. Well, once you’ve been online long enough, you realise you’re really not in totally control, you know, you still have to rely on these people call Google’s and all these other things and all the whatever mystical stuff they do and in Google mountain there to make your life a challenge.

Mike Beatty 26:28
That’s the point that you’re making, though, is like, as long as you’re willing to sort of go through those challenges and failing forwards, you know, that you you’re figuring stuff out, you’re learning you improve. Well, that’s it, then it’s never really an issue. Whereas No, go, which I felt like doing. It is just going

Leo Emery 26:47
Oh, no, my website is falling apart. I know. I don’t know what every day. I have no idea. I

Mike Beatty 26:52
still don’t really know, like, older coding techie stuff. No, it’s just figuring out message like as long as you’ve got support People that you can message to help, then there’s always a fix it.

Unknown Speaker 27:04
rocket was really good with because I asked them, you know, before I can I don’t know, I think I was asking regards because at one time before I had WP rocket, I had two other plugins like auto optimizer and a few other ones to help with, you know, deferring, you know, stuff and everything like that. And she goes, you won’t need that get rid of it. Because now it’s very cool. Because when you open up your website, if you open up post, you can see on the right hand side, oh, it’s the minify is checked off. This is all it’s all there. And you’re like, well, who’s the smart little critter that figured out this WP rocket,

Mike Beatty 27:43
isn’t it? I didn’t really realise how effective a plugin could really be until I did until I use that what is the only plugin I’ve ever paid for actually. So yeah, just yeah, beautiful. And if I knew that it could actually do though,

Unknown Speaker 27:57
then No,

Unknown Speaker 28:00
oh, get it done this a year ago for crying out loud, but, and again, I think we’re running parallel lies because I’m going to be doing a WP rocket review as well too, which is what I want them to do because it’s like, I know there’s other people out there that have put a dent in the wall from banging their head on the wall to because they’re probably going through the same issue and it’s like, okay, yeah, and that’s what I’m excited about doing a podcast. It’s like, I can convey all this information in a blog post. But this would be to me a perfect thing to talk about. In a podcast on this is the crap I went through it, trust me, you know, I almost wanted to start drinking again. It’s like, go run in the middle of the woods and Primal Scream or do something. What is going on? And it’s it. It’s It’s frustrating as all hell but that it may sound maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I find that exciting at the same time. It’s Like, it’s very rewarding to know that you’ve not rewarding that you had, there was a challenge, but the reward was, Hey, I figured this shit out. And now I got another feather in my cap and I got maybe a little bit more of a skill set. I will not say I’m a coder or anything like that, but I figured it out and I realised that, hey, I had people in my corner because yeah, like you I, I, you know, email rocket, hey, I’m, you know, what do I do? I got a lady too. Could have been the same one, hey, you do this, this, this and this, and here’s some references for it. And here’s some articles for you. And I’m like, cool, you know, and and it’s like, Okay, well, I think that’s what anyone was asking for. If we was circle back to making money online, that’s what people are looking for. Yeah. They want someone just to add, I don’t, I’m not here to when I have like when I have my referrals that come to who such as you have your referrals, you know. I’m not there to do the work for you. You know, that’s not my job. That’s not my responsibility. But my responsibility is to be there when you need me. If you have a question, if I know the answer, I’m going to give you the answer. If I don’t know the answer, I’m going to go, I have no frickin idea. But I know some people that I can get ahold of that do know what they’re talking about. Or if you’re pm such and such, let them know and I’m the kind of guy that goes I’ll use you as an example. Well, pm pm Mike, he knows his stuff about this, you know? After I’ve told them to do that, I will pm you right away and go Hey, Mike, I just gave up your name to so and so who’s a member here and they’re looking for this kind of answer. This kind of question. I kind of thought you’d be the guy. If you’re not oops. Yeah, you know.

Mike Beatty 30:47
So what about that network, isn’t it you know, building those connections and yeah, it passing it on to other people as well when they need that support when they need that help. It’s just that I know you’re just speaking to you. There’s so many people that you will know that I know could help me in the future. And so it’s just again, building that network. It’s like, well, that’s nice. Yeah. But honestly, not through like, scamming people out and

Leo Emery 31:13
no, there’s no boy on his face and stuff like that, you know, there’s no motivation behind it is designed to help you out because I’ve given people links, and I go, here you go. It’s not an affiliate link. Here you go, but then they’ll email me back. Go. Give me your affiliate link. Okay. Okay. Because my motivation is not money motivated when I’m trying to help you. That’s it. Yeah. This may sound a little crazy. Well, you’re already in an essence like an homage to us. Being a member of wealthy affiliate. You’re already kind of paying me every month because of your membership because you went through my affiliate link. I’m not gonna ask you for more. I’m, you know, like better I’m already making money off you. Yeah. I’m here to help you. And I think a lot of people don’t believe that, because I’ve had really, I’ve had those were really, really, really.

Unknown Speaker 32:12
I’m good. You know? I’m, yeah, I’m not it’s and I think, I think that catches people off guard. Yeah, really, they probably been just seen as an ATM for so long. Yeah, you know? And it’s like, well, I don’t believe you’re doing that. I don’t believe you’re doing this. Because yet while I am, you know, if you want to take advantage of we’re not totally up to you trust me. I’m going to sleep just fine tonight. And that’s why I can sleep like a baby at night because I know I’m not screwing anybody over. I’m not ripping anybody off. I’m not here to take your last dollar kind of thing. And I’ve told people like I want to join but I can’t afford the premium membership. And I said, Well, there’s ways you can afford the premium membership. Obviously. I’m not going to tell you To join and then work your ass off to make money to pay for your membership gets that not gonna work. But I say, What skills do you have? I can do this, I can do that. Have you ever thought of maybe freelancing it’s a tough gig to freelance, but the opportunity is there, you could go to freelancer, you could go to Fiverr. You can make these quick little. And when you think about it, if you can make that 50 bucks a month doing the freelance thing, well, then maybe that could pay for your premium thing. And then you can kind of work both ends at the same time. I know it’s a tough road to hoe. But at least it gives you an opportunity. And I remember one person going, holy crap, no one told me that one guy just told me to get a second job. I said, I think you probably figured that part out on your own. You didn’t need someone else to tell you that. And I think I think his motivation was that he wanted you to go through his affiliate link. He goes, Yeah, I think you’re right. No, well, you’re not it’s and the funny thing about that is okay, you may get that person to go through the filter. Like, and you may earn a passive recurring income from that person once was it worth all that bs? Now, people I want to be what I call in my team on my tribe, when I’m referring and I keep talking about why because I have a passion for the place is that I, I’m trying to I know I’m not going to resonate with everybody out there because I’m a new a unique little critter. So is everybody else my friends say my biggest asset is I say exactly what’s on my mind and I have no filter and my friends also say my worst asset is I say what’s on my mind and I have no filter. And it’s like well, I, the people that I want on my team is I want people coming in here knowing Okay, this is not a get rich quick thing. This is going to take hard work on your part. You’re not going to have fairy tales, rainbows and unicorn days every frickin day and but if you hang in there Things can turn you, you can actually change your destiny. And also, here’s the thing you probably don’t want to hear. Not everyone’s gonna make it. Reality Reality Check not everyone’s supposed to make money online, there are supposed to be gas attendants there are supposed to be teachers, there are supposed to be doctors, you know, construction workers, car salesman, it just is what it is. You know, all you got to do is find your thing. And I go, but here’s the crazy thing because I know I’m telling you, not everyone’s gonna make it but at the same time, I’m telling you, everyone can make it because once you find your thing in the real world, you find your passion, you find your hobby. Maybe you’re the best car salesman on that car lot. Did you know you could have a website that teaches people how to become the best car salesman on their car lot and now you have an internet business?

Mike Beatty 35:52
Yeah, I don’t think people don’t think about that.

Okay. Everything is transferable. 100. Again,

Leo Emery 35:57
whether to work or not. Yeah, I can’t guarantee that. Yeah, but there’s, you know, look at that guy that made God knows how much money someone plans for how to build a frickin chicken coop for crying out loud.

Mike Beatty 36:12
Yeah, well, I’d love to Well, that’s actually how we kind of connected, wasn’t it? I think it was through talking about podcasting and stuff on the affiliate platform and just yeah, messaging about some of the opportunities there a bit more.

Leo Emery 36:28
Sorry, Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, you’re the one that told me go get Pete’s course.

Mike Beatty 36:33
Yeah, well, um, I don’t want to get there. But I also want to know a little bit more about like, because obviously you’ve had multiple websites before you were just mentioning before this chat about one that you sold with a you built it with a friend who’s actually the owner of Thrive one

of the one of the creators of thrive.

Leo Emery 36:54
Yeah,

Mike Beatty 36:55
that’s really cool. But so can you like describe some or explain We’ll share some of the websites that you have had or that you currently

Leo Emery 37:03
Yeah, kind of have gone well, well, actually, Paul and I years and years ago, like I said, I’ve been with Wealthy Affiliate since 2012. Paul and I met inside Wealthy Affiliate, when Wealthy Affiliate was totally different. When it came to the back office back then. It was actually a chat board. Yeah, very clumsy. Very good, because you’re spoiled with live chat now. You know, it’s like, yeah, chat, chat chat. And private messaging, there’s no, there wasn’t private messaging or nothing like that. And the platform back then I would say it was kind of chaotic, you know, in regards to flow, but they, they were they back then Collin Carson, were still kind of I’m sure. Their visions were of what it is today, but it certainly didn’t start out that way. You know, and we met online there and we started talking and then one thing led to another, we actually had to look at because you can go back in that time machine. Things online to look at old sites holy crap our site looked like shit.

Mike Beatty 38:06
All sides did back then. No Did they like that was just

Leo Emery 38:09
Well, we had the golden green bat golden green banner with the coins.

Oh, it’s just oh, God was disgusting when I looked at it going, Oh my God, we are one of those. We were one of those Hey, we can make you a millionaire website.

Unknown Speaker 38:25
And so we had that it was basically showing you how to build a business and make money online. And, and, you know, we went through courses and everything, we had our courses and we created and built everything. But at the same time, Paul was working was collaborating with Shane on various projects. Paul’s a coder, you know, and we i was i was like the design guy I and he’s like the code guy. And it’s kind of funny when he taught coding my eyes roll back in my head like a shark going I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Did

Leo Emery 39:01
I always just say, is it gonna work? Yep, that’s all you need to know.

And we’d be on, it’d be wild, we’d be on Skype talk, and he’d be coding I go, how do you what? Just guys? It’s just like, whoo, crazy. And so he was kind of working. In the end, he says, you know, I’m gonna move that direction. I’m like, Yeah, I get it. No worries, you know, let’s just tap out just a website and sell it for whatever we can. And we got this. People didn’t buy the site, they bought the content within the site. So okay, so the content, and then he went his way and then I tried a bunch of different I went into a bunch of different niches, and then I dig Wealthy Affiliate because I met another fella named David inside the wealthy affiliate who owns a company that helps people get out of payday loan debt. Well, he’s allowed me and I think just one other person to be, and I’ve been with him for what, five years now. help generate leads to help people get out of payday loan debt. So that’s a very cool feeling knowing that you’re helping people get out of payday because those payday loan debt companies are evil. Absolutely. And I hear horror stories and I am because on my website, you go to the website, it gives all the information. And my marketing is actually just done through YouTube, his YouTube videos that directs them to the website, and they just fill out to get a free quote. And his team will send him a full blown free quote. And because David has these phenomenal relationships with actually the payday loan companies, and he can reduce people’s payments that they’re paying to these companies by 50 to 75%. You know, and that’s huge when some people are pretty much giving at least one of their paychecks to these companies every, you know, two weeks or more. It’s just horrendous. I look at all my site, it’s like, just give me your first name, last name the state you’re in. And the number of payday loans you have and the total. There’s people that are 510 12 payday loans 15 grand and in, like, holy crap, like how and what the problem is, is they’re getting one loan to pay the off the other loan and there’s that and that’s the cycle they want you to get into, you know, and so those are one of the websites I’m like, that’s very cool because these they can go to bed at night. Now whether people act on taken advantage of David’s service, you know, not not on me or or David, but it’s nice to know that, hey, here’s an awesome niche that’s actually helping out the 20 million people that have payday loans in the United States, and average, and what’s going on today with this COVID stuff. It says we’re gonna see a lot of people that are probably gone and got payday loans and now they’re in trouble where they can’t pay it back and he says we’re gonna probably get a flood of people looking for help. And Mike that’s feels it feels good to be in a niche where you’re actually helping somebody This

Mike Beatty 42:15
is crazy how these companies give out these payday loans is absolutely insane it’s just it’s so unethical and I don’t understand how they can sleep at night those bananas

Leo Emery 42:29
Yeah, well, like we had it we have companies like that up here in Canada as well too. And the thing is, is when I’ve learned a lot of this from David is that when these people and most people are getting these payday loans because either it’s a medical thing or are something can’t like the, you know, the transmission crapped out in their car, you know, and one scary thing I heard from the guy that used to own a payday loan company up here in Canada, he goes If you want to make money from people, you make money from people that don’t have options. So these people that are getting payday loans, they can’t turn to their friends and family for X amount of dollars, because more often than not their friends and family are in the same financial situation that they’re in, they’re probably living one paycheck away from maybe being homeless, you know, they’re just scraping by so they can’t turn to their friend and go, Hey, can you lend me $1,000? So I can get this, you know, and he goes, so they can’t go to the bank. They got no credit, you know, banks not going to go near him. So where are you going to go, Oh, well go to a payday loan company. We don’t really care about where you’re at. You know, and when you’re in that situation, Dave says when they walk through the door, they don’t care about reading the contract. They’re just seeing the cash that’s sitting behind the counter that’s going to save their bacon for whatever is going on. And then after the ether wears off, and a month a week goes by, like crap, I’m gonna pay this back. Number one, you get another oh my god it’s like there’s what do you say the average annual interest rate for some of these is can be as high as 300% you know, it’s just it’s just like oh my god you know yeah

Mike Beatty 44:18
and then I got to just touch on a point there you said how your use YouTube to drive traffic there What do you What’s your YouTube content right now

Leo Emery 44:29
are basically it’s just the

when it comes to the the end payday loan debt site because that’s what it is and payday loan debt dotnet it’s just the YouTube videos I have I created only about a minute minute 30 seconds long. And all it is is just, you know, quite honestly, it’s like, are you in payday loan debt? You know, here’s our service. Here’s how it works. Get a free quote. Click the link below. The video will take you to the website and you get a free quote and you’re good to go. kind of think that’s all the videos are. Yeah, and I’ve probably on video, one, probably close to 200 videos now. Yeah, it started that beginning making a video every week, then boom, boom, boom, and then I backed off now it’s every two weeks because I’ve got I got quite a few videos that were on page one, but now things have tailed off because, you know, wonderful Google. They did an update and they really kicked ass on the payday loan keywords because there was a lot of companies out there promoting payday loans. So I kind of got trapped and trapped in that net. So things have dropped off but slowly coming back again. It’s kind of like okay, we realise you’re on the good guy side. You’re not on the bad guy. Sorry. Thank you

Mike Beatty 45:58
actually ranking in Google But for your YouTube videos

Leo Emery 46:02
yeah I didn’t I all I did was created a website that had a bunch of great information on it. I didn’t. Then I didn’t create one liquor written content. I just did videos. My whole Yeah, and the whole goal was because I knew Google owns YouTube. Yeah, so I just applied what I learned from creating content in the written way. So you do your keyword research, you know? And then you just and Tim Schmoyer He’s like, my mentor when it comes to YouTube because he’s like a certified he’s certified from YouTube and audience growth. So I got he shows you how to build a YouTube channel but I wasn’t after that information because I wanted the information of how do you SEO YouTube videos properly? Right, that’s what I zapper so I learned that so it was his name, Tim. Yeah, let me get his. I always screw up his last name. I actually just did a I’m just going to my site right now. Actually just did a post about him crazy, but

Mike Beatty 47:02
he actually goes into like YouTube, SEO and stuff like that as Yeah,

Leo Emery 47:05
actually I just did a post about YouTube SEO tactics and the tactics that you’re probably wasting your time on. And these are the tactics that I was using. Holy crap.

Mike Beatty 47:18
You are wasting your time.

Leo Emery 47:19
Some of them I was but he’s, and his first name is Tim and his last name is spelled sc HMOY. Er. And he has like a plan.

Mike Beatty 47:32
Yeah, it’s your blog post. I’m guessing you link to him as well. Oh, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 47:37
I did. Absolutely. I was I suppose they

Mike Beatty 47:39
all put I’ll just put a link in the show notes to your on your blog post and just if anyone’s done that and they just want to get that and you know, what up, just go to the show notes.

Leo Emery 47:49
Yeah. And then what I’ll do is I’ll just copy that link and put it in the Skype thing here for you. But yeah, at the bottom of the post, it’s I give you a link to his website and a link to his YouTube channel. Because what I did for this post was this was an email that he sent out. And so if you’re not on his email list, you want to gotten this information. So basically what I just said was that what I’m doing is just, I want to share what he sent on his, through his email. And basically, I just, you know, in my own words, talked about the 11 little tactics that you shouldn’t really drive yourself crazy about. And

Mike Beatty 48:32
so I’ve kind of started YouTube a bit recently, but I need to it’s one of those things I normally like to dive in, you know, like how you’re probably about to start that podcast because there’s really only three forms of content I’ve kind of learned this as well as like there’s written video and audio there’s not really anything else that you can do not different watch some

Unknown Speaker 48:50
of it, but they won’t watch

Mike Beatty 48:53
his recent video audio. So

Unknown Speaker 48:55
yeah,

Mike Beatty 48:57
yeah. But yeah, look, it’s good to be in all Three events. Yeah, I would, I would say focus on one probably to start.

Leo Emery 49:04
Yeah, that’s what I was taught to is like, yeah, there’s, you know, when it come, let’s use social media, there’s a million different channels, you can use that well focus on just one if you want to, you know, Facebook is your thing, become the Facebook expert, then if you want to go try Instagram and this and that you can, but the truth of the matter is, you don’t need 10 social media channels to take advantage of social media. I personally can’t stand social media accounts that it’s all white noise and I could care less what you had for breakfast and you know, and I’m sorry, you lost your sock, like, come on. And I don’t need to take a picture of your food. I care less what you’re eating. You know? Yeah, you don’t look so cute glasses was sold the other day. I don’t care. So I was always like, you know, I have a Twitter account. I don’t think I put anything on In five years, and so I had all these and the only reason and I go, Well, obviously don’t like social media because I just find it all white noise. There’s just so much noise you got to break through to get to the people you want to get to. And I’m sure there’s other people out there that will say, Oh, no, no, you’re all wrong about it. But you know, that’s just my personal view. To me, my social media, for lack of better term is YouTube, because it is actually a social it is a search engine, but it is social media, as people are interacting through the videos, and now from what I’m going to call my social media is my podcast that I’m going to be doing. That’s going to be my social media just about

Mike Beatty 50:41
to say another one, as well as Pinterest. Pinterest is also a search, like, yeah, so you actually search on it. And it’s kind of social media, but it’s actually kind of not similar to YouTube. And not actually podcasting is really exactly the same because people can actually search for certain things in the podcast app. And then yes, Coming from that wouldn’t Yeah, it’s probably not as interactive because it’s not like people can comment on podcast True.

Leo Emery 51:08
True, you could have you you’re obviously having a more immediate, you know, interaction through social media. Could you pass? No, I would say yeah, you know, you will

Mike Beatty 51:16
have the in someone’s ear buds is that going for a journal that is a gym or, you know, walking the dog shopping, cooking, whatever, you know, people listen to podcast is much more intimate. You know, you’re slightly almost speaking one on one with someone.

Leo Emery 51:31
Yeah, and that’s why I find I just find I find it quite a bit of social media or just a lot of no real. I don’t, and I should maybe it’s just me just no real connections. It’s all kind of just surface stuff. And, yeah, you know, and it’s like, you know, yeah, and I’ve, boy, I get trolled the social media has given people everyone a voice, but it doesn’t mean we have to listen to everybody. You know, cuz not Everything that everyone says is worthwhile listening to.

Mike Beatty 52:03
Yes, I love you. And I think that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s so much noise out there is deciding who you actually do want to listen to and who, yeah, it’s figuring out like, do I relate to this person? Are they giving cutting

Leo Emery 52:15
noise? Yeah, cutting through that is so much noise, you know? And it’s just like, wow. And I think, you know, maybe 2% of what’s on social media is valuable. The rest is just filler. Noise waste of time. You know, it’s right up there with the Kardashians waste of time.

Don’t get me started on those people.

Mike Beatty 52:37
Well, they are social media, are they? So the right anyway, I could honestly chat to you all day. But I’m also very aware I’ve kept you for a very long time. So there’s always one thing I always ask my guests when they get like towards an end of a podcast, and I try and pick a specific day. So we’re going to think of a specific day but the question is If you could go back in time, with all the knowledge that you know now and go and speak to yourself on this day, what would be up to three pieces of advice that you give yourself and I want you to try and think of while you’re thinking of that, I want you to think of a day where you know it’s like the worst day so you’re going to one of your 50 jobs and you know you it’s a Monday morning like you say always, every Monday the car is raining and you step in a puddle is soaking wet and you get into the you get into your job and you just think why what am I doing? I hadn’t let it like what am I actually doing? If you could go back to that moment? What pieces of it

Leo Emery 53:45
I had, I have that day in my head cuz I I was working for a muffler shop and my job was to replace mufflers, you know, that’s not the cleanest job in the world is dirty, working with free And well, it’s just a horror show for about a week. Oh, whoo.

Unknown Speaker 54:06
And

Leo Emery 54:08
bad day, you know, I remember burning off bolts and when you burn bolts, they explode. And of course, every spark ends up going down your back or down your shorts, you know, and you’re getting burnt and I bang my head countless times on the undercarriage of buses and cars and my day was just getting worse and the rest of the crew was learning all kinds of new swear words for that day. I didn’t even go in the lunchroom I sat outside and coated and bitch to myself going there’s got to be a better way dude. You know, you’re earning X amount of dollars an hour, but it looks like you’ve been in a war. You know, you got these little burn marks all over your even if you’re wearing coveralls that goes right through because there’s molten steel. You know, I’m driving home and it’s kind of a semi shitty day. And all of a sudden the cops pull me over and I’m like, great. Now what? I’d forgotten. Yep. Oh no, I’d forgotten to put my seatbelt on. So I’m getting a ticket seatbelt and I’m like, are you and I’m trying to explain this to the cop when my day and he’s kind of looking at me. I don’t care Dude, I

thought I’d explain it to you

get you know and then get home and it just goes from bad to worse after that and I was just sitting on the deck and I go There’s got to be a better way. And that’s

Mike Beatty 55:30
how you get to got it from now you go transport teleport back to that day time, guys.

Leo Emery 55:37
Yeah, and it’s kind of like that. And this is all before Tony Robbins and all this kind of stuff and everything like that. But it’s kind of funny when I was taking this course you know, Tony says you’re going to be they’re motivated by inspiration or desperation. I was motivated by desperation. I was also very pissed off. Gone. This is not my life. life this is not, I’m no, I’m not going to be 50 years old banging my head on the undercarriage of some frickin bus going on, you know, pitching all the way home. And then you know, and I said, No, no, that’s not going to happen.

Mike Beatty 56:15
What would you tell yourself if you could go back to that time?

Leo Emery 56:21
She I don’t know what I would say, you know, it’s, um,

Unknown Speaker 56:27
I would

Leo Emery 56:29
if I could teleport myself and sit in the passenger seat of that car on the ride home. Let’s say that you may not see it now, dude. But at every moment in your life, you can change the destiny of your life with one simple decision. And it doesn’t matter how shitty your day was, what happened five minutes ago, 30 minutes ago or five years ago. There’s nothing saying you can be successful. Two seconds from now. So, I know in that moment, it sucks What’s going on? And you can’t see the forest for the trees and you think the world’s crashing in on you. It’s like a shit this is my lot in life and I’m not going to be any better than that. Feel free to go through that and say that to yourself swear all you want, you know, check whatever you need to kick as long as it’s not a person or a dog.

Mike Beatty 57:31
That’s a fine. No, really.

Leo Emery 57:35
That’s my neighbour has a cat I can say that.

It’s actually my dog and the cat get along. They play each other between the fence That’s hilarious.

So it’s so funny when I have a mini wiener dog she thinks she’s a Great Dane though.

But it’s like you’re you’re going to have that inspiration, desperation mode, but understand that no matter what’s going on You’re absolutely in control of everything that’s going on your life, it may not feel like it. But you are, your decision to do that is going to impact your life positively or negatively your decision to do this positively or negativity and a lot of times you’re going to have to have a real shitty moment to have that inspirational moment. You’re not going to be having a glorious day and the world’s going perfectly and all of a sudden have this, you know, hey, I’m going to change my life. Now. You know, it, I’ve never had a great day where I’ve decided that I’m going to have you know what I mean? It’s always been in those moments of okay. Ah, okay. Things gonna change. Okay, well, the only way things are gonna change is if I decide to change them. You know what I mean? And I’ll go back to Tony like, he taught me a lot of things. And the one thing that he taught me that’s gotten me to the places where I want to go, is that I’ve just asked myself better questions of myself. You know, and that’s what I did that day. Okay, what do I need to do not to burn myself for welding gear anymore, and not keep banging my head on the bottom of cars, what do I have to do? And then that’s kind of like how things moved into? Well, I’ve heard of this online stuff, you know, and, you know, and maybe and I sit there well, and you know, maybe I can do that at night while I’m bitching and moaning during the day about my gig. But then one thing that I thought was so cool, was while I was starting this online stuff, and even though I was getting screwed over for those first three years, I could care less what my job was because I knew this job was just there to pay my bills. This isn’t was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. Because what I’m doing for the rest of the life is what I’m working on when I get at home. So I care less what my boss was like, I could care less what job I was doing. Because that’s not what I’m meant to do forever. That’s that’s an ends to a means. That’s like, you know, that’s like being you know, some girls sugar boy, you’re paying a The fiddles could open. And I’m doing my gig at night. And that’s what kind of got me kept my motivation going, even when I was getting screwed over left, right and centre, you know, and then I had that wake up moment of God going, Okay. And you would think after three years, I would have figured this out a little sooner, obviously, this is not working. You know, you think you kind of figure that out after two or three months, six months. Apparently, I’m a slow learner. However, at the top of my class, and I think that just proved it. But then once I realised, okay, let’s go back to what I was taught mentally there like that. You know, it, you know, if this is your goal, you’re going to go You’re, you’re getting to your goal is not going to be a straight line A to B, there’s going to be a C, then there’s an H, and then there’s an x and then you’re back to B again, you’re gonna it’s gonna be a kind of question. Little road. But as long as that crooked little road is still moving your forward gonna be okay. And I think and my first aha moment was okay. It’s obvious I have no clue what I’m doing. I had to admit myself. You’re a knucklehead, you don’t know what you doing. You think you know what you’re doing but you have a frickin clue because if you did GPS a lot farther ahead than you were. I said, Okay, rule one. Let’s not listen to all the gurus and patches anymore even though they’re telling you exactly what you want to hear. And you know what the funny thing is even to this day, I’ll come across something go Holy shit. That sounds pretty good.

No, like wait a minute, shake your head gone. No, no, no, that’s that’s more garbage stuff.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:45
week every week. So still,

Leo Emery 1:01:49
so whoever’s listening, don’t panic that never goes away. So own it, but just realise just don’t get sucked into it. Now I just laugh at and go are you freaking kidding me? Yeah.

Mike Beatty 1:01:59
I’m skip it. Week and if it’s still interesting, then yeah, I’d say,

Leo Emery 1:02:04
Yeah, exactly. And, and when I also tell people I go if it’s that magical and that fantastic and also don’t listen to all that false scarcity, like, Oh, you don’t buy it now you’re gonna miss out on it. Trust me, come back in a week later and you’ll still be telling you don’t buy, you know, whatever. Just step back and just do some research. Just get out there and put your detective hat on and do your Sherlock Holmes thing and just research the shit out of this thing. And trust me, you’ll probably come across more information telling you to run for your life, then you will spend your money kind of thing. But I my moment was okay. I need to find somebody that actually knows what the hell they’re doing. And that’s how I saw it without me knowing how to go about doing that. Again, that’s how I stumbled across Cory because I was going okay, I need to get to understand what’s going on. I saw that infomercial with Tony and I saw the successful people and I go, geez, that guy, obviously onto something, you know, and I saw his infomercial over and over and over again I go, Oh, my God, you’re your same age as I am and you’re living in a frickin castle What the hell is going on?

Unknown Speaker 1:03:18
It’s not right.

Leo Emery 1:03:20
And then one and I just noticed that once I started taking control of of what I could control, then things started to kind of fall into place. So I go, Okay, I’m not letting other people choose my destiny for me. I’m also taking everything that everyone says with a huge grain of salt and putting putting them through the litmus test of Do you really know your shit. You know what I mean? And then that’s when I found other mentors to help me. Do the things that I wanted to, you know, try to accomplish and of course, not everything worked out, you know? Again, you’re foolish if you think it’s going to, but I did always walk away with, okay. 80% of what they said was cool the other 20% and not so much, you know, but that goes with everybody, you know, probably, you know 20% of what I say is okay, and 80% it’s all crap. You know, you see if there were eight mindset work on that first because without with the right mindset, you can accomplish whatever you want to accomplish, and I don’t care what it is, because it’s your mindset. This is going to get you through the challenges. It’s your mindset, that’s going to support you in what you want to do. And one thing I really truly want to say and this is the things that I’ll talk about in my podcast, understand your why why are you doing what you’re doing? Because and I don’t want you to be doing it because you want a nicer car, a bigger house or this or that. I want you to get to the core of what you’re doing. Why are you doing this? Are you doing this because you want to have the financial means that you can take care of your parents and their elderly years or do you want them financial means so you can send your kid to whatever college you want to go to. Because believe me, there is going to be times every day because it happens to me. Where you’re going to go. Why the hell am I doing this? This is nuts. This is the shit this is not working. Well then have your wife sitting on your wall and big bold letters. You’re doing this because, okay, that was gonna save your ass and help you keep moving forward.

Mike Beatty 1:05:26
Yeah, no, it’s so true. And I just think it’s such a big one. Like, as soon as we realise we are in control, and our decisions change everything. Yeah, it ends up changing everything but yeah, it Yeah. Honestly, it’s been brilliant. Like to to chat to you. And I definitely want to keep picking your brains and we’ll definitely have to do this again sometime. But ya know, thanks so much for coming on the show today. No, it was fun. It was cool. So there you have it, Leo. Definitely. knows his stuff. And I’m just going to summarise five key takeaways that I’ve taken from the podcast and hopefully that will help you as well. Number one, is that the secret the one secret to success online? is consistency. Boring, boring. Yeah, consistently head down. Boss in the air. I love the way that he said that. Just being consistent with it. And I think everyone that I’ve spoken to on the podcast, would 100% agree with that. Everyone has a very similar story. There’s patterns in these people that are on the podcast, and it’s those that are consistent and stick with it long enough to see success are the ones that are the most successful. Number two, is he kind of spoke about like failing forward and making mistakes, but then learning from them and then we’ve kind of touched on site speed and things like that. And we mentioned WP rocket. We both just use that plugin recently and he was mentioned on the podcast recently as well. So if you are interested in a quick win to get improve your speed, I cannot recommend WP rocket enough. Number three is building a network. Again, with so many businesses, your network is your net worth. But if you can actually build real relationships with people help other people out, you will also then find is way easier to get things done. When have you got any issues going on, you know, even if it’s your site, if you know the right people to ask, if it is something that you’re you know, you create a new product and you want to promote it, just having people around you in the similar sort of niche is going to help so much so do not underestimate the power of your network. And then number four, is he was talking about some of those YouTube SEO tactics. And in fact I just the reason I put this down is just because I mentioned that I will give a link in the show notes. So if you go to Make time online comm forward slash six five so that’s makes Harmon nine.com forward slash 65 you can get the show notes and the link to those YouTube SEO tactics that Leo was talking about. And then number five, the final one is just what he would tell himself if he was to go back in time. You can change change your whole outcome with one decision. So once you realise that you are in control of what is going on, that is how you can actually end up changing your whole outcome and your future. So no matter how bad the situation is, you are always in control. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that one guy’s not gonna ramble on for much longer. And yeah. Thanks for listening in to this episode of Make time online. Be sure to subscribe to our podcasts you don’t miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast. You The App Store keep changing for the better guys. Take care.

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The Start Up Mindset & Outsourcing Tips w/ Moe Saghier

​So many people ​love the idea of having a business that means they can work when they want, where they want. 

There's also the thought of putting yourself and family in a better financial situation and genuinely helping other people (you know employees, clients and real people). But so many people ​put their business plans on the back burner.

Then one day they realise they are 60 years old and they missed their chance to try this. 

My good friend and old colleague, Moe Saghier from Edventures Recruitment, explains what made him take the ​leap and start his own start up. We chat about:

  • The importance of just starting
  • How finding someone else who has done what you want to do can save so much wasted time and money
  • ​Why your mindset​ is one of the most overused words in a start ups vocabulary
  • And much more

​The Start Up Mindset

Moe Saghier

From Edventures Recruitment

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Listen to the full ​Moe Saghier podcast episode

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​Resources and tips mentioned in the ​podcast

Here are some of the best tips and resources mentioned in the podcast...

  • Taking a step back and giving yourself more time can help you reflect on what you want from life. 
  • Mentors are super important to avoid pitfalls & fast-track progress
  • Upwork or Fiverr (outsource work and find freelancers)
  • Onlinejobs.ph (freelancers from the Philippines)
  • Just going through the process helps you to learn (i.e. interviewing other people helped Moe to refine his vision)

​Books mentioned...

  • The Lean Startup (Eric Ries book- how to build a startup- as low cost as possible and testing ideas as quick as possible)
  • Rich Dad Poor Dad (Robert Kiyosaki book- that Moe and I found changed our mindset. Read my review here)
  • Millionaire Fastlane (MJ De Marco book- my most highly recommended business book...  I also love his second one Unscripted. Read my review here)
  • 4 Hour Work Week (Tim Ferris- outsourcing work)
  • The Slight Edge (Jeff Olson- Perfect for creating good habits)
  • Complete Guide to Money (Dave Ramsey- this isn’t an affiliate link as I don’t recommend this book! That’s the link for my review of it… I wrote this review ages ago and it makes me cringe a bit if you want to see how my site has changed for a laugh!)

(These are all Amazon affiliate links and I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you purchase any of these books through these links.)

You can find what I learnt from reading over 100 books in 3 years, with my top book recommendations here.

Full ​Moe Saghier Podcast Transcript

Moe Saghier 0:00
That step back is like so important, like, fit. Like there’s, you know, all these is when you start this process of, you know, trying to start create something for yourself all these, you know, sayings or quotes that you’ve heard along the way start making sense. Finally, are they making sense like, you know, you learn more in failure than you do in success that sort of thing is it’s like, it’s true. It’s like when you’ve had you’ve had that kind of moment where you’re like, not doing as well as you thought you should have been. You really come away with a lot more than than all those times that you were successful or you did get the job or you did get the promotion, that sort of

Mike Beatty 0:36
thing guys, it’s Mike from Make Time Online, and today we’re joined by Moe Saghier from Edventures Recruitment.com.

So I actually know mo from working in Qatar. We both were teachers in a school in Qatar, and he is kind of like just really starting up a new app, a new website and a new idea. And I thought it would be a really good idea to get him on the podcast just to kind of like explain some of the

thinking that he’s gone through and some of the concepts and things that he’s actually done. And the way he’s actually got an idea and started executing it, because this is where a lot of people kind of get ideas in their heads, but then they struggle to execute. But also, it’s really helpful. This chat will be really helpful for if you’ve got any interest in like hiring other people or outsourcing work, and just like mindset, like business mindset in general. So if that is you, then I 100% recommend listening to this chat. If you like if you just want to skip the last few minutes and find out the few takeaways that I took from the chat. Then you can just get the last few minutes but if not, it’s a really good one. So hope you enjoy it.

All right, my first question, I always like to get a story from someone. So I know obviously, I know your story a little bit. But I want to know, did you have this? It’s called an FTP. I read it in a book once, and it’s basically fuck this event is what he calls it in the book. And quite often entrepreneurs get this f t, apparently, before they actually dive in. Was there like one thing that happened where you’re like, Yeah, fuck this.

Moe Saghier 2:32
Yeah, probably wasn’t one thing. It was probably lots of things. Lots of those events. No, actually, yeah, there was definitely one thing it was an experience with a recent

Unknown Speaker 2:46
employer where I didn’t feel my contributions were valued at what they should have been. And, you know, I made the decision to move home. I like it as a human. You know? others out there listening don’t know, I was international for the last 10 years, my wife and I were working in international schools. And, you know, we went through the recruitment process so many times. And it was just time to move home. And then and then we moved home. And then we realised, hey, it’s actually a different, whole different situation back here in Canada, and Ontario with getting teaching jobs is that you can’t just apply and get a job and go there’s, there’s a process. So part of part of the inspiration was, you know, just waiting around a couple months for the school year to submit, you know, first of all, to interview for the position and then for the school year to start and then for me to start getting my name out there. So I guess my FTP was a chain of events that led up to kind of like a two or three month period where I really didn’t have much to do other than you know, of course, be a father and a husband and a son. So, yeah, I guess my FTP was a three month low in action and otherwise busy life.

Mike Beatty 4:08
I suppose like that is it? Well, there’s no better reason is there then to actually start and try and do something yourself then? Yeah, like you say having a bit of a low I guess it’s quite a big empty.

Unknown Speaker 4:22
Yeah, life was so busy up until that point that was the thing it was just like one thing after another and you really didn’t have a stop a chance to stop and think like, Am I am I am I being fulfilled with what I’m currently doing? am I passionate about what I’m doing? And then, you know, lo and behold, life throws, uh, you know, a little bit of downtime your way and you start thinking you’re like, I’m not really engaged, you know, fully in what I’m doing or passionate about where I am at life. And once you do have that moment to just sit there and think ideas start to flow surprisingly enough.

Mike Beatty 4:58
It honestly is amazing. How many people I speak to on like, even on the podcast and stuff who start in a very, very similar way really, it’s almost like something that’s not it’s not necessarily something like a decision that they’ve made it’s more an event that’s actually happened and I just thought it you know that with your story is obviously very, very similar really, and I’m excited to see like, what’s gonna happen anyway in the future, but I just wondered like, if you could share, what was that the first thing so obviously, you’ve got this idea in your head to create ICA. Well, can you explain that what the idea is?

Unknown Speaker 5:36
Well, the idea is a a membership app application, a mobile application to basically streamline the process of teacher recruitment. Not only to take out you know, the expense to teachers and schools themselves are seriously limit it. But to make it a little bit more transparent, I remember my wife and I, we had applied We were working with a recruiter a few years back. And the recruiter set up one interview and it was like, we had one Skype conversation, they set up one interview, the school that interviewed us wanted us, but then we did our research and we realised it wasn’t a good fit for us. And it was like the recruiter had got so upset with us that we had, you know, somehow wasted his time by not deciding to you know, move to another country. Three years of our lives there and he was just so upset and I thought to myself, I’m like that is that that that process is like, is so nuanced with so many things that we actually didn’t know as teachers like we didn’t know that the recruiter was getting paid for, you know, was going to get paid a finder’s fee for each of us, you know, accepting the job and and completing. We didn’t know the name of the school before we we had applied

Mike Beatty 6:50
was that when you were in Kuwait?

Unknown Speaker 6:52
we that’s when we were in Kuwait, and it was supposed to be it was it was a job in the Emirates somewhere. I can’t remember which Emirate But, you know, we felt like it wasn’t even a lateral move, like, the school that was we were interviewed for was like going to be actually, you know, a step down from where we were. And you know, with international teaching, you’re always kind of trying Well, you know, for some people, you’re trying to climb that ladder and you know, get to a school where, you know, you feel really comfortable and you feel valued and what not. So that was one experience. The other experience was when I was I was working as a middle school principal, and I had to actually work with recruiters, and I just spent so much time emailing a recruiter back and forth before I even ever gotten in front of a candidate. And then, you know, like, you’re going to interview people, and they’re going to realise, like, like my wife, and I did that the job’s not for them, and they’re not going to take you up on that offer. And it was like for every 10 interviews that I was doing, I was, you know, landing one teacher to come to the school for the following here. And, you know, for all the for each every of those 10 interviews, I was probably sending five or six emails. Back and forth. And that, you know, would, by the time all of a sudden done, you’re like three weeks into the recruiting process, and you’re just getting to talk to the candidate. So I, I, based my experience. Well, the idea for the app comes from like, having both of those experiences having like a negative experience as a, as a teacher, trying to find your next destination. And as, you know, as a principal trying to recruit teachers to your school, I just felt like there was so much in terms of time and energy and money and transparency that could have been done better. And then lo and behold, I go for a coffee with a gentleman who later becomes my mentor. And he’s the one that he talks me through this process. And, you know, mentorship is important when the creative process I mean, so much of the creative process is, is like so riddled with, you know, self doubt and worry. And when you have a mentor or someone who’s like, what even if they’re just one step ahead, then you You know, they lead you down certain paths and it just you miss you dodge so many of the landmines you would otherwise.

Mike Beatty 9:06
Yeah. So have you noticed it was like a friend or

Unknown Speaker 9:11
just it was just as a childhood friend that he works. He works as and you know, hadn’t spoken to him in years either it was just a coffee. It was like a coffee after coming back after 10 years, he told me he’s working on a fitness app himself. And, you know, he’s like, he was so into the process. And he was telling me and I’m like, and it was weird because I had read a written a read, sorry, an Instagram post before, just before going to him and, you know, talking about, you know, new industries cut in, you know, in the 21st century and whatnot. And one of the things was, you know, building membership based apps and it was like, that little piece of knowledge based on the FTP is based on a random coffee and someone you know, going out on this journey themselves, and it was just, it was a week after that, that the ball was rolling. Like everything started from that point. That’s crazy.

Mike Beatty 10:02
So it was literally you had a chat with him a week later. So what was like your first step? Because obviously, you’ve got the idea, then you want to build this like, membership app. I was what’s your first thing to do? Was that kind of where he was quite helpful?

Unknown Speaker 10:20
The first Yeah, well, Yes, he was. He’s been helpful every step of the way. Actually. The first step was to actually do some research and see is it did I just come up with somebody else’s idea? Was this idea already out there in the in the market and how was it doing, you know, and if it was doing well, was there space for competition? And after looking and searching and, you know, as an international teacher, you’re familiar with a lot recruiter. So you know, it wasn’t hard to start the search. I realised that it wasn’t out there. No one had done it before. So that was the first step research. And then after that, you know, passion. took over and then you start wiring, you start doing something called wireframing. Where, okay, this is what the app is going to look like. But you do it in a, in such a basic way. Since you don’t have any IDE, since I didn’t have any technical ability, it’s like kind of like a rough copy for an essay or something. You know, this is where this button would be this information would be helpful for the school to know about a teacher, and you start brainstorming your whole idea.

Mike Beatty 11:26
Yeah, no, it makes it makes sense to them flat once you’ve got like the plan and everything for for the app. How did you because well, I know you don’t know how to like build an app by yourself and do that sort of stuff. So how did you like even think What to do?

Unknown Speaker 11:45
So I am someone who has like, zero initially, I’m learning quickly. Initially, I would have said I have zero technical abilities. I could turn a computer on I can use it. I can send an email, that sort of thing. I’m great, you know, using apps and And downloading them really had a basic basic basic understanding I guess like a, you know, a common man’s understanding of technology. But it’s funny there are, you don’t always need certain skill you can use other skills that you have in order to help you develop new skills 10 years working in the Middle East in those expat communities, you’re you’re communicating, you’re learning how to communicate in an entirely different way. Like you’re learning how to communicate with people from India and Pakistan. And, you know, you have your Kiwis and the Aussies and people from all over the world and, and you develop this sense of, you know, being able to blend in and talk the talk. And, and basically, what helped me was was was those 10 years of being able to communicate because then I just got on a website called Upwork. Yeah. Where you can you know, I think you’re familiar, you’ve done some work with a similar But you can you can hire freelancers, you can hire people who have the know how. And the only thing that you need to be or do is be clear vision and understand what you want, and be able to communicate with them. You know, I must say when I would look for a designer for the app, so someone who took my frames and actually turned them into something professional looking, I must have interviewed about 15 people through Skype. And in each conversation that I had, I actually my vision became a little bit more clear. So sorry for those, you know, first 14 people wasting their time, but I learned a lot from them, right? Like I learned it, you know, the vocabulary, the lingo, the types of programmes that they might use, and then I would use that information later on in the you know, in further interviews to actually sound like I knew what I was talking about.

Mike Beatty 13:51
That’s really cool. So you’re actually using the interview process that to learn for yourself and then use that later.

Unknown Speaker 13:58
And like going back to like, Again, again, your lived experience is like so important in this, in the whole creative process is like, you don’t know why you’ve had certain experience or sometimes they just come out, you know, organically and you’ve had these experiences that like, I wouldn’t have known how to interview someone if I didn’t do those hundred interviews, you know, for those 10 candidates that I had when I was working as a middle school principal, so I was able to, you know, rely on those previous experiences to help me get through the interview process. Did you have these people? These are freelancer, sorry, like so these are people who are trying to get your project so they’re interviewing for you, right? So you’re kind of in a position of power there.

Unknown Speaker 14:36
So did you um,

Mike Beatty 14:39
how did you do it? Did you have like email sequences or anything? Like Did you have some questions before or was it just literally anyone that applied? You just hopped on Skype and had a chat with them?

Unknown Speaker 14:49
Yeah, well, so Upwork they, they really they really help you. They have templates basically, like they’re saying what you know, what type of job are you looking to What looking job are you trying to hire a freelancer for? And they, you know, they say oh, if you’re looking for a designer, you can use this template where, you know, they have like the bait the bare bones skeleton of what your job posting should look like. And then you put in your own personal information. Having a mentor again, who was a couple steps ahead of me at this point in their own process, was he able to talk you through talk me through the process as well so I mean, you just got to be willing to take a chance and be able to learn new things and listen and communicate and and find the resources it’s like the day of the internet like every answer is out there you can you can find what you’re looking for.

Mike Beatty 15:44
I think that’s the that’s the really frustrating and kind of cool thing at the same time is like everything is available for free. Literally every single information on this process, right

Yeah, well, yeah. So like when I when I went through that as well, What amazed me and again, I just used it was It was just another guy’s training basically, within the community that I often use. And I just went through that step by step. And what really amazed me is that, you know, like, that’s how I that’s how I envisioned this process going. I envision like, you know, getting applicants and I envision getting on Skype and lots of to and fro and things like that. It was like I was I was hiring for a writer. So it literally doesn’t matter at all, to me how they communicate face to face, All I care about is how they put words on paper and where they can do the research and things like that and follow instructions and light be willing to learn. Those are the sort of things I was looking for. So I actually hired the guy, I had 50 different applicants and I actually hired the employee, the writer, employees, I say, look at you with your employees.

I actually hired him without having a face to face chat or speaking to him in person. It could have been made up for I know, but I just went through like this series of email, but he was like, send this email first with these questions, then if they sound right, then send them this email. And it just kind of bought everything out that you needed to know about them. And I was like, this is so much easier. You know, it was like 50 people, I did it within a week, literally from sending out the application to hiring the person. And then I think in the end I sent out for for actual, like tests, almost It was like, This is the key word I want you to research and not write for me and then send it back. And that was like, that was huge. You know, but I guess with an app, you can’t really do that can you can just go make the app for me and then send it back.

Unknown Speaker 17:45
And that’s and that’s the the the nerve wracking part is like if especially if you don’t have extensive knowledge, it would be very easy to get duped, right, but that’s why you go through a website like Upwork or I think there’s another one called Fiverr Where there’s like, there’s kind of insurance policies built in, like, you know, even if you were to sign a contract, and if you were to pay, and then you realise, Hey, I got, you know, I got a lemon on my hands, you could go through Upwork. And they would be able to somehow get you a partial or a full refund.

Mike Beatty 18:19
I didn’t know that. Yeah, I’ve heard I’ve heard some horror stories from Fiverr, to be honest, but I didn’t know you could do that with Upwork.

Unknown Speaker 18:26
Like, I’m sure these sites are developing, and they’re always you know, with more and more and then they even have like consultants. So like, when you actually open a contract, you’ll get a message from one of the Upwork employees and they’ll say, you know, how’s it going and then if you want to schedule a call and talk about it and that sort of thing. So they kind of have these like fail safes built in so anyone can really use it sounds like I’m really a part member, owner of Upwork.

Mike Beatty 18:51
No, actually just that that’s reminded me of something we chatted yesterday and a point that we kind of made brought up was I use online jobs dot pH which is like Filipinos mainly Filipinos. And I think knowing like your, your audience and like the person that knowing what you’re actually trying to get someone to help you do is really, really important for which platform because like I was saying to you typically, this is a very big stereotype. Typically, Filipinos have good English. And so if you’re looking to hire a cheaper writer, that’s actually quite a good place to go, sort of thing to online jobs.ph whereas I didn’t know that I didn’t know any of this before going through this training and stuff. Whereas obviously, like Upwork, and things like that Fiverr you’ve got people all over the world. So if you’re looking for like different things, so like software development or app development, it could be somewhere else it doesn’t you know, boys like the Philippines is really really good for writers and people if you need someone to be doing like English speaking and stuff like that. I just thought that was a really cool thing to do. And obviously that is a stereotype. Obviously, you can find great ones on at work. And obviously, you can find great app developers and stuff on online jobs.ph or whatever. But it just, I hadn’t even thought of it, you know, hadn’t even thought of that thing of actually thinking about what it is that you want done, and then decide what platform to use after that.

Moe Saghier 20:18
Yeah, I mean, just going on what you said. You know, there are some jobs where spoken English is not super important, like my designer. Yeah. So and don’t go, if anybody’s looking for a designer, dependable, go reach out to me, I’ll put you in contact with him. He had mentioned on his application that he was fluent in English, I turned out to not be necessarily 100% true. But let me tell you what you could do, though, that that gentleman who designed a beautiful app, and actually when I took his designs at the end of the whole process, and he was very patient through it all and I you know, he let me revise the product as much as I wanted. When I took the developer to a development team in idea. One of the first things was when I sent the screens over to them, they’re like, who designed this for you? I’m like, Oh, you know, I hired someone. I’m like, why is there a problem with it? They’re like, actually, no, it’s the best that we’ve ever, you know, one of the best technical designs like he was able to, you know, design the whole app in such a way that when the developers took it over, it was very easy for them to make changes and make adjustments. And, you know, his design made the development process so much easier. And, you know, you don’t normally hear one Freelancer talk well of another freelancer. But yeah, that’s true. But I guess it just goes to show like, you know, certain skills are necessary for certain jobs, right. And it’s you to kind of decide what’s important for for the particular job that you’re, you’re,

Mike Beatty 21:48
you know, posting 100%. So, what’s kind of like the next step, then you’ve got the app. So is the app up and running, or is that

Moe Saghier 21:57
coming July 1 is the release of the app. So right now We’re in something called beta testing. Beta testing is when I reach out to a community of, you know, teachers whom I know. And I say, Okay, here’s the app, go ahead, use it. And then tell me any of the problems that you faced along the way. That’s the next step. So currently, myself and the developer, we’re going through that process ourselves. And, you know, basically, since we both have an intimate knowledge of the app, we’re being able to pick up little things along the way, because you know, the guys who code the app, they’re just, you know, oh, click this button, it goes here, that sort of thing. They might not necessarily understand the the nuanced features of the app. Yeah. So myself and the project lead are are working on that now. Soon, we’ll be looking for teachers, anybody who is particularly interested in, you know, being on to new technologies and helping out there so we’ll be testing amongst a group of our peers. And then it’s a release in June 1. We had intended The idea behind it was that we were going to be ready for December. Number 2020. Because, you know, that’s when the recruiting process started, but you know, would would technically start. We’re ahead of schedule. So I thought to myself, hey, with what’s going on in the world right now, why don’t we see if we can get the app out sooner or at least release the app sooner and see if we can help people be placed for September 2020. Since I’m sure everybody’s behind in the recruiting process, and, you know, there’s a lot of deals that have probably fallen through since the beginning of Corona. So, right now, the plan was July to December to you know, July, August to really just give it a give the give the product away, let people use it and interact with it and you know, for us as a as a, you know, as a entity or a business to learn from it See, see how How we can help how we are helping and what, what more we can do to help?

Mike Beatty 24:04
Yeah, you said, it’s like so many there are so many things there were I was thinking, um, it’s like I’ve just, I’ve read quite a lot of books in the last few years. And I was like, Yeah, you’ve just mentioned so many really important thing, like really important lessons. And I don’t know if you’ve read them before, but I’ll have to send them to you after actually, because they’re probably absolutely perfect for you. But trying to think of names of things called like the startup way, or you might the lean startup is his main one. Like that is a is basically exactly what you’re what you’ve just sort of said there. So rather than, like, back in the day, like a business, you had to spend all this thousands of dollars, get the products absolutely perfect. And well, that’s kind of what people think about businesses and things like that. Whereas the lean startup, it was almost like completely switched it. It’s like how can we do this for like, as cheap as possible. Like, get it like Like, test things, get out into real people, not just, you know, just us having a look at it, like, get actual teachers on it and get actual scores and stuff on to it and things like that, and actually get it working. Because it’s not until you do that is 100% no matter what you do you guaranteed to find things that go wrong, things that people don’t like, and you’re gonna have to change it, and he’s gonna have to, like keep changing. So that’s kind of the whole point of the book is like, How can you do this for like, low cost as possible, as quick as possible? Get it out into the real world. And then, you know, adapt pivar, like change things that you actually need to do. And then do it again. And like, you know, keep that process going for as quick and as low cost as possible. And basically, what is really

Moe Saghier 25:49
yeah, in the app world that’s called your MVP, your minimum viable product called where it’s like, you have an idea for an amazing app. But you don’t know if there’s a market for You know, you know, it’s never been done before. So you basically build a, like a very small version of the app, and you release it out there and you see what works and what doesn’t work. And then, you know, once you’ve generated then you could go and try to get funding. And then once you’ve gotten funding, you can really develop the app, you know, that you had intended.

But back to the toxic the idea of the lean startup, how important is reading and all of this,

Mike Beatty 26:29
honestly, is I don’t really think this is one of the things where this time, six years ago probably Yeah, like just before, it was almost just before we came to Qatar for the first time. I think I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I think was the first one.

Moe Saghier 26:48
That’s the one for me. That’s the one that that just changed my mindset. Yeah,

Mike Beatty 26:52
exactly. And I just think the thing is the thing that that book did more than anything else, it’s not even the content or anything else. It is In still this like love of learning and wanting to improve and I think like any any startup like any online business owner anyone that wants to do like any of this kind of stuff I just feel like it’s so important like from again everyone I speak to there is an anyone that I spoke to who has been like yeah I haven’t read any books I’ve just done this like this every single person is like they they want to improve themselves and they go out of their way to do like self improvement self to whatever you want to call it, I just think is absolutely huge. Do you have you read any like really good ones that you can recommend?

Moe Saghier 27:39
That’s that’s the one for me of Rich Dad Poor Dad. I’ve been really into the Dave Ramsey stuff I tried to buy one of his I can’t remember the name of I don’t know. He’s He’s good though. He’s like he’s inspiration or he want he wants people to succeed and like and even like, if you see like the project Which he offers his, his his his content is just like it’s priced that anybody can can afford that. You know, it’s not like overly priced is not like these $300 online training courses like you could tell he’s out there for the people. He’s inspirational. I like what he does. But it was really that was a Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I like what I liked about Rich Dad Poor Dad was it didn’t speak down to you. Yeah, I mean, you can read it, it was easy to read, it made everything so simple. And it was like, definitely, you can do this. It’s like anybody can do this. You just have to, you have to, you know, but you have to, you have to put the time and you have to try you have to want and you have to, like, really be committed to it. Because I mean, there’s lots of things that you can do with your time and your energy and your money that you know, don’t necessarily get you, you know, get you further ahead

Mike Beatty 28:50
in life. No 100% and I do think there are some good ones or some bad ones. There are some like really no retirement at all. Man, that was a waste of time, but Yeah, no Dave Ramsey, I find that some people that inspire and like, try and make you want to learn more. And there’s other people that are like, this is how to do it and almost shut your brain off. And his books I’ve ever I think I read like two I think I stopped halfway through the second one, because I just didn’t like there was numerous things I didn’t like about what he did. I really like his like, Debt Snowball thing, and I really like, like, the more I’ve seen of him, like, want to see him on YouTube, and he’s got podcasts and things like that. I actually do be like, I’m actually like, yeah, now he’s, he’s definitely his hearts in the right place, definitely. But what I don’t like is that he doesn’t teach what he does. As in, he makes money through his businesses that he’s rich because of his businesses and his books and his products that he’s put out there. Whereas he’s teaching people to live below your means. Don’t Don’t use credit cards. You know, don’t buy a house with don’t buy a house with a mortgage. That’s apt Loop inside one that gets

Moe Saghier 30:01
me cuz like, we’re my wife and I were looking for a house right now and it just like, without you It shouldn’t be more than 25% of what you earn. And it shouldn’t be more than a 15 year mortgage. It’s like, well, what? And you know where we are in Canada where we priced that almost anything?

Mike Beatty 30:18
Yeah, I mean, I do agree like if it’s your own house, then yeah, you should try and get as mortgage free as possible. 100% like, that’s just the same as debt and things like that. But if it’s a rental property and it’s cash flowing, you want as much debt as you can possibly get because it’s bringing money into your pocket and it’s like this mindset. He almost closes people minds off to that and I didn’t really like that side of it. Yeah, like Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Actually, the F t is MJ DeMarco and that’s millionaire Fastlane and his blue having

Unknown Speaker 30:52
empty

Unknown Speaker 30:55
not ever talked about.

Unknown Speaker 30:57
There’s probably no I’m

Mike Beatty 30:59
probably nothing like Compared to yours, but there definitely was a moment actually last year, it was just, it was a really stupid it was petty. I don’t know. It’s just probably a lot of happen that day. And you know, you just went like this one kid. But you’re like, why am I doing it? Like why am I actually doing this? And it just it literally made me think, why am I doing this? Is it is it even worth it? No, it wasn’t it wasn’t like one massive moment which is you know, like what this this guy talks off that that that book anyway, millionaire Fastlane and unscripted. His other one that it does perfect for business is honestly is so good. And it’s really, again, it’s more like it’s not saying this is what to do is more like his knowledge, like go and get more knowledge sort of thing. And I don’t know, I find those books are a way better because anyone that tells you like exactly what to do is, is closing your mind really and any I just think any entrepreneur in the end is not going to be able to, they’re not going to because you’re going to always gonna have challenges even if someone tells you exactly what to do. You’re always going to have to overcome things and figure stuff out by yourself. And it’s more like getting yourself equipped with those skills and figuring things out as you go, I think which is really important.

Unknown Speaker 32:25
There’s that Well, there’s one book called that I always wanted to read just because I had a catchy title on it. It’s ironic because I can’t think of the title right now. But it’s the four hour work

Mike Beatty 32:34
day, oh, four hour workweek by Tim Ferriss is a bit old. It’s not his best book. And but it is really good. What you’re doing is exactly it you know, like as in hiring other people to do stuff and things like that. But he Yeah, it’s good. It’s really good for like online businesses and things like that. And it his story was basically like he was really overworked doing his own business selling I don’t know, I think it was like protein shakes and stuff like that online. And he just realised he needed to stop. He went travelling outsourced a lot of his work and his business started growing and he was doing nothing, and he literally was doing the four hour workweek. But the big issue with that is that a lot of people read that or hear the title and think, oh, four hour workweek, whereas seems great. They miss they miss his whole like process, which is again, some of the MJ DeMarco talks about all the time is like this process is the process, not the event. Whereas he put in hours and he was putting like hundred hour workweeks in for like four years to grow his business and stuff. You know, it wasn’t it wasn’t a four hour workweek. It is not like he just went four hour workweek he was working. He was way overworked and then realise it wasn’t it was only when he took a step back and worked a four hour workweek that he he worked on the business rather than in the business and you know, that’s when it could like, grow

Unknown Speaker 34:00
That step back is like so important like, fate like there’s you know, all these is when you start this process of, you know, trying to start create something for yourself all these, you know, sayings or quotes that you’ve heard along the way start making sense. Making Sense like, you know, you learn more in failure than you do in success. Like it’s true. It’s like when you’ve had you’ve had that kind of moment where you’re like, not doing as well as you thought you should have been. You really come away with a lot more than than all those times that you were successful or you did get the job or you did get the promotion, that sort of thing.

Mike Beatty 34:37
Yeah. Now I just think it’s so important now like that whole mindset thing. I know some people see it as like airy fairy and whatever, but the more that you can kind of, it doesn’t have to be a lot and that’s it. A really good book for that is the slight edge, which is really good just for like habits and things like that. And it’s similar to like the compound effects. There’s A few books like that. But I think they’re really good at just emphasising the fact that he talks about just just read 10 pages a day. So like 10 pages before bed, but anyone can do it. It’s easy to do. But it’s also easy not to do. And the people that end up doing well are those that consistently do those tiny small habits that same with like fitness, you know, health, like if you’re, if you put in a little bit of exercise each day, and you don’t have that piece of cake each day. It like compounds and eventually you get like big results and things like that, but you can’t see it. And that’s the thing where you won’t notice it’s not like there’s gonna be a switch that changes. It’s just, if you look back over five years or something, there’s huge changes basically. But it’s all a matter, all super useful. But anyway, moment, I always are someone who just was ending the podcast, and I’m going to try and pick a day Now let’s let’s go back then let’s go back to when you were in Kuwait and you went you had the one recruitment. You had the one like, call to go

Moe Saghier 36:12
Yeah, recruiter interview with her

Mike Beatty 36:15
to go to the school. If you could go back to that day, you know, you’ve just had the interview you both realise are now we’re not going to go to the school. What would be like one piece of advice you could give to yourself, then knowing everything that you know now? Oh,

Moe Saghier 36:34
I’m not sure if it was a piece of advice. I think I was like, I’d like to go back and you know, give myself a pat on the back for making that decision. You know what I mean? Like sticking up for yourself and just saying no, this is this is not what we want and don’t you know, don’t take something that’s, that’s not for you eg it’s, you know, being here. It’s really important to be yourself and and, you know, Put yourself in successful situations. I really thought this was gonna be a question about the future, not the past, he asked me a question about the future, and where are you gonna be in five years, five years, you know, the whole idea behind the adventures recruitment, by the way is to be a, a, I, you know, I don’t know if everybody says this, or this is just very naive of me at this point. Again, we’re all constantly learning, we’re constantly evolving, especially when you’re, you know, in an industry that you didn’t know much about 12 months ago. The idea behind it is to be so so prevailing in the community of international teachers is that we can start handing out some scholarships or start working with some of the schools that are working, you know, that are working with us and, you know, start finding some money, you know, because like even in Qatar and Kuwait, not everybody, not everybody were, you know, not everybody had the same crack at it and some students were going to schools that, you know, That didn’t push them to achieve. So the idea behind this is to get so, you know, ingrained in the community that we start having partnerships and we say, Okay, let’s, how can we bring a scholarship to your school? And how can we fund that that child or that student for the next five or six years and get them to high school and get him a chance to, you know, possibly go to university somewhere out there? But But definitely the idea is to promote education. Again, we’re always you know, always the teacher about to promote education by using you know, structures and and processes that are already in place, simplifying them, earning from them and then reinvesting in the community.

Mike Beatty 38:46
Awesome.

Moe Saghier 38:47
Yeah, I think that might be more than five years, though. That might be a 10 year

Mike Beatty 38:51
mission. You never know. that’s a that’s a really good quote that you should definitely remember is let me get it right. You can accomplish a lot more than what you think in 10 years, but a lot less than what you think in one year. Or the other way around.

Unknown Speaker 39:11
But no, no, I think you got it right. Well, yeah, that makes. Yeah. But yeah,

Unknown Speaker 39:16
there’s there’s a long time. Right,

Mike Beatty 39:18
exactly. I think most people underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years. Yeah, one year, most people overestimate what they can achieve. So bear that in mind this time next year.

Unknown Speaker 39:31
We’ll see where we are next year. Maybe we’ll be back here with different news for

Mike Beatty 39:34
Yeah, no, definitely. That’d be good. If anyone does want to get in contact with your mo or like, you know, just go to your website or something like that. What’s the best place

Moe Saghier 39:44
so you can reach me at admin at EDV recruit .com. So that stands for adventures, the first three letters of Edventures and recruitment. EDV recruit .com or you could follow us on our social media. accounts or our website is something newly developed something that some work that I purchased off Upwork as well. adventures recruitment .com.

Mike Beatty 40:09
Awesome. Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure. I appreciate it. So I really enjoyed that chat, because Moser really cool guy. And just, you can see his whole thought process and everything that’s going on. And it’s really exciting what he is doing. So I really hope that is really helpful as well, because I’m going to summarise just like the main four takeaways that I took from the chat with him, just to kind of put it all in perspective in one place. So number one is just start. If you’ve got an idea, it doesn’t, it’s useless unless you actually execute and take some sort of action. You know, so most first action was actually researching it. Just you’ve got to actually do it. You’ve got to actually start putting in time and effort and actually doing something. Otherwise, nothing’s ever going to take place. If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m guessing you’re already doing that anyway. But number two is to keep on learning. Like as you’re going as you’re, as you’re, as you’re getting these things, as you’re starting to realise what you do need to do, you need to keep learning he needs to keep like improving and things like that. And so it might be reading books, you might be a mentor, which kind of leads on to number three, which is find someone who has done what you want to do. If you can find someone has done exactly what you want to do, and connect with them. Then if you can find a way to make like a mentorship or just coaching or like whatever it is, if you can do that it’s gonna save so much time. Like Moe said, there’s so many things that he’s just like sidetracked or sidestepped, I should say, avoided so many pitfalls, just because this guy’s already done exactly what he’s doing. And he’s telling him what he did. So it’s just a great idea for any kind of business model that you have any interest in doing. And number four is You probably have more skills and experience than what you actually think. And Moe kind of realised that all of his experience in the past has actually really helped a lot of the things that he was doing now such as like he’s done interview, when he was a principal in a previous school, he did lots of interviews, and during the whole hiring process and finding like a freelancer and to outsource some work to was just so helpful. Even if you haven’t done even if you haven’t interviewed people for it, chances are you’ve been in interviews before you’ve like seen what does work and what doesn’t work. But it just, you probably have more skills, and you probably have a better idea of how to do these things than what you may even think we give yourself credit for. So just be aware of your experiences and things that you’ve done before. And that’s probably going to really help what you’re doing in the future. Anyway, I’m not gonna just carry on rambling. I really hard that was helpful, and I’ll catch you on the next one. Thanks for listening in to this episode of making Time online, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast in the App

Store. keep changing for the better guys. Take care.

Podcast Summary

​Here were my main takeaways from the chat...

  1. Just start
  2. Keep learning
  3. Find someone who has done what you want to do
  4. You have more skills and experience than you think

What were your main takeaways? Any questions? Drop a comment below…

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Is Six Figure Stamp Club a Scam: Featured Image
Not Recommended, MLM, Reviews

Is Six Figure Stamp Club a Scam? Everything to Know Before Joining

You are most likely here because you’ve been told about this opportunity of working at home.

But then, you’ve thought and asked yourself… Is Six Figure Stamp Club a scam? To put you out of misery… Yes, there are a number of signs that show Six Figure Stamp Club is a scam.

But aside from knowing that, we also need to learn if it is still a legit opportunity to make money from home and ditch your career?

This Six Figure Stamp Club review is going to reveal all the answers to that along with pros, cons, images, and videos, to help you come up with the right and informed decision.

Six Figure Stamp Club Review

The overview and rankings

Name: Six Figure Stamp Club

Founder: Unknown

Type: Cash Gifting MLM

Products (Including Pricing): 2/100

Success Stories: 1/100

Price To Join MLM: $50

Is Six Figure Stamp Club a Scam: Logo

What to look for in a MLM:

  • Low start-up fee & maintenance cost
  • High-quality affordable products
  • You don’t have to carry inventory
  • An affiliate-like system 
  • Generous compensation plan
  • Company is in the early momentum phase

Six Figure Stamp Club Pros

Six Figure Stamp Club Cons

  • No real product
  • Lack of information
  • Pyramid scheme in disguise?
  • Downward trend

Summary

Six Figure Stamp Club offers lead packages to anyone for a discounted price.

Members can then use the leads to help improve and advertise their business so they can sell the same stuff to others.

Make Time Online Rating: 5 out of 100 

Recommended: No

What is Six Figure Stamp Club?

There’s not much information about Six Figure Stamp Club. I can’t even find the name of the founder or the exact address of the “company.” However, there’s one PO box address that popped up, and it’s in Columbus, Ohio.

I also found out that the website of Six Figure Stamp Club was just registered on Nov. 9, 2018, which is still very fresh. But despite that, there’s not much to know about their company.

Nonetheless, I can conclude that Six Figure Stamp Club is a Multi-Level-Marketing company which accepts members who send postcards and letters to anonymous leads.

The recipients are then asked to pay a certain amount to become a member. And once they accept, they can also enjoy the same benefits as the one who sent them the letter who also serves as their recruiter.

Here's an 11-minute video about what they are all about...

The lead packages come in two forms. The first one is discounted and is specifically made for members.

Meanwhile, the second type are in retail prices and available for non-members.

Is Six Figure Stamp Club a pyramid scheme?

There are a lot of signs that show Six Figure Stamp Club is a pyramid scheme.

Members can not earn any money if they were just to sell whatever it is that they are offering. Instead, they need to recruit people for them to earn some bucks.

However, a better and more accurate question to that should be…

Is Six Figure Stamp Club a pyramid scheme in disguise?

What is a pyramid scheme?

A pyramid scheme is a company which offers members payment for recruiting people rather than selling actual services or products.

Most countries labeled these as illegal as it is impossible for members to earn money from a company which only pays for recruitment.

See this diagram from Wikipedia below to learn why...

Members who earn the most money are those on the upper tier of the organization, most likely being the founders only.

And if you were to closely see the diagram above, you’ll notice that it is just impossible for all of the members to earn money from a system such as this as you are going to run out of recruited people sooner or later.

Know more on how you can check these “pyramid schemes in disguise” in this 5-minute video...

Let's then move in knowing why...

Success is rare with Six Figure Stamp Club

The chances of you achieving success in a company such as this is very low.

In fact, statistics state that between 72.5% and 99.9% of MLM members lose their hard earned money?

92.3 Percent of Members Lose Money in MLMs

This is the usual case because MLMs have a “sales quota” where members can only stay active and earn money if they manage to sell a certain number of products monthly.

If they can’t then the only way they can avoid losing money is by buying the products or services themselves, which still technically means that they’re losing money.

This is why most members lose huge tons of cash from their own savings before recruiting a single person...

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I created a passive income online within a year. I had no marketing skills or online experience when I started. 

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How does Six Figure Stamp Club Work?

Six Figure Stamp Club offers lead packages that come either in retail or discounted prices.

These also have their own mailing materials. Their members then gain an opportunity to work from their own home by selling the products so that they can receive commissions.

Sure sounds like a win-win for everyone, eh?

Well, what many don’t know is that Six Figure Stamp Club saves huge money from their supposed marketing campaigns because they just let their members do all the job in promoting and advertising.

Six Figure Stamp Club products

Six Figure Stamp Club isn’t selling any product or service.

What they are doing instead is giving their members an opportunity to promote their affiliate membership to other people, recruiting them, and then earning commissions from the recruitment process.

I verified this on their site and found out that the site is really just offering lead packages available in retail and discounted prices. These also come with mailing materials.

Because of the absence of any physical product or service being sold, it’s easy to say that Six Figure Stamp Club is clearly a pyramid scheme.

Although they aren’t yet closed by the FTC, it’s very possible that they will be shut down in the near future.

Here's another 6-minute video of what they're actually offering...

Take note, though, that it isn’t only Six Figure Stamp Club that’s into this kind of business model, as there are also other MLM brands that follow a similar structure.

You may think that it's rare to find a MLM that doesn't offer any real product. But here are some other MLMs that don't offer any product at all and only focus on recruiting (*cough* pyramid schemes *cough*):

All of them claim to have a special offering why they stand out even if they just offer the same stuff...

Can you make money with Six Figure Stamp Club?

You’re going to have a hard time making money from Six Figure Stamp Club.

There are a few, but they’re just the ones on top, most likely the founder and a few of his other founding friends.

What’s worse is that there’s no income disclosure to prove that their members are actually making money...

How to make money with Six Figure Stamp Club

There is only one way you can make money from Six Figure Stamp Club, and that’s by:

  • Recruiting members

To make things far worse, you are compensated directly for recruiting a person, which makes it even clearer that Six Figure Stamp Club is a pyramid scheme...

How much does it cost to join Six Figure Stamp Club?

You have 4 package options to choose from if you’d want to become a Six Figure Stamp Club member.

These are:

  • Red - You pay $50 for your first sponsor’s stamp book, $20 for your second sponsor’s stamp book, and another $10 to the company for the processing fee.
  • Blue - You pay $150 for your first sponsor’s 2 stamp books, $40 for your second sponsor’s 2 stamp books, and another $20 to the company for the processing fee.
  • Black - You pay $300 for your first sponsor’s 3 stamp books, $100 for your second sponsor’s 3 stamp books, and another $40 to the company for the processing fee.
  • Pearl - You pay $1,000 for your first sponsor’s 10 stamp books, $500 for your second sponsor’s 10 stamp books, and another $200 to the company for the processing fee.

Six Figure Stamp Club compensation plan

What MLMs usually do is complicate their compensation plans. Well, nothing’s different with Six Figure Stamp Club.

But don’t you worry because I’ll still do my best to simplify things up…

Their compensation plan is split into their 4 different levels.

These are:

  • Red - Being in this level means you can earn $50 from every person you recruited and another $20 every time your downline recruits a new member.
  • Blue - Being in this level means you can earn $150 from every person you recruited and another $40 every time your downline recruits a new member.
  • Black - Being in this level means you can earn $300 from every person you recruited and another $100 every time your downline recruits a new member.
  • Pearl - Being in this level means you can earn $1,500 from every person you recruited and another $1,000 every time your downline recruits a new member.

Check out this 20-minute video about their compensation plan to get your head around this a bit more:

Sounds simple, right?

But hold your horses because there’s a simpler explanation to that, and it is that you can only earn money by:

  • Recruiting people

If you’d like to know more about this, then check out this 0-minute video about their compensation plan...

Is Six Figure Stamp Club a scam?

Yes, there are a lot of signs that prove Six Figure Stamp Club is a scam.

First off is that their address is listed as a PO box instead of an actual address. That’s already a clear sign that they’re a scam because they are hiding their exact address.

Second is that their offerings are intangible and don’t offer any value.

Third is when you check their site, you can see that the details they talk about there are explained in very vague terms which just confuses people...

You even have to pay your recipients and the company when trying to reach out to them for recruitment.

Then there’s the absence of an official compensation plan and income disclosure. These two documents are vital to prove the legitimacy of any company...

All these are common signs of a pyramid scheme.

Just to be fully transparent with you, I am not a distributor myself and I do not endorse it in any way.

I have researched the website, testimonials and information on the Internet to get to the bottom of what this program genuinely does. This is because I have been burnt from programs just like this in the past and I want to prevent others from making the same mistakes. If you’d like to learn how to “Spot an Online Marketing Scam” then click the highlighted text.

Tired of MLMs? Check out how I make money online here!

What I like about Six Figure Stamp Club

As much as I’d want to find something nice about Six Figure Stamp Club, I still can’t.

It’s way too obvious that they’re a scam and an outright pyramid scheme...

Key Terms:

  • Pyramid Scheme – recruits members via a promise for payment from recruiting others into the company rather than providing a product
  • Affiliate Marketing- Connecting a customer to a product they are looking for and receiving a commission for doing so
  • Red Flag - A warning sign

What I don't like about Six Figure Stamp Club

#1 No real product

The biggest and most obvious sign that they are a scam is that they don’t offer anything valuable.

They don’t sell any product or service.

Instead, they just let their members send out mail to anonymous recipients that invite them to become a member.

When one of those recipients agree, the sender member can then earn money. The recipient then becomes a member and can repeat the same process.

It doesn’t need a genius to reveal this as a scam.

#2 Lack of information

Open their website and you won’t see anything valuable as well. It just lacks information as to what the company is, who its founders are, and what they’re all about.

Is Six Figure Stamp Club a Scam: Cons

Aside from that, they also don’t have a compensation plan and an income disclosure to prove and show that their members really earn money!

#3 Is Six Figure Stamp Club a pyramid scheme in disguise?

Six Figure Stamp Club is all about sending multiple anonymous people mail stamps and inviting them to become a member.

Once they accept, you earn bonuses. Meanwhile, they can also earn bonuses once they repeat the process and also send mail stamps to others.

Here's what that looks like:

MLM pyramid scheme

The fundamental core of their business model is earning money by recruiting people into the company, and nothing else.

Once the pool of people who are gullible enough to join the company runs out, then it’s sure that Six Figure Stamp Club will collapse with it also...

#4 Downward trend

The final deal breaker for me is what I discovered in Google Trends:

Is Six Figure Stamp Club a Scam: Cons 2

As you can see, Six Figure Stamp Club has a falling trend, which means that the number of people who are searching for it on Google has decreased.

I even compared it with Farmasi, a well-managed and legit MLM and you can see the striking difference between the two… You’re going to have a hard time selling the idea of a cash gifting MLM to others.

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My opinion - Six Figure Stamp Club

Six Figure Stamp Club is just littered with flaws and with obvious signs of being a scam and an outright pyramid scheme.

They don’t sell a single product or service, is way overpriced, and relies mainly on recruitment.

So, what can I say about the business opportunity presented here?...

It just isn’t hard to see that this company is a plain joke.

However, there are other ways you can make good money from a legit business opportunity...

How I make passive income online

MLMs are not scams or illegal. However, I'm not a fan of them because of the restrictions to the expensive products you have to promote.

Once I learnt about affiliate marketing, I realised it's a far superior business model because:

  • You can promote anything you want and truly own the business
  • You never need to sell to friends and family
  • It's completely free to start

In 2018 I had no idea what affiliate marketing was.

But I went from a full time PE teacher to making a passive income online within one year...

Mike PE teacher to Passive Income Online

If you want to discover how I did it then check out this special video I created which explains exactly how. You can also get your free 7-day bootcamp to get started.

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club_cash_fund_featured_image
Not Recommended, MLM, Reviews

Is Club Cash Fund a Scam? Another Gifting Pyramid Scheme?

Most likely, you are here because someone told you about an opportunity to work from home and you’ve thought to yourself...is Club Cash Fund a scam? Well, I’ll be putting you out of misery…

Yes, Club Cash Fund have a signs of being a scam.

But despite that, can they still be considered a legit opportunity to make money from home to ditch your full-time job?

Well, this review on the MLM called Club Cash Fund will answer everything along with images, videos, and pros and cons, so that you can arrive at the right and informed decision.

Club Cash Fund Review

The overview and rankings

Name: Club Cash Fund

Founder: John Stalvey

Type: Cash Gifting MLM

Products: 3/100

Success Stories: 1/100

Price To Join MLM: $80

Is Club Cash Fund a Scam: Logo

What to look for in a MLM:

  • Low start-up fee & maintenance cost
  • High-quality affordable products
  • You don’t have to carry inventory
  • An affiliate-like system 
  • Generous compensation plan
  • Company is in the early momentum phase

Club Cash Fund Pros

  • Gaining momentum

Club Cash Fund Cons

  • No real product
  • Unsustainable business model
  • Lack of information
  • Is Club Cash Fund a pyramid scheme in disguise?

Summary

Club Cash Fund is a cash gifting MLM that allows members to send monetary payment to others and provides them an opportunity to earn money by recruiting other people into the MLM.

Make Time Online Rating: 5 out of 100 

Recommended: No

What is Club Cash Fund?

Club Cash Fund is a  Multi-Level-Marketing company that follows a direct mail cash gifting system.

This allows members to join the company to send money and hoping that they receive cash from other members who do the same process.

But what makes the firm a bit different is that they follow a certain kind of automation that speeds up the system and enables other people to send cash and earn commissions in a faster way.

Club Cash Fund is a cash-giving scam that promises users will receive dozens of free cash checks. People will contribute money to the program, expecting others to join after them, do the same, and give money by direct mail.

It is a pyramid scheme in which you submit payment without purchasing good concrete hopes and then hopes others follow the same path. Nonetheless, there are a few ways in which this cash gifting plan differs (and is more automated):

This system, unlike others, will take care of everything once you've joined.

You can earn commissions if you purchase a position for a one-time charge of $80.

Here is a 14-minute video showing what Club Cash Fund is all about...

I also discovered that the name of the founder of Club Cash Fund is John Stalvey who hides under the alias of Chad in the videos.

There’s not much information about John Stalvey, aside from the fact that he’s been through other pyramid schemes before. And what’s worse is that he’s the one who started them!

Is Club Cash Fund a pyramid scheme?

Yes, Club Cash Fund is a pyramid scheme. First off, is that their members can’t earn money aside from recruiting other people to join the company.

They also don’t have any real product to sell. But still, a better question for that is… Is Club Cash Fund a pyramid scheme in disguise?

What is a pyramid scheme?

A pyramid scheme is a company that pays members who manage to recruit other people into the system. This is the main focus instead of selling real products or services.

Many countries have already labelled these companies as illegal as it is impossible for members to earn money from a system that is only paying for recruitment.

You can refer to this diagram from Wikipedia below to learn why...

There might be some who make money, but they just do nothing other than recruit, recruit, and recruit, while selling the idea of becoming your own boss from this alleged “business opportunity.”

But if you were to look closely at the diagram shown above, you can see that it is impossible for all of the members to make lots of money from a system such as this as you will eventually run out of people to recruit.

Know more about these “pyramid schemes in disguise” in this 5-minute video...

Let's then learn why...

Success is rare with Club Cash Fund

What’s more is that you are going to have a hard time getting any kind of success when you’re with Club Cash Fund.

You can even refer to the latest statistics which state that between 72.5% and 99.9% of MLM members are losing money.

92.3 Percent of Members Lose Money in MLMs

This is happening because of this “sales quota” which has become common for every MLM.

What this quota does is that members can only stay active and be eligible to receive commissions is if they manage to sell a certain number of products monthly.

If they can’t, then they have no choice but to just buy the products themselves.

This then leads to hundreds, if not thousands of members losing loads of cash from their own savings before recruiting a single person.

Ready to make passive income online?

Hey, I'm Mike.

I created a passive income online within a year. I had no marketing skills or online experience when I started. 

Mike Beatty

How does Club Cash Fund Work?

The company has a cash gifting system where members can send money and earn commissions by doing that sole task. The more money they send, the higher chances they can earn more commissions.

Club Cash Fund utilizes an automated approach even though such schemes are not novel and are extensively illegal in many nations. To participate, you are not required to send anything to anyone. Everything occurs organically, granting you the benefit of the doubt in this situation.

Their website needs to be a working version of its website. You need access to it directly. The only way to get money from Club Cash Fund is to invite. What is the deal with the cash gifting scheme?

It seems like they are offering regular people an opportunity to work from home by being a part of the “system.”

But if you were to closely analyze the business model, you can see that there’s something fishy about this because all you have to do is to recruit, and nothing more.

And what happens when you can’t find anyone to recruit? Well, you don’t earn money! Hence, a solid example of a pyramid scheme.

Club Cash Fund products

The usual thing with MLMs is that they offer real products and services where members can sell them and earn money without having to recruit. This is what common MLMs do.

But Club Cash Fund is different because it just doesn’t follow that system. Club Cash Fund doesn’t sell any kind of product.

Instead they just provide a system where members can send money to other people, and expect to receive monetary payment for doing that simple stuff.

That’s the best description I can give to what they are “offering.”

Here is a 7-minute video showing what you can expect from becoming a member:

Let's now move forward and know if...

Can you make money with Club Cash Fund?

Yes, but you’ll eventually be losing the money you’ve earned. And mind you, it’s very hard to make money from this scheme.

There might be some who earn, but they work tirelessly throughout the day and sell the idea of becoming your own boss while treating it as your full-time day job.

What’s more is that there is no income disclosure which proves that members are earning. So, that again is another thing that’s fishy with Club Cash Fund.

How to make money with Club Cash Fund

For you to make some kind of money from Club Cash Fund, you have to do any of these 3 things:

  • Qualify for cash gifts by signing up

  • Recruit people to become your downlines

  • Help your downlines to recruit other people

And take note that your entire “earnings” come from the recruitment that you do, which is a clear sign that this is a pyramid scheme...

How much does it cost to join Club Cash Fund?

You have to pay a one-time fee of $80 to join the MLM. However, I also found out that the subscription fee before was $100. Perhaps they lowered down the price so that they can attract more people.

Club Cash Fund compensation plan

I’ve been reviewing numerous MLMs lately, and there’s one thing I noticed that’s similar with all of them.

And that’s their confusing compensation plans. Although Club Cash Fund’s compensation plan is a bit simpler than most MLMs, it still has its own confusing plans.

But no worries as I’ll simplify it to the best of my capabilities...

Basically, you get a $20 commission every time you recruit a person into the company.

That newly recruited person pays $80, right? So, you get their $20 and the remaining $60 goes to the person who recruited you. The cycle goes on from then on...

Here is a 6-minute video about their compensation plan to help you understand it a bit more...

Meanwhile, the company also gets $20 for every $100, which is how they make money...

It sounds simple at first glance, but it turns out to be confusing later. But don’t worry!

Because in reality, there’s just 1 thing to do when you’re with Club Cash Fund, and that is by:

  • Recruiting as many people as possible.

Anyway, you can refer to this 0-minute compensation plan video to get your head around their “money-making” scheme even more…

As you can see, there’s something odd about this company because you’re just tasked to recruit as many people as you can possibly find.

And for what? For the hope of increasing the chances of earning more commissions?

Is Club Cash Fund a scam?

There are a lot of signs which prove Club Cash Fund is a scam.

They don’t sell any products or services aside from offering a platform and system where members can send money and earn commissions.

But before we confirm that this is really the case, let’s dig deeper and know the pros and cons of this review so you’ll know if this is for you or not...

Just to be fully transparent with you, I am not a distributor myself and I do not endorse it in any way.

I have researched the website, testimonials and information on the Internet to get to the bottom of what this program genuinely does. This is because I have been burnt from programs just like this in the past and I want to prevent others from making the same mistakes. If you’d like to learn how to “Spot an Online Marketing Scam” then click the highlighted text.

Tired of MLMs? Check out how I make money online here!

What I like about Club Cash Fund

Key Terms:

  • Pyramid Scheme – recruits members via a promise for payment from recruiting others into the company rather than providing a product
  • Affiliate Marketing- Connecting a customer to a product they are looking for and receiving a commission for doing so
  • Red Flag - A warning sign

#1 Gaining momentum

I checked Club Cash Fund’s status in Google Trends and I can see that they are faring well:

Is Club Cash Fund a Scam: Pros

As you can see, they are gaining momentum and the number of searches in Google for Club Cash Fund is increasing.

This means that there are more people who are becoming interested in the MLM, which is technically easier for you if you want to recruit...

What I don't like about Club Cash Fund

#1 No real product

The most obvious reason why this is another one of those “big joke” MLMs is that they don’t offer or sell any product or service. 

The only that they are “offering” is a system where members can send money and expect to earn commissions whenever they recruit people into the company and literally just do the same process that they did.

It’s really not that hard to realize that there’s something really off with this MLM.

#2 Unsustainable business model

The company has a very unsustainable business model because members are only paid once, and that is when they sign new recruits and they followed the same process of sending cash to another person.

The mere thought of earning money by recruiting people who do nothing but just to recruit is just another clear sign that this is a pyramid scheme!

#3 Lack of information

Club Cash Fund doesn’t have an official compensation plan to show how their company really works and how they intend to pay.

But what about the compensation plan I talked about earlier? Well, that’s based on the various information I found from different sources around the internet!

What’s more is that there is also no official income disclosure to prove that their members are really making money.

I even checked their website and the feel you get when you’re there is that there’s something off because of the misspelled words and the awkward placement of content and tabs.

It just seems like they’re not spending the time to build up their brand and reputation.

Because well, all they care about is recruitment… and nothing more!

#4 Is Club Cash Fund a pyramid scheme in disguise?

No doubt it is!

Having to recruit as many people as you can just to stay active and become a member eligible for commissions is a very clear sign that you are in a pyramid scheme.

There is no offered product or service, and the only way to make money is to recruit people and encouraging them to again… recruit!

Here's how that looks like...

MLM pyramid scheme

For this reason, I am convinced that this company will be closed by the FTC. It might not happen any time soon, but time will come that it will.

They have all the red flags of a scam and pyramid scheme so there’s a very big chance this will happen...

Ready to make passive income online?

I've created a growing passive income online with no previous marketing skills or online experience... 

I've made a special video for you to explain exactly how I did this. 

MTO Income

My opinion - Club Cash Fund

Looking at Club Cash Fund, you can easily dismiss the company as a scam and pyramid scheme because they’re not selling anything.

All it does is just let the members send cash to people they don’t know, recruit people to do the same process, and then wait for the commissions.

Here is what I think about them...

In no way does that sound like an ethical business to me because all you have to do is recruit, recruit, and recruit… Nothing more!

You’re just selling the dream of financial bliss when you know for yourself that you just recruit other people to ease the burden of recruitment and to earn more money for yourself and nothing more...

How I make passive income online

MLMs are not scams or illegal. However, I'm not a fan of them because of the restrictions to the expensive products you have to promote.

Once I learnt about affiliate marketing, I realised it's a far superior business model because:

  • You can promote anything you want and truly own the business
  • You never need to sell to friends and family
  • It's completely free to start

In 2018 I had no idea what affiliate marketing was.

But I went from a full time PE teacher to making a passive income online within one year...

Mike PE teacher to Passive Income Online

If you want to discover how I did it then check out this special video I created which explains exactly how. You can also get your free 7-day bootcamp to get started.

Make Time Online Income
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Tiffany Domena Podcast-min
Podcast, Online Business

Setting up an Online Business the Right Way w/ Tiffany Domena

Starting a side hustle or any online business can feel overwhelming sometimes (a lot of the time).

But the one thing that often gets overlooked is the business side of things.

Should you set up a limited company or just stay as a sole proprietor? What about tax? Should you even worry about this when you start?

Tiffany Domena from How to Entrepreneur joins the podcast to explain what she has done now that she has almost 3 years experience.  

We chat about:

  • What Tiffany would do if she started again
  • Some of the biggest mistakes she made
  • How long it really takes to be profitable in most businesses (online or offline)
  • and much more

Setting up an Online Business the Right Way

Tiffany Domena

From How to Entrepreneur

Tiffany Domena podcast

Make Time Online Podcast on iTunes - Online Entrepreneur Tips

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Listen to the full Tiffany Domena podcast episode

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Tips and tools mentioned in the podcast

Tiffany was in the military and realised it didn’t really bring out her creative side. So she tried a ton of different entrepreneurial ideas such as:

  • Fish farms (she built a pond but you could buy big fish tanks)
  • ATM's
  • Book publishing
  • (I also want to note she has been raising 2 kids throughout this!)

What Tiffany has found out...

  • It takes most businesses 3-5 years to make profit (most people think their website or online business will be different)
  • It’s taken 2 years to start making a good profit from How to Entrepreneur (over $3,000 revenue a month)
  • Creating content helps to save you time and provide someone with a better answer than a quick email response

When did she incorporate the business?

In 2017 Tiffany set up her & her husband's real estate service based business as a C-Corp (which she wouldn’t recommend for a small business).

C-corp downsides:

  • Need to do quarterly accounts
  • Need to pay yourself a “reasonable” amount, and the sales may not be there at the start

Tips on how to set up an online business:

  • Don’t incorporate until you have some risk to mitigate
  • Stay as a “sole proprietor” until you have something to be liable for
  • Once you’re making consistent sales then it can help to incorporate as an LLC (you will need to check with a tax advisor and get your own legal advice!)
  • Inc file is a good place to incorporate your business and learn more 

Top tips and links from Tiffany

  • You can’t get an “A” in everything. Choose what you want to be good at. 
  • Quickbooks for accounting
  • Hotjar (you can watch how people engage with your content & heatmaps)
  • VWO - also includes recordings and heat maps & push notifications)

Full Tiffany Domena Podcast Transcript

Tiffany 0:00
So that stage may take them some time as they’re choosing a niche, they might switch a couple times as they’re choosing what products and services to sell, whether they do affiliate products or whether they do their own or whatever the case is. And so I feel like incorporation shouldn’t really happen until you until you start having some risks that you need to mitigate. Because the whole point is, like in a limited liability company is to take off some liability, legal liability and also tax liability. And if you don’t have any sales, and if you don’t have any potential of a lawsuit, that is kind of like, Why do it right now.

Mike Beatty 0:46
Hey, guys, it’s Mike from Make Time Online, and today we’re joined by Tiffany Domena from how to entrepreneur.com

So Tiffany is about two and a half, or coming up to two and a half years into her online business, how to entrepreneur.com. And she’s just kind of really getting to that stage where things are really starting to scale. So I thought it’d be a really good idea to have a chat with her, particularly about like, kind of how she got started and how she set things up. Because, I mean, she was really just like a serial entrepreneur, she was just trying to try and different things as you were in the chat. But she has got some real good business now, some of my word sounds about right. But she, she just understands, like she’s really set things up or try to set things up well, but as she kind of explained, it could have probably been a bit better. And so I just thought it’d be good to get like her ideas and things like that on you know, whether it you need to incorporate your online business because you know, at the start, you’re not going to be making any money and so, when’s a good time to do Do this and just some of the lessons that you kind of learn from her so that we can sidestep those mistakes and hopefully sort out in the future. As always, this is quite long chat. So if you just want to jump to the last five minutes up also, I will summarise some of the key takeaways and hopefully that will help you enjoy this one guys. So, Tiffany, obviously you’ve been on the podcast before but we didn’t really chat too much about what you were doing. So I’d love to love to know a little bit about like, how your website is doing now I’ve seen a lot of stuff that’s going on but I just wonder if you could share like how long you’ve been doing it and what what sort of stage is that now?

Tiffany 2:45
Yes, so I started how to entrepreneur calm and January of 2018. So it is a it has over two years now. I will actually be two and a half years in June. So when I started, you know, it took some time to get the compounding working in my favour. But now that it’s at the two year mark, I feel like I am moving into a new phase of business. And that’s exciting.

Mike Beatty 3:18
Yeah, no, I’ve heard that from so many people as well as like, around two years, two and a half years seems to be like how long? It really takes a website to almost just be trustworthy, like Google and you know, like, getting more and more traffic and things like that. So yeah. Now have you noticed that as well?

Tiffany 3:38
I think that it actually transcends beyond a website. I think that from my experience with business offline, it seems like that’s the same trend. And even when I read my books, because I took courses on entrepreneurship and college, and when I took horses that they say that usually businesses don’t make it into to profit until the three to five year mark. So it’s like, it’s pretty standard. I think what we see in online is that you can expedite the growth of your reputation because you leverage intellectual property so much you’re writing these articles. They it’s not like your pin and out business cards and flyers that wrinkle up and get rained on and stuff like that. And then nobody refers to them two years down the line. If you build a website, then this is an asset because you you take that same time you want us to make a flyer or to buy a flyer and you create an article online and it stays there and people can search for it for years on out. So and even when you count like the cost of flyers or something or business cards, usually they’re like 20 cents per card. You can get let lower cost per click when you have advertise online. So I feel like the same thing exists. I remember when I was trying to get marketing clients from going to local business events. And I was taking my business cards with 20 cents per card. And I would have goals like I want to hand out this many I want to meet this many people, you know, and you have to go to relevant events very, I mean, it’s just all of these things to think about. And it takes some time for even if you go to an event and you meet a person live, it takes some time to really build that relationship to where they’re like, I can see that this relationship will be valuable, and I want to work with her. And so I feel like when you have a website, you can you can build that kind of somewhat passively because the It’s not like, I’m going to this networking event and I talk to this person and they’re late want to approach me again at the next time I attend the same event. And again and again, to handle whatever objections, answer whatever questions. You know what I mean? Yeah, I’m like, sometimes that may take, if you were to do it manually, it may take several conversations before you are making a sale. Yeah, with your website, you have an article and you interlink it to somewhere else, and somewhere else that actually has the conversation for you. So that the sale is like, is more passive. And that is to me the beauty of having a website and online marketing and yeah,

Mike Beatty 6:52
yeah, no notice that was so many things actually is even. Even if someone has a question quite often you you’re like, Oh, yeah, I’ve already written about that. Or Now have a podcast on our YouTube or whatever, you already have something and you can just literally send them a link. And it’s easy for you because it takes, what 10 seconds to send the link and then yeah, actually gives them more value than what you could do by typing out an email for 30 seconds or whatever, you know, guys is so much yeah,

Tiffany 7:21
I mean, my videos, usually I take a lot of thought into making them even before I shoot the video. So then they’ve got all this research time plus, if the video is even a half hour, that’s time that’s a that’s a long conversation if you were to do it on the phone. So, um, I think that and, and also the videos are a little bit more put together because I have all of my research right there when I do it. Whereas if you just have a conversation you might not remember all your references

Mike Beatty 8:00
Don’t remember what I did last week, let alone what I was reading and everything so, no 100% Yeah, actually, it’s something that I’ve always kind of noticed from you. And something I definitely want to get to in this podcast is how you’ve, you’ve definitely got like this more entrepreneurial business mindset. And a lot of people that I’ve spoke to particularly you know, people that are still relatively new in the journey and everything it’s almost like from day one you knew this is like a business and you’ve kind of set things I’ve just noticed there’s like this aura about you that set things up in a really cool way. So I just wondered if you could let us know like, what did you would you actually do like have you? Did you have to like incorporate your business like what have you what are some of the steps that you went through to get things like set up in a in a more like business structure?

Tiffany 8:57
I was say that I would say I did a lot of things wrong too.

Mike Beatty 9:05
Good to know.

Tiffany 9:07
So let’s go back to how did I build up a business mindset. For one thing, my parents are real estate investors and my dad started buying houses when he was 18. So that was one thing that that I think positioned me in a different way where I was able to build some entrepreneurial skills early on, because they had my dad and my mom, they had me around 26. So at that time, he had been buying houses, and renting houses, and he had built up something by time I was born. And then over the years, he had been buying houses, flipping houses, rent and houses, all of that stuff. And we would have to, like that’s how we would get our allowances by working with business. So I used to have to keep track of who pay rent and what day and who was late and things like that. And I think I started that probably in middle school. Okay,

Mike Beatty 10:17
so young to be doing all that. That’s so cool. It’s such a good experience, isn’t it? Really?

Tiffany 10:22
Yeah, it was good experience for my brother. He got the chance to do all kinds of like flooring, jobs, roofing jobs, age back jobs, and build up a lot of trades like that early. And my sister was the same way but they would try to gear us more towards what they could see we were naturally stronger. And that was helpful. So for me, I was very always very artistic. So they would definitely have me involved in things like if they needed a flyer made Or their logo. And I still do things like that, for the sake business. If they need swag, or anything like that, I still do those things when it comes to, so I think that was helpful. But once I got to be an adult, I really wanted to use more of my artistic skills. I was always in performing art schools, and I didn’t know how to translate being a good painter into business as much as I didn’t want to be a gallery painter, you know, like, I didn’t want to go the whole manufacturing route and try to get my pictures in Burlington or somewhere because I knew that was a long road. And so, I tried to I tried a lot of things in order to figure out which one would best fit

Unknown Speaker 12:00
Ask employees

Tiffany 12:05
to figure out which ones are best fit with. What, what, what, why skills. So I started out when I was in the military, that was a whole that is not artistic at all. Let me mention that my artistic or creative or anything like that the military is very structured, you do what you told. And that was one thing I really didn’t like about it because for me, I’ve always been a yyy person, a person that tries to bet things and there’s no room for that in the military unless you were really high leadership positions. And so I had a lot of

Unknown Speaker 12:52
problems.

Tiffany 12:56
Yeah, no, unless I did have a good opportunities to because some leaders really want people like that. Some leaders absolutely hate people like that because they just want to be in charge. So you really have to learn what type of people you can work with when you’re that type of person. So anyway, I started doing a lot of site hustling, and I did what my husband would tell you. We did. fish farms.

Unknown Speaker 13:32
No way.

Unknown Speaker 13:35
We built a bigger pond in our background. Did you really

Mike Beatty 13:42
well, and you would like to sell in the local market. Again.

Tiffany 13:48
It was an epic fail. What happened when I had an area my guy that did not go grass because the stern has been so hard to it, so I was thinking I started doing research about what I should do to make sure something something happens in his area. And then I came up with the idea that like somehow and I turned into growing tilapia because then you will have the fish water that you’ll be able to use to water the other plants and plant these fruit trees and the use the fish water somehow irrigate the pond so that the water will lead off with the with the plants.

Unknown Speaker 14:35
And then I’ll have this beautiful forest.

Tiffany 14:42
And so I got some tilapia, they really breathe pretty fast and they they eat algae. So when you have them in the sun, then that’s where the algae grows, they have something to eat. I’m like that’s perfect because that part of the yard is just horrible. Anyway And this would be a perfect use for it.

Mike Beatty 15:04
It makes total sense Have you still got it?

Tiffany 15:09
What happens is um I think we got the fish around maybe early in the year when it was really a lot of fun and I didn’t plan for our first frost

Mike Beatty 15:25
right I didn’t

Tiffany 15:26
plan for when the weather would get cool and tilapia can’t handle that so I didn’t get heaters and all that stuff so once once it got to the point where the the tilapia was really multiplying and we’re like, this is gonna be great so much this is gonna be I go my the fries came and I came from work they were

Mike Beatty 15:58
no Just one day. Oh, no.

Tiffany 16:04
Yeah. So, I mean, his things happen, like you take a risk, that was a business idea. And it was, it was fun we had a lot of fun doing everything with bird in the pond and going out there and looking at the finish girl and and all that stuff. But honestly, like I said it would have been going forward after we had the fish it would have taken time to build that reputation that we have a fish farm to explain that our habits and how clean we are and you know all of those things to build that reputation takes time. And it probably would have taken us more time than we expected. With that and just by trying different business ideas. That’s what I’ve learned that would have probably been In about two years of consistently going out telling people that we have a fish farm and it’s in our backyard, but our backyard is you know, well maintained. And don’t worry, you can actually come see it if you like, you know, his food and people especially like with the COVID and all the stuff going on, people will be concerned about whether or not I we did we did a good job whether it’s really healthy whether we’re putting pills in the tilapia and on and on. Yeah, so. So the tilapia was one, one idea. Then I moved on, and I did ATM. And the idea was basically, I was, I have my son was in private school, right and he was in a school They only accepted cash. And really, they did not take cards. Why? Because it was a really, really nice school. And so they didn’t take cards. So I started getting upset because I would have to drive so far. If I forgot to bring his tuition, I’ll have to go all the way to this ATM that the ATM was like two miles away, which isn’t far but it is far.

Mike Beatty 18:27
Okay, yeah.

Tiffany 18:29
You just got off of work and you go to pick up your kit, you forgot to pick up the tuition. You got to go all out of your way. So there was a corner store across from his school. And I decided like what if I buy an ATM and do a deal with the with this guy that owns a quarter store and let him know we’ll split the surcharge. So that’s what I did. So I bought an ATM. I placed it. I talked to the guy before Of course, before I bought ATM, I talked to the guys that, Hey, I got this idea like this school across the street is you know, all of the parents are always needing to get money to pay the tuition is cash only. And if we just put this ATM here, I can promise you, you’re gonna get people coming over here to you know, get to I will keep the thing failed. And I’ll do all the maintenance to the ATM and we’ll split the surcharge because I don’t have a patient right? Yeah. So that’s what I did. So that was my second idea. I was a good idea.

Mike Beatty 19:39
Yeah, it sounds like a pretty good idea.

Tiffany 19:41
Yeah, it worked. So I was getting passive income from that, though, was very mostly passive because all you got to do is put the keep the money in there. And then from there,

Mike Beatty 19:54
how do you do that? Do you have to get the money out of the bank, or do you have to Since you’re all in cash you have to put in there

Tiffany 20:03
well it kind of works like a loan right? So you put the money in and the the payment processor is transferring the money from their bank to your bank so you should always have more coming back than what you put in right Yeah, because you get the money back plus your surcharge Yeah, every time

Mike Beatty 20:24
and 1% or something No,

Tiffany 20:27
it’s what you make it so dependent on the demand in the area like if you go to like a more amusement park surcharges will be high. Yeah, if you go to somewhere where the demand is lower, then surcharges will be lower. So for for me, I had a pretty medium surcharge. I was I was like, 350 $3 50 cents. So every time when somebody would take out money, I would get the money back plus two 350 Wow. And so I thought it was it was great. Yeah. Yeah, it. I kept that working until until the guy sold his store. Okay. So

Mike Beatty 21:14
yeah, so you would get that going basically if it was possible.

Tiffany 21:19
It was pretty simple and I felt like I was being paid to pick my kid up from school.

Unknown Speaker 21:27
Like,

Mike Beatty 21:28
parents wish they could get paid to pick their kid up from school.

Tiffany 21:33
It was right across the street, I would go check in make sure thing is still working, but nothing was wrong with it. But I will also get notification if anything was wrong with it. So it was pretty passive. And I really like deals like that where is whether intellectual property or in some way you’re leveraging your time and not directly, directly trading your time I really like things like that. So yeah, I think really, you know, that’s what

Mike Beatty 22:04
everyone is looking for, isn’t it? At the end of the day, I think everyone wants to. I don’t think most people are entrepreneurial minded people have no issue in like working hard. But the ideal is like, work hard for something that can sort of like, pay you over and over again sort of thing, isn’t it? Yeah. That’s the dream.

Tiffany 22:24
Yes. So I did the ATM and from the ATM, it was book publishing. And so I published 15 books, and I work on my Christian lifestyle. And that’s kind of what brought me to internet marketing because I had these books that I’ve self published. And I wanted to learn, I didn’t want to have to do book trailers and like the book signings and stuff like that, because when I wrote the books, I was active duty, so I didn’t really have time to be doing Amongst tours and going all over and speaking, you know, I just didn’t have the time what kind of they were Christian lifestyle was like, yeah, so things like marriage and, um, and just overall mindset and things like that. So, um, I wrote these books, and then it was like, I started to want to get more sales with the books. Obviously, yeah. So I started, like, one thing I learned from just trying different businesses was I had a bad habit of investing in the investment in the product development and investing in the service design before having an audience for it. And I learned to flip that model and really Internet marketing has helped with that evolution. But I wrote all these books, but I didn’t build the audience first, you know, then when the books were published in or live, then that’s what I’m concerned about how are how am I gonna get sales with them? So I have a co host here. I don’t know if you know daycares are

Mike Beatty 24:26
I guess that’s one of the one of the great things as well, isn’t it about what you what you’ve set up is like you can actually be there with your kids and

Tiffany 24:35
is I’ve been able to compare because I did all of these different ideas before and been in the military before and even with my parents doing real estate, and having tenants call when they need this or that. There’s passive components to real estate, but there’s very active ones too. And so I’ve been I’ve been To compare all of those things in, I was so grateful that I chose to start an online business and to work on how to entrepreneur.com and the people that I come in contact with, like, and still being able to have my kids like, you know, the first two years were super rough, because it was building a business. It was having a newborn. It was having my son was in a hospital. So it was so emotional and stressful. Build in the business with all of these things going on. Yeah. And I feel to now that if I could do it, then there’s no excuses. There is Yeah, like so two and a half years. This may With all of the sales and stuff like that, now I can officially say that our business is full time, you know, I was able to get more than 3000 a month. That was a long road. And I feel like if I could do that with all of the things going on, then people should not have so many objections.

Mike Beatty 26:26
Sorry, would you make more than 3000 a month?

Tiffany 26:28
Yes. Oh, so this month with my sales, I haven’t got it in hang it. So this is just what I’ve accrued. But, like this month, I can say that I know that I’ll get more than 3000 next month.

Mike Beatty 26:47
Nice. That’s a good place and it’s kind of like been Snoke like growing each month as well recently. Um, what do you take ups and downs

Tiffany 26:58
um, the first year was definitely more predictable because like I got sales in my first month, so that I did have flukes like that that happened, I knew kind of that you have to put your affiliate link and you have to get traffic to that. You have to have good copy and all that stuff like that. Understood. So I was I was able to get sales early. But as far as actually building that reputation where people come back and people are coming to you for recommendations, and your website traffic is actually compounding that process took some time. And, um, so I that I think that after my one year mark, that’s when I started to see more like, I mean, you know, it’s always going like uphill, but I think that I have more confidence and I was starting to To be more confident and experimenting and the risks that I was taken and and at the same time, I was managing my personal life, better able to prioritise my business more. Because when I first started out having a newborn and having my son I was homeschooling and just trying to figure out when can I do this how to get the baby to sleep long enough that I can do this, you know? Like, it was a challenge. So at some point, I got better with her napping patterns and her sleeping and now she’s much more independent than she was before. She can make her own popcorn.

Mike Beatty 28:56
Hey, never need to cook again.

Unknown Speaker 29:02
She could make her own popcorn

Unknown Speaker 29:05
in the microwave

Unknown Speaker 29:07
in there.

Tiffany 29:10
And it’s just step by step, you have little milestones like that, where it’s like, she can do a little bit more by herself. Yeah, when she knew a little bit more by herself, that means that this one was thing I have to do, right? And that the same thing with my son just teaching them things like how to cook and how to clean up after themselves. And all those things mean that I have less distractions in my workday, because like when she was younger, and she makes a big Kool Aid mess, and she doesn’t know how to clean up by herself, then I feel like well, even though I was working on this blog post, I have to stop and they’ll clean up their Kool Aid otherwise there’s gonna, you know.

Mike Beatty 29:56
Yeah, so obviously not when you actually first started as us Like, do you have this exact plan of like how it was all going to go? Do you know? It’s going to take two years, two and a half years? And did you? Did you kind of like get everything set up from day one? Or did that from like the business side point of view, then did you that how did you actually get that all set up?

Tiffany 30:19
Okay, so, the business side, I incorporated in 2017. And that was before I started hot entrepreneur. So I incorporated this cohort, Inc. And I did that in 2017. And I incorporated as a C Corp, which I feel is a big mistake. I felt like I should have incorporated as a limited liability company. And at the time, the business was a service based business. So I was doing marketing services for people and my daughter. She was just she was four months so my my head been started, but I never got to my final business that worked and supported us. That was the general contracting company. So when I was in the military, about two years before I separated, we started with a general contracting company. And so my husband was started out he was doing lawn care for people. He was from Ghana, he had a tough time finding jobs here in the US. And a lot of them one at work experience when I was starting low hourly wages, and he just wasn’t for that. He wanted to be able to really contribute to the house. And so he decided that he would do better off just cut people’s yards. And he started taking a lot more and cutting people’s yards. And because he was reliable, it grew from there where you have people who would start to ask, Well, if you could do this, can you also do a fence? Can you do this? Can you do That. And so his services kind of expanded. And so he started doing fencing and it got to the point where he he did full home renovations. And now he still does that. So he does for home renovations, mostly for real estate investors. So they will buy a house that is just jacked up and then hire him and he will make it where it’s ready for rent or ready for sale.

Mike Beatty 32:30
And team then as well, or is it just him?

Tiffany 32:33
Yeah, nice. Yeah. So basketball over time. But that was another opportunity. I had to see a business startup. So I like I would be in my uniform going door to door telling people do you need to I mean, it looks like you do need to York.

Unknown Speaker 32:57
No justice.

Tiffany 33:00
Did you have any time today or two out pigeon? You’re doing our sales thing. Oh, but Emma. So it grew. And I would also go to like groups like pay groups like real estate groups and stuff like that. And those people pay a lot to be in those real estate groups. those groups might be like 20,000 or something like that to be a part of it, especially if you in multifamily circles. Well,

Mike Beatty 33:37
what is that for training or just to be part of the group?

Tiffany 33:41
is a this both is training working. Also, they go into deals together. So like, it might be like, if you have a big apartment complex, like more than 200 doors or something like that. It’s usually not one investor that goes in on it. So they might partner and have like seven investors and say you each one of us has to put in no less than this amount. And then this person will be the primary investor that’s gonna be in charge of the management and everybody else is passive. So you get dividends every month on this day and that so they set up this deal right? and the like, those people are good to work with when it comes as a as a contracting company. So I would go and network with those people and then get to know them or network with single family, real estate investors and get to know them, and they will get sales, right. So that business has been a large contributor to us even to this day. So that’s what my husband does most of the time and it is very time intensive as a service based business and So because of that, when I started my, my business then then I was kind of pulling away from that one. Because I wanted, I was had a baby, it was harder for me to do what I was doing before. What the baby in, I wanted to find something that was that I could do from home. That was also a way that I could be really involved with her. My son was having some health challenges. I don’t know what happened, but I know his heart rate just went down. And it went down to 30 beats per minute at one point, and so extremely lethargic. And I started having to go to the hospital with him a lot. And so all of these things kind of inspired me to look for different work because it was like, I can’t be doing that. contracting and balancing this. And then even with the doing the marketing services, it was tough. So it got to a point where I was like, I felt like I can’t do, I don’t know how I’m gonna balance my time and still be able to offer these services and fulfil expectations for people. And so that was in 2017. I had incorporated as a C Corp, I would say, don’t do that.

Mike Beatty 36:33
So what is a limited liability company is better?

Tiffany 36:39
Like, I’m not an accountant or a legal professional yet.

Mike Beatty 36:42
Did you get advice or did you just kind of go online and do it yourself?

Tiffany 36:48
I should have gotten much more advice than I did. I mostly go on my what the benefits that I saw a C Corp was I was thinking way years down the line. And I was thinking of being able to offer things like profit sharing to employees and being able to have employees that can buy stocks of the company and I was thinking of different things like that. That Are you, you just don’t do early. Yeah. So, so what is the bad? what’s the what’s the disadvantage of having a C Corp? The disadvantage is that you have to you have to do quarterly taxes, you have to run payroll, you have to pay yourself at a certain at a reasonable rate, they say, and when you’re starting out, your sales may not be there, huh, you know, to where you can pay yourself, like consistent to what a company would pay you. Why are you know, in those first couple of years, you may not be able to so And then in the first couple years, you are trying to be on your grind with sales and with just establishing your service and your reputation. So it’s much easier for you to focus on to not have to focus on like accounting and finance as much, you know. And I didn’t see that going forward. I just was like, Well, you know, taxes four times a year, that’s cool. payroll, yeah, I’ll be able to get my sales. That’s fine. Even if you even if you read my blog posts when I first joined the affiliate,

Unknown Speaker 38:41
Marisa, by me

Tiffany 38:45
my first blog was I think I was so motivated to become full time and like why mom, two, three.

Mike Beatty 38:55
That’s why everyone thinks I think this is so much false information online. You know,

Tiffany 39:01
I don’t know why they make it seem like online is so much different than offline. Right? And, like you You think when you start out you don’t know if you actually get paid for the typing Am I articles? articles are gonna end up into my mate. At some point you have to, like, you realise that as a small business and all the parts that are no small business are in the in the online business or in the blogging business. Yeah. So, yes, I incorporate it and then that I pivoted quite a bit because like I said, I started out with doing services and From the services I realised that this isn’t the best fit for us have it again family since my husband has this demanding service based business in there for me to have a service based business to that means who’s gonna be Washington? Like, because I felt like capable of being really successful with that, but I felt like it was just I like to be good at what I do. And I really felt like I couldn’t because I really wanted to be a great mom. So like, I don’t want to fall flat on that. And so I decided I had said it was one of my friends told me well Tiffany, you can’t get an A everything. You got to choose what you want to get in. And you got to be okay with getting a B or C and some other things. So, that advice really stuck with me because it was like voice I want to get a in my professional life. And I want to get an A, as a mom and as a wife too. But this professional right here is that it’s not gonna work. Because if I want to get an A in this, then I’m gonna end up getting a B or C as a mom and a wife. And according to what I felt my standard was, and so I decided to hold off on that and to focus more on building my website as an asset and leveraging that because I could vlog in the morning and I could vlog at night after the kids were asleep and I really stabilised with it nap schedule, and make sure that I was able to get work done while she sleep.

Unknown Speaker 41:55
Yes

Tiffany 42:00
She’s a big YouTube fan

Mike Beatty 42:03
does she watch your channel?

Unknown Speaker 42:10
She She does

Mike Beatty 42:13
get some hours out 50 you get up get her into your channel

Tiffany 42:17
yeah my now my kids are into my son’s into fortnight.

Mike Beatty 42:25
Nice my boy kid into fortnight

Tiffany 42:28
you’re right my daughter’s into lol surprise dos. Oh

Mike Beatty 42:33
no I surprised you like lol

Unknown Speaker 42:35
surprise Yeah,

Tiffany 42:37
yes. lol So now she’s not really that into business at this point my son is actually more into business he he is but not to the point where the information I’m sharing will be like super valuable for him. No. Well,

Mike Beatty 42:56
I mean, there’s so many obviously you got your kids everything I don’t want to keep you too long, Tiffany. And I’ve already kept you very long. So we had a massive chat before we actually start recording. So is there anything that you would kind of do differently? Like when you set it off? Or what would you do? Knowing what you know? Now, if you could go back and like you were setting up your business and everything? Is there anything that you think is really important that you need to get in place? Or what would you do?

Tiffany 43:22
I think what I advise people now is that, like, the, what I noticed is the concept phase of the business takes some time. And most of the people that are startup entrepreneurs that I meet, they don’t clearly have a concept of what product or service they want to deliver. They know that they want to make an extra 500 1000, you know, per month, but they don’t know how they want to do that and what they want to do to help other people so that they can make that money. Yeah, and so that stage may take them some time. As they’re choosing a niche they might switch a couple As they’re choosing what products and services to sell, whether they do affiliate products or whether they do their own, or whatever the case is. And so I feel like incorporation shouldn’t really happen until you until you start having some risks that you need to mitigate. Because the whole point is, like in a limited liability company is to take off some liability, legal liability and also tax liability. And if you don’t have any sales, and if you don’t have any potential of a lawsuit, it’s kind of like, Why do it right now? Right? So

Mike Beatty 44:40
you don’t need to do it straight away was what you’re saying. How was she going? Now what would you say is the right time?

Tiffany 44:47
I think it’s okay to be a sole proprietor until once you start having some liability. And that usually is when like, for forever As as online marketers, and as blogging business owners, we start doing those reviews, those reviews are starting to get traction, and people are starting to kind of get their feathers ruffled about, like what you say. Because when you’re doing reviews, you’re directly commenting on somebody’s product, and it can be damaging to their reputation, they could say something to you. You, you also have you also can say more taxes when you incorporate. And so once you start to do your taxes, you’ll notice that you’re being charged more once you’re getting sales, you know. So it’s gonna be once you get to sales, and once you are possibly having more legal liability, then that’s when I would say you definitely want to start looking into insurance. Corporation because just to protect yourself if somebody did say, I’m thinking about suing you or whatever, then you’ll know that they’re not gonna steal your house. So you adding a house so you add to everything else that you’ve accrued personally so it’s all protected

Mike Beatty 46:17
Corporation and do a Can you like offset? You know your expenses and stuff? Can you offset that if it’s in a company, but you can’t if you’re a sole proprietor?

Tiffany 46:32
I haven’t experienced a lot of that. Let me know most of our expenses as blogging business owners are fairly low. Yeah. So I will say that I know that because I’m incorporated I could do things like the payment protection and all those things that might be a little bit more challenging for a sole proprietor because they most likely may not have their accounts separate. But I would say that it’s also important as early as you can to get a separate bank account. Because it’s really much easier to know how much like, you see how people do their income reports. But it’s difficult to know how much you put into the business because it’s usually like change at a time. Yeah. And it’s like little experiments, and you don’t really think of them as business and investment until it gets to a point where you’re consistently investing.

Mike Beatty 47:36
a lump sum, actually, just spoke to a really cool guy. McAteer vicini. I think his name is, but he was talking about a book called profit first, and I really liked it and like, even from Have you have you read that one? Yeah, yeah, I just like the way that he sort of taught. He broke it down into three bank accounts sort of thing, whereas you don’t know you could just have it in one bank account. And then just have to Basically have your expenses to where most of you just stick with income in there, put 10% in a profit account, and then like, what 15% in a tax account or whatever. And then the rest is to pay to yourself and to any other operating costs and things like that. I was like, That’s such a great idea, particularly as a new business. I think that’s so if you can get into that habit every month is like, right, I’ve got made this much money. I’m gonna put 10% into a profit account, you know, 15% into a tax account, and then the rest I need to pay myself and whatever expenses and stuff.

Tiffany 48:38
I think it’s harder to do as a business. Because

Mike Beatty 48:42
Yeah, they all everything’s changing everything, isn’t it? But

Tiffany 48:45
yeah, because everything changes. I thought I was at the point where that would be a good idea at this stage. But being honest, it is still challenging to do because you have your actions expenses. And then you work, you want to get to the point where you can pay yourself as if you had a job. So now I’m at the point where I think I can I can increase how much I’m paying myself. For a long time, I was paying myself, like maybe less than a third of what I bring in, in in for a longer time. I was paying wasn’t paying myself at all. I just started paying myself in October, which would be when the business was from January 2018 to October 2019 over a year. Yeah, I was. And I wasn’t paying myself. So in October is when I set up QuickBooks and I set up the payroll. And I started doing my bookkeeping at the beginning of the month, and when I would get all my affiliate code missions, all of my service income, all of that stuff, and then saying, This is how much I need for expenses. This is how much I want to say, for working capital. And then this is how much I want to pay myself. So I just started doing it. And honestly, that working capital account is what also could be called the profit account. And I don’t like leaving it alone. Alone, because I’m constantly thinking about, well, if the reputation of the business grow more to sales will go up. Yeah, you know, and so it’s kind of like should I just have this money so that I can give myself bonuses or so that I can say that I’m profitable, or should I just not profit right now and double down on growing the reputation and increase in sales because really I’m not happy with the, the amount that I’m paying on myself, or am I happy with them on the sales that I have? So I need to just keep, like, boosting that. I need to keep going.

Mike Beatty 51:14
I can actually agree. But I’ve got to say like when I when I read the book, it just kind of like made me think. Yeah, no, actually I do get it. It’s like, it’s more like a habit. And if you can get into the habit of putting though put in profit first, always like this is profit. You keep that. And what I actually said as well is every quarter so that every quarter then you just pay yourself 50% of the profit. So that’s like a bonus to you. Because that’s the whole point of setting up a business.

Tiffany 51:44
I love the book. And I love the concept. Like, I understand that you don’t want to get into like, you don’t want to you see the public companies that they’re constantly reinvesting for growth and reinvestment Grow, you don’t want to get to the point where you never get to profit. Yeah, it does seem to be a point where you have a deadline. That is like from this point, we’re going to make sure that the company’s profitable, we’re going to keep the expenses at this range. We’re gonna the pricing is just right. I don’t feel like I’m there right now.

Unknown Speaker 52:24
No, I know what you meant. I do know what you mean.

Tiffany 52:27
I think also when you you, you have to you might have to change the decision sometimes because when you see an opportunity, and it’s a timely opportunity, then you might feel like it’s necessary to double down for example. During a lockdown, I saw that there was a big interest in alternative ways of making money. So I have money that is in my from My brother. And I had no intentions on advertising. But I said, this is a great opportunity. And I have some posts that are doing well organically. So should I keep that money there for working capital for a computer that I might buy in a couple of years for like, should I keep it there? Or should I take advantage of this timely opportunity? And I feel that sometimes you have to think like that and because like even Jeff Bezos talks about that, how he knew that he knew that it was important to double down with Amazon, and to just like go all in so he chose not to profit for a period of time, so that they could expand at the rate that they did. I think there are there has to be calculated into the equation when you decide what to put to the site versus what to reinvest and all of that. Yeah, timeliness is is going to be very,

Mike Beatty 54:13
very true. Just you kind of mentioned there, you had like a couple of posts that are doing well organically. And I guess that kind of like links on to what’s gonna ask you, have you got any other tools or anything like any training or tools or anything like that, that you use? particularly to like, track things? or just in general, maybe if your whole online business, anything that you haven’t already mentioned?

Tiffany 54:36
Oh, well, I strongly watch Google Analytics. And so I see I see a lot of information from there. But in addition to that, I also watch hot jar and hot jar like with hot jar, you can actually watch recordings of the people Who are showing your website, and you can see how they’re engaging with your content. You can make hypothesis about what to move around so that you can get better results with your content. Like it’s just so powerful. And then it also has the feature of heat maps. So it’ll show you by colour coding. Like the red areas are the areas that a lot of people are seeing and the blue, the blue areas are the areas that are kind of pulled, not a lot of people are getting into. So you’ll be able to kind of see which portions of your website are the most engaged. And when you know that then you can possibly move call to actions to highly visible areas. You can decide whether whether your content in certain areas is engaging enough because obviously it’s not bringing them all the way through so you can try to rework some of these content to see if maybe you can increase the engagement is all kinds of hypotheses that you can create as a result of having that tool.

Mike Beatty 56:10
Yeah. No, it sounds like such a good one. You were saying it before the chat. And I was just like thought, this sounds amazing. And it so you can get a free plan. And then you I’m guessing you get paid plans as well.

Tiffany 56:21
Yeah. And you know, another tool that kind of does similar things that I’ve also looked at is called VW Oh, I don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but they have very similar things. I haven’t used them for that. But they also have a really feature rich set of tools that includes recordings and heat maps. And they also have those push notifications. And I’ve been really thinking about experimented more with that. That’s not something that I’ve done to this point, but push notifications kind of work like retargeting, yeah, because Fs parser signs up for push notifications, with with retargeting for those who haven’t studied it before, basically, you can have, you can take the information from people who’ve come to your website, and then advertise on like Facebook or other places in a way that will bring that audience back to your website. So you stay top of mind with put push notifications that people have opted to click to receive more notifications from you. And it can have the same effect where you are posting things. And then whatever you post, I mean, like, of course, you can play around with what type of content you put through the push notifications, but it will bring them back to your site. Yeah, so I think the push notifications, awesome, really powerful. People are saying that they’re seeing good results with that in comparison with email marketing, or even in complement with email marketing. So I’ve been thinking about that, but bw was definitely more on the pricey side in comparison to Yes Who Jar Jar has the free plan and then they have plans that are like $40 a month and etc 99 depending on your traffic VW O is starting at 100 a month

Mike Beatty 58:21
so well step up basically. So I just always ask someone is at towards the end of the podcast if it is if they can go back in time and I’m going to try and choose a good day let’s go I’m going to go with like when you were during the like serial entrepreneurial phase like when you’re getting the fish farm set up, let’s go for that day actually, let’s go for when you came back, and the frosty calm and like ruined your whole plan. What would you ever do with knowing with everything that you know now what would you tell yourself if you could go back to that day?

Tiffany 58:59
Yeah, If I could go back to that day, hmm. I think that that day was such a, it taught me so much. And actually, at that time, I was so eclectic, and what I was willing to do, like that had nothing really to do with my skills. I was just, I have multiple interests, and I just would go after him. And I think there’s a lot of good about being spontaneous. But I think I would tell myself to go back to when I’m stronger and to build an audience based on that, because yeah, I think that would have gotten me to my angle much faster. But because I was like, just spontaneous and just wanting to try all kinds of things that I did that. But I didn’t really know much about fish don’t really know much about fish. I was not willing to fish at all. I wasn’t there. I was too scared when they start swimming around in the match. Oh, I would just like be jumping in.

Mike Beatty 1:00:20
So basically stick stick to what you’re good at

Tiffany 1:00:23
how to get somebody else to do majority of that business like it didn’t leverage my skills at all. I don’t think it would have been a good long term play unless my husband was willing to go into it with me which at the time he was, so he’ll be the one in there fishing. And even when we came back and saw that the fish were by pretty much died. He wasn’t there and and fish them out and put them in Ziploc bags and he’s like, well, let’s see if we can preserve anything.

Mike Beatty 1:01:00
You’re like that done.

Tiffany 1:01:03
Yeah, I think that I couldn’t eat something I was like, I just it just, I just was too disappointed in the whole thing to even think about.

Mike Beatty 1:01:14
Well, if if anyone has listened to this, Tiffany, and they’re like, just want to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

Tiffany 1:01:22
I think how to entrepreneur is definitely a good way to get in contact with me. But I’m also a member at Wealthy Affiliate and my username is t dominar. I write quite a bit of content there and do training and stuff there. And I engage quite a bit there. So I would say those are two good ways and also on my YouTube channel. I do respond to the comments. They’re really good. So let’s say those three ways.

Mike Beatty 1:01:51
Cool. I’ll put links to everything in the show notes, but it’s been an absolute pleasure, Tiffany and thank you so much for your time.

Tiffany 1:02:00
Thanks for having me. It’s always fun chatting with you. So yeah, thanks for having me, I’ll make time online.

Mike Beatty 1:02:11
So there you have it, she is obviously, like doing amazing things right now. Just as she was sort of saying their incomes just starting to, like grow and snowball and things like that. And it just sounds like it’s such a common thing, you know, two and a half, three years, that sort of timeframe seems to be very, very, seems to be like very similar to other people’s stories as well. So she’s still in that early phase, you know, just like us, we’re all in this together. That’s the whole point of this podcast, just kind of share these sort of things. Anyway, the I’m going to just summarise five key things, and hopefully that will help you. Number one is that Tiffany started or she incorporated a company before she even started online business and she was sort of saying that she did a C Corp. I don’t even know what that means. But she basically said it is not Good idea to do that at all a limited liability company would be far better. But then also number two is that she said, it wasn’t necessary to do that you could just be a sole proprietor. Again, I’m not entirely sure what that means. But I think it’s something to do with the fact that you’re not a company. only do it when you actually get to a certain level, you know, so once you actually starting to bring in income and you have anything to actually be liable of is kind of like what she said, you know, if you’re not making any money and you’re not like, doing it, you’re not at a stage where you have any liabilities as such, then you can probably just get away with not doing it. Not that maybe, yeah, that and that. I think that’s pretty good advice. Anyway. Number three is that it often takes any business sort of, she’s read loads of books and stuff. We didn’t really get into that in the chat. Although we had such a I think we’re on screen. for three hours, that’s the longest I’ve ever been on Skype with anyone for the podcast. And we were just chit chatting, you know, like it does seem to take three to five years for any business to sort of start seeing profit and really becoming a business. I did quotation marks there in case you didn’t see. And I just think that is it’s just something to be aware of, you know, so many people jump into an online business and you see all these things online, how I made money, how I made $3,000 in my second month blogging, you see all those sort of titles all the time and is misleading, because what they don’t tell you is how much they have done before. You know, like, there might be my built websites and things like that before they’re not starting from scratch. They never they might have even tried a website that’s failed before or something like that. And this is their second go. So that’s just something to be aware of that mindset washer going into it. Then number four is that she sort of said, she realised once she started the fish farm and that failed, she realised he just needed to kind of like go back and stick to what she is good at, you know, leverage your own skills. There’s no point in trying the basic would be no point in me trying to become an artist because I would be terrible at that. And it’s kind of obviously the thing is though, what I would say with that is a lot of people think oh, well, I have no like techie skills or online business skills or remember blah. The thing is, all of these things are learnable, however, is trying to find something that suits you like you might be more extroverted and maybe doing YouTube channel might be a better one for you. Maybe you really like writing and you’re quite introverted and you want to, you have to be in behind the screen, but you don’t want to be that out. In person like to start with so you figure out what what it is you might like chatting while I haven’t talked to people so maybe a podcast is a good route to go down use the skills that are good for you like suit you and I think that’s really good advice. And then number five is just some of the tools that she mentioned. She actually mentioned this one offline Inc file is a great website to get incorporated with, which I didn’t know. So you know, if you are looking to incorporate your business that’s a good place to go. And hot jar. I think this is my standout one. She did mention loads of other stuff to me, but those are the two hot jar is basically you can start for free. And you can like see you see a video of people looking on your website. I think why not like that sounds like such a cool idea because you can see where they like hang around, shows you like hotspots, it kind of shows you where they’re interested in and it can maybe help you place like a link or something like that if there are loads of people hanging around a certain place. Anyway, that’s my main takeaways. I don’t want to just carry on rambling too much. I really hope you enjoyed it guys.

Thanks for listening in to this episode of Make time online. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast in the App Store. keep changing for the better guys. Take care

Podcast Summary

Some of my main takeaways from this chat are...

  1. No need to incorporate when you start out
  2. There may be benefits to incorporate once you start making consistent income
  3. Online businesses are more similar to offline businesses than people think
  4. Leverage your own skills and what you’re good at (is it writing, videos, podcasts etc.)
  5. Build an audience based on what you’re good at

Get in contact with Tiffany at How to Entrepreneur, on Wealthy Affiliate or YouTube.

What were your main takeaways? Any questions? Drop a comment below…

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I've created a growing passive income online with no previous marketing skills or online experience... 

I've made a special video for you to explain exactly how I did this. 

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abundance_network_featured_image
Not Recommended, MLM, Reviews

Is Abundance Network a Scam? MLM Review on Alleged Pyramid Scheme

You are most likely here and reading this article because someone told you about an opportunity to work from your home and you asked yourself…

Is Abundance Network a scam? Well, to put you out of misery… kind of...

But we need to dig deeper into that to know the facts about it. And so, is this a legit opportunity to make money from home and ditch your career?

The rest of this Abundance Network review is going to answer that question along with photos, videos, and the pros and cons that go with it so you can come up with the right decision.

Abundance Network Review

The overview and rankings

Name: Abundance Network

Founder: Jeff Long

Type: SMS MLM

Products (Including Pricing): 2/100 ($100)

Success Stories: 2/100

Price To Join MLM: $200 + $697

Is Abundance Network a Scam: Logo

What to look for in a MLM:

  • Low start-up fee & maintenance cost
  • High-quality affordable products
  • You don’t have to carry inventory
  • An affiliate-like system 
  • Generous compensation plan
  • Company is in the early momentum phase

Abundance Network Pros

  • None

Abundance Network Cons

  • No real product
  • Expensive products
  • Owner faced lawsuits
  • Is Abundance Network a pyramid scheme in disguise
  • Downward trend

Summary

Abundance Network is an SMS and voicemail system MLM company where people can join and become members to earn commissions from their recruits.

The company had gone through a number of ups and downs as well, which is normal to MLMs.

Make Time Online Rating: 3 out of 100 

Recommended: No

What is Abundance Network?

Abundance Network is an Multi-Level-Marketing text messaging system that uses AI for its SMS technology.

It’s all about generating leads using the voice messaging and SMS service of the company. There’s not much to know about them because there literally is no information about their site or any press release that talks about what they offer.

Here is a 10-minute video that shows what Abundance Network really is...

What’s in their site is nothing but an affiliate login form and the terms and conditions of joining their program.

I read through it and noticed that they referred multiple times to Autom8tion, which is a company owned by Jeffrey Long and is based in Utah.

Who is Jeff Long?

Jeffrey Long is the founder of the Abundance Network.

He has had a number of experiences with MLMs, just like when he founded AutoXTen in 2011 which collapsed due to unknown reasons after a few years.

He then started SMS Dailies, another company that soon again failed. Then in 2015, he launched Get Paid Social, which is basically a system that spammed posts on Facebook.

It soon stopped operating because of it being labeled as a pyramid scheme. But then, he still didn’t stop and started 1 Online Business, another social media company which was modeled after a pyramid scheme.

It got closed and he promoted Luvv, another one of his endeavors, which again, was dismissed as another pyramid scheme. He founded NewU Financial in 2019 but still was a scam...

Is Abundance Network a pyramid scheme?

Yes, Abundance Network is a pyramid scheme.

Their members can’t earn any money if they don’t recruit people. But a more fitting and specific question to that is… Is Abundance Network a pyramid scheme in disguise?

What is a pyramid scheme?

A pyramid scheme is a company that is paying members for recruiting other people into the company.

This is the main focus of the business operations instead of selling an actual product and service.

Countries around the globe have already banned these as it’s impossible for all constituents to earn money from a company that’s only paying for recruitment.

See this diagram from Wikipedia below to learn why...

Members who make the most cash are those who sell the idea of a “business opportunity.”

But if you were to check out the diagram closely, you can see that it is impossible for all members to earn from a system such as this because you’ll just be running out of members to recruit.

Know more about these so-called pyramid schemes in disguise in this 5-minute video...

Let's then know more about why...

Success is rare with Abundance Network

Sadly, it is very hard to see success from an MLM company such as Abundance Network.

Statistics even state that between 72.5% and 99.9% of MLM members lose money.

92.3 Percent of Members Lose Money in MLMs

This is happening as MLMs have a “sales quota” where members can only stay active and receive commissions once they sell a specific number of products monthly.

If they can’t, then they buy the stuff themselves just to stay active. This leads to members losing thousands of dollars from their own savings before recruiting a single person into the company...

Ready to make passive income online?

Hey, I'm Mike.

I created a passive income online within a year. I had no marketing skills or online experience when I started. 

Mike Beatty

How does Abundance Network Work?

Abundance Network works by selling SMS and voicemail services.

However, this isn’t an actual product or service because all you have to do is signup to gain access to the system. And the only way to do earn is by recruiting.

But still, it sounds like a win-win situation to some, not until you know that the company is saving huge money because instead of them undertaking marketing campaigns, they just let their members do all the advertising.

Before confirming if that’s really the case, let’s focus on...

Abundance Network products

If you are really interested in becoming a member of the Abundance Network, then it’s best that you learn about their products.

This way, you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into.

However, the thing with Abundance Network is that there’s really no offered product or service here, aside from the opportunity of earning money from the commissions you make once you’ve recruited people.

But I’ll try my best to describe this supposed “product” of theirs:

  • SMS text messaging ($100) - You gain the ability to spam various messages to multiple phone numbers. And if any of the recipients answer back, you grab the opportunity of explaining the money-making scheme.

It’s because of the fact that they don’t have any product or service that makes them a pyramid scheme...

Take note, though, that there are multitudes of other brands out there that have the same business mechanics as Abundance Network.

A few of the most notable MLMs are:

All of them claim to have an innovative product that isn’t present in other companies, when in fact, they’re just offering the same stuff...

You can check out this 5-minute video to see what their SMS product really looks like:

Now that you know their product...

Can you make money with Abundance Network?

You are going to have a very hard time earning money from Abundance Network.

There are some who do, but they work day and night, even more than sales managers. And for what? For payment that’s lower than minimum wage?

They don’t even have an income disclosure to prove that their members are making money...

How to make money with Abundance Network

There is only one way to make money from Abundance Network. And that is by:

  • Recruiting members into the company.

This is another very clear sign that there’s something fishy going on here, and that it’s an outright pyramid scheme.

How much does it cost to join Abundance Network?

You need to pay a hefty $200 to become an official member of Abundance Network.

However, that only means that you’re a basic member. In order to become a Master Reseller, as what they want to call it, you have to pay a massive $697.

They say that you can make more money if you become the latter because you have access to more numbers...

Abundance Network monthly cost

I calculated the costs you are going to incur for a year, and this is what I found:

  • $200

  • $697

Minimum costs for year 1 = $897

And that’s before you add up the other costs for training and promotional expenses like gas, travel, food, and other miscellaneous costs...

Abundance Network compensation plan

MLMs have confusing compensation plans.

The same goes with Abundance Network. Don’t you worry, though, as I’ll simplify it to the best of my capabilities…

Their compensation plan works by having their new affiliate members gift $100 to current and existing members.

So basically, newer members provide a $100 gift to their recruiters, and the latter then provides another $100 to the one who recruited them.

Simply speaking, the $100 just goes up the ladder, much like a pyramid scheme.

There’s really nothing much to say here, apart from the fact that this is an outright scam.

Is Abundance Network a Scam: Compensation

Confused still?

Well, I understand because even though their compensation plan is simpler compared to other MLMs, it’s clear to see that they’re just deceiving their members and promising payment even if the money they are earning is just recycled cash from the pyramid.

There’s only just 1 thing to do, and that is by:

  • Recruiting members

Anyways, you can check out this 7-minute compensation plan video below to learn more...

So...

Is Abundance Network a scam?

I don’t normally conclude this in my reviews, but in Abundance Network’s case, I can clearly say that this is a scam.

They don’t sell any real or legit products and services, and their business model and compensation plan are just simply flawed and riddled with all the signs of a scam!

The remaining section of this review will reveal the facts about this company so you can come up with an informed decision if this is for you despite all the clear signs of it being a scam...

Just to be fully transparent with you, I am not a distributor myself and I do not endorse it in any way.

I have researched the website, testimonials and information on the Internet to get to the bottom of what this program genuinely does. This is because I have been burnt from programs just like this in the past and I want to prevent others from making the same mistakes. If you’d like to learn how to “Spot an Online Marketing Scam” then click the highlighted text.

Tired of MLMs? Check out how I make money online here!

What I like about Abundance Network

I hate to say this, but there’s really nothing nice I can say about Abundance Network...

Key Terms:

  • Pyramid Scheme – recruits members via a promise for payment from recruiting others into the company rather than providing a product
  • Affiliate Marketing- Connecting a customer to a product they are looking for and receiving a commission for doing so
  • Red Flag - A warning sign

What I don't like about Abundance Network

#1 No real product

First off, is that there is no real product or service offered.

Although they have an SMS and voice messaging system, if you dig deeper into what they really do, you’ll see that it’s just made for recruiting members into the company.

There’s really no point or any value offered by it, neither.

#2 Expensive subscription

You have to pay $200 or $697 just to become a member.

And for what?

To gain access to the SMS system which allows you to just contact as many people possible and waiting for them to come, hear your sales pitch, and become recruited, and only to do the same thing?

That’s just plain wrong, based on my own perspective...

#3 Owner faced lawsuits

Jeff Long, the founder of Abundance Network, had a series of misfortunes with all of his businesses. Because all of them are downright pyramid schemes! He’s had 6 other businesses previously, all of which have been closed because they’ve been dismissed as a pyramid scheme scam.

They are:

  • AutoXTen

  • SMS Dailies

  • Get Paid Social

  • 1 Online Business

  • Luvv

  • NewU Financial

#4 Is Abundance Network a pyramid scheme in disguise?

The only way you can stay active in the company and earn commissions from the recruits is by, well… recruiting!

Check out the diagram below to know more about what I'm referring to:

MLM pyramid scheme

You need to sell the idea of a business opportunity to unsuspecting people and then waiting for them to discover that there’s really nothing nice about the “business opportunity” that they’ve grabbed.

#5 Downward trend

I checked Google Trends, and I wasn’t surprised with what I discovered…

Is Abundance Network a Scam: Cons

As you can see the trend for Abundance Network is going down. This means that there are fewer people searching for the company on the internet, which again is going to make it harder for you to recruit.

I even compared it with Farmasi which is another notable MLM and you can see the gap between the two.

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I've created a growing passive income online with no previous marketing skills or online experience... 

I've made a special video for you to explain exactly how I did this. 

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My opinion - Abundance Network

It’s plain to see that there’s nothing nice you can get out of Abundance Network.

They don’t sell any product or service, and their business opportunity is just not good. There’s just no value with whatever they are offering.

So it’s just a no for me...

The only way you can make money is by recruiting as many people as possible.

And that’s if you can recruit! In no way does this sound like a legit business model to me.

You’re just selling the dream of becoming rich by being a member and then leaving it up to your recruits to discover the fact that they’ve just been scammed.

How I make passive income online

MLMs are not scams or illegal. However, I'm not a fan of them because of the restrictions to the expensive products you have to promote.

Once I learnt about affiliate marketing, I realised it's a far superior business model because:

  • You can promote anything you want and truly own the business
  • You never need to sell to friends and family
  • It's completely free to start

In 2018 I had no idea what affiliate marketing was.

But I went from a full time PE teacher to making a passive income online within one year...

Mike PE teacher to Passive Income Online

If you want to discover how I did it then check out this special video I created which explains exactly how. You can also get your free 7-day bootcamp to get started.

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Mediavine podcast-min
Podcast

How Much Does Mediavine Pay & How to Qualify w/ Amber Bracegirdle

I had been wondering how much you can earn from Mediavine ads and what it takes to qualify as a partner. So I had a chat with Amber Bracegirdle, one of the founders, and here's what she said...

The average RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) for the last 7 days has been $21.60, which is up from $12-$13 for the beginning of the month. That means that a website with 50,000 sessions can expect to earn around $850 per month from using Mediavine ads. 

We also chat about:

  • How to qualify for Mediavine & why the requirements have changed
  • How Mediavine helps you to improve your load time and website speed
  • The ideal type of content that Mediavine looks for
  • And much more...

What it Takes to Make Money from ad Networks

Amber Bracegirdle 

From Mediavine

Amber Bracegirdle Mediavine podcast

Make Time Online Podcast on iTunes - Online Entrepreneur Tips

Listen to the full Mediavine podcast episode

Subscribe & Download

Never miss out on a new episode! Subscribe using your favorite app for listening to podcasts.

How much does Mediavine pay?

I have analysed a ton of blog income reports to find out how bloggers make money in the early stages

I found over 20 income reports that shared their ad income from Mediavine and pageviews, which came out to an average of $12.77 RPM.

It's important to note these were all "beginner bloggers" in the study either earning less than $2k a month or within 2 years of starting their blog. Amber made it clear that some members earn $75 RMP in winter months and even some people had a $40 RPM in June, despite the COVID-19 issues. 

This is in line with what Amber said on the podcast too. However, she did also point out that there is a trend that ads tend to follow at different times of the year (check out ad revenue by the seasons for more on this).

It is safe to say that bloggers can expect an RPM of between $12-$25 for the majority of the year if they work with Mediavine.

How to qualify for Mediavine

Publishers now need to reach the minimum requirement of 50,000 monthly sessions as of June 2020 (up from 25,000 monthly sessions before this). Mediavine are also ending their unofficial policy of accepting second sites from publishers that are below this traffic requirement. Any websites changing ownership must also re-apply. 

The type of content you produce can also play a role.

Amber digs into this in more detail in the podcast and there is some more info about this below...

Links and tips mentioned in the podcast

Amber didn't only share what Mediavine offers, but there were a ton of little tips in there to actually improve your content.

Such as, tips on how to improve your site speed, writing style and length of content. 

Here are some of the main ones and links mentioned in the chat.

Mediavine supports bloggers with site speed...

  • Uses "asynchronous" script (allows content to load first)
  • Lazy loading ads (option to enable ads to load only when the user scrolls)
  • Encourages site speed tips- use caching, CDN, image optimised, lazy loading (check out my chat with Matt Giovascini for more on improving your page speed. Or see how I improved my site speed by 63% with WP Rocket here.)

Where are ads placed with Mediavine?...

  • 2 in the side bar (desktop only- 1 above the fold, the other last on the side bar)
  • Adhesion at the bottom (mobile & desktop)
  • In content ads dynamically placed (uses the settings in the dashboard that you can change for mobile and desktop- max of 70:30 ratio of content to ads)

What Mediavine is looking for ideally from content creators...

  • Lifestyle blogs (travel, finance, food, parenting, cars, gaming etc.)
  • These tend to attract a certain audience (typically female, affluent, 20-45 years old, makes spending decisions, countries such as USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand etc.)
  • Write short paragraphs (around 1-3 sentences) so that the ads can be slotted into appropraite positions (they use <p> and </p> html to know where to place adds)
  • Use clear, helpful and easy to see headlines
  • Write long form content

WordPress plugins created by Mediavine...

  • Create (schema plugin for recipes, how-to's and lists) Recipes [see example] and how-to's are types of "cards" that hold "most valuable content", while lists [see example] can be a great way to do round ups of your amazing content to build cornerstone content on your site.
  • Trellis (WordPress Theme framework)
  • Grow  (social sharing plugin)

Other links mentioned in the chat...

Full Mediavine podcast transcript

Amber 0:00
Average RPM for the last seven days has been $21 and 60 cents. And that’s up from 12 to $13 at the beginning of the month now that’s keeping in mind that June is the end of the quarter. It’s still the end of q2. But people are you know, now that things are coming back a little bit in terms of the the economy. Across the globe, people are spending a little bit more money, which is why you’ve seen that giant jump of almost $10. But typically in June, a site with 50,000 sessions would see about $850

Mike Beatty 0:33
Hey guys, it’s Mike from Make Time Online. And today we’re joined by Amber Bracegirdle from Mediavine.

So in case you don’t know, media vine is basically an ad network which can really help bloggers to get a bit of income when they reach a certain threshold. We’re going to talk about that a bit more in the podcast. But it has changed with 25,000 monthly sessions to 50,000 monthly sessions recently and has been this whole hoopla about it if you’re follow or if you’re in any Facebook group, you would probably have seen everyone talking about this exact topic recently. So I find this is a really timely episode. And in case you didn’t know media vine actually started as an SEO company back in 2004. So this chat today is with Amber. And she’s one of the founders, there was three others Steve Martin Eric, who actually founded media vine. And they’ve kind of changed it from what it you know, pivoted from where it first was as an SEO company talking all SEO knowledge and things like that. And they’ve ended up becoming this ad network to actually give bloggers quite often small bloggers this opportunity to monetize their website using ads on their site. Amber is going to explain all this and way more Explain how much you can expect to earn if you actually can become a partner with media vine she explains what to what’s like the ideal client for them, or what’s the ideal blogger what what kind of content that would be perfect for you to put out and also the audience that you’re attracting. And just some other general really useful tips there’s site speed tips in there and it also how media vine actually can help with your site speed rather than lots of other ad companies or reducing it by quite a lot. All this is covered more so I really do hope this helps is a long chat. So if you just want to get like the main bit summarise if you’re in a rush, you can skip to the end and find out the main things from me. Enjoy it guys. So Amber, can you explain why media vine changed the required sessions from 25,000 to 50,000 sessions per month?

Unknown Speaker 2:58
Sure. So the idea had been on the roadmap for a while, actually, you know, we’ve we’ve been growing at a clip. And we knew that at some point, we’re going to reach saturation, where we just can’t hire enough people to give the support level that we like to keep things out. But what really fast tracked that decision was COVID. With everyone being online, from the start of countries locking down, we found that we were getting more and more and more applications, which on the surface seems like a great thing, right. But the benchmarks of what makes a really good, good partnership to make sort of moved right, the the things that were benchmarking a site at 25,000 weren’t really making sense anymore because a lot of sites were spinning up like right at the beginning of the lockdown They only have two months of history, but they were well over the traffic threshold. Technically, their traffic looked okay. But there was no history to the domain, which can be a real problem for advertisers, that kind of thing. And so basically, at the end of the day COVID caused the landscape to change. And we looked at a lot of different ways to attack the problem, including hiring more people, we were we were actually very close to just hiring, you know, 15 more hands, but the advertisers weren’t buying in the same way because everyone had pulled back their their money, right for when the lockdown started. And so advertisers weren’t buying in the same way. And a 25,000 k 25,000 site wasn’t earning in the way that it had before COVID. And so it really wasn’t we’ve always been the people to say like, don’t put advertising on your site until it makes sense to you. Right? Because No matter how you run the ads, there’s going to be a small loss of user experience. Even if you’re falling, following all the best practices, well, the thing is when we evaluated that five years ago, 25,000 is where it started to seem worth it, right. But now with the recession and everything like that, it didn’t seem worth it. And so we were locking all these people into contracts and spending all this time on applications that were ultimately getting rejected. And really, it just didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that we were spending time our hours rejecting new sites when we could be helping the sites that we already work with. And so raising the minimum was kind of the quickest way to make sure that those hours went back to support and that the benchmarks for the sites are where we need them to earn the best possible income for the site.

Mike Beatty 5:57
Well, yeah, actually, I’ve that heard this before as well about media vine about their support and things like that. Right? Can you just kind of explain like why media vine? Or how how it kind of works? Because I’m guessing like, really the answer is that media vine wants to provide support as much as possible and weren’t able to do that by getting a influx of people. Yeah. You know, applying and then ultimately, like you say, getting getting rejected. I think I even saw a stat on something like 72% of applicants, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 6:31
get rejected. We reject 70. And I think it rose a little bit during during all of this. So I don’t know if you know, the history of media vine. But you know, well, let me let me talk a little bit about that. So we comment ad management from a very different place to anyone else in the market. I am a blogger. My fellow co founders, I don’t know if they would qualify themselves as bloggers but they call themselves content creators. But the difference being that they were three guys that knew SEO really well and created websites that they knew they could capture terms on and traffic on, mostly in the entertainment space. So before I joined them, they had The Hollywood Gossip TV fanatic and movie fanatic and they wanted they wanted to add food fanatic to their roster, like create that site. Because their advertising company at the time they were working with an ad manager, just like people work with media vine. And they kept saying, you know, our CPM is not great or RPM is not great. What can we do to make it better? And as someone who’s been around for a long time and experienced this exact same thing, I will tell you they got the exact answer that we were all getting back then and this is like 2011 2012 is hands up in the air and you’re in the wrong space. If you had a lifestyle website you would make more money because their audiences More money. And so the guys, you know, we’re trying to figure out what sort of lifestyle website they would start. And they weren’t parents yet. They didn’t know anything about fashion.

Unknown Speaker 8:14
They didn’t know anything about

Unknown Speaker 8:18
finance. And so it was like, food. We all like food. And, and so Eric and I met at a food blogging conference. He’s one of my co founders and the CEO of the company. And quite famously, I’m known for being a bit of a loud mouth when it comes to people giving out bad information. And one of the things that happened during that conference is that there was a Google Plus person there. And there was a bit of drama because Google Plus at the time was requiring like, if you uploaded a photo, the terms and conditions stated that you were transferring them copyright. And so I asked her that question. I was like, why? blogger because she was there to encourage people to use Google Plus, instead of Facebook. And I was like, why should people use your platform, you’re taking their copyright from them. And famously, he was there with my old podcasting partner, Josh and leaned back and said, That’s her. And what’s really crazy is that I wasn’t even supposed to be at that conference, the dates moved in, and I was able to go. But, um, so the four of us started food fanatic together, basically, they let me run with what I thought they, you know, they just wanted content content content, they were like, the more content we have on site, the better. And I said, well, the best way I know of to do that is to hire food bloggers, and allow them to find a new audience, right. So like there were people like Christina from dessert for two, who at the time was not doing savoury recipes on her site, but we hired her to be our dinner for two years. fanatic. And so she was able to sort of introduce her audience and a new audience to her to her recipes. And provide context for this is why I’m doing dinners for two. And this is why it makes sense for the dessert for to brand that ultimately allowed her to show, even cookbook, like agencies that she was able to do more than desserts, and she’s now on her fourth cookbook, I think. We had another fanatic that was a sandwich fanatic, that ended up getting a sandwich cookbook, based on her work for food fanatic. Like it’s, it’s really cool to see that stuff, right. But that’s sort of the reason I’m talking about that is that when ad management came like when we decided to do our own ad management, what happened was basically our ad company fell apart. And it was right after the guys had taken me on full time. I just had a baby and I had left my six figure job and stuff. To them, I want to come and work for you so that I’m like, I don’t want to not work. But I want to be home with my baby that I thought for 10 years to have. And so they hired me. And and I will say I took a $70,000 pay cut to do that. And it was the best decision I’ve ever made. Yeah, but the the thing was that they had never worked with other content creators the way that we I introduced them to these food bloggers. And our ad company fell apart. And Eric being the programmer among us, and at this time, all he was doing was building and running the websites like that was his job was to build and run the websites, because we don’t run on WordPress. And he started researching programmatic advertising. And he said, I think I can build something that will allow us to at least take back some of our backfill money. And so he built the first version of the media vine script wrapper. And when he built it right, he was extremely opinionated about how he was going to run these ads, because he had built our websites. And he had built them for speed, because that was one of the main ways that we were owning all of the topics. Like all the keywords that we were owning is that we were the fastest website. And so he built lazy loading into that very first script. It’s not something we came to later that was literally him being like, I’m not going to allow ads to screw up our SEO. I’m going to lazy load them. We didn’t realise like, we were too dumb to know that nobody else was doing that. That kind of thing, right. And so he built it for us. Just our four websites. And then I happened to mention to my best friend who’s also a food blogger that Eric was doing this and she wrote for food fanatic as well. And she was like, Well, my company sucks. Can you guys help me too.

Unknown Speaker 12:55
So Samus, you weren’t?

Mike Beatty 12:57
You weren’t basically just provided In the ads, you’re actually helping more. You don’t have a whole user experience and everything.

Unknown Speaker 13:06
Right? So like one of the, I guess, from how we were approaching food fanatic, right, like we couldn’t pay these food bloggers a lot. And so one of the things that the guys did was they gave SEO advice, because they had been the very first iteration of the company was an SEO firm for hire. And they kept getting fired after they did really good jobs, because big companies would be like, Oh, we don’t need SEO anymore. Now we have number one rankings. And so they’re like, that’s not how SEO works. But you can’t you can’t convince people that right kind of like site speed is an ongoing thing. SEO is an ongoing thing. And companies couldn’t be convinced of that. So the guys were like, screw this, we’re gonna go and build our own websites. We’re, you know, we we can do this for ourselves. And so that’s what they did, right? And they made a much more sustainable company by by doing it themselves and Using all of their SEO knowledge to create these giant websites, I mean, The Hollywood Gossip gets between 30 and 60 million page views a month. It’s the largest hollywood gossip website on the internet. So they the relationship that they have with the bloggers that wrote for food fanatic was very, very indicative of how we’ve gone on, right as media vine, because the guys were very much like let’s do what we can for these contributors that are in the same content boat that we are like that they’re struggling with SEO and they’re struggling with site speed, and they’re struggling with all these things. And so when we decided to do the ads, like, literally our thought process for support and what we would help with and what we wouldn’t was, what did we hate about all of the ad companies that have come before us? Right, and so it was like you not having communication having to wait days for an hour. Sir or never getting one and having to email five times. All of those types of things like out of the gate, we intentionally said no one will ever have to do that.

Mike Beatty 15:11
Yeah, we’re free. So communication waiting for emails, I guess slowing up the speed of the

Unknown Speaker 15:18
website without going down the website. Yeah, very, very much. So like, Eric, from the very beginning has been like if we’re going to do this, like I want to do this in a way that does not that we’re not the cause of someone’s SEO done. And so that’s why we’ve lazy loaded ads from the very beginning. It’s why we talk about site speed all the time. And it turns out that if you care about site speed, you actually improve your ad performance. Because the ads load faster, and are in view for longer, and so you make the advertisers happier to and that means you make more money

Mike Beatty 15:59
makes total sense. I’ve got loads of questions from that. So they do remind me to come back to, like the ideal blogger and like the ideal content and stuff like that, because you sort of touched on some things there. But I definitely think this is a good, good time to sort of dig into site speed and like, what exactly is that? media vine? Does? You know that is it? If you ask me as a blogger, if I you know, join a partnership with media vine, do I need to be worried about my site speed? Do I need to do lots of things myself? Because I hate site speed. Drive is like the bane of my life.

Unknown Speaker 16:39
Right?

Mike Beatty 16:40
I try my hardest, but it’s always something that, you know, it’s, you know, got WP rocket as a plugin and things like that and try to get support as much as possible from other places. But, you know, how does it work with media vine?

Unknown Speaker 16:54
So it’s really hard. We totally understand that. From the media vine perspective, like the actual ads Tech, we do everything we can to get out of the way. Right? So from from day one, our script was asynchronous, meaning that it allows other things to load. And it waits. Until it’s it can write, which is why we we harped on site speed and like image optimization from the start, because with an asynchronous script, if you have stuff that’s taking too long, people are halfway down the page before an ad even loads. And so we we encourage people to optimise their images, you know, things that we know they can do have a caching plugin in place. Consider having a CDN in place. optimise all your images with a plugin and like those are things I think that are pretty low bar that someone can do or can if you’re with a managed host, you can make sure that they’re handling the caching and the CDN, half of it and then you can make sure your images are optimised and you’re not like putting five gifts on every page and things like that. And then on our side If the script is asynchronous, and then also we’re lazy loading ads, so there’s actually an option in your dashboard that you can enable that says, Don’t even load my ad script until the first time to interactive, meaning the firt. When someone when they load the page, right, they aren’t interactive right away, because they’re reading what’s at the top of the page. And then they start to scroll, when they start to scroll is the first time that they’re interactive. And so you can have it there’s a setting in your dashboard that you can enable that says don’t even load my ad script until they start to scroll. Now, on top of that, the ads are lazy loaded. So really what that affects is any ads that might have been above the fold, which is usually just the the first sidebar ad and also the sticky ad at the bottom of the browser, we call that the adhesion. Those are what would be affected by that setting. And they would load after someone starts to scroll and then all of the rest of the ads are lazy, loaded. They do not exist, no auction runs, no ad slot forums nothing until a reader starts to scroll near them. Now that does a couple of things that helps your site speed because none of those ads exist when during your first bite load time, which is what the search engines look at to know if your site is fast. But it also helps with your viewability score. Now viewability is one of these made up words, but it’s a metric that advertisers use to buy. And what they’re looking for is a site that has somewhere between 65 to 80% viewability. Now 80% is really hard to get medium and runs somewhere between 70 and 72%. Network wide, because

Mike Beatty 19:47
65 to 80%

Unknown Speaker 19:49
viewability. What does that mean exactly? So what it means exactly, is it takes how to it needs 50% of the ad In the viewable screen for at least one second, it changes a little bit based on the size of the ad or where it’s loading. And I think the IV they oh shoot international ad Bureau, something like that. We always say IB and I forget what it stands for. But they have like, they basically set out the metrics for this. And they and they have something on your website that tells you like, exactly how long something needs, how much of it how long it needs to be in the screen, for viewability score to start capturing. Right? So yeah,

Mike Beatty 20:36
65 to 80% or someone’s experience when your website you need to have an ad on there, right?

Unknown Speaker 20:44
Well, no. So what you’re looking for is you’re looking for that ad to be 50% of that ad to be in the viewable screen for at least one second. And as it’s been in that screen for one second. The score starts to to count And how how exactly it counts is, I think proprietary out there depending on the ad server that you’re using, but

Unknown Speaker 21:11
but it’s

Unknown Speaker 21:13
basically, the longer you can keep an ad and view the higher you viewability score is, but and also the idea that you’re loading, you’re not loading ads that are being seen. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Mike Beatty 21:28
Yeah. Yeah. Same is like lazy loading images, I guess. It doesn’t even it doesn’t even count until the user actually gets to that area, and then it will note, so it doesn’t affect your page load speed or anything.

Unknown Speaker 21:39
It doesn’t affect your page load speed. But the other aspect of that is that you’re not asking an advertiser to pay for an ad that nobody saw. Right? Yeah. Which that drags down your viewability score. And so you have these other ad companies that they load all ads on site load, right? So hello, 12 ad positions as the site loads, so First that’s slowing down your website. But also, if a reader only ever scrolls halfway down the page, because they’ve already got the information that they need, and you loaded five more ads below where they scroll to all of those ads have terrible viewability scores because no one saw them. Yeah. And that drags down your whole site’s average. And advertisers use that information to buy inventory on your website.

Mike Beatty 22:28
Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. So you kind of touched on as well, though, with even with the lazy load, there probably would be two positions. I think you said the first sidebar and then the sticky at the bottom. Are there any other like requirement or like where do Where are ads placed with media vine? No, each ad network kind of has their own thing.

Unknown Speaker 22:51
Right. So we have to in the sidebar, and only two. So the first one is above the fold, and sidebar. The second one is the last thing in your sidebar. And it scrolls with the reader as they scroll down the page. Obviously, those are both only desktop positions, because there’s no sidebar on mobile. Then there’s the adhesion at the bottom, which there’s one on mobile, and there’s one on desktop. And then there’s in content ads. And those are dynamically placed our script figures out how tall your content is, and pixels, and uses what settings you have in your dashboard. So I’ll touch on this a little bit. We operate to the Coalition for better ads guidelines with regards to advertising density, which says that readers don’t start to be intolerant of advertising until you go over a ratio of 70% content to 30% advertising. So it’s, it’s not that readers are sitting there and counting every ad position that you have in your content. It’s the density of it, right and that makes complete sense because if you think about it in terms of like Facebook or Instagram, they don’t stop loading ads. If you keep scrolling, you keep getting ads. Right? But did you count how many you had? So that’s actually how media vine ads work, right? If people keep scrolling and they’re still content, and we’re not operating over that 30% Mark, we will keep loading ads, right? So

Mike Beatty 24:24
long, it’s not like it’s a set place. It just kind of depends on how much content is on that page and things like that.

Unknown Speaker 24:31
Right? a 2000 word post is going to get more ads than a 300 word post. Cool, for sure. And I think the you know, there are important things to that is the only people that count your ads are bloggers. And they’re just not thinking of your website in the same way that people think of Facebook or Instagram, but why not? Like it doesn’t make sense. If the contents there and the reader is still engaged. Why are we not serving them in You know, and so what we have in our dashboard is some settings that you can change around, that allows you to change the density. And it’s done by desktop or by mobile, like you have the option to change the density between them. So say, for example, you are on your desktop a lot. And you know that you only have 10% or 15% desktop traffic. If you want to keep a lower density there where it’s, you know, it’s 23%, instead of 27%. Do that all your traffic is on mobile and mobile readers are more sort of looking for tolerant of in content advertising, because that’s really other than the footer, that’s the only place that you can advertise. So they’re just more tolerant of it on a mobile device. And so you can sort of amp up that percentage that density to a higher number and not have reductions. planes, no way. So on mobile, you can actually have a higher density than

Mike Beatty 26:04
desktop. That surprised me.

Unknown Speaker 26:06
Yeah. All of our our settings like that are separated out by desktop and

Mike Beatty 26:12
mobile. Cool. So obviously, those ones in content there, I’m guessing those are the ones that would be lazy loaded. So it shouldn’t really impact your website very No,

Unknown Speaker 26:23
not at all the ones.

Mike Beatty 26:25
That’s funny, because there was actually someone in, in, in my facebook group who asked that exact question. I sort of asked some people, anyone want to get some stuff out there. And that was one of the things that they asked was kind of, well, why do they require in content surely that’s going to damage your, you know, user experience and things like that. And

Unknown Speaker 26:45
so yeah, that’s something that a lot of website owners think. And it doesn’t actually bear out in the data. Again, because mobile readers are so used to being served ads that way with Instagram and Facebook, and whatever That is happening on your website doesn’t even make them blink. And because it’s lazy loaded, like it’s not impacting your site speed the way that it would if all of the site, all of the ads were being loaded. And on mobile, that’s so important, right? Because data connections are terrible. Not everybody’s on Wi Fi. We’re very aware that Google is looking for its next billion users, and they’re in places that don’t have nationwide Wi Fi coverage. So you know, we do a lot of like, basically, we listen to Google. And when Google says site speed is important, because we’re judging you based on someone in Bangladesh, being able to load your website in not point two seconds on a data connection. Like, that’s what we’re going with. And so that’s actually also why we’ve because there’s one more opposition we didn’t talk about and that is the moment valuable content card, add position and there’s a couple of them now like there, we can place more than one of them. But so if you’re a recipe blogger, you’d have a recipe card. If you’re a DIY or craft blogger, you can now have a how to card. If you’re a travel blogger, you could potentially use a how to card for like a packing list. Or you can we even have marketing bloggers that use how to cards for things like cheap how to choose the best email provider, like between MailChimp and whatever and it has like steps of how to evaluate like it’s really cool. But we we made, we started out making create, which is our WordPress plugin for most valuable content. It offers recipe cards, how to cards and lists, which a lot of bloggers would refer to as a roundup. But most people don’t realise that there’s a schema type for that. And so we we created it in create Makes roundups an absolute breeze. And if you rank for say, for example, someone was like searching the best hotels in Bali, and you had a list, and your list was links to reviews of hotels on your own website, you would most likely rank and take over the mobile carousel where every entry of your list is one of the items in the carousel. No way. Yeah, it’s really cool to see.

Mike Beatty 29:35
So when you say like the schema is that, yes, are they different two snippets, they are different are they you know, like the snippet.

Unknown Speaker 29:44
schema is what tells the snippet is on your website. So like, you know, in a rich snippet you’ve got if say you’re looking at a recipe, you’ve got a star rating, you’ve got prep time, cook time and that kind of stuff. All of that comes from the schema. Right? So in a recipe card, right, it’s got all of those items. And behind the scenes, what that recipe card plugin is doing is it’s not just it’s one, it’s making it pretty on the front end and making it printable. But it’s also providing it’s marking up each of those items that you enter into the the entry fields. It’s marking each of those up with schema. So part of the reason that we even decided to go into making a WordPress plugin is that our DIY and craft bloggers were using recipe cards to make printable cards for their craft sites. And because they were using recipe card plugins, they weren’t differentiating their craft supplies. With the right schema. They were marking those things up as ingredients, right, which is telling Google these are edible. If you marked popsicle sticks and cotton balls up as edible. I mean, Google has an entire army of people that is reviewing websites all day every day. That’s how you get a manual action. Because some look at your website and say, cotton balls aren’t edible. And so, you know, we were like how at first the idea was, well, we’re going to make a recipe card plugin. That’s faster. That was the initial idea. Then we realised that craft bloggers were doing this. And we’re like, well, now we have to add something. And at first, the idea was, well, we’ll just add, we’ll just add a card that’s a bit more generic and doesn’t have any schema markup. But then we started looking, there’s a website called schema.org, which is what all of these basically it’s another coalition where everyone is agreed to use schema.org and what’s written there and, and they devote developer time to it and stuff like that, and realised that there was actually a house To schema that works perfectly for crafters but no one was using it no one was offering it there was literally no how to card in the WordPress repository. And so we added that to create and I will kid you not Mike so we released create in October of 2018 with the idea we added how to schema like right like it released with that it was you could have a recipe card or how to card and crafted DIY bloggers hopped on it because that was another place to add advertising. The thing about the way that we started with food bloggers is we realised very quickly that the most valuable place on the page was actually the add in the recipe card. Because no matter how a reader came into your website, all roads lead to the recipe. They’re always going to see that Yeah, they’re always going to go to the recipe card. And so we felt we feel and we still feel this way that it’s the same like if you can train your readers on a craft bloggers Dry blog that you have that at the end of your post, they’re going to start doing that. Right. And so then that becomes the most valuable place. And that’s why we call it most valuable content. So we released create in October 2018, Google was not parsing how to schema at all. By February of 2019, Google was parsing how to schema. And to this day, there’s still nobody offering how to schema other than create. And so it’s just one of those things where it’s like, if you build it, they will come. Yeah,

Mike Beatty 33:35
well, I’ve actually even noticed I don’t know if you use Gutenberg, you know, the new press. I’m sure they have. I don’t know if that is how to schema but they have a there is a box on you know, one of those things there now. It definitely is a how to box and you know, you can list it out and things like that. I don’t know if that schema that they’re actually doing or what but I hadn’t noticed that. while ago, I actually hardly use it anymore. Obviously mainly use thrive but ya know, I noticed that I don’t know if that’s the same thing.

Unknown Speaker 34:10
Any Do you have Yoast? Yeah, it might be something that’s coming for me, because I know yes to started doing some schema markup too, right? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it’s one of these things where like, you can really stop and look at your website and say, How are my readers interacting with the page and understanding how they interact, interact with the page can help you decide where to put the advertising so that it actually makes you more money. And that’s how we came to the recipe card app. Because when media vine started, literally no one was putting ads in recipe cards. And in fact, one of our competitors dragged us for it. and was like, why would you put Why would you put this below the fold? Why are you wasting people’s time bla bla bla bla, but we knew from our own testing on our own websites and putting that out on food recipe card that it blew every other ad out of the water.

Mike Beatty 35:04
Yeah. Right. It totally

Unknown Speaker 35:06
Yeah, it makes complete sense. And so it’s like one of those things where, you know, everyone else was focusing on above the fold and I need a leaderboard next to, you know, the masthead and all these things. And we’re like, No, do not run a leaderboard. People scroll right past that the viewability is terrible. We don’t want you to run one. And people are like, what? So it’s just one of those things. We’ve always kind of let the data guide us to what the ad positions are. And there are definitely ones that we’ve rolled out and rolled them back. As soon as they stopped working. Like for a while on mobile, we had a read more ad unit, where if we, if you enabled it, it automatically gave you one of those read more buttons on mobile, and people always over scrolled. So they would see that ad and then they would hit read more. But after a while, readers got savvy to that and they were Just hit the button and they wouldn’t over scroll. And so it stopped being a highly viewable place. So we took it away. We’re like, this doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t make sense to have it.

Mike Beatty 36:09
So just keep always to kind of start seeing what works. So yeah,

Unknown Speaker 36:13
we have a data analyst named Cynthia. She’s our Director of Business Intelligence. She looks at numbers and see stories the way are you and I read a blog post and see a store. Like it’s crazy. She can look at a number and be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, huh? How do you know? Yeah, no, she’s incredibly smart. And she works her tail off to find like, She’s literally all she does all day long is look at numbers and pulls out these little anecdotes that are like, I think if we do this to the ad tech, it’s going to do this. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but we’re doing that 1000 times a day. Trying to pull out more money for people that isn’t just let’s put another ad on the page.

Mike Beatty 37:06
Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. And you kind of touched on it again a couple of times there, you know, sort of different types of websites and things like that. So I would love to know if what would be like the ideal blogger collaboration, you know, if someone is applying to media vine, what is like the ideal? Well, we’ve kind of touched on requirements, so the 50,000 sessions, but yeah, what would you want them to sort of be like, what would you like their type of content to be about? What audience would you like them to have? Like what are some of the ideal things that you’d love to see?

Unknown Speaker 37:42
So content doesn’t matter nearly so much as people think it does, in terms of which part of lifestyle you’re in lifestyle is really where we’ve we’ve made our home so but that covers so many things, right? That covers travel and finance and parenting Even cars and gaming and food and you know a lot for a long time we were known as as of only dealing in food. And the reason for that is literally just because we started with people who wrote for food fanatic, right, and that’s where word spread. But we work with so many different websites that are all in the lifestyle space, it really doesn’t matter because what we’re looking for there is actually your audience. people that read lifestyle websites are very similar in terms of audience. So it’s typically women, it’s typically women that are fluent in the 20 to 45 range. They have most of the spending decisions like that is the valuable audience to most advertisers. Obviously, there are different ones so like, if it’s a car manufacturer, there may be more looking for a male audience and stuff like that. It really just kind of depends, but if you’re in the lifestyle space, you’re getting the audience. That’s most valuable to advertisers at this point in time. So we’re looking for websites that have really the most important aspect is long form content that has good paragraph breaks. And what I mean by that is that when it comes to web reading, a bunch of different people have done studies Microsoft, Apple, Google, about how people read on a mobile device, which is where all of your traffic is, right? And if you have paragraphs that are longer than two sentences, on a mobile device, it looks like a wall of text. And so they disengage. Right, and so we’re looking for someone that has well formatted text has a decent amount of headings that are keeping people engaged. The reason that those paragraph breaks are important not only to readability and user experience is that they provide our advertisements places to go. And they use open and closed paragraph tags to understand where they can insert themselves so that they don’t break up your content in unnatural ways. And so if you have a, I was literally just talking with someone on Reddit this weekend that has a restaurant website, and he has all these really great restaurant reviews. But there’s literally not a paragraph break to be found. And I said to him, I was like, Listen, man, you will have to go through and format these things. So that every two sentences you’ve got a hard return, not a shift return a hard return. He’s like, what does that matter to advertising? I was like, You can’t even possibly understand how much that is for advertising. You know, we’re looking for someone that their website they thought about it from a mobile first way, right. It’s not just enough to have a responsive theme like, really at this point in the game, you should be thinking the world First whenever you’re designing website, and I know that’s hard for bloggers, because they’re always on their desktop. Yeah, exactly. But you really you have to do it from a mobile first standpoint, or you’re going to lose readers. And so we’re looking for that we’re looking for and we’re looking for audiences that are located in countries we know will monetize well, because the way that our ads work is that we run an auction for every single position. And so if you imagine that each of your ad positions is an eBay auction, we have a reserve price set because we don’t do backfill. And we also don’t keep the reserve price low because we are very committed to add quality. We do not run want to run toe fungus ads next to a recipe. facility but that’s just kind of where we’ve always been with that. We are very much there’s even a blog post on our blog called

Unknown Speaker 41:59
why us Hundred percent fail sucks.

Unknown Speaker 42:03
I would encourage anybody that thinks you have to have 100% fail to go and read that post. What we’ve found is that if you raise your reserve price, and you just collapse the ad, if someone’s not going to fill it, for what what it’s worth, the impact to your income is pretty insignificant like one to 2%. But your ad quality and your reader engagement shoots through the roof.

Mike Beatty 42:34
So if that reserve price doesn’t get hit, who just means that ad spot just wouldn’t get anything in it?

Unknown Speaker 42:40
Yeah, it was it wouldn’t exist at all. We do have a new thing that we just in the last couple of months we’ve released. They’re called psats. And it started with COVID. So we designed and we actually just added a bunch of creatives from the UN has created a collaboration with artists around the world that have provided their their imagery. And it can be used any number of ways. And so we added a bunch of those. But basically, you can enable those in your dashboard if you want to and so instead of the ad collapsing if it doesn’t feel you’ll get a PSA about COVID that’s like, you know, wear a mask or stay inside or alone together those types of things. And then also in the last couple of weeks, with George Floyd being murdered, we enabled Black Lives Matter. PSS, it’s cool.

Mike Beatty 43:37
So So current affairs

Unknown Speaker 43:40
careers, you know, we’re looking at it now that we decided this is the thing we’re doing we’re looking at lots of ways that we can add things like we’re looking at you know, maybe a child hunger campaign, things like that. No Kid Hungry is a big entities in the US. I can’t remember if they’re in Europe or not. But we’re looking at differently. means that we can offer people ways to support causes that they care about. Instead of collapsing the ad, and we’re covering the cost of running the ad server for those and things like that, but we just kind of felt like it’s a thing. bloggers wanted something that they could do to help with their website. And we, we’ve always kind of been the the people to say, you know, what would we want? And this is something that we would want. And so that’s why we decided to create it. So you have the option of doing that. Or if you don’t, then the ad just collapses, right? But, um, but again, the the audience is important, right? So if, if you’re a blogger that has 90% of your traffic in India, unfortunately, we don’t have enough partners in that country that are going to meet our floor, our reserve price that you wouldn’t make any money you just literally even if the scripts there, you wouldn’t be running any ads.

Mike Beatty 45:04
So I’m guessing it’s mainly us. Maybe it’s UK, Australia,

Unknown Speaker 45:12
New Zealand,

Unknown Speaker 45:14
Canada. Surprisingly, Switzerland is is a decent one to have, but it’s typically the top four. What we’re looking for is like US, UK, New Zealand, Canada, Australia. And if you’ve got like China in there, Japan or something like that, like it’s not a deal breaker, but we have to make sure that the ad partners that we have are actually going to bid on the inventory that you have. And so we’re looking for that we’re looking for brand safe content. We’re looking for nothing that’s like, gone viral and is going to die in a month. So like if you have a million pageviews to your Christmas cookie post in November. And we know that come January, you’re back to having 5000 sessions a month, you know, and so we’re looking for stuff like that, because it’s not just about it’s not just about how much money you’ll make. It’s about having that long term sustainable business. And if you haven’t gotten to a place where you are turning over content during all seasons, then you’re not in a place of sustainability yet. And that can be hard on your buying history with advertisers. And they always buy on history. So one of the things that we’re trying to do is protect your history. Right? It’s better. Like, we’re definitely of the opinion that you should not advertise until you’ve built up a loyal audience or a loyal Google following basically, you know, you’ve got different audiences, right. You’ve got your SEO audience, and your Interest audience in your actual loyal audience that cares what you say. And so we’re we’ve definitely always been of the opinion that you should not put ads on your site until it’s worthwhile to you monetarily. And if you are in a place where you only get traffic, two months of the year, you’re just not going to make a lot of money. So that’s, that’s the kind of stuff that we’re looking for. We’re looking to make sure that this is a long term partnership that’s going to work for both of us. And then we’re not locking you into a contract that makes no sense two months from now.

Mike Beatty 47:38
Yeah, I mean, just from what you’ve kind of been saying through this, it just it just shows like how media vine is not just this elusive company. It’s real people. You know, they’re real bloggers. And they’re like you’re saying, I’ve never in my head, to be totally honest, the whole time. It’s just been our media, Vine, this like ad network that you need to get these matters. sessions and it’s like this big company, you know, is the way to speak spoken about is like, you know, is is tiny and is very personable as well and, you know, really thinking about people.

Unknown Speaker 48:13
The first thousand sites that that were on media vine were launched by myself, Eric and Brad, our Director of ad ops like the three of us did it. I handled the support. Brad handled the launches and Eric handled the tech. Now we’re now we’re in 86 person company five years later,

Unknown Speaker 48:32
which is bananas in and of itself.

Unknown Speaker 48:35
36 of those are support people, like actual support people and then another 25 are engineers. We have half of our engineers working on the ad tech and the other half work on our WordPress solutions. So in addition to create we have a sharing plugin called bro. And then we have our WordPress framework that there are some big announcements coming about Today, later today, there will be a Facebook Live with Eric about our WordPress framework. It’s called trellis you know, you worry a lot about site speed and how to handle it. trellis is the solution to that. Cool. So, yeah, it’s pretty, it’s pretty awesome. These are things like I remember when we first started and Eric was like, No, we can’t ask for anybody’s WordPress logins, I’m not being responsible for that they have to do all of this ourselves. And then we’d be like, Eric, they can’t even get the script on the site, we have to help and they’d be like, okay, you know, and now we’re building products for WordPress, that it just the and I think that’s important to touch on right like, even though we’re building WordPress blog products, the core of our company has become this ad management. And everything is in service of that, that and user experience, right and site speed. So we built Because user experience was suffering from other people’s plugins, and site speed was suffering. And then we built trellis we started on trellis before we had grow, we started, we started building trellis, because we need it we’ve, for a long time, we’ve wanted to move our owned and operated sites to try to WordPress, but we can’t do that, especially with The Hollywood Gossip. Because if we were like we evaluated moving it to Genesis and things like that, and it was just too slow. That site is just too big. And so we had to find a solution that would allow us to do that. And that was the original idea around trellis And just like with create, like a lot of creates features came from the recipe card that Eric built for food fanatic. And it’s kind of one of the things that we figured out the pain points for ourselves. And now it’s like well, we know All these pain points, why would we only build it for ourself? And so we, which is exactly the story of the ad tech, right? And so that’s how all of this stuff has come to be. But every single one of these things is in service of you getting more out of your advertising as well as keeping people on site.

Mike Beatty 51:19
Right. Cool. And it

Unknown Speaker 51:21
just, yeah. It just kind of acts like it’s a whole picture, right? We’re not just an ad company. We’re kind of your whole blogging solution. We want to make the business of blogging better.

Mike Beatty 51:33
Yeah. That makes total sense is a seems like you kind of have to do that. Don’t you guess if you’re providing all these ads it because that is the that is the most annoying thing about putting ads on a website, is the user experience slowing things down? Absolutely. It can just be so frustrating because, you know, you get to the stage where you’re getting an increase in traffic and then all of a sudden you put ads on there to make some money in and you lose all your traffic and yes, like, yeah, I can see it makes total sense. And it’s probably why I hear a media vine so much from different bloggers and things like that so

Unknown Speaker 52:09
well and you want to know some crazy stuff, Mike, we number one, we don’t do any outbound marketing other than going to conferences, and speaking at them. And we don’t offer a referral programme. Because we wanted the opinion out and the opinions of us out in the world, we wanted them to be based in honest experiences and not tied to a revenue stream. And so the thing about a programmatic network is that the bigger it grows, the better money it makes, right? Because programmatic is all about scale. So in terms of like a referral programme, technically, if you’re talking about us and more really quality websites, join media vine, you will make more money in that sense, but we don’t have a refer and there’s even a blog post on our website. Like we’re very specific About our finance bloggers hate it, because they love a referral programme. But we don’t offer one because we did. I personally fought and decided early on, we will not offer one like, we grow fast enough. And there is no reason for us to sort of muddy the waters by paying people to write about us.

Mike Beatty 53:27
Oh, yes. Imagine if you hadn’t done that. The right hours.

Unknown Speaker 53:31
Oh my gosh, say, well, that and we definitely didn’t want to. We definitely didn’t want to become a Bluehost situation. You know, I hate to speak ill of an ecosystem partner, but like Bluehost is not a good host. Yeah, exactly. And so it’s like, it’s one of those things where like, if someone’s talking about us, I want it to be from a place of authenticity and we work our butts off to make sure that The experience they’re having is a positive one. So that if they do talk about us, it’s because they’ve had a positive experience.

Mike Beatty 54:10
Yeah, makes total sense. Right? I’m very aware of kept you for a very long time already. So I just want to get like three quick questions through absolutely, like quick fire or just you answer them however you want out of them quick fire. But, um, one thing that I know, I would be thinking this whole time that’d be listening to this chat is what is the typical RPM, you know, what is the actual typical sort of amount of money that someone could expect to earn if they get to that? 50,000? Yeah, sessions per month.

Unknown Speaker 54:42
So this year’s been a little weird. Not gonna lie. 100%. Even numbers for 2020 are a little skewed. They’re lower than they were last year. But right before we got on, I got some numbers from Brad, who I mentioned our Director of ad Ops, though Average RPM for the last seven days has been $21 and 60 cents. And that’s up from 12 to $13 at the beginning of the month. Now that’s keeping in mind that June is the end of a quarter. It’s still the end of q2. But people are, you know, now that things are coming back a little bit in terms of the the economy, across the globe, people are spending a little bit more money, which is why you’ve seen that giant jump of almost $10. But typically in June, a site with 50,000 sessions would see about $850 Wow.

Mike Beatty 55:39
That’s awesome. And you sort of said it’s the end of q2 and I’ve heard this from some other people as well. I’ve heard you particularly like December, I’ve heard the ad. Income like RPM tends to jump up lows because certain companies have like an ad spend that they can spend and so they just spend it sort of thing is that

Unknown Speaker 55:58
yeah, it is true. So I’ll give you a quick overview view. But there’s also a blog post on our site called ad revenue by the seasons, written by Brad, that gives you some good data of how this works and stuff like that. But basically advertisers work and then think of it in terms of how magazines work, right? magazines, decide their budgets ahead of time or their content budgets ahead of time. And they

Unknown Speaker 56:25
they are very

Unknown Speaker 56:28
conservative at the start of the year in terms of the content that they’re putting out. But then, towards the end of the year, it’s balls to the wall, and they have every kind of thing you can imagine this, it’s the same with money, right? So they decide they know that people are not spending money in q1, right, because they’ve just had a giant Christmas or Hanukkah and spent all the money and now they need to tighten their belts, right. They’re also not going out to eat because they’ve made new year’s resolutions, all these things right. And so it doesn’t make sense for an advertiser to dump a bunch money into the market at that time, because people aren’t spending money. And so as you go through month by month, people start to loosen a little bit, you see a holiday, like you’ll see Valentine’s Day, there’s a little pop of money around that time, then you’ll see Easter, there’s a little pop of money around that time. And advertising budgets are decided by quarter. And then by Well, they’re decided by year and then by quarter, right? So they start out very conservative in q1 because of all those things I mentioned. And then as we go through, they are loosening a little bit each quarter. But the thing is that even when you get into q2, April, people are still not spending money. Whereas in June, because people are starting to go out. It’s summertime all of these things in a normal time. They they’re dumping more money because of that, but they’re also dumping more money. Because typically the rule is if you don’t spend the money in the quarter it’s assigned to you don’t get to roll it over. Yeah, so, so June, typically has way more spend than April. But then what will happen next this week, which we always love this. So we’re now going to be in q3, which people tend to associate with money money, not as much as q4. But the thing about q3 is its people always forget this. It starts in July. And in the United States where most of the advertising like exchanges are, there’s a holiday right at the beginning of the month. So that means people aren’t working, meaning like the advertising people aren’t working so they aren’t pushing out that ads so they aren’t spending money. So it’s almost like there’s this delayed start to q3, because as soon as July one hits, all the spending goes away, and it doesn’t come back until after the holiday. And so for like the first five to 10 days of July, everyone wants to kill themselves, but they’re they’re just like this is awful What happened? You know, and some people it really stinks because they’ll have like a really big pop of traffic because I had a great job. They’ve got a great July 4 recipe or something like that. Or like you guys might see more spending because I heard that the pubs are opening on July 4, you’re getting our own and yeah, that’s that’s exactly it. Yeah. You think I don’t live with two British people. And so it’s like this, this whole thing. depending on what’s literally happening in in your world and your sphere, you’ll see advertising money change. Yeah, right. And so yeah, so that that’s what happens to like at the like in the US. And now that like Black Friday is a concept that has sort of continued into other places on the globe. In the US, the q4. The reason that it makes some money so much money is the lead up to Black Friday, and then the lead up to Christmas. What’s interesting is that you’ll actually make more money together. Typically in November in the lead up to Black Friday, then you will in Christmas because people stop buying Christmas presents around the 20th. And so advertisers pull back because there’s no reason for them to be pushing

Mike Beatty 1:00:14
anything go the January sales where they try and get some stuff out. But yeah, fail miserably.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:20
Yes.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:22
So that’s kind of how the cyclical like advertising money works. And so yeah, you you absolutely we even put warnings in our Facebook group like Joey one is coming, or is coming, I need you to understand like, please don’t do that. Don’t write in and be mad at your support person. Like there’s nothing they can do. This is literally the advertisers and how they’re spending.

Mike Beatty 1:00:43
Yeah, that makes total sense. Right. And then last quick two is one from again, these are both actually from people that I just reached out to our Facebook groups and things. Richmond said, what are the requirements for like existing partnerships, so it’s They already had a partnership from like the 25,000 sessions. And now with the change is Yeah, because I think before was it like 15,000 sessions if you already have one or something like that was a bit of a grey area.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:13
This is where the game of telephone gets us. So we had an unofficial policy wasn’t written into the contract wasn’t written and help docs of if a second, if a person hadn’t successful first site, we would allow them to, to apply a second site of 10,000 sessions. Now that didn’t guarantee it would get in at all. It still had to meet all the other metrics, but people sort of took it as a given that it would and so one of the things with COVID is we saw people you know, I talked about people spinning up sites that had you know, been around for two months and had more than enough traffic. They were spinning up sites. Like, instead of having two sites, they were spending up five and applying them, right. And a lot of those were getting rejected, which was adding to the volume of applications. And so we’ve decided like basically a second site, we have to do away with this, this smoke and mirrors second policy. And they and it’s in the blog post that Steve wrote.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:28
Or I can’t remember receiver Eric, but

Unknown Speaker 1:02:32
it’s now 50,000 for a second site as well. But if you are a blogger that is in an industry that has been hit hard by COVID, so for example, a travel blogger, you can and this was what it always was, is basically you were supposed to write in and ask for us to consider your site before the session requirement. And so we’re especially taking that into account for industries that have been hidden By COVID, because like, obviously travel bloggers have been hit really hard, whereas food bloggers have seen an increase in traffic. So like when we’re evaluating a second site that’s below the 50,000 threshold, if it’s a food blogger, we might be a little bit more critical of the fact that it’s not at that 50,000 session, then we would have travel blogger, it’s not guaranteed, but it is something we are taking into account simply because we understand that there’s context.

Mike Beatty 1:03:28
Yeah. And the traffic probably is going to come back like if it’s been there before.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:33
Yeah,

Mike Beatty 1:03:34
hopefully. Yeah, inshallah, as they say, in Cata. And then the last one, then is just there was I think, in that blog post, I’m guessing the one that you just require, mentioned, there was a mention of like, for new scalable ad solutions for smaller publishers and things and something coming potentially in 2021 can share a little bit more about that. You don’t I have to go into too much detail because obviously so

Unknown Speaker 1:04:02
I won’t.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:05
I don’t Well, I’m not allowed to share a whole lot. So there’s that. But we do have some plans to try and create a solution. Like, again, I’ve said a few times, right that we don’t think you should put ads on your website before a certain point because it really doesn’t make sense monetarily. But there’s an entire sub group of folks that don’t agree with that and want to put ads on their site from day one. And I guess our our thought is, well, if they’re going to do that, maybe what we should do is provide a product that allows them to get the best possible history so that when they are at a 50,000 session level, they’re not starting out with a handicap because that sticks with you. Or like people will put AdSense on and then accidentally do something wrong like their mom clicks all their ads or something and they get banned by AdSense. That means we can’t work with them. Right? So providing a solution, a scalable solution that you can just kind of opt into, and it doesn’t need a lot of heavy lifting from support or anything like that is really kind of what we’re looking at. We’re trying to come up with ways that we can do that, that would allow someone to put ads on their site media vine ads on their site, but not not necessarily be opting into the full product that media vine ad management is today.

Mike Beatty 1:05:32
Yeah, that makes total sense as well. But yeah, no, honestly, I could keep on going and asking you loads of little questions, but I am going to leave you. Okay. Thank you so much besides that, um, but is there any way for people to kind of get in contact or is there what’s the best place for people to kind of reach out and check out more info?

Unknown Speaker 1:05:53
Yeah, so there’s tonnes of information on media vine.com our blog, we update it like eight times a week. not even joking. With different stuff about the industry we write about SEO topics we write about new things that Google’s pushing out, we write about add stuff like that blog is pretty prolific if I do say so myself, the team that I had up, runs the blog. And so we, we work our little tails off to put as much information out there as we can. And then actually, our help files are open to the public. So you can look at help at media vine.com. And learn more about us in that like what it would be like to get started, there’s an entire section there have joining media vine. And then there is on our blog, there’s something called the RPM challenge. A lot of people want to know like, what they can do to their content to make sure that it’s well formatted for media vine before they’ve even applied, and like how they should be writing their content from the jump in terms of like formatting and things like that. That the RPM challenge you can use it even if you’re not a media vine publisher, there’s like a downloadable PDF. There’s a Google analytics dashboard that you can instal and get emailed to yourself every day or you can actually still have that for food fanatic. And it helps you to sort of know what content you should be paying attention to, to optimise little tweaks that you can make that mean when you do launch with media vine, you’re already optimised and you will basically be giving yourself the best foot forward. And then if you have any questions that you can’t find an answer to on our blog or on the help files, you can email publishers within ask publishers at media vine calm.

Mike Beatty 1:07:48
Awesome. Thanks so much Amber. I’ll put links to all of that in the show notes as well if people want to grab them, but no, I really appreciate your time. It’s been so

Unknown Speaker 1:07:56
cool to chat via YouTube Mike, thank you so much.

Mike Beatty 1:08:03
So there you go. Amber’s is just so down to earth and so normal and just so helpful with everything that she did there, she gives so much actual useful value. It’s not just all about ad network and making money, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, here are the main takeaways that I took from the podcast, which hopefully can help you as well. So number one, is that the reason that the change actually happened from 25,000 to 50,000 monthly Sessions is just mainly because media vine wants to be able to still give that support. Obviously, Amber was totally upfront and said COVID has had a massive impact on what has happened recently. You know, with the numbers and the amount of like RPM so what people are actually making per thousand monthly impressions has been impacted. And so just to allow media vine to still be able to provide the support and things required for the clients and the memberships and partnerships that they do currently have, they needed to make this change because it can just means that there’s less people applying, because they’re still having thousands of people apply every single month. And so they can actually then give real support to people that can have that. And as he kind of went on numerous times throughout the podcast, they believe that you really should only put, you know, ads and things on your website once you hit a certain threshold. So 2550 sounds like a lot if you’re brand new blogger, but it is definitely achievable if you stick with it. Number two, is she talked so much about site speed, and the fact that media vine really works on trying to help keep your site speed up. So lots of people associate putting ads on their website as really having this negative impact or to their site speed. Now I’m going to be totally honest, I haven’t used media vine yet. One of the My Health website is actually in the process, or if one of those applicants that she was talking about from when it was 25,000 monthly sessions, so I will see if it gets up accepted, I don’t really know. But I mean, this kind of links on to number three as well, which is the fact that the actual, your audience is super important for to to become a partner with media, Vine, lifestyle blogs, such as food, travel, finance, parenting, cars, gaming, health and fitness, I guess, all those kinds of websites are going to be better suited typically, for the audience that they’re after, you know, typically she said, lifestyle blogs are going to have attract women that are typically affluent in 20 to 45 age bracket, and they’re in control of the spending decisions of the house and things like that. And she said there are you know, certainly countries as well, that just won’t. If you’re getting most of your traffic from certain countries, they’re not going to be able at that ad networks and things are not going to be able to make enough revenue from advertising from those countries. So the main ones are UK, US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the big five, basically. And then she said, also Switzerland as well. And there are other countries that can that can do well, but those are the main things to be aware of. And it needs to be like brand safe and long term, not just sort of get a load of traffic in December and then never any traffic for the rest of the year. So those are some of the things to be aware of. Number four is where media vine places the ads to the to in the sidebar as the addition at the bottom, so like a little sticky one at the bottom. And then there’s the in content ads as well. And those ones are like dynamically placed so it’s not like you have X amount of ads per article is more depends on how long the article is. So she talks a lot about this 7030 split, so 70% content for 30% ads, and they found using data and stats and analysing it, that seems to be what that’s the ratio that he kind of has to be to perform the best best basically, and without breaking up user experience too bad number. I think I just said number four. Number five, is if you do get 50,000 sessions, you can expect to earn somewhere around $850 per month. So that gives you a good ballpark figure to kind of go off. As you said, recently, there are new figures that have just come out it was $21 60 RPM, so that’s the revenue per thousand impressions. And it has gone up from because of COVID and things like that. It has been a lot lowest it was sort of saying that around 30 dollar range. So it’s been a big jump at the end of this quarter. But it’s back in line with more what they were kind of at. So I do hope that was super helpful. If you do want to get the show notes, head over to make time online.com forward slash 60 to make time online.com forward slash six, two, and you can get the shownotes with all the links that amber mentioned towards the end of that podcast as well. Thanks for listening in to this episode of Make time online. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast in the App Store. keep changing for the better guys. Take care

Mediavine podcast summary

Amber is super down to earth and so helpful. She just shows how personable and support focused Mediavine really are. 

Here are my top takeaways from the chat:

  1. The change in 25,000 to 50,000 sessions has happened due to COVID and the changes in the economy. It allows the team to still focus on support to their existing members
  2. Mediavine focuses on helping site speed with features like ad Lazy Load
  3. Lifestyle blogs are still the best suited content attract the best audience for ads
  4. Currently a $21.60 RPM at the end of June 2020 (50k sessions = around $850 per month)

What were your main takeaways? Got any questions? Leave a comment below?

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