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Joe Fier and Matt Wolfe
Episode highlights:
00:57 – What’s in a name?
03:45 – First impressions
04:58 – Bloggers turned podcasters
07:48 – Splitting the work
11:01 – A growing trend
14:24 – Blogging the journey
15:49 – A recommendable angle?
19:30 – What Matt and Joe do recommend
21:48 – Stakes and rewards
27:19 – After selling out…
30:19 – Are there points of conflict?
35:14 – The system behind the podcast
38:00 – Episodes that got cut
42:44 – Who names the episodes?
45:29 – Most interesting podcasts?
49:11 – Creative approaches to dealmaking
52:25 – Do metrics count?
55:46 – Serving the public and your members
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Transcription:
James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 571. And I’ve invited two guests to this episode. Hopefully that makes it twice as good. Welcome, Matt and Joe.
Matt: Hey, hey.
Joe: Thank you.
What’s in a name?
James: Now Matt, your last name is Wolfe.
Matt: Yes.
James: And I remember having a neighbor, this Italian neighbor. Once, I moved into a new house and he leaned over the fence and he said, “Hello, my name is Lupo. It means ‘wolf’”. I was a little bit frightened.
Matt: That’s funny. My dad’s nickname at the company that he used to work with was Lobo. Everybody at the company just called him Lobo.
James: Well, it does have an “e”. I guess that differentiates you from all the other Wolfs.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s Lobo-e.
Joe: Lobo-e. Wolf-e.
James: And what about Joe? Your name’s a bit unusual.
Joe: It’s different, yeah. It’s pronounced “feer” but I like to, if I’m feeling fancy, it’s “fi-er”. Fierrrr.
You know, it’s a little intimidating. My wife’s like, “Do I really want your name?” You know? She was a Hemingway. Well, she still is. She’s like, “I don’t know. I had kind of a cool name too.”
James: Wow. So you could have stuck with the Hemingway if you wanted to go down the mother’s…
Joe: I was thinking about taking her name. Yeah.
James: I’ve ended up with a very difficult name to go through life with. It’s hard to spell, hard to pronounce. But it does stand out. That’s a positive.
Joe: What’s your favorite nickname? Like, involving your last name?
James: Probably the most interesting one is the one that John Carlton gave me. He just calls me Shrak. He dropped the “c”, he just went S-h-r-a-k. He said that’s much simpler. It’s easier to spell, it sounds good.
Matt: One syllable.
James: He actually wrote me a full-length sales page on all the reasons why I should change my surname to Shrak. He thinks it’s his biggest failure to date in the copyrighting, ever. But it’s kind of cool.
Joe: Sounds like someone with too much time on their hands.
James: Well, it started out because I did some piece of content for his members in his action coaching group and someone misspelt it on the URL. I pointed out to him and he said, “No, I think it’d be better if you just change your name.” And then I got this long letter.
So that’s probably the most story-based one.
Matt: Nice.
Joe: I like it. Yeah, that’s a good answer.
Matt: Matt Wolfe has been a hard name as far as a marketer’s standpoint because there’s like, an actor named Matt Wolfe; apparently, there’s a singer named Matt Wolfe. So when you Google Matt Wolfe, there’s just too many Matt Wolfes. So I just need to come with a pen name and just rebrand from scratch, I think.
James: I was lucky enough to grab my own dot com. It turns out there’s another person with the same name. I think there’s even two now, because James is a pretty common first name. So in the entire world, I just got the early start on the SEO side of things. I guess it’ll be harder for the other James Schramkos. Poor guys.
Joe: Suckers.
James: It’s all good.
Initial impressions of Evergreen Profits
So, Matt and Joe, I’ve invited you to this podcast because I was recently a guest of your podcast, which is over at EvergreenProfits.com. And in preparation for that, I actually went and had a look at your website. Because, I don’t know, on a hunch I thought it’d be a good idea to check out the podcast that I’m going to be speaking with so that I could be relevant to the audience. And what I found when I went to your website was a really interesting situation where your content is actually good.
Joe: Success!
James: Yeah, because I guess a lot of people are still finding their way with the podcast and they all have their own style. But something about your website, I liked. First, I liked the style of it. But the other thing that I thought was interesting is when I was looking into the topics, you’ve covered quite a broad range of topics. And they’re all set out quite nicely, and it’s sort of a blog where I thought I could go back and listen to some of these podcasts.
And then I’ve seen a few people mention it on Facebook, the occasional time that I log into there. And I think you’re doing something well. You’ve got Aaron Fletcher in there an awful lot, which is interesting.
Matt: He’s a mutual buddy of ours.
James: Yeah, he’s a mutual friend who introduced me to the San Diego surfing scene, the Encinitas group, which I’m grateful for.
From blogging to podcasting
But you were blogging well before you were podcasting as well, so I’d love to just talk about some of the journey and also some of the tips you might have for my audience, who a good portion of them are thinking about content marketing. And I think that’s a natural situation, because if they’re listening to my podcast they’re already exposed to that platform. They’ve seen the power of it because it pretty much drives my business. So would you be willing to share a few tips and ideas with our audience?
Matt: Yeah, absolutely.
Joe: A hundred percent. Yeah. We get pretty creative with their contents. It’s probably kind of out of the box content marketing, but we haven’t really talked about, you know, in other places.
Matt: But yeah. I mean, just to go back to the first question, the journey a little bit, we started blogging in… well, I started my first blog in 2005, which was actually a blog about shutters. I worked at a shutter company at the time. I think Joe, I don’t know if Joe was working there yet or not.
Joe: No.
Matt: But Joe worked at the same shutter company for a little while. That’s kind of how we got connected. But I had a blog about shutters. And I didn’t know marketing, I didn’t know blogging, I didn’t know traffic, I didn’t know any of that stuff. So that blog actually failed pretty quickly, because I wasn’t really passionate about shutters. I just kind of knew about shutters because I worked in a shutter company.
And so that ran for maybe six months and I kind of gave up on it. And then I partnered with Joe in 2007 to start our first blog that actually started making money. And we started saying, ‘Hey, look this can actually turn into something.’ And that was a personal finance blog, called How I Will Be Rich.
Joe: That’s right.
Matt: It was very much inspired by Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich. We were not very creative at the time.
Joe: No, it was putting good juju out in the universe, you know?
Matt: Yeah.
Joe: “I will be rich.”
Matt: So we started that blog, and we basically talked about paying down debt and ways to stash away money and how to earn more money and all that kind of stuff. Pretty much the same type of stuff Ramit talks about on his blog, come to think of it.
But that was our first blog. I think we got that blog, it was making like 50 bucks a month through selling advertising on it. And then we said ‘Hey, this is pretty cool. Let’s see if we can double this up and make a second blog.’
So we made a second blog all about health and fitness, called Be Healthy and Relax. And that blog actually to this day still exists, still generates traffic, still generates some income for us.
So that was the second blog that we built. And then after that, we went, ‘This is kind of cool, we’ve got a couple of blogs that are making a few hundred bucks a month. Let’s go and teach people how to make blogs like we’ve done and recreate the success that we’ve done.’
And I created a course called The WordPress Classroom. That sort of eventually got bought in with another partner and we rebranded it as LearnToBlog.com. And then I sold that business and then Joe and I started working together on Evergreen Profits. And that’s kind of the journey in a nutshell. I’m sure I’m missing some things that Joe could probably fill in the gaps on.
Division of labor
Joe: Yeah. Kind of at the same time, I was doing more consulting work, running an animation agency. So I worked with a lot of startups and internet marketers and kind of did more of the people side where Matt was doing more of the blogging side. And that’s kind of how we roll today too, with Evergreen Profits, in the way we create content and then market our content. It’s kind of like a combo.
Matt: Yeah. Really the business is sort of split into two sides at the moment. We’ve got the blog content, podcast, that’s mostly generating affiliate revenue. And then we’ve got the consulting side of the business. And Joe and I are each essentially CEOs of each separate side of the business. I run the content side, Joe runs the consulting side, and that’s kind of how we split things up.
James: That’s very interesting. I thought when you were talking about the shutters that you might have been doing that as part of the job in your shutter company that you worked for. Did you ever consider joining those two?
Matt: I sort of did. I built the website for the company. It wasn’t a blog, it was just kind of more of an online business card sort of website. So I built that for them and that’s sort of when I taught myself HTML and website building and WordPress and that sort of thing.
And so because I built that site, it actually led into a different direction. I did some sort of freelance work where people would come to my parents’ website. The shutter company was actually a family company – my parents owned the company at the time and they eventually sold it later. But I basically made their website. People started coming to them and saying, who builds your website. And then when people asked them, they’d refer them to me, and it actually turned into a little freelance gig where I started making websites for other people.
The blogging was more me going, ‘Hey, there’s this thing called AdSense, I can just throw these ads on my blog and make some money. And anybody who searches shutters, I can make a little extra side income.’ And it didn’t really pan out because I never drove any traffic to it or anything. So that was a very, very short-lived blog. I don’t even know what I was thinking when I tried to build that in the first place, because I really have no passion for shutters or window coverings, which meant that I ended up making like three or four blog posts about the topic ever, got bored and then just never made anymore.
James: You’re probably passionate about the idea of making money online.
Matt: Yeah, that’s true.
James: And this is very common. This is probably about the same time that I got started, actually, And I was doing a very similar thing except that I built a relationship with the guy who was running our website, who actually was the son of the person who owned the business that I was working in at my last job. And I applied everything that I was learning with my online marketing from home and on weekends to the company website. And I was actually building up my own online marketing muscle using an actual business, which helped me a lot.
And then there was this point where my private website started to become more profitable than the whole Mercedes-Benz business that I worked for, which was fantastic.
Joe: It’s a good day.
Matt: I mean, that’s very similar. Joe and I were building these blogs in the early days, and then when we started switching more to like, Joe was doing more of the done-for-you work. I started doing some agency-type stuff done-for-you website building. And then I started up The WordPress Classroom, which was my course on how to set up blogs like I did. And the courses that taught how to do it and the freelance work pretty quickly outpaced the income from doing the blogging stuff we initially did.
Joe: Oh, yeah!
Matt: And then eventually outpaced what we were making in our day jobs and it eventually became the reason we left the companies we were working at.
James: So you’ve been flip-flopping between the do-it-yourself market and the done-for-you market, I guess, with consulting and with courses.
Matt: Yeah.
The course trend
James: You don’t have to look far these days to see everyone is flogging courses on how to make courses.
Matt: Right.
James: That seems to be in right now. My good friend John Reese is talking about it. One of his courses, Traffic Secrets, was a big seed of inspiration for me over a decade ago, because it was the Million Dollar Day, and it was like, wow. So he’s been in that market for a long time of making courses, but now he’s teaching people how to make courses. A lot of bloggers are teaching people how to make courses.
Matt: Yeah.
James: Do you have a course on how to make courses?
Matt: We don’t. We actually went the other direction. I think we might have taken a backwards approach to what most people do. We actually had our own courses for a long, long time, sold a lot of courses and then eventually decided we didn’t actually want to sell our own courses anymore. We’d rather just teach for free and then earn income off the affiliate stuff and then if people want some extra hand-holding, you want the consulting or work with us privately, we’ll charge you for that. But most of our money is made off the affiliate income and the consulting now.
So we pretty much got rid of our courses. We had courses for years and years and years, and one of them had a module on how to create your own course, actually.
Joe: Right.
Matt: But you know, we pretty much turned all of that stuff off, stopped selling it. We did a sort of 80/20 analysis, realized that affiliate marketing and consulting were our bread and butter, but the teaching, the online courses was what we actually spent most of our time focused on.
Joe: Well, actually, we looked at our EHR. I mean, to use your term, we looked at our EHR for where we were spending most of our time, which was at the time, this was just a few months ago now. We shut it down, but we had a physical newsletter that we were sending people in the mail. We charged $100 per month for it. And it sounds like a great business – it always grew; nice, expected recurring revenue. But we were spending literally 80 percent of our time on that making about 20 percent of our income. And then immediately saw, look at all of our affiliate offers, and all of these other things we’re selling with our content. That’s just blowing it away. Yeah, and we’re like, okay, we need to make a shift here.
James: Yeah, I have a few friends who have done the subscription newsletter. Doberman Dan was a recent guest on the podcast and we also had, a friend of mine, Sean Kaye, head of Casual Marketer newsletter, but I think he stopped that. I’m sure it would be hard work and you’d have to really like your content creation to be doing that.
Joe: And we do.
Matt: For us, it was a great business model. We actually loved the business model and we loved creating the content and we were always rounding up new guests to help contribute content and that sort of thing. For us it just came down to focus. We felt like whatever we focus on is where the money tends to come from. And at that time, we were putting a ton of time into the newsletter but the newsletter was not generating the most of our results. Most of our results were coming from affiliate. We just said, ‘This is ridiculous. We need to take all of our energy, all of our focus and put it on the thing that’s working the most.’
James: So you’ve got a similar situation to me, where you have content driving some way of getting paid. I took all my courses and just put them inside the membership and then wrapped my consulting together with that.
So in the membership model, you get the content, you get the coaching, and then the third wing of that, the really cool part, is the community, and that’s where they kind of look after themselves and arrange themselves and you build a tribe. So that’s something that might also be on the menu at some point.
And of course, this community is always going to need affiliate offers. So I guess we’ve ended up in a similar place.
Blogging the journey
I’m really interested in this personal financial blogging situation that you had, which I would classify as a blogging-the-journey type angle, and I see this one a lot. People tell me when they’re new, they’re going to start blogging and share the journey as they get rich and get successful online. And I usually tell them, please don’t do that. I think it’s un-aspirational. I don’t know why someone would follow someone who’s a complete beginner or novice, to learn all the mistakes, the painful slow way along the journey.
I’ve hardly ever seen it succeed. I’m not sure I can think of a single case study. When I started, I took more of the approach of just figuring out the things that I did know worked and just focused on those and then slowly incremented success.
I mean, I note that you were quite happy to start teaching people how to blog off a couple of hundred bucks a month. That’s a pretty low threshold for success. But in that process, I imagine you sold a fair bit of the WP Classroom and leveraged up your success into a bigger success.
Matt: Yeah, that’s true.
James: Well, that’s kind of like legitimizing yourself through the process of that growth phase. And that’s really common, like a tow truck driver that might start off by pinching a few cars off the side of the road until they can afford to pay for the tow truck and then they can go straight.
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
James: There was another famous online marketer who got busted by a government agency for making false claims and then turned legit. But a lot of them, I think, start out with a fairly small or humble product. I think even Russell Brunson talks about a potato gun infoproduct when he was in a dorm room. So it’s fascinating to watch that journey.
Would you recommend it?
What are your thoughts on the blogging-the-journey style of angle? Do you think it’s something you’d ever try again or advise others to do or to avoid?
Matt: You know, I have advised other people in the past that they want to get into blogging and they don’t know what to blog about, is to go and learn and then talk about what you learned, but from the standpoint of, I’m not an expert – this is just kind of my journey, this is what I’m learning.
So I actually have told people that that’s a good way to start. But I’m not sure I can think of a ton of people that have super mega success from doing that. I mean, maybe Pat Flynn is kind of along those lines. You know, I feel like in the early days of his blog, he was kind of sharing the journey a little bit.
Joe: I’m not actually really a fan of it, because I mean, I tried it as well.
Matt and I both had our blogs. You know, I bought my JoeFier.com. It’s kind of like what we were saying. That was like, my first domain I bought. I started doing that and just kind of trickling out what I was learning. It was more of a diary for myself, though. I wasn’t expecting to make money from that.
I always took the approach, like so when Matt was doing his courses, I instead worked with clients. So I was out there kind of hustling on the phone, figuring out who to meet, who can then spread the word about what I’m doing, but at the same time, learn as I’m going through things that way. So it gives them kind of value. For me it was creating sales videos. Like VSLs using Keynote and ScreenFlow and pretty much doing that for like dirt cheap in the very beginning or free to people like Frank Kern, I did one for him. And it’s like, inherently you’re going to start meeting some people, and their network referring you out.
And that’s how Evergreen Profits, when we kind of kick things off again for ourselves, it started as a content marketing agency and we actually worked with clients. So instead of just blogging about how we’re doing our content marketing or testing new things, we got paid to do it. We basically leveraged. There is a big brain center in Texas that was a client and they were paying us five grand a month, and we would just test random content, things that we wanted to try, and pretty much got paid to learn.
James: That was what a job was for me. It was like a paid apprenticeship, getting paid three hundred grand a year to run this enormous business and learn all about hiring and training and marketing. Very interesting. And I think you might be right with Pat Flynn. He’s possibly an example of someone who by his own admission is a crash test dummy. But I would say that that is a very isolated incident.
A few facts on that. Firstly, I’ve met Pat a number of times and he is a lovely person. He’s also got quite a lot of talent when it comes to his natural personality. He loves presenting and putting together courses and he’s fascinated with the whole industry. But I would say his prime income source, which appears to be Bluehost affiliate income, (and I know this because he publishes it, so it’s no secret) I would say that’s a risky business model to be so dependent on one income source.
So I think he’s been lucky. You know, in a way that that rug never got pulled. And it’s great to see him diversify out into making courses. So he’s done really well with a course on how to podcast, and he’s making other courses. But I think he’s taken a long time to get to an income level that others will reach much faster with a different path. So I still think it’s probably a difficult path. And it’s kind of like, once there’s a few people who have taken that path, it probably becomes incrementally harder for others to come in with it.
I can’t imagine how hard it would be for someone else to be Pat Flynn. But I’m sure there’s plenty of people trying. It’s like, he’s got that spot.
“Go out and find experts to put on your platform.”
What Matt and Joe do recommend
Matt: Yeah. I mean I don’t think these days I would be recommending to blog the journey. I would say, you know, whatever sort of product or whatever sort of niche you’re in, go out and find experts to put on your platform. Have other people do the research, create the content and publish content that’s relevant to your niche. That’s what we’ve been doing lately. We’re actually, a lot of the stuff that we’ve been teaching for free on our blog and that we used to do with the courses we sell, we still do a lot of it. We’re just starting to do it in other niches. We’re in the sleep niche, we’re getting into the homebrew niche, there’s a handful of other niches. We’re getting into the Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Joe: Hey, hey, hey. You’re giving away all of our niches. No, I’m just kidding.
Matt: We’re getting into a handful of niches where we’re partnering with other experts to sort of be the content creator in it. And we’re sort of masterminding it and planning the road map behind the business and the whole content marketing strategy. I’d say that’s probably the better way to go now, is there’s plenty of people out there that are experts that are willing to talk forever on any sort of niche topic you want to get into.
Joe: I think the big thing that I would recommend, and I think we would both recommend without discussing it together first is, somehow provide value that you can give others without trying to feel like you have to recreate yourself just because you’re doing it online. I mean like you had at the Mercedes-Benz and other dealerships, you had killer freakin’ sales skills and you knew how to manage systems, people and all that stuff. And you were able to apply that in a different way, but at the same time you’re growing a following.
So figure out ways to give value, maybe it’s for free, probably for free. Grow an email list, grow a Facebook group, page, whatever you got to do, chatbot list. All these little owned audiences, which is kind of what we call them. All these places where you have this influence over people who can listen to you whenever you want. Whenever you want to send a message, boom. And I would suggest to start growing things that way, no matter how small you’re starting. I mean, that’s the way a business kind of starts to compound into what we have now and what you have, too.
James: Yeah. I talk about that in a concept called Own the Racecourse, where you’re getting multiple subscriptions and not relying on just having that email list or just having that Facebook page.
So I can see that once you’ve got the piece of content, it’s good to share it across a few different platforms and build your subscriptions. It seems that chatbots are the next place to be catching people, and Messenger.
What partnership deals look like
I did have a question though. Just where you mentioned that you are partnering with other people, especially experts, what does the deal look like for that kind of arrangement? Who’s getting the stake in it and how do you get rewarded for it?
Joe: So we’ve done it in multiple ways and it’s funny you asked that because literally like, we had this discussion this morning with one of our niches we’re getting into. But a lot of the times, someone will be an expert.
Let’s talk about a business that’s kind of already going, because you could obviously start with a business that’s from scratch, where you have an expert that says “Hey, I want to make an infoproduct.” Say it’s a doctor or something like that, and they want to get into a niche online. That one, we would probably have a pretty big stake in the company, I mean at least 50 percent. And we would be bringing in the advising of that person to kind of ramp things up initially. And then we kind of come in when they’re ready to apply some marketing, and things that we can bring to the table.
In terms of a business that’s already going, unless we’re buying in, I would say at least 50 percent for equity. And that’s literally us just doing the sweat, but they’re getting both of us, our team, our processes. We’ve done this kind of stuff in a variety of websites.
Matt: To be honest, every single deal is structured completely differently. We’re in the middle of working on three deals right now. One of them, we literally just bought the IP from the other person. We bought all of the content that they’ve already got, we’ve bought their existing sales messages and sales letters, and we just flat out own 100 percent. But they didn’t really have any sort of marketing behind it. This was actually a course that was for sale on Udemy. We just liked the course, saw the guy wasn’t doing any marketing, decided, ‘Hey, let’s make this guy an offer, buy the course off of him. We’ll bring it onto our own platforms, bump up the price and then run our own marketing through content, Google Ads, Facebook ads, that sort of thing and really scale it up.’ So that was one deal.
Another deal is somebody that they just bought a company, they own 100 percent of the company. They didn’t want to run the company so they came to us and said, ‘Hey, what sort of equity do you want in this company to essentially use your team and your assets and everything you have at your disposal to run this forum?’ So we’re in negotiations right now with that person on the percentage of the company that we’re going to take just for our own sweat equity in the company.
So every deal is completely different. We’re working on three right now and all of them are structured completely differently. So it really is just kind of a case by case basis, I think.
Joe: Our first one actually was, I think it was 10 grand plus what, 30 percent or something like that?
Matt: Yeah, it was 25 or 30 percent.
Joe: So that was, I mean you could do it also to get paid. So someone, actually, this was years back, the first time we ever tried this whole equity-type thing, we’re like, oh, this could be fun – get paid for more of the, you know, how we can raise this thing. That was 10 grand upfront paid by the other person.
Matt: Yeah. They paid us to come in, and then we also asked for equity as part of it to basically take the company over. He just didn’t want to be involved anymore but he wanted it to continue to scale and ramp up, so he actually paid us 10 grand to come in, plus I think it was 25 percent equity on the business to essentially just like, take it over for him. We set up some automated systems, we put a couple people in place to make sure it keeps running. And then we sort of bowed out and to this day I think it still generates a little bit of money.
James: So when you talk about equity, does that mean you’re going in as a director and you’re becoming a part of that business?
Matt: Again, it’s really a case by case basis. So the one that we were just talking about, the first one we ever did, he basically came to us and said he wanted us to sort of consult and have a done-for-you kind of deal. And so we just basically set our price. We went in there and we thought we were shooting for the moon with this price by saying $10,000 plus 25% as a percentage of any revenue that comes through from it. And he didn’t even hesitate on that one and we thought later, ‘Man, we should have asked for more on this one.’ But that one, you know, we actually don’t own, I don’t think, technically any equity in the company. We were just getting a percentage of any income that went through that business.
Joe: Well, that one literally I think it was on Clickbank. So he just added us as a percentage payout on Clickbank.
James: That’s what I’d call a revenue share deal.
Joe. Yeah.
Matt: Right. And then so the ones that we’re working on right now, one of them we bought the company outright, so we’re 100 percent owners of it. That’s the sleep product we’re working on. The other company that we’re negotiating in right now, somebody else bought 100 percent of the company and we’re negotiating what percentage equity we’re going to have in the company by coming in and sort of building their marketing systems and their content plan for them.
Joe: And that would be on like, as a director.
Matt: That would be like a director. We’d be an equity holder. When that business sells, we’d get whatever our percentage of equity is out of that business.
James: Gotcha. And you’re not worried about the liabilities as well? Like what happens with the other partner has more control than you?
Matt: Yeah, and that’s what we’re working out, because we have a team and we’re only going to do deals with people. And this is just like affiliate products that we promote. We’re only working with people that we trust. We know they’re cool to work with, they’re not going to be a pain in the a**.
“You have to have strong filters.”
James: You have to have strong filters. This is the highest evolution of my own business, is revenue share deals, where I take usually a smallish percentage. But that’s a percentage of revenues, so it’s considered before profit and loss and all of those things. But I don’t become a director or a shareholder. I’m just basically on a royalty or a licensing-style deal.
Joe: Yeah, and that’s totally cool. I mean, if you can compound and do a lot of those, you’re going to get revenue coming in from all sorts of places.
Matt: Yeah. Our bigger play with these ones that we’ve got in the works right now is actually an exit. Where we’re kind of looking at these as let’s buy in with our sweat equity, get some equity in the business and then within 12 to 18 months sell the business and cash out of them. So the big ones that we’re sort of negotiating right now, that’s sort of the end goal.
When selling out…
James: And what will you do with the cash when you sell out?
Joe: That’s what I was just about to say, is it’s almost like we see it as a stepping stone to where we, we’re trying to figure out what we want to do when we grow up. We’re trying to figure that out, still.
James: I think I have probably more further down the track, where most of my deals are really just an ongoing recurring revenue situation. I’d like to have, if you did the numbers, if you could work on just 10 accounts where you got 10 percent and they’re doing a million dollars more than they were when they started, that would be 100,000 each from 10. There’s a million dollars a year recurring royalty deals and they’re in different markets and segments, which is good. And that could continue for a long time. But you still get paid if they sell, of course you put that into the deal. If they do sell the business, then you’ll get first option and then you can get your percentage of the sale price. And I learnt most of this from Jay Abraham.
Joe: That’s smart. And that’s the big thing. What we do know about our future is that we always want to have an equity stake in bigger projects that we want to work on. So that’s part of our whole thing with the model that we chose for Evergreen Profits is, let’s go free with our content. And all that paid content we used to put behind paywalls, now it’s free. You know, stuff on the podcast, blog, all that stuff. It’s the consulting on the higher end, so on the higher end of the spectrum, that’s where we want to start cherry picking deals. Because we get a lot of opportunities from people at least wanting to work with us, just for a flat fee, but at the same time bring us on as a partner. We’re going to have to have some pretty good filters after a while, because we just made this transition like three months ago and we’re already like, “Oooooh-K! Slow down a little bit here!”
James: Yeah, definitely. You’ll find that those sort of deals are actually really easy to get from the wrong people, who are either desperate or just want to, you know, they hope and wish that you’re going to come and fix a crappy product or do all the work. They’re much harder to get with more established businesses.
Matt: Yes, agreed.
James: They’ve got most of their stuff dialed, which is, that’s the sweet spot I’ve found. And yeah, you need to have super strong filters. It’s actually something I did when I started online and then retreated from a bit, and then 10 years later started doing them again when I’ve learnt all these lessons.
Joe: Yeah. And I think that’s how we started as well, and then we regressed, learned a lot more and went back to it. But going back to answer your question, with that cash, so when we sell both of these companies or maybe one of them, one of them specifically, we want to make it a goal in 2018 to sell probably the sleep product. We’d like to, I mean obviously, pay ourselves a little bit, you know, nice little celebration fee, but then also parlay that into another thing that we can maybe flip, you know, quote unquote flip, take something that’s on the market, make it better and then sell it. And then kind of just kind of step stone higher and higher. So let’s just keep selling, maybe the first one is 200000 next one’s 500000. And then beyond from there.
Keys to a working partnership
James: Yeah. It’s an interesting situation where there’s two of you. How do you go about business with the two of you? Do you ever find that there are points of conflict?
Joe: We’ve worked together for a long time. And before this, we were, like Matt was saying, we were working at his parents’ shutter company. I guess it always, I didn’t think about it, but I was on the phones, I was dealing with people all the time, all the customers of the business, whereas Matt was kind of doing the books. You were behind the scenes, you were…
Matt: I was running the factory, yeah.
Joe: You’re still running, dealing with people, but not the outside people, I guess. Still to this day, I’ll do a lot more of the calls with clients or potential people we’re going to work with, whereas Matt’s really good at the analytical stuff, spreadsheets, systems.
Matt: Yeah. We definitely do butt heads on ideas every once in a while, because Joe and I, we definitely approach things from different perspectives. I would say Joe is a little more… don’t take this the wrong way, Joe. Joe tends to be a little more impulsive. He’ll see an idea and go, this is really cool, we should jump on it. Where I’m way more analytical, I’ll see an idea and go, OK, let’s think this through, let’s run the numbers, let’s talk to a couple people, get their opinions. And I’ll go too far in one direction on the analytical side, where Joe will go too far in the other direction on the, let’s jump on this while it’s hot kind of thing.
And I think we tend to balance each other out in that respect, because we’ll argue back and forth for a day on something and then by the end of it we come to a really good compromise, and it’s always worked for us. I mean, we’ve been working together since 2007 on our business, so I think we’re one of the rare partnerships that has managed to last a while, because we figured out a good balance, I think.
James: Yeah. And it’s possible that you’re actually making twice as much because you’re working together than if you were just to do it by yourselves.
Joe: Yeah. I mean, there are definitely times when we’re like, it’s a lot of debate, but at the same time there’s a reason for it, like what Matt said. There’s actually a really cool test. What’s that personality test, Matt?
Matt: The DISC assessment?
Joe: Yeah, the DISC assessment. And we both took it recently. There’s a free one at TonyRobbins.com, I think, somewhere. And we literally scored on the opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of analytical and people person. I forget what the actual letters are. But it had this diagram that was like a triangle going away from each other. But then at the core of what we really wanted, things like stability, financial gain, trust in people and all that stuff, it was identical. So it was interesting to see how they perfectly overlapped.
But in that same test, (and this could be cool for you to, we can maybe find a link to this thing, it’s totally free) it actually teaches you how to speak to other people and then how they should speak to you without ruffling feathers, or just the most effective way to communicate with people. And we looked at that list and Matt and I, you know, we’ve been doing this 10 years and then we finally took this test like a month ago, we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we kind of figured all that stuff out the hard way.’ But you know, it works. So that’s like more of a shortcut.
Matt: I would legitimately say that Joe and I working together are probably making double what we’d make of each of us as an individual. Because I tend to be much more introverted, I don’t really get out and network, I don’t really like getting on phones with people, I don’t like doing sales. I like to crunch numbers, I like to put my head down, I like to write content, I just like to put my head down and focus. Joe is more of that outgoing, like, let’s go meet more people, let’s go make deals, let’s get on the phone, let’s do sales let’s do coaching. He kind of likes all that kind of stuff. So because I’m the way I am and he’s the way he is, we’re able to have both elements in our business.
James: Yeah. And if you liked DISC, then you guys would probably get a huge amount of value from doing a Kolbe and compare.
Joe: Oh, yeah.
James: There’s also a good book, and I’m just mentioning this for listeners as well, called Rocket Fuel. If you find that you’re going to be in a partnership, then a book like Rocket Fuel gives the partners a method of communicating where you don’t want to punch each other up. And since you’re in the jiu-jitsu niche, you know, you’ve got to avoid the chance of a choke out or whatever.
Matt: I literally know zero about jiu-jitsu.
Joe: I did take one course, but yeah, I’ll still get my ass handed to me.
James: I know you know how to sleep.
Matt: That’s definitely a one that we’re partnered with somebody who is a very, very credible expert in that world.
James: Yeah, I’ve had the pleasure of coaching someone in that world as well. It’s really interesting learning about new things with the different projects that come along. One of the other projects that I’ve had is working in the clothesline space.
Matt: Clothesline. Alright. Window shutters and clotheslines. It’s good.
James: It’s amazing how big these markets can be and how successful.
Matt: True.
James: The scale. I mean, pretty much every house has a clothesline, even if it’s just a foldaway indoor one. If you think about it, it’s a big market.
Matt: That’s very true.
James: You know, I thought we were going to be talking about content marketing, but I really think this episode is bridging on the topic of how to get paid for your knowledge. There’s been some very interesting side avenues there, but I thought it was worth going down.
How the podcasting works
I do want ask you a couple of ideas. When you’re going to do a podcast, do you have a very clear idea about what it’s going to be about before you roll into it? And then do you run it tight to that or are you fairly flexible when you come into a podcast?
Matt: So with us, the podcast was initially created as a networking tool. We just wanted to use it as a way to get in with people, to network with people. Every time we have a guest on the show we always ask our guests if they can introduce us to somebody else, and it was a way to expand the network. So looking at from that standpoint, our approach to it was, let’s talk to our guest about whatever they’re most excited about, whatever they’re most passionate about. So we have a fairly open podcast. We typically do have a few notes written down of here’s where we’d like to take it, but if it goes in another direction we’re totally okay with that.
We’ve actually got a pretty solid system built around our podcast now that just works really, really well for us. We literally only put one day a month into our podcast and then we don’t even think about it until the following month. We batch all of our episodes so we just record one day a month and record back to back to back.
Joe: I’ve actually joked with Matt before, like I totally forgot we even had a podcast because it’s literally one day a month of work for us. We have our team and system kind of doing the rest.
Matt: Yeah. So essentially, we record one day a month. We record everybody back to back to back. We take all those audio files, put them in a Dropbox, and then we have a person who edits them and writes show notes for them and he handles everything from that point on. So the podcast is very systematized, it’s sort of our way of systematizing networking.
But over time the podcast has grown and grown and grown and got more popular and more popular. We’ve seen people talking about it and giving us feedback on what they like to hear more of. So I think just for those reasons, we’ve started to get slightly more structured with the podcast, because we started to learn what people like to hear.
We’ve started to learn that A, people really like to hear sort of our own stories, which we always thought was bizarre. We always wanted to focus on our guests. But a lot of the feedback we’ve heard is that people like to hear from us more often. So we’ve been doing more and more episodes where we don’t even have guests.
We’ve been learning that people, they like it when we give them a step-by-step process. Some of the best episodes we’ve had as far as traffic and the feedback have been one where somebody has come out and said, okay, I’m going to teach you something from A to Z, let’s go. And they just sort of map out a process, almost as if they were giving a webinar on our podcast.
So we’ve taken that information that we’ve sort of gathered from the crowd and we have been sort of getting slightly more structured, but we’re always open to it. We always want to take it wherever our guest wants to take it, because that’s where everybody has the most enjoyment from it, I think.
James: Yeah. I appreciated being on your show, and it was a surprise to be included in the top 10 because it was kind of a late entry.
Joe: It was. You were the last one there.
The episode that didn’t make it
James: But when I looked through your topics, they were all really interesting topics. So it’s great that you’re listening to your audience and being guided as to what they want to hear about. Do you ever record one and then not publish it?
Matt: I’ve been podcasting since 2010. This is actually, I think, the fourth show I’ve done. I used to have a podcast with Josh Bartlett. I had one that was just a solo podcast in the past. And Joe and I actually had a different podcast years and years ago as well that was more focused on a different niche. But out of all the years I’ve been doing podcasting there’s one episode that I’ve never released and that was one that I was partnered with Josh Bartlett on.
Joe: Who was it, Matt, who was it?
Matt: I don’t want to mention any names on it because, yeah…
Joe: Obviously it was a big name.
Matt: It was a big name marketer that a lot of people have heard of, but the podcast episode just didn’t come out good. The person who was on the show, I don’t know how to say this and be politically correct, but he was kind of a d*ck.
James: Well, you don’t mention his name, so it’s totally cool. I was going to ask you the reason anyway, I couldn’t leave that sitting there.
Matt: So this person was very, they were very confrontational. You know, we’d ask them a question and their response would immediately be like, well why do you want to know that? And it was just kind of, it almost felt like a power struggle throughout the whole episode, where every time we’d ask a question they wouldn’t give us an answer and they tried to flip the question back on us. And we just didn’t feel like by the end of it there was any value there for the audience, so we never released it.
“What would the person listening to this want me to ask?”
James: Yeah, that’s really the responsibility, isn’t it, when you’re doing podcasts, is to think, what would the person listening to this want me to ask? What are they going to take away from this? I’ve definitely canned podcasts. I’ve actually called some of them halfway through and said, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is going to work, thanks very much.’
Joe: Wow.
James: But I have been known as fairly direct.
Matt: That’s good.
James: Good news, guys, we’re going to run with this one. Just in case you were wondering.
Joe: I was going to say, are we getting the cut, man?
James: No, no, it’s not. I had one with a copywriter who was spouting out all the usual stuff, you know? End in sevens and use red headlines. And I’m just like, do you have anything to support this? Like, where does this come from? And they just said, “Well, I heard it from someone else.” And it reminded me of that grandma who cuts the roast in half and puts it in the pan to roast it and then someone says, “Why do you do that?” And then they say, “I don’t know, my mom used to do it.” And they ring up great grandma in the nursing home and they said, “Why did you cut the roast?” She said, “Well, because we had a tiny little oven and it didn’t fit.”
“Your podcast can be both an attraction and a conversion device.”
James: And I worry about that. If I’m not getting good information that I think would help a customer, then it’s deal off. Because just like you guys, I think your podcast can be both an attraction and a conversion device, that helps people really get a good insight as to what you can bring to the table. And I’m sure that it helps attract deals for you, it builds you an audience, it connects you with influencers. You’ve done podcasts with quite a few influencers, actually. I think half my coaching Rolodex is on there, which is funny.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, even people we’ve talked about. I’ve had Pat Flynn on shows in the past. Erin Fletcher is an interesting one because he actually lives here in San Diego with us, and so we’re actually just meeting with Erin last week. But we’re actually going to be putting on live events. His brand and our brand are sort of partnering up to be putting on live events, so we’re doing some interesting things there as well.
James: He was an early member of my community and I think he sort of got his training wheels going there.
Matt: Yeah.
James: And he brought substantial knowledge from outside, which is what makes him good. He was already doing good things outside and he just bolted on the membership concept and then took off in full flight. So it’s great to see that. But you’ve got that whole Encinitas hub. I see Paul Clifford there and Robert Stanley. You’ve mined that one out nicely.
Joe: I posted something – this is just a tangent – but I just posted something the other day, because Matt and I like to, every single year we map out kind of the whole year. Obviously, we can’t go super detailed there at the whole year, but at least have a good vision of what the heck we’re doing. And I posted, “Hey, San Diego people, where the hell can I get a big whiteboard space that’s not my house or my own office?” Like, I want to go into kind of a quiet place, Matt and I will take it over for the day. And that’s when Paul Clifford raised his hand.
So this is a public shout out to Paul over at Designrr. He’s super cool, because he cleared out his whole office, his beautiful office in Encinitas, California. We had it to ourselves for like 10 hours and he stuck himself in a little hallway closet, hidden inside all day long.
James: The great thing about that office is there’s a very good coffee shop just around the corner.
Joe: Oh, my god, it’s like attached to it.
James: And it’s a short drive from some of the best surfing in the world.
Matt: Yeah. And if you like beer like us, there’s plenty of it up in that area as well.
Joe: That’s right.
James: Nice. OK, so a couple more questions.
Naming the episodes
When it comes to writing the subject line or the podcast name, who’s naming them?
Matt: I’ve been naming them. So I figure out the name. You know, it’s a little bit of a combination between keyword research. I’ll go one on Ahrefs.com and do a little bit of keyword research for some keywords that I think we can potentially rank for.
Joe: And you do that prior to the show, right?
Matt: No, I do it after we recorded it because I never really know…
Joe: Well, we have topic ideas, so we always go with topic ideas for a show title, but then it probably changes.
Matt: Right. Before we bring a guest on, we have a rough idea of the topic and I usually make a note of like, the main topic for this episode should be X. Once we’ve recorded it, then I kind of try to find some little hook or some little thing that I think people will find interesting, combine it with a little bit of keyword research from our SEO tool that we use, and we do that. But what I’ve actually found as far as keywords go is trying to rank for our guest’s name is actually the best thing we could do. So I’ve been putting less and less focus on trying to get good keywords into it and instead trying to SEO for our guest’s name.
Joe: So what actually had us go down that path is somewhat recently, we had a guest named Christine McDannell on our show and we’ve had her twice now, so there was a previous episode that was made maybe like, eight months ago. We didn’t notice it, but we ranked number one for her name. And she’s not a big internet market or anything, but she’s a big business owner in San Diego.
She recently donated a hundred thousand bucks to Richard Branson and actually gave it to him in person, flew all the way to Paris to go see him. And Richard ended up writing a blog post on his Virgin blog, posting it all over Twitter, social media, Instagram, all that stuff, her name. And instantly, like that day or the next day, we just saw Google Analytics and our podcast, we started blowing up.
Matt: Because people were searching her name and we were ranked right there for her name. So that’s kind of been our strategy, there’s not a ton of science into the name anymore. I was trying to get some keywords in there, but now my focus is, let’s just kind of tell people what this podcast is going to be about. Make sure the person’s name is in the title, and then in the content itself make sure it’s all sort of optimized for SEO for that person’s name. And that’s sort of our strategy now with that.
James: Yeah, you guys are all over that. It’s like, I ranked well for Pat Flynn when I had him on my show. If someone is famous, it’s a very simple thing to put their name in the title. It makes sense to do that because their audience… and sometimes, they’ll share it with their audience. I always share a podcast that I am on as a guest.
Matt: Yeah, so do we.
James: I think it’s definitely a good courtesy and I think it helps other people invite you to their show. I’ve already got my audience, so I’m not giving anything away and I don’t even mind if someone’s in the same space as me, because I know that people in my space are going to buy multiple things. It’s been a good idea.
Most interesting podcasts?
Of all the podcasts you’ve done, what was the most interesting podcast that you’ve ever recorded?
Matt: We probably have different answers for this one.
James: Go for it.
Joe: Interesting as in how? So like, maybe mind-altering?
James: In my case, I recorded a podcast with Mick Fanning’s breathing coach. Mick Fanning’s a multiple world surfing champion, and this podcast was with his mindset coach, who teaches him about managing his fear about winning competitions. He had to deal with the passing away of his brother, getting nibbled on by a great white shark, and the world title series, you know, the pressure that’s there.
And I was just fascinated with what Nam Baldwin shared with me about what he teaches world champions. So when I was recording that, I’m like, ‘this is fantastic. I’m actually enjoying this so much.’ And I’ve used what I’ve learnt from him pretty much every day when I go surfing, when I get rolled by a big wave, held under the water, I’m using this. And when I get setbacks in my life, I used the framework that he teaches, which is called NEAT. Anyway, that was Episode 529, Whatever Happens Use It – Mindset Training With Nam Baldwin. So I remember just saying, this is the best podcast that I’ve recorded, just because it’s the most useful to me and it was just so interesting. But do you have one that stands out like that?
Joe: Yeah, so our preferences in that, a lot of our podcast we’ll ask people who we’re selfishly wanting to learn something from. So you know, if we had him on our podcast, I would probably have been struggling with surfing you know, constantly feeling I’m going to go die under the water, you don’t want to get pummeled, which I do, because I’m horrible.
So saying that, yeah, we… I think two people did, and this is kind of a recent thing, is Brad Costanzo and Christine. Even though this wasn’t really the topic for the webinars, they both think differently and this is kind of in my head recently, in a way that – Matt’s shaking his head.
Matt: No, I’m saying, “bastard”, because this is probably the two that I was going to point out.
Joe: Oh, really?
James: That’s good. I mean, it’s economical if you had the same one and you’re both such different people, isn’t that interesting?
Joe: That is, yeah. I probably have a different reason, though.
So they both, and this is so minute, but it kind of triggered my brain to start thinking differently. They both have luxury cars of all different sorts, well they both have Audi R8s, but also Christine has boatloads of others, and they – and that’s not the point, I’m not a car guy or anything – but the way they pay for all their cars is that they rent it out or they leverage other people to pay for their monthly payment plus their insurance, and the rest is profit from there.
So, just thinking about that, it’s kind of like just a different way of approaching a situation. It kind of got my head going, OK, how do we make different types of deals? And that’s where, you know, there’s homebrew things coming bubbling up, sleep thing came up, we never started really, or at least I didn’t personally. I was thinking linear, and I think a lot of people, when you buy a house, when you buy a car, when you just approach a deal, you’re just thinking kind of a conventional deal. Like, OK, I’m going to go have a car payment, it’s always going to be a liability to me. It’s going to be fun to drive. That’s my benefit, I guess. You know, you can call a house an asset, but really it’s kind of not. You’re paying every single month for ever. So it kind of flipped, and now I’m actually about to buy a Tesla and try this for myself. Because I’m like, hey, I always wanted a Tesla. I might as well have someone else pay for it. But now it’s also translated into deal making, too.
A less linear look at dealmaking
Matt: The reason that those two pop into mind was literally what you just said, was they got me thinking less linearly. Like I was thinking, to earn a good income I’ve got to sort of build products, ramp them up through Facebook ads, and just kind of consistently generate sales. Those two people are people that sort of, they’re deal-makers. They go into businesses, they make them really, really creative offers. They buy out either percentages or the whole business and then they leverage the assets at their disposal to ramp them up and sell the businesses and flip the businesses.
“Stop trying to build stuff from scratch.”
And they really got me thinking on a different wavelength. And I think it was actually the Brad Costanzo interview that we did that sort of led us down this path of let’s not just start from scratch with businesses anymore. You know, so many people think of, OK, I I need to make money online or I need to start my own business, and they think about how they could start a business from scratch. Brad Costanzo got us thinking on this wavelength of how do we go into something that already exists, that’s already generating money, that’s already working, and leverage that to earn an income. There’s ways to creatively finance buying businesses, oftentimes without even putting your own money down. And so he got me thinking along those lines of like, stop trying to build stuff from scratch. Find stuff that already exists and figure out how to work your way into those and just kind of jump a few steps.
James: Very good advice. You definitely don’t need money to have a business.
It’s kind of funny, because my whole first success online was as an affiliate. And my main rule of thumb was that I wanted to fund anything that I bought by being a affiliate for it and paying it back so that it was self-funded.
So I did that with my website software, my hosting, my autoresponder, and I built quite a substantial affiliate income business, even with my shopping cart through Josh Bartlett.
Matt: Yeah, us too.
James: That turned out to be a great situation.
So, creative deal-making. I learned a lot about that from Jay Abraham. He’s like a wizard at those things, putting together triangulation deals. That’s how I bought all my Dan Kennedy material, was I went to a smash repairer and I said, “Listen, you buy these Dan Kennedy books for me, I’ll read them and then apply what I learn on your business until you’ve got 10 times the value.” And I ended up getting him a Mercedes-Benz franchise, which probably put millions of dollars into his pocket each year. So he was very happy. I got my Dan Kennedy books, so I was happy. And there was no money down. So I think that’s a very valuable lesson and I appreciate you sharing that with me and a few other people who listen to this.
Matt: I think at the end of the day, you just got to start looking at money as just a tool and almost any outcome that you want to get, there is multiple tools that you can use. Money is just one of the many tools.
James: Right. And of course I choose to work only with businesses who are already in motion. I think of this metaphor that was drummed into me by a mentor, and that is, you can’t steer a parked car. Pretty much every time you start up a business, that’s like trying to trying to get into a parked car and see if the thing will start. And you don’t know – like, is the battery flat? Does it even have an engine? Whereas if you if you jump in an already moving vehicle, it’s easy to teach them how to change gears and steer. It’s just so much easier than startups. That’s why I don’t waste too much time on it.
“You can’t steer a parked car.”
How important are metrics?
When you publish episodes, do you track the downloads or the metrics?
Matt: We do, yeah. I mean, we use Libsyn for our hosting, so just the very limited sort of metrics they give us is all we really have. You never really know how many subscribers you have on iTunes, or anything like that. So it’s not something that we get too hung up over, but we do pop in from time to time to see how episodes are doing.
Joe: And something we do, and this is kind of biting us a little bit, is that we’re not really pushing people to iTunes to subscribe and to leave reviews and all that stuff. We’re starting to, but we like to push them really to our blog.
Matt: Well yeah, because our blog is, when we have the show notes, you know, the show notes have our affiliate links on it. They have the links to the guest website on it. They’ve got the little opt-in boxes where we’re grabbing their email. So pretty much all of the benefit to our business is by driving them to the show notes. The downside of that is, we never really get much new traffic finding us on iTunes because we never really promoted, “Hey, go find us on iTunes.” We’ve always promoted, “Go download it right off our blog.”
James: I guess for insurance I’ve started pushing people to iTunes a year or two back. What I do is, on my blog under our player we put “Get notified of future episodes,” and we put our Apple, Android and Stitcher links and the RSS feed. And then on the sidebar, we have the iTunes and RSS link, on the basis that they’ve been to my blog so they already know the websites there, and I’ve got the remarketing cookie.
And they’re possibly an email subscriber, because we do create custom content upgrades. But one big change that we made was, we did a massive spreadsheet, we went through all of our archive, we selected all of the podcasts for either keep, update, or delete. And when we deleted all the ones that got a delete tab, then we numbered the episodes, and from now on I’m able to reference the number.
So when I’m talking on a podcast like we did today, we mentioned Episode 529. It’s easy for someone to go to my blog and search for Episode 529 and find that episode. And then it’s easy for someone to go to that episode on the blog, search for that episode number and then they can get the PDF transcription. And in the case of that episode, there’s 12 Insights and Tips for Achieving Better Performance Through Mindset, so they can download that piece of content, but they have to be able to find it.
I think one way I can get an indication as to how many people are on iTunes is how many people download that episode when it gets published, before we send out an email or social media syndication.
Matt: Right. We have a lot of automation in that sense, so as soon as a podcast goes live on the blog, a Pushcrew notification goes out. It automatically gets posted to YouTube as well. We use a tool called Repurpose.io which automatically takes your podcast and put them on YouTube. So I mean, almost the moment it goes live, the sort of traffic engine to it is already turned on.
James: Gotcha. Yeah, we have the Pushcrew as well and we do syndicate to YouTube. But generally, our emails are going to be a strong boost.
Matt: Surprisingly, Pushcrew drives a lot of traffic for us to where we’re always surprised when we log in to Google Analytics, it’s one of our top five traffic sources.
Joe: We put that on every website or any kind of property we have for it, like an affiliate offer. I mean, it’s kind of amazing, actually. You could just use the free account for that, too.
Matt: For the most part.
Joe: For the most part.
James: Yeah, I do like the Pushcrew.
Serving the public and the membership
And we also, our podcasts will push inside our paid membership, which sounds counterintuitive, because they’re already paying for that and you’d think, why would they want the free stuff? But the reason for that is, people love to discuss the episode. Like, I’ve interviewed the person, they want to know the behind the scenes or develop that topic. Beyond just listening to it, they can ask the person who published it.
Like, where this episode appears inside my membership, members might be saying, “Hey, James, you talked about revenue share deals. Can you step me through what your filters are for looking for a deal?” I mean, that sort of information is worth millions of dollars to someone who wants to go and get revenue share deals. It’s not something I’m going to answer in my Disqus comments on the public-facing blog. But it is something that I can develop as a seed or a conversation starter inside the membership. So that’s a creative place to put content that perhaps people may not have considered.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely.
Joe: I love it.
Matt: Yeah, for a while we were doing podcasts where we had both video and audio versions. And we released the audio version for free on iTunes and the podcast. And if you wanted to watch the video version, the video version was only available to members of our membership at the time. So we tested stuff like that, but the video version of our interviews didn’t really seem to be much of an additional draw that added many additional members or anything like that.
James: I would have guessed that. Harlan Kilstein looked at a sales video of mine and he slayed me on it. He said, “No one wants to look at you talking, it’s boring.” And he’s right. I was listening to a Facebook Live video yesterday about webinars and I just had it playing in a tab in the background while I was cooking dinner. I don’t want to watch a guy sitting in a hotel room talking about webinars. I’m happy to listen to it. So we have different preferences the way that we consume. And also, would you agree, it’s just so much easier to set-up and record audio than video?
Joe: It’s amazingly easy. That is a beautiful thing with video, though, is that you kind of have two mediums with that, you just strip out that audio.
James: Well, you can take your audio and add a picture and put quotes and things – there’s a lot you can do with the audio. Especially in our case, we transcribe every single episode and they pull out quotes and things as you do. So we didn’t really get super technical on the content, but we did have some big ideas there. I really think you’ve given us some catalyst for how to get paid for your great knowledge. And we’ve talked about the different types of premises, you could either be blogging for a cooperate, you could be doing the blogging for a journey, you could be teaching people how to do things, you could be leading people to consulting, or you could be looking for deals, in your case, which seems to be the focus these days.
We’ve talked about different guests and what you’re doing with them and how you come up with the names and some ideas about where you’re publishing. But I think in general it’s just been a really fun conversation and I really appreciate you guys coming along and sharing with me.
Joe: Yeah, I know, it’s been a good time. We love this. I mean, it sounds just like our podcast. It’s just kind of free flow, you have a good focus, there’s always a lot of nuggets people can just pull out. You never know which ones going to resonate.
James: There you go. So I’ve been chatting with Matt and Joe from EvergreenProfits.com. This is Episode 571.
Guys, absolute pleasure. I hope I’ll have you back in the future because I’m sure whatever you’re doing now it’s just like before – it’s just one step in a pretty amazing journey. So I’m excited about where you’re going with this.
Joe: Thanks, man.
Matt: Absolutely. Yeah, we loved chatting with you too.
Joe: For sure. Alright James, thanks so much man.
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Thanks so much for having us on the show. It’s always a blast chatting with you. Looking forward to meeting in person at T&C next month!
Thanks so much for having us on the show. It’s always a blast chatting with you. Looking forward to meeting in person at T&C next month!
That will be awesome!