322: Benny Lewis On How To Make 7 Figures Language Hacking

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I my friend Benny Lewis on the show, and Benny is known as the Irish Polyglot, and he managed to create a seven-figure business based on his love of languages. So stay tuned to learn how he did it. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now it’s safe to say that most of us have been doing more online shopping lately. And if you’re an e-commerce brand, that means you might be seeing more first-time customers.

00:28
But once they’ve made that first purchase, how do you keep them coming back? That is what Klaviyo is for. Klaviyo is the ultimate email and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce brands. It gives you the tools to build your contact list, send memorable emails, automate key messages, and more. A lot more. And that is why over 30,000 e-commerce brands like Chubby’s, Brooklinen, and Living Proof use Klaviyo to build a loyal following. Strong customer relationships mean more repeat sales, enthusiastic word of mouth, and less depending on third-party ads. So whether you’re launching a new business or taking your brand to the next level,

00:57
Klaviyo can help you get growing faster. And it’s free to get started, so visit klaviyo.com slash my wife to create a free account. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postsgroup.io for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store.

01:25
and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is the tool easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at a push of a button. Not only that, but it is price well too. And with the holiday season rolling around, SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free.

01:53
That’s P O S T S E R I P T dot IO slash Steve. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:15
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Benny Lewis on the show. Now, Benny is actually someone who I’ve known for probably 10 plus years because we were in the same blog voting group many, many years ago before I even knew who he was. But we didn’t actually get a chance to meet face to face until a couple of years ago at the Menfluential Conference. And what is hilarious was that I think the first thing that Benny said to me was, dude, check out my TikTok. And it was him like showing me this TikTok of him acting like super goofy on camera.

02:45
Now, Benny is actually known as the Irish Polyglot and he runs fluentin3months.com, which is a community that gets over 2 million visits a month. And it’s a great learning resource for language learners all around the world. And the man speaks seven languages fluently and countless others conversationally. He’s actually helped Tim Ferriss learn Tagalog and he runs a very successful business doing so. And with that, welcome to the show, Benny. How are you doing today, I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me.

03:13
How’s the TikTok game going by the way? Cause that was like two years ago. was two. So I was very early to the TikTok game and it really suits my personality. I’ve ADHD. So these like short form videos, I was born for that, you but I’ve really put the effort into posting more consistently over the last few months. And then it’s been growing now every, every couple of weeks. One of my videos will get like 300,000 views, which is just amazing. Cause

03:41
I don’t see that kind of consistency on other platforms as easily, you know? That is crazy. We’ll talk about TikTok later on and you can give people your handle because you’ve got some really creative videos. You’re always pushing the envelope. For those in the audience who have no idea who you are, Benny, just give us the backstory and how you decided to turn your love of languages into a business because it’s pretty random. Yeah. So it’s random, especially because I write about languages. I publish books about learning languages.

04:09
But my background is actually in electronic engineering. So I graduated as an engineer and I had always had this interest to learn, especially Spanish, but I did poorly in languages in school. So my background isn’t someone who’s just grew up speaking a bunch of languages. When I was 21 years old, I could only speak English. And I moved to Spain and I kind of imagined, as many people would, that just being in the country is going to automatically

04:38
force you to learn the language. But after six months living in Spain, I couldn’t speak a sniff of Spanish because I had hung out with other English speaking expats. I talked to the people who had been arriving and successfully learning Spanish, and I really tried to understand what were they doing differently. And I wanted something simple in terms of it being, you know, some program that they bought or some, some audio they listened to while they slept or whatever. But it turned out

05:05
They were just actually genuinely trying to speak the language. And that was my big realization that I needed to speak the language consistently from the beginning. And ever since then, whenever I tried to learn a new language, I have had a model of speak from day one. And that was way back in 2003. So I have been traveling for the majority of the last 17 years, every few months, picking my stuff up and moving to a new country.

05:34
and trying to learn a new language. And after I had been doing this for six years, so 2009, that’s when I started my blog. And the goal of my blog was to inspire other people to try to learn languages themselves, because my whole thing is trying to demolish the concept that I have some natural talent and other language learners have some inborn talent. That this is actually something that you can pick up as an adult.

06:02
because of the way that I’ve been blogging and making videos about it. It’s floated. And as you said earlier, it’s reached a good two million unique visitors a month. That is crazy. I mean, can we break down that traffic? Where’s it coming from? I want to say at least 60, 70 percent from the States, because the blog is in English, it’s English speaking audience. I do have lots of people who follow me from other countries on my other channels, my video based channels.

06:32
Um, and I was telling you this briefly before the call, but one thing I really like about my business is I’ve gradually, uh, stepped further and further back from managing every single aspect of it. So to be honest, I haven’t seen my Google analytics in about four or five years. So I don’t really know. The only reason I know I have 2 million uniques a month is because the site manager told me that I have it. So do you have an idea? Is it Google traffic?

06:58
Pinterest, YouTube, I mean, where’s the traffic coming from? what traffic source? I want to say at first, first five or six years that I was working way more behind the scenes. Most of it was social. So it would have come from Facebook and social media in general. But since I’ve hired a team, they’ve helped me to create SEO geared content because I actually never, to this day, I’ve never learned anything about SEO.

07:27
So I would write content that just had that, that kick in virality to be shared. So, you know, real tongue in cheek kind of ways of expressing why people should learn this or why this isn’t as hard as they think. And I had a big aspect of storytelling. So I would pull a lot of people in with, as you can imagine from the title of the blog, I would have these intensive three month projects. So I’d get a

07:55
burst of new people following as I announced whatever the next language was. Now, having said that, team that I’ve hired have expanded on writing SEO friendly articles. So now I do believe that we’ve definitely gone over half of our traffic coming from Google. And the great thing is from what I know, every time Google does an update to their algorithm, it almost always affects my site positively.

08:23
The team I work with, they come up with excellent content. now my job is mainly, I’ve taken a step back from creating the blog content and I’m mainly working on video. So even though the blog continues to have multiple posts every week, I’m mostly just going to be the embedded videos whenever it’s relevant to a blog. So Benny, we have similar backgrounds in that we’re both electrical engineers. I’m just curious for selfish reasons why you decided to drop that and go into this. Well,

08:52
When I was growing up in Ireland, we had Spanish students visit my hometown to learn English. And that’s what inspired me to want to learn Spanish. And when I first moved to Spain, I actually had an internship as an engineer. And for, I want to say the first five or six years, my plan was actually to become a conference translator for technical conferences where people would talk about engineering concepts.

09:20
Instead of doing that, I ended up having a very early in the game, had a work online opportunity way back in 2006, where people would email me engineering documentation in Spanish and French, and I would translate it to English. Generally translators would translate to their mother tongue. And I got pretty good money from that because all my clients were based in Europe. I was earning in Euro and I was spending in rupees or pesos or whatever it was.

09:49
So I could live it up and this was way before I even started the blog. So for a while I was still combining the languages with my technical background. And I’m very passionate about travel and immersing myself in other cultures. And I’ve never really described myself as someone who’s passionate necessarily about learning languages. And it’s one of the reasons that I’ve had so much success with learning languages. I don’t…

10:15
get bogged down with perfectionism and think that this language is such a pure, beautiful thing. I need to get everything correct. For me, a language is a means to an end. It’s a tool that helps me to get to know people from another country. And because I see it like that, it means that I give myself permission to make mistakes as a beginner learner. And that helped me learn so much faster compared to people who may put the language on a pedestal and they don’t want to ever

10:45
make the tiniest little mistake in it. And that’s going to stop them from making any progress ever. So I can see how languages or the love of learning languages has a very broad based appeal for your blog. Do you remember how you generated like early traffic to your blog back in 2009? I do. Yeah. It’s essentially, as I alluded to before, it’s the story. because I didn’t have any SEO that I was working on for vast majority of the history of the blog,

11:15
What I would do, and I had the same method to grow my email list as well, is I would use a certain sense. I mean, we’ve got a lot of musicals and acting in my family, so I have this sense of drama to my personality. So I kind of injected that into my blog and I created a sense of suspense and I would kind of build up, you know, what is the next language I’m going to learn? I would have people taking surveys and quizzes.

11:44
to see if they could guess it, or I’d be giving clues in ways that you couldn’t necessarily Google easily. And because of this, I built this interest in firstly announcing it. And then obviously after I announced it, I would continue to create the narrative. this narrative, I definitely feel, is what drove the very, very fast growth in those initial years of the blog, is that people followed me for the story. They wanted to see how would Benny do.

12:13
And I shared both the successes and the failures. Because obviously if you attempt so many different projects, some of them aren’t going to go so well. And at the end of it, if I did not reach the target that I had aimed for, I’d be writing in great detail about why that happened and what I’m going to do differently next time. And I’m absolutely positive that this is the reason that I had this kind of traction. Because when I came onto the scene in 2009, I was not the first person to ever write a blog about languages or learning languages.

12:43
There were lots of other people doing that, but they were doing it from a much more traditional perspective of writing about the content of the language and not really tying it in to any sort of narrative. And that’s what really helped things kick off for me. you give the audience an example of maybe like your most popular stories that really hit it viral? Well, I’d say in terms of blog articles that have done the best, I would say

13:10
When it was my 29th birthday, I wrote an article of 29 life lessons I’ve learned in traveling the world. And I took a little piece of something, some form of wisdom I might have picked up in a different country. And that, that did spectacularly well. Another one in terms of, like I said, I like to be tongue in cheek a bit, is I wrote about, I really like using the languages that I’ve learned to learn about the culture of the countries.

13:37
And I expanded that beyond languages. And I wrote about clashes I’ve had in America. So the article was cultural clashes this European has had in America. And that article, after just one month, had 9,000 comments on it. I forget how much traffic it was getting. It was obviously going viral, but it was very much galvanizing people, either on one end or the other. you Euro trash, get back to your country versus…

14:05
Yeah, you tell them how it is. was great. I was loving it because, you know, when you’re dealing with controversy, people will angrily share a link on Facebook or something at the time, you know, because that would have been my bigger source of traffic. But they’ll angrily share it on some social media and say, this guy is an idiot. And they’ll link to my blog and they’ll share it with other people. And they never really realized that. And I always tell people who are trying to write about something

14:35
that could potentially be a little controversial to really double down on it. mean, you don’t want to go overboard. You don’t want to offend people, obviously, but to a certain extent. But I really doubled down on here are my controversial opinions on the fact that tipping is dumb and I don’t like this and I don’t like that. And I wrote about like a list of things that I clashed with with American culture and it just did spectacularly well. And that was kind of along the theme of

15:04
cultural differences between countries, which was something I had written about many times for other countries. That’s actually a great tip. So we actually started blogging at around the same time. And for a while, I was afraid of offending anybody and I wasn’t getting any traffic. It’s only once I started taking stances, maybe not as extreme as yours, Benny, did actually any of my articles start gaining traction. And what’s funny, Benny, when you started, there was no social media. So how did something go viral? I remember

15:32
my 29 life lessons post that went particularly viral on stumble upon. you remember. Oh yes. Yes. So that it did. And then, you know, Facebook, Facebook was around by then. So people would have shared it there. Same with Twitter. So there was a bit of social media, but generally it was people sharing it directly. I think if I looked at my analytics, the majority just said either no source or other other websites would syndicate or link back to it.

16:02
I had many people offer to translate the articles and link back to the original. I know the Huffington Post, they syndicated a few articles and they linked to the original in the top title. So I got a lot of traffic through those means as well for people just directly linking from their own blogs to my blog. So you don’t really handle any of the stuff your team does now, but what traffic generation techniques are you using today?

16:28
So today I know that our major source would be SEO. So not something I work on directly myself, but generally what we do is we get a lot of questions from people. get a lot of questions via email in response to Instagram posts or YouTube comments, that kind of thing. And we try gather these questions, see when something is coming out on top and try to address that. And a lot of the questions are quite basic. People may…

16:57
Like we, we noticed we got a significant number of people asking, you know, how do I, how do I roll my R in Spanish? For instance, that’s just something we could write an article about. And I’m sure there’s, there are other things that the team themselves do to see on Google trends where people are actually searching for. But like, um, that’s, that’s handled by them. Okay. What I did for the first few years was a lot more haphazard. And it’s one reason why I prefer the current role that I have that I

17:27
I just make videos with whatever random ideas I have. And then my team assigns me three days a week. kind of, since I was telling you before the call, I’ve demoted myself to the chief creative officer. And I really, really like that I’ve done that. And one aspect of it, of course, by demoting myself means I give the team a little bit more power and they have three days a week that they can dictate the kind of content that I’m creating.

17:55
which is the kind of content that actually definitely brings us consistent traffic. So things people are searching for in terms of how do I count up to a hundred in Spanish? I just recorded a video on that the other day. So things like this that are not necessarily the kind of content I’m passionate about. If I’m making a video, I prefer for it to have some kind of ridiculous aspect to it. know, but ultimately I like the situation I’m currently in because it’s balanced.

18:25
It means that I have two days a week that I have complete creative freedom where I can make silly things that, you know, maybe have like nine out of 10 of them will, will get decent traffic. Nothing too big a deal, but one out of 10 of them will explode and go viral because it’s so unique and ridiculous. And I like that. But then at the same time, three fifths of the content I’m making is specifically tailored to what my team has analyzed. Find actually is getting us.

18:55
consistent long-term traffic. Right. Yeah, that’s a good balance. How did you actually get your articles syndicated? Was that something you intentionally did or did it just kind of happen by accident? I think it’s happened by accident for the vast majority. mean, obviously I’ve done my fair share of guest posts on other blogs. Generally, when I do that, it’s unique content, not syndication. Right. I know that for a while I had an arrangement with Huffington Post where they just syndicated a certain

19:24
wasn’t any kind of financial arrangement. just appreciated the traffic they were sending me, but no, don’t, I don’t think I’ve had, I’ve had any kind of a strategy. It’s just, it’s just happened naturally. Yeah. I mean, I can see your style of writing and just the nature of the videos that you do. Like those are just things that people want to share. And I’m going to, I’ll post links to like your channel and your blog just so people can see it. But right now, so let’s say you have, you have this 2 million uniques per month. How do you monetize that traffic?

19:53
Yes. How do you make money? Yeah. So initially it was my own products, probably similar to yourself. I would have like initially struggled with the idea of how can I monetize a blog? And it was actually Chris Gilleboe who inspired me when I met him very early on, like when my blog was just six months old, met him in Bangkok and he inspired me to create a simple ebook to because people

20:20
were enjoying my blog, but there was no start to finish process of how do I actually learn a language? I would give tips, but it’d be very disperse and there’d be no structure to it on the blog because then I’d give a narrative story that wouldn’t necessarily have any kind of actionable advice in it. But I created an ebook in 2010 and that did exceptionally well. It’s so well that I was able to quit my job as a translator immediately after I launched the ebook.

20:49
Wow. And part of that process was definitely the email list. So the blog being two million uniques a month sounds impressive. But what I think is a lot more important is that my email list is 300,000 people with an average open rate over 30%. So we actually, if I, if I didn’t call my list, we would definitely be at a million subscribers at this stage, but our open rate would be terrible.

21:17
So we, every six months, we actually put people into an autoresponder to try to get rid of them because we don’t want them to be impacting our open rates and to see if they’re still active so that they stay on the list. But the email list has been the way that I actually earn money. So if you’re looking around the blog, we literally just six months ago started to put advertising on the blog.

21:45
For over 10 years, we never had a single ad on the blog. But ultimately with the kind of traffic we had, and especially because I’d spent a couple of years, very expensive years in New York, and we needed to get a boost of income. So we saw this as the easiest way by far that we switched over to Believe Mediavine, where we have targeted ads for people. But that’s very, very recent. Before that, we would just want to get people on our email list.

22:14
I do know that about 60 % of our revenue that comes in is from other people’s products that we act as an affiliate of. it’s a lot of work to create these products. I put that work in and then obviously over time they become slightly less relevant. Like I might list my favorite resources, but then the company stops to update their product or something and it doesn’t become as useful.

22:44
So it’s a lot of work and I’m not necessarily as passionate about that. So for a long time, I stepped back from making my own products, but because one of the things we do when you’re on our site and we suggest you join our email list, because we give people a crash course in how to have their first basic conversation in a week, we will ask you what language you’re learning as you’re signing up to the email list. And this information is extremely useful because it means that

23:14
If you are learning a language as specific as Swahili, you are actually, it’s actually more valuable to us per subscriber, a Swahili learner than a Spanish learner. Because a Spanish learner has so many other resources that they could potentially be buying, but a Swahili learner doesn’t have that many options that they could buy. And we have done all the research and we have the partners that we work with, in this example.

23:42
Swahili pod one on one, we get recurring revenue for referring people to that product. So that means you’ve signed up to our email list. We know what languages you want to learn. We give you like tons and tons of free information. And then of course, once in a while, we’ll push one of these products. And that’s effectively how we make the vast majority of our income is by sharing resources to other people’s products. And then more recently this year, I have gotten back in the game of my own products and I have a

24:12
a three month community, the Flute in Three Months challenge that people join. And then my team guides them into intensively learning a language in the same kind of style that I would do myself. So we have been getting back into it. It’s a lot of work to maintain, especially because I have my team running it. So they put a lot of hours into it. But so far it’s turning out quite well. So we’ve got the nice balance of other people’s products, as well as growing our own to be

24:42
Ideally larger than the current percentage of our full-time income, since we’re still relying on third parties a lot more than we’d like to, you know?

24:54
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

25:23
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

25:52
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s EMERGECONSCL.com. Now back to the show. So when you first started out, you started out with that ebook that made you enough for you to quit your job. Did you continue on that path to make your own products before going the affiliate route? Or did you jump to did. Yeah. I’d say a good five or six years. And for anyone listening to this who might be feeling like I’m…

26:18
I don’t know if I could do that or it’s just so much work to create an ebook. One thing that I did was I threw together the advice that I could come up with. spent maybe, I don’t know, a month or two intensively writing this ebook. And do know what I did? It was in Microsoft Word and I literally clicked File, Save As PDF, and I put that up on E-Junkie and that was it. There was no complications whatsoever to it.

26:46
It was the ugliest ebook you could imagine, but at the time people just wanted to get my advice and I could take a portion of the profits I made from that initial sale to then hire a designer to make a nice looking ebook. And there were actually a couple of mistakes so I could even hire an editor, but I did that after launching it. And a big issue I know a lot of people with a perfectionist mindset have is it needs to be perfect before you launch it.

27:16
And one of the major reasons I can pinpoint the majority of my success in many aspects of life, both in language learning and in business, is that I’m an imperfectionist. That I’m okay with getting it done rather than getting it perfect. I’ll get it done. I’ll put it out there. I’ll ship it. And then I’ll tweak it after that because at least it’s in the system. I’m getting feedback and potentially earning revenue from it or with a language.

27:44
I’m actually using it and getting practice. And this is my philosophy with everything you just got to ship it. Nice. That’s actually really good advice. And I’m just kind of curious. So with e-books, you can easily iterate on it. But I know that you’ve published a bunch of physical books as well. What was the rationale for going that route? Yeah. So physical books, wouldn’t recommend to anyone necessarily. Unless you’re JK Rowling, you’re not necessarily going to be making a lot of money from physical books. For me, it was more

28:12
that I’m in a somewhat academic space. And for a long time, people wouldn’t take me as seriously because I was just a blogger. So it was more to get my, it was more for expanding my reach to other audiences and just to be taken a bit more seriously. So my first book, I put a lot of effort into launching that. It became an international bestseller, did very well. And since then I’ve gotten the likes of paid speaking engagements being interviewed on television.

28:41
Whereas beforehand, they wouldn’t have really taught themselves why would we want to interview a blogger? know, whereas instead they’re like, now we want to interview an author. And nothing really changed except the book was out. And similarly, I published a bunch of other books, which are actual language courses. And I published them with the same publisher that Charles Darwin used for the Theory of Evolution, John Murray, and like a British publisher. So that has a lot of

29:10
prominence to it, that people really take you seriously and that I’ve been able to have universities get in touch with me. Because ultimately, I really want to inspire as many people as possible to learn a language. The books have definitely been a negative impact to my finances. The amount of work and effort I put into them versus the money I’ve gotten back from sales.

29:36
On the other hand, it’s free advertising because once they reopen again, all the Barnes and Nobles in the country have five of my books in the language shelves. And that’s people I wouldn’t necessarily reach with some kind of a viral video. If they’re in their bookshop, then they’ll see me. And of course I have my blog URL printed on the back and I’d suggest they join my email list and they get into chains that I’m more likely to earn more sustainable income.

30:04
Did you already have a big audience before you wrote that physical book? that how you became a bestseller? Yeah, I used my audience to drive the sales of that book. How does one become an award winning traveler nominated by National Geographic? How the heck did that happen? That was actually quite funny. I got an email when this goes right back to what I was saying before about perfectionism. I got an email from somebody from National Geographic that apparently

30:32
They had run a poll and some of my audience had nominated me for traveler of the year. And they were in the decision-making process and they needed to get an answer from me about why do I travel? Now, if you are somebody who maybe has again a mentality that I need to write the best essay to convince these people, I’m going to take the next few weeks to write this response to this email.

31:02
But I’m not that kind of person. was just like, oh, this sounds like too much work. I literally wrote them an email in 10 minutes and just shut it off and didn’t run it by anybody. And it was not perfect. It might’ve even had a spelling mistake in it for all I know. But the response that they got, they loved it so much that that was what convinced them to ultimately go with my nomination and put me on their official title of the travel of the year. And I said something about how

31:30
how I get inspired by learning languages and how I love other cultures. But again, I think if I had put too much thought into it, then I would not have, I probably wouldn’t have replied in time, or I may have given them a too long response. And sometimes with things like this, the less words, the better. And that’s essentially the main reason. mean, obviously the initial reason I was on their radar was because some of my readers had nominated me. Sure. Sure.

32:00
And knowing you is probably pretty sarcastic and tongue in cheek in that reply also, right? Yeah, of course. My whole philosophy is to not take too many things too seriously. One question on like a personal level, I just wanted to ask you, like, how does exactly one learn a language fast? Like I took Chinese school for 12 years and you probably speak Chinese better than I do. I actually am positive that you speak Chinese better than I do. Yeah. So I took German in school for five years.

32:27
And at the end of that experience, I couldn’t even order a train ticket when I first went to Germany. So I’m in the same boat as you. And I understand precisely why you took all that time to learn the language and you don’t have anything to show for it. And it’s mainly because when we think of language learning in academic circles, we kind of do it back to front. We obsess over the grammar and getting everything right or in the likes of Chinese, maybe getting the

32:57
the Chinese characters, being able to write them perfectly, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of things that we focus on that don’t actually help us in the short term. And I always try to get people out of this mindset of thinking of languages academically. It’s not like studying mathematics or geography, where every mistake you make is something you deserve to get a big red X on and bring you closer to a fail. Because if you imagine

33:24
You have an opportunity to speak a language and you have very little of it in your head and you want to ask somebody where something is and you say simply, supermarket where? They will understand that and they’ll give you a response and you’ll have achieved what you wanted to do. Whereas if you went to the perfectionist path, you would wait and you would not say that until maybe a year from now when you could say, excuse me, kind sir, could you direct me to the nearest supermarket, please? And you, you know, you have the equivalent of that in your foreign language.

33:55
And I think that this issue is what we have in academia, in schools, that we tend to have too much perfectionism. So what I’ve done differently and what I’ve recommended to people who have gotten into languages, and even to a certain extent, what I’ve seen in use successfully in countries like the Netherlands, where the way that they teach a language like English is that they use it truly as a means of communication.

34:23
And they tried to actually get their students to actively speak it from the very first lesson, even if what they’re speaking isn’t perfect. And that’s the thing is you need to encourage speaking rather than encouraging a lack of mistakes. And that’s the major difference. like, it took me a long time to really get this philosophy in my head. So when I finally got around to learning Mandarin, the major difference was I had been learning languages for so many years.

34:53
That even though Mandarin is nothing like any other language I had ever learned, I had the same philosophy that as soon as I arrived in Taiwan at the time, nowadays I would just learn a language entirely online. But at the time I traveled to the country and I just truly tried to use the language as much as I possibly could, despite my mistakes, rather than waiting until I didn’t have mistakes. Because that day is never going to come. Even in English, I still make mistakes. So…

35:22
waiting until you never make mistakes is a fool’s errand. I think what you’re saying actually is a life lesson as well. I mean, it applies to business. It applies to everything in life. So I teach e-commerce and a lot of people spend a lot of time analyzing a whole bunch of stuff when they could probably learn 10x more by just doing it and screwing up and doing it. So that’s the thing. Yeah. Like my, like the shortest way could summarize this philosophy with anything language learning business and such is your goal should be to suck.

35:52
a little less every day. I think that’s from Adventure Time, the cartoon, as to suck a little less every day. When you think of it that way, it’s a lot easier philosophy to take rather than to be perfect every day, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Benny, I want to switch gears. I want to talk about your TikTok adventures, because I know you’ve been building up your account and you’re probably not monetizing it yet, but I know that the stuff that you’ve been doing has been pretty effective. And I know my audience doesn’t know a lot about it. So

36:22
So number one, how does it work and how do you actually get traction from it? Yeah. So the first thing I think like by now, a lot of people would know of TikTok. It’s get like the TikTok videos get shared on other platforms with the watermark stamped into them. And the issue is if you ever open the app, it’s you will get put off it very quickly because the quite a lot of it is teenagers dancing. Yes. And it’s really weird to open the app and have to see that.

36:50
So one of the first things I would tell people is if you do test out the app and you see a video of some girl dancing, if you hold your finger on the screen for a second, a pop-up will come up and you can say, I don’t want to see videos like this. And you have to do that a couple of times, but eventually the algorithm gets the picture. And eventually you’ll start to see videos that you actually genuinely find entertaining, interesting, or relevant to whatever your niche is.

37:20
And I know this because forget if I told you this when I saw you last, but I actually have think either 13 or 14 separate TikTok accounts. Okay. You didn’t tell me that. crap. So what I’m trying to do with TikTok is to reach audiences around the world, but rather than have the one platform, I have my main English TikTok, but then at the same time I have my Spanish TikTok and I have my French and my Portuguese and so on. sense.

37:49
Yeah. So I’ve had to do this process over and over again. And as I start a new account and bring it up, what do I see immediately? I see girls dancing and I’m like, my God, I don’t want to see this. It’s weird. You know, they’re teenagers. So again, you have to train the app to get rid of those. And eventually now when I open up my German account, I will literally only see content about the German language. That’s how like it’s.

38:17
effectively learned what I want to see. So that’s the first thing. You’ll appreciate the content a lot more. If you train it, make sure you like the videos that you enjoy and you mark to not see the videos. And you just have to go through that process. But effectively what TikTok is, it’s like a modern version of Vine that some people may may know of from a few years ago, where it’s a looped video, generally 15 seconds, but it can be up to 60 seconds of someone just

38:46
presenting something. It could be literally anything, like an Instagram story. It can be about whatever you want it to be about. And the reason I feel that it’s doing so well, especially with younger people, a reason that I can definitely relate to because of my ADHD, is it really tailors to short attention spans. So a YouTube video generally is going to be two minutes, 10 minutes, something along those lines. And

39:15
you’re going to get a lot more content out of the likes of YouTube. But something that’s a lot shorter, tailors to someone with a shorter attention span. So everything has to happen in those 50 to 60 seconds, whether it’s a joke with a punchline or you’re trying to teach somebody a single thing or it’s a silly dance video, whatever it is, it has to happen in that short span of time. And as you see one video, you’ll scroll, scroll, scroll, and that’s kind of

39:43
What people will do all day long is scrolling up past the videos and it really kind of kicks in your dopamine, like your need to get a dopamine kick that you’ll see a video, you’ll like it, you’ll see the next video, you’ll like it. Whereas the payoff for some longer form content, like a blog or YouTube video, you have to wait a few minutes. So this is why it’s very easy to get dragged into the likes of TikTok. But in terms of business, like marketing your business, you mentioned there’s a lot of kids on there.

40:13
Is there a lot of money on this platform to be made? Absolutely. yeah, there’s a lot of kids and it’s of course a majority of kids, but that doesn’t matter if 80%. I literally, I don’t know what the numbers are, but if 80 % are under 20, that still means you have 20 % of a billion or whatever users who are over 20. And that’s what I’m interested in. I don’t care about the 80 or whatever percent that are the kids that I know.

40:42
I’m just not going to get any value out of the kind of content I can make. They’re definitely not going to be paying customers. But on top of that, I’m not necessarily going to inspire them to learn a language because my audience tends to be more adult. So you can absolutely tailor to the adults, despite the fact that it is a majority younger platform. Interesting. So have you managed to get any referrals over and how does that process work?

41:07
So similar to Instagram, you can put a link in your bio so people can check out your blog or your YouTube channel or whatever landing page you might have. The most successful that I’ve seen so far is a friend of mine has actually used her TikTok with a relatively low number of followers. Cause obviously if you already have a recognition and a million followers somewhere else, you can…

41:33
You could just use TikTok the same way you would any other platform and just have a big audience. But what I found effective was she made a TikTok where she was giving travel tips, like five quick travel tips or something. And then at the end, she very effectively said, I expand on this. go into way more detail. So she what she does is she gave her travel tips. And at the end of the video, she said, I go into a lot more detail on my email list.

42:00
I just clicked the link in my bio to check that out. And she told me that she got a thousand people sign up to her email list and she did not have a big following. that, was a surprisingly effective use. it’s like, I wouldn’t say necessarily there’s some way to game the system or anything. I feel like a lot of advice that you’ll find anywhere about how to make YouTube videos and how to get people engaged with that, how to write.

42:29
how to write tweets to get people engaged, how to write blog posts to get people engaged. You could take a lot of those same philosophies and apply it to this platform. You you put up as much free content as you can, as interesting stuff that it’s going to grow your followers, that’s going to build trust with your audience, that people are going to associate you with something. So for now, I haven’t done the same kind of thing she’s done. I haven’t actually tried to monetize or get people to click anything.

42:58
But I am trying to build myself up as the language guy on TikTok. I want to have that kind of recognition. So when the time comes and I do want to promote something, I still have to do it in a fun way. don’t think you can like, TikTok doesn’t really lend itself very well the same way the likes of, you know, if I’m scrolling through Instagram, for instance, and I see an advertisement, I can still potentially click that ad and buy something. But with TikTok,

43:26
you’re not really in the mind space as much to be in immediate buying mode. You more likely have to be convinced of it in some other form. So I’m really trying to maintain an entertaining angle. if I want to promote an email, you know, if I come up with a product that I want to sell about learning a language, I’m going to have to think about how could I make a silly sketch where my head explodes or something? And then at the end of it, you

43:55
you get the answer to some question by joining my email list. You you have to take that angle to it. And you would see what works with your niche, with your specialty. But ultimately, it’s similar to any other platform that you just have to put as much content, especially with TikTok. I’d say the main thing is to put as much content out there as possible. And it can be low quality content. One of the reasons I’d say my TikTok did not grow

44:24
very much in the first year or so that I was testing it out is I kind of went against my own advice and I got a little too perfectionist about things. like I really love editing videos and special effects and so on. And I would think it effectively needs to be a shorter version of a YouTube video that happens to be vertical. And you don’t really, that doesn’t necessarily jive with people. don’t need to see high quality video.

44:52
You can literally just grab your phone, talk at it, similar to an Instagram story, except the differences needs to be entirely contained in that 15 or so seconds. Whereas an Instagram story, can obviously trail on between different stories, but it has to have some kind of a punchline to it or whatever. And it does not have to be high quality. And one of my best performing videos was literally a video I just pressed record.

45:19
threw an idea together without any special effects added to it. And then that immediately got 300,000 views. And it’s just because it’s a silly video. So I would recommend people don’t overthink the platform too much. Your friend who got all those email subscribers, are her TikToks more serious or are they kind of silly also? Her TikToks, I wouldn’t necessarily call them serious, but she’s definitely like the ridiculous part of it. That’s just by personality. It’s not, I would not say that’s something you

45:48
necessarily need to bring to TikTok. She makes content about inspiring people to travel and her videos are very visually appealing because she happens to be making them in Bali and she has this spectacular backdrop behind her while she’s making the videos. And so I think that definitely helps a lot that the videos kind of grab you visually, but she doesn’t make like she might throw up the odd video that makes a joke or something, but her content is more

46:17
Here are my top tips on how you can become a digital nomad. And it’s the kind of content you would expect to see on other platforms. She’s just, she’s tested it out. And that’s the thing with TikTok. You just put a bunch of stuff out there. You’re not really going to suffer if you have a bad video. It’s just not going to get a lot of views. You’re not going to lose subscribers because the algorithm doesn’t really work in terms of showing your subscribers or your followers. It doesn’t show them all of your content.

46:48
It just shows you random stuff and it happens to bring whatever is performing well that day. And then sometimes it’ll slightly prioritize people who you’ve followed. But getting a large number of followers is not actually that useful on TikTok because you can go viral and get a million views, even if you have zero followers, which is almost impossible on other platforms. The likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

47:15
You cannot go viral on those platforms unless a really big name retweets you or something. But within TikTok, you can have no followers. And if your content has viral potential, it can go viral all on its own. And that’s what’s unique about it. It’s what I like about it. It also obviously has loads of problems to it. But this is the part that I feel gives it a bit more of an edge. And it’s still very much the Wild West as far as social media goes.

47:45
Yeah, you might have convinced me to try it. The reason why I’ve been hesitant is because I don’t want to be classified as one of those dancing teenagers. I just feel like it might hurt my credibility for some reason. You know what saying? And I’m a ridiculous guy, but I can tell you, despite that, I have not once done one of those silly dances in any of my films. You know, so I have definitely stuck to my guns and I have done content that I feel

48:14
fits my personality. I haven’t had to sell out to the platform as it were. So you could definitely find a balance and there are lots of people making very serious videos that don’t really even have to have a visually appealing background or whatever. And their content is just interesting that it goes viral. It’s just that because you’re also dealing with short attention spans, you’re a lot more likely to go viral if it’s something entertaining.

48:43
Yeah, for obvious reasons, know, whereas a YouTube video can go viral if it’s if it’s just good content, even if it’s not entertaining, because people put the time in to actually wait out the whole video. Whereas on TikTok, you’ve really got to hit that dopamine fix. You got to make them laugh or whatever it is. So you do have to keep that in mind, but you can absolutely still find a way to make it work. OK.

49:11
Cool, Benny, that’s great advice. And I like how you incorporated some life lessons in this episode. If anyone wants to learn a language or be able to reach out if they have any questions, where can they find you in your business online? Yeah. So if they go to Fluent in three months, and that’s the number three dot com, then just sign up to my email list and I’ll give them a free crash course in how to have their first conversation in a week. And then loads of other stuff. Like I said before, I’m all about

49:39
you know, 90 % free content to make it actually useful. And then I might recommend some resources if they decide to go down that route. And then of course I’ve got, if they look for Irish polyglot, P-O-L-Y-G-L-O-T on social media, that’s how to find the stuff that I’m doing on TikTok, on Instagram. And as it happens on Instagram, I also have 15 accounts. So I make sure to link to them somewhere. They’re, they’re in other languages. So obviously.

50:08
only interesting to people who speak those languages. All right, Benny, appreciate you coming on, man. Thanks so much for having me.

50:17
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, if Benny’s personality didn’t come through on the podcast, the man is hilarious. And you should definitely check out either his TikToks or his videos online. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 322. And once again, I’m gonna thank Postscript.io, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

50:46
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

51:15
head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.